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5 KPIs to Support Your Online Recruitment Strategy

Written by Wendy McDougall | Fri, Feb 11, 2011

The importance of recruiters measuring their Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) to ensure goals are being achieved is crucial to an organisation's performance as a whole. Once certain quantifiable goals have been identified, keeping an eye on your KPIs will help you confirm whether or not the work being carried out is actually achieving those set targets.

So, what are the KPIs that ensure you're recruiting effectively online? 

1. Number of candidate application and registrations

Having a fully functional recruitment website to be used as ‘the hub’ for all your candidate activities is critical. Maintaining visitors on your site and then progressing them through to perform an action such as registering or applying for a job should be the main purpose.

There’s no point in investing in a cutting edge design if you don’t have specific calls to action or effective candidate journeys to encourage interaction at specific points throughout the site.

Potential ratio calculation: Number of unique users/number of candidate registrations + applications

2. Candidate conversion Rate

Of the number of candidates who applied online, who actually got considered by the hiring manager and placed? By measuring the quality of your applications against the number of those who progressed you can quickly see if what you’re doing is providing you with right-fit candidates.

Potential ratio calculation: Applications source/placement

3. Number of re-engaged candidates

Encourage your existing candidates to return to your website. You don’t have to be continually working on getting new visitors. By measuring the percentage of those returning and interacting you can see if improvements have to be made to your site’s content or functionality.

Potential ratio calculation: Existing user visits/new job alerts + applications

4.  Number of new candidates

There are now loads of really useful free online tools which you can use to help market your vacancies to the largest audience possible. And don’t forget there are also a number of job boards which are either completely free or giving away free trials, so take full advantage of these to find out if your candidates using those sites. 

Be strategic and post jobs where your candidates will actually see them. There's no point posting jobs on boards your candidates aren't likely to visit, so measure where you have the most success and focus your efforts there. 

To ensure you have the best reach ask yourself, "are my job adverts attractive enough to be shared?". Attractive adverts, that are Google for Jobs ready, are much more likely to attract candidates than ones that are thrown together in five minutes. 

Potential ratio calculation: Number of re-tweets + refer a friend/applications 

5. Social reach

Social networks are being used to communicate with candidates, but they can also be used as an additional channel to advertise your vacancies. And best of all, at the basic level they're completely free.

You need to measure which channel is the most effective to ensure what you’re doing is giving you the best return though.

Potential ratio calculation: Unique users/number of general registrations + applications

By using the above methods, you can quickly identify if there any blockages in your online efforts and discover where improvements can be made.

Are candidates falling off at any stage of the process? If your adverts are getting lots of views but the percentage of applications is low, you know you have to work on improving your adverts. Or if there is a lot of candidate activity on your website but only a few registrations then you'll need to look at the registration process. Is it too long? Not clear enough? The quicker you're able to identify any issues and resolve them the better for everyone involved.

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