The KPIs you’re measuring aren’t telling you everything. In our last post, we outlined 3 vital recruitment KPIs that most businesses aren’t measuring. Why aren’t they being measured though?
It’s largely because they’re difficult to quantify. We all know how important it is to keep candidates engaged, but how do you put a number on candidate engagement? How do you keep track of who you’re attracting with your ads?
Turning these into manageable, measurable metrics is daunting. It shouldn’t be though – with some simple, free tools you can get on top of your online recruitment KPIs. More importantly, once you’ve started to measure them you can then identify areas for improvement, act on them, and reap the rewards of outstanding results in 2012.
Google Analytics
Traditionally a marketing tool, Google Analytics shows you how a user found your web page, how long they spent looking at it, and what they clicked on to leave it. This is an incredibly powerful tool and the good news is, the job boards you post to are already using it. If you ask, they can generally provide you with the number of views your ads have received.
Google Analytics is quite straightforward to use on your own Careers site too – all you need to do is copy and paste a line of code. Mashable posted some straightforward instructions to help you get started with Analytics here.
Using this free tool, you can take a note of your overall job advert: view and view: application ratios on a regular basis and aim to improve it month on month. Try making subtle changes to your ads – titles, bullet points, the length of your job description - then see how they influence your ratio. Keep the changes that have a positive impact and kick the ones that don’t. If you keep experimenting in this way, you will see continuous improvement in candidate attraction and conversion.
This is a simple one. If you’re not already using Twitter for recruitment, you should be. Start tweeting links to your job ads and build up a rapport with your target market by sharing other content that is relevant to them: articles, news, statistics, or anything else that might be of interest to them. The more Twitter followers you have, the more candidates you’re likely to attract to your jobs.
Record the number of Twitter followers you have at the end of each month and set specific a goal to increase that by the following month. As with all KPIs, you should be setting this at the upper end of what’s attainable: if you’re meeting your goal every month without breaking a sweat, you’ve probably set it too low.
Take the same approach to the number of Facebook fans, LinkedIn connections, and Google+ contacts your business has. It will only take half an hour at the end of each month to check and record these numbers, which will give you an overall impression of your social reach and where the opportunities are to reach more candidates.
NetPromoter
We’ve talked a bit about how to quantify candidate attraction and conversion, but what about candidate engagement? This is the one that seems the trickiest initially but is, in fact, quite straightforward: just ask your candidates.
Have you ever received an email, text, or call from a business you dealt with to ask how likely you are to recommend them on a scale of 0 to 10? They’re using NetPromoter to measure your engagement with their business, and there’s no reason why recruiters couldn’t use the same system to quantify candidate engagement. John Warrillow wrote a good basic introduction to NetPromoter here, aimed specifically at small businesses but relevant to all.
Monitoring NetPromoter scores for the business as a whole (or even for each recruiter in your business) will give you a feel for the quality of the candidate experience you’re providing. If you’re pushing for a high score, you can expect to see the candidate referrals roll in next year!
2 more free tools to help you get started:
SurveyMonkey – this is a great tool to help you create your NetPromoter surveys and analyse their results.
MailChimp – free email campaign management software that can help you improve candidate engagement by running surveys, creating newsletters, etc. It also integrates very well with third party software, including SurveyMonkey.
Download the eBook below to find out how to get started with running an awesome recruitment email campaign!
