Recruitment Marketing analytics can be intimidating — not just because we have to make sense of a lot of data from a lot of different sources, but also because the stakes to get it right are so high. Any time you talk about measuring the effectiveness of a campaign, program or channel, it’s a reflection of your strategy, your ability and in some ways of you.
As a practitioner, you’re always trying to find ways to demonstrate your value to the organization, and while analytics are a part of that, it’s identifying and telling the story around the analytics that’s key to building your credibility. Having the skills and confidence to interpret the data and then make decisions is extremely important to continually improve the effectiveness of your Recruitment Marketing strategy while also demonstrating the value you bring to your organization.
To help you master Recruitment Marketing analytics, we hosted a Recruitment Marketing analytics bootcamp where we focused on how to improve the effectiveness of our top-of-funnel metrics — aka job advertising. The following video include some highlights from the bootcamp:
We brought in 3 amazing industry experts: Liz Caselli-Mechael, Digital Communications Lead at Nestlé U.S.; Dana Meyer, Recruitment Marketing Director at ManpowerGroup; and Amy English, Customer Success Analytics Team Lead at PandoLogic. Our experts taught us how to understand Recruitment Marketing analytics, from paid social media ads to programmatic job advertising.
Here are the top takeaways from the bootcamp that can help you master Recruitment Marketing analytics and tell the story of your impact. You can also watch the bootcamp on demand and have the opportunity to earn a Rally Academy Certificate of Completion!
Meet the Experts
Liz Caselli-Mechael, Digital + Content Communications Lead, Nestlé USA
Liz Caselli-Mechael
Liz Caselli-Mechael is the Digital + Content Communications Lead for Nestlé USA. Her team is responsible for external digital platforms for Nestlé’s corporate and employer brand, as well as a range of internal employee communications initiatives.
Amy English, Customer Success Analytics Team Lead, PandoLogic
Amy English
Amy English is the Customer Success Analytics Team Lead at PandoLogic. She is a strategic leader with expertise in recruitment advertising, product strategy, agile product development, relationship management and client services.
Dana Meyer, Director of Recruitment Marketing, ManpowerGroup
Dana Meyer
Dana Meyer is the Director of Recruitment Marketing at ManpowerGroup. She is focused on creating innovative Recruitment Marketing solutions for RPO clients, rooted in technology. Dana is a marketing and communications leader with expertise in marketing, communications, social media, recruitment, public relations and event marketing.
3 Experts Help You Master Recruitment Marketing Analytics
1. Build a strong foundation to get the right data from your paid social media ads
Paid social media job ad campaigns are a great tool for recruitment teams of any size and expertise level. That’s because they’re simple to scale up or down — there’s very little barrier to entry in terms of required resources and they don’t require a big budget to get started, so you can easily work with what you’ve got! According to Liz, paid social media also brings 3 important benefits to your Recruitment Marketing strategy:
- It offers detailed targeting for your audiences
- It builds a loyal fan base
- It creates a social environment where you can actively interact with that fan base
These are all amazing features that you want to use when attracting potential candidates. To get started, Liz suggests laying a foundation for getting the data you need:
- Step 1: Set up a tracking infrastructure. This could look like embedding conversion pixels or insight tags from LinkedIn. Setting up some sort of tracking infrastructure is critical to understanding the full user journey.
- Step 2: Monitor your audience size. Keeping an eye on your audience size is important to help you adjust as you get feedback from your analytics so that you can target the right level of depth to maximize your return.
- Step 3: Have at least 5 variations of ad creative. This can include different visual templates or something as simple as a small change in your messaging or call to action (CTA).
To get the best data from your paid social media ads, Liz suggests using A/B testing. Quality checking your ads and alternating creative assets will allow you to pinpoint what works and what adjustments need to be made over time.
Liz also recommends that you go in with a hypothesis and see how it turns out. Based on these outcomes, you can create better insights into your audience and refine your targeting.
