Source of Hire: Is It Even Possible to Track?

By Mark Mehler and Gerry Crispin of CareerXroads

With all the enterprising recruiters who pride themselves on being strictly ‘social’ recruiters, we fantasized what a map would show about the job seeker’s path to a job in the future:

1. First, the candidate would likely tell (some) friends on Facebook they were looking for a new job. (So far so good).
2. A friend might then suggest asking Siri to search Google.
3. And perhaps somebody paid off Siri to forward him to Indeed which led him to Job Central which linked him to a great position on the career site of a firm in his commute range.
4. The candidate then went to Linkedin and found a friend of a friend who worked there and had gone to the same school as he did.
   Wanting to be cool he followed the employee on Twitter, then put him in his “must meet” circle on Google+ and soon found out that he (the employee) would be at a meet-up nearby where they #accidentally-on-purpose-met. Dropping the name of the friend they both knew in common, they found other common ground (they both pinned Italian recipes on Pinterest) and the now new friend and employee agreed to be his referral for an open position.
5. When asked in the application, “How did you find us?”, the candidate put in the name of the referral and, internally, the employee completed his form referring the local candidate. When the recruiter searched his ATS, the software’s [proprietary] algorithm weighted and tagged the referred candidate as a highly qualified match and the rest is history.

Except, the firm’s SOH reporting had switched to last IP address and, since the candidate had come directly from his home computer to the company career site, the ‘unknown’ IP address was coded “Other” for Source of Hire. Fortunately the external service that put the cookie on that particular prospect at the moment he reached Indeed was able to update the ‘source’ field – except, the recruiter altered the field again based on his interview of the new hire and so he changed it to, “Facebook”.

– Gerry Crispin and Mark Mehler work full time consulting, educating and discovering how talent and opportunity connect through emerging technology. They can be reached via email at mmc@careerxroads.com, phone at 732-821-6652, or on-line at http://www.careerxroads.com.