Welcome to Talent Tech Labs Lookback. We spend a lot of time exploring the Talent Acquisition Ecosystem and Marketplace and while every TTL Trends Report focuses on a different theme, we occasionally like to look back at some of our greatest hits.
It seems like a day doesn’t pass without an article, blog post or tweet that expounds the promise of using big data and analytics to help companies find hidden value and insights about their businesses. Unfortunately, there’s a big gap for many HR leaders between understanding the “promise” of big data and actually putting it to practice in a meaningful way.
New York City-based Recruitics is an innovative company that helps HR leaders do just that. They have a forward-thinking approach that leverages big data to help companies maximize the ROI of their online advertising budget and ultimately, make great hires. Employers are promoting their open jobs online through a variety of methods, including pay-per-click (PPC) ads, job postings, job slots and more. This intersection of job seekers and employer advertising creates a deep and rich trail of information that companies can leverage to make well informed, smarter decisions on which online recruitment advertising sources drive the best ROI. Recruitics has built a programmatic buying platform that is custom tailored to the recruitment advertising industry.
Take a look back at our Trends Report V3 from 2015, where we covered how @Recruitics helps you make smarter decisions regarding online recruiting ad spend. Click To TweetMaking smarter decisions with your online recruiting advertising spend.
While there is a range of data available to help you better manage your online advertising spend, understanding which data you should be measuring is key to avoiding information overload and truly seeing results.
- Know Your Conversion Rates.
Job postings are your honeypot. They are how you attract job seekers to apply to your jobs. Therefore, you first need to be able to answer a simple question: Are my job postings working? From a data perspective, the “lowest hanging fruit” to determine if your job postings are working is your conversion rate. A simple definition of conversion rate is the number of times a job is viewed divided by the number of applicants you get to a job. For example, if a job is viewed 1000 times, but only has 10 applications, it has a 1% conversion rate. That’s a job posting that is simply not working for you. You could invest thousands of additional ad dollars into that job to drive more applicants, but if it is only converting about 1%, you’ll simply be wasting your money. Instead, stop spending on that particular job and identify the reason it is not converting viewers into applicants, and ultimately, hires.
- Track the performance of every job.
Every job and job seeker is different, so it is critical that you map an online advertising strategy to maximize the performance of every job. There are multiple factors that determine the effectiveness of an individual job posting. For example, it is likely that the success of certain ad sources (e.g. Indeed, LinkedIn, CareerBuilder etc.) varies based on the type of job you are trying to fill. Jobs also perform differently based on the day of the week and the time of day they are advertised. They also perform differently based on the job title or the content of the job description. If you are unable to measure all of these aspects at the job level, you will never achieve optimal ROI on your advertising spend. But more importantly, this is something that is best suited for a “computer” and not a person. There are simply too many dimensions to track and evaluate in order to accurately and consistently manage for performance.
- Stop spending when you have met your goal.
Another common problem you may encounter is actually getting too many applicants to your jobs. From a budget perspective, every additional applicant you receive but don’t need is spend you’re taking away from an in-demand position—particularly if you are working in a PPC or cost-per-applicant (CPA) model. Therefore, you want to have some idea of what your applicant “goal” is for every job. Think about a job that you are sourcing for now. What is the number of applicants you think you need before you will get an appropriate number of interviews to fill that position? Whatever that number is, that’s your applicant goal and the point when you want to stop spending ad dollars. Establishing that goal and having a system in place to track your ad spend to programmatically alter and stop spending when said goal has been hit, is critical to driving high ROI.
Understanding which data you should be measuring is key to avoiding information overload and truly seeing results in recruitment advertising. See what @Recruitics suggests: Click To TweetThe advent of big data has enabled companies like Recruitics to take advantage of all of these data points to programmatically manage your online advertising spend. Want to discover more about investments, HR and talent acquisition? Head over to Talent Tech Labs website to get more industry insight and sign up for our blog. Want to explore more into TTL’s Think Tank and industry research? Download our latest trends reports and while you’re there jump into our series of trends reports covering topics from Real AI, Vendor Marketplace, Employer Branding and more!
