Calculating Return on Investment: It’s More Than Just Money


We talk a lot about recruitment ROI being in the ‘I’ of the Beholder. But the R of the ROI piece is equally something every recruitment leader needs to stop for a second and think about. Investing in lots of technology and resource to stay the same is crazy!

We're passionate about helping our clients improve profitability through effective digital marketing and recruitment technology...

That’s why we created an infographic for Firefish readers to help recruitment leaders understand what they should be looking for from their recruitment tech.

Read on, think about what ROI means to you (and how you’re going to start measuring it!), and start seeing a return from your investments. We see the R (return) as being three-fold:

T - Time

E - Emotion

C - Cashflow, Clicks, Community, Content

Time

We all want more time - what projects / initiatives are you running right now to create more of this?  We know that the average recruiter spends 1 hour per working day messing about with emails - that's 261 hours per year. What could you re-invest that time in?  And how much more pounds/dollars/euros would you generate with that cash? 

Emotion

I have yet to start working with a recruitment leader who didn't tell me how they feel - even before they talk to me about how much money they've "wasted" on systems and marketing before not really seeing the value.  Every recruitment, IT and marketing leader I work with wants to be happier in their role and they want to see their emotions improve through improving their businesses. 

Cash

...and profit.  This is normally what we see as the ROI piece - but it simply isn't enough.  I know plenty of businesses making lots of cash, generating nice tidy sums of profit, but they want more, and only more time and happiness (see above) will help them feel effective.

Community

Every recruiter I know wants a more qualitative community (not necessarily more people!) - ROI is about a strategy which delivers talent, clients and ideally more recruiters.

Clicks

Recruitment leaders are balking at how many systems the "younger" recruiters need to do their jobs.  ROI should be about reducing the clicks a recruiter needs to deliver to complete a placement.  It should also, however, increase the clicks of your contacts and candidates - more job views, more job applications, more contact us pages completed.

Content

So the content of your blog is critical - it's the only thing (aside from job adverts) which changes on your site and thus Google will be sniffing it out, indexing it and (hopefully) driving your ideal community to you.

But the content of your recruitment database is actually the thing that recruiter leaders are challenged by.  Is your recruitment software capable of improving the value of your recruitment business?  Or are you simply "all the gear and no idea" and paralysing your recruiters with so much tech that your main system (CRM) is the lonely aunt in the corner at Xmas?

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Lisa Jones

Barclay Jones founder Lisa Jones helps recruitment leaders and marketers set ROI-led goals and use digital marketing strategically.

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