In this ad, the Nestlé U.S. team experimented with changing their message. They hypothesized that using the brand name would attract more candidates and they were right! The ad that highlighted the brand name had a 30% better ROI.
2. Leverage programmatic job advertising to go beyond your standard ROI metrics
As you know, there are a ton of benefits to using a programmatic job advertising platform. Programmatic allows you to get in front of your target candidates more effectively and at a more efficient cost. Not only that, but with programmatic’s AI and automation technology, you can focus on the outcomes and strategy versus manually managing your campaigns day to day.
Amy shares that most practitioners who are already leveraging programmatic today for job advertising are only looking at standard metrics that can measure ROI such as cost-per-click (CPC) and cost-per-applicant (CPA). However, if you want to get more bang for your buck, then you need to go beyond these metrics.
By leveraging the aggregated reports in your programmatic job advertising platform, you can look at which sources are working well and align with your strategy and company goals such as:
- Number of unique sources yielding applicants
- Percent of application volume from top 10 sources
- Types of sources
However, the interpretation of this data is dependent on what you’re trying to accomplish. For example, you might notice that you’re getting a ton of candidates through “easy apply” (e.g. ZipRecruiter or Indeed), which is casting a wide net and is great for high-volume hiring; however, if you’re hiring for a role that has really specific requirements, and is more challenging to find the right candidates, then you may not want this.
Looking at these insights can help you shift your strategy and focus on sources that give you a smaller group of more qualified candidates. From there, you can go back and look at your CPA and conversions from other sources and pivot your strategy.
By leveraging the aggregated reports in your programmatic job advertising platform, you can look at which sources are working well and align with your strategy and company goals.
And for those of you who are more advanced, you can also track how source performance changes over time — perhaps there are new sources that are providing applicants that you’re not even aware of! Ultimately, if you aren’t looking at these metrics, then you may be missing out on key data that can better inform your Recruitment Marketing strategy and drive the outcomes that will help you be successful in your recruitment goals.
3. Determine what “good” looks like
Now that you’ve gathered all of this data from your paid social ads and your programmatic job advertising platform, what’s next? Well if you want to demonstrate that your efforts are working, and even exceeding expectations, then you have to determine what “good” looks like!
First things first, Dana recommends that you establish benchmarks. If you don’t have any data yet, you can start by looking at industry averages. For example, Dana shares that the industry average for conversion rates on landing pages is 3-7%, however, when looking at her client’s pages, their benchmark is between 5-15%. So if she’s running a campaign that’s tracking at 3%, she can determine that particular job ad is under-performing and may have some more iterating to do.
What looks good is going to vary across channels. Your CPAs and CPCs for social advertising are likely going to look very different than those same metrics for your direct job boards.
And don’t forget — what looks good is going to vary across channels. Your CPAs and CPCs for social advertising are likely going to look very different than those same metrics for your direct job boards.
Don’t be afraid to look at qualitative data either! One time, Dana and her team were running a job ad in 3 different locations for a new client. 2 of the locations were performing well in terms of metrics and application flow while the third was not doing well at all. At first, they made various changes to the ad to try and move the needle, but what they ultimately found was that people were sharing comments directly on the ad about that work location such as the use of outdated equipment, issues with supervisors and competitors in the area paying more. Data is important, but don’t forget feedback too!
Think about it like this: when you’re determining what “good looks like”, an ad like this may see great results in terms of engagement metrics, but if all the comments are negative then something might be wrong!
Taking a holistic approach that incorporates both quantitative and qualitative data will help you paint a more complete picture and set you up for greater success in creating effective digital job ads.
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We hope that you have enjoyed reading through these insights on how to master Recruitment Marketing analytics. If you’d like to learn more, you can watch the Recruitment Marketing analytics bootcamp on-demand. You’ll also get access to the workbook to help you plan your approach and report on ROI. #yougotthis
