6 Recruitment Marketing Metrics You Need To Start Measuring
Traditional metrics around cost and time to hire are helpful indicators of recruitment marketing effectiveness, but they don’t tell the whole story.
Recruitment marketing metrics are actually pretty similar to the ones that your marketing team uses to track and analyze their campaign activity across multiple channels.
Typically, it takes a long time to measure hiring success — for example, you need a large dataset to be able to understand cost and time to hire accurately. By contrast, recruitment marketing metrics often show significant changes on a daily basis, allowing organizations to be far more agile with their approach and prioritize their time and resources more effectively.
Here are six of the recruitment marketing metrics that every organization should be tracking:
1. Pipeline generation
First and foremost, recruitment marketing is designed to help your organization build a pipeline of prospects for current openings and future roles. It stands to reason, then, that pipeline generation metrics are important to keep track of.
It’s likely that you already have a number of initiatives in place to build your pipeline, (e.g. campus recruiting, events, sourcing, ads) — do you know how many candidates are being captured from each of these campaigns? Do you know whether you added more candidates to your pipeline this month than you did last month? What source is the most effective? Where should you be investing more time and resources to achieve the best ROI?
If you can’t answer simple questions like these, then you need to rethink the way that you’re running your recruitment marketing programs.
2. Pipeline quality
When you’re building your pipeline, it needs to be based on quality over quantity. Adding a whole load of irrelevant candidates might help you build an impressive database, but it’s not going to help you actually hire anyone!
You have to be able to gauge the quality and relevance of your pipeline, otherwise it’s hard to judge success accurately.
How does your pipeline match up to your target personas? What sources are most effective at creating a relevant candidate pipeline? Are you on track to hit your diversity targets? Do candidates have the right skills and experience? Are they interested and engaged with your messaging?
This data is all vital to understanding whether your campaigns are attracting the right candidates. If you can break this data down by individual campaign, (e.g. how many quality candidates did our graduate event generate), then that’s even better!
3. Pipeline coverage
Your pipeline coverage is the number of candidates in your pipeline relative to the number of roles you have to fill. How does this work?
Let’s say your average conversion rate from a lead to a hire is 1% (meaning for every 100 leads you have in your pipeline, you make one hire). If you then have 100 candidates in your pipeline, you are 1x covered.
This is not an ideal scenario — there’s no room for error. If anything goes wrong, (e.g. your offer gets rejected) you’re going to miss your hiring targets.
Organizations should aim to be 3x covered for all the roles they’re trying to fill. If we go back to our example, this would mean you should have 300 leads in your pipeline per open role, at all times.
Understanding pipeline coverage lets managers and team leaders know ahead of time how likely they are to hit targets, and helps them invest resources more strategically (e.g. if they’re way behind they can double down on pipeline generation).
4. Conversion rates
You might be pumping your pipeline full of talent, but how well are those new leads converting to applicants?
If you don’t have the reporting infrastructure in place to dig into the composition of your pipeline, conversion rates are a great indicator of quality.
A high conversion rate shows you a couple of things: First, that the people you’re adding to your pipeline are genuinely interested in your company. And second, your efforts to nurture candidates and educate them on the benefits of working at your company are clearly working!
5. Source of influence
It’s well documented that candidates can have as many as 12-18 interactions with your company before they decide to apply. These interactions are not necessarily linear and could involve anything from opening an email campaign, to liking a tweet, to watching an employee testimonial video.
Ideally, you should have some way of measuring the influence that these different touchpoints have on the candidate journey. Someone might have ended up applying from your careers site, but was that the real reason behind their decision? Maybe the monthly newsletter you send to your database prompted the application. You need a way to find out.
6. Engagement
Recruitment marketing is all about relationships — the candidates that you’re engaging might not become hires for many years.
To be successful, you need to be able to track this engagement and see the effect it’s having on your pipeline over time.
This will show you which candidates to prioritize, and will help you understand the frequency with which you should contact candidates — engaged candidates can (and should) receive more frequent communication than the rest of your database.
Why does an organization need a Talent Lifecycle Management system?
Top candidates have more options than ever before, and in such a competitive talent market, every aspect of the recruiting experience matters. It’s on the talent acquisition function to design the new way of working that will bring in the best talent to fill your open (and future) roles. Talent Lifecycle Management helps the world’s largest enterprises keep their employees engaged, make better hires, and support the organization’s growth.