We’re firm believers that utilizing data is the fastest way to honing a successful Recruitment Marketing strategy. But there’s a difference between clean, usable data and distracting, irrelevant data, with the former pointing you in the right direction and the latter making progress more difficult.
Fortunately, here to help you organize your Recruitment Marketing data is Rally’s very own Keriann Mason. Beyond being Rally’s Data Entry & Management Assistant, Keriann also owns her own progressional organization business, a venture she started after spending 11 years as an officer in the military.
In other words, she is passionate about all things organization! With that said, here are Keriann’s 4 rules for approaching organization, and how you can apply them to your Recruitment Marketing strategy, keep track of the right data and use it to constantly improve your strategy at scale.
Rally note: Download our free Recruitment Marketing Measurement Kit to combine with the lessons shared below. You can use it to guide you through the process of crafting your Recruitment Marketing plan, understand which metrics are important to gauge effectiveness, document how you’ll track and measure, and set up processes for analyzing and reporting on the results.
Rule #1: Separate the signal from the noise
As Keriann emphasizes, the first step to effective organization is deciphering the signal from the noise.
This is relatively easy for one aspect of Recruitment Marketing work: attracting people to jobs. Number of applications, cost-per-click and cost per application all let you know if what you’re doing is working.
But for the other side of Recruitment Marketing, attracting people to your company and employer brand, what constitutes useful data is much less clear. What data tells you if you’re doing a better or worse job at attracting people to your company?
The answer to this question has been our main pursuit for many years now. Having worked alongside, spoken with and learned from many different employers related to this topic, and even developed a Recruitment Marketing and employer brand measurement tool, Rally Inside, here are the three data points we’ve established as being important to measuring Recruitment Marketing and employer brand:
- Reach: Number of people in your talent audience reached by your employer brand and jobs.
- Engagement: The rate at which your audience engages with your content.
- Reputation: Your reputation as an employer as defined by reviews and awards.
Rule #2: Don’t try to track everything at once
Keriann’s next rule is to locate and prioritize where you can make the biggest impact. If you’re like most Recruitment Marketing teams, you have limited time and resources to make an impact (and prove that impact to your leadership); making a lot of progress in one area rather than a little bit everywhere, especially at the beginning, can help keep you from getting overwhelmed and show impact sooner to stakeholders.
Understanding which of the 3 data points above to prioritize will depend on what you want to achieve. For example, maybe you have a big enough reach through your various Recruitment Marketing channels, but you’re not getting enough engagement on your content, or vice versa.
Why clicks are a simple-yet-effective metric that can be used to track growth in any of the 3 main areas listed in the section above.
Thinking about larger talent attraction goals at your company can also help you prioritize, and more easily get buy-in and support from stakeholders and leadership. For example, is your company looking to hire more engineering talent? If so, you could prioritize tracking data around reaching, engaging and inviting more reviews from engineering talent.
Once you reach your initial goal, or your team gains more capacity, you can begin to reassess and reprioritize.
Rule #3: Make your data digestible
After establishing your goals, Keriann then recommends creating a system for your data that allows you to keep track of progress and report on it in a digestible, visually appealing way.
With job ads, this is relatively easy. You set up a campaign on Indeed or some other job posting platform and relevant metrics (i.e. number of applications, cost per click and cost per application) are automatically tracked, organized and easy to present through a clear dashboard.
Keeping track of and presenting your progress in attracting people to your employer brand can be a little more complicated. For one, there are more possible indicators of success than in job ads. When trying to gauge your progress in the areas of reach, engagement and reputation, possible indicators of success include:
- Reach
- Subscribers in your talent network
- Followers on social media
- Names in your talent database
- Engagement
- Likes, comments and shares on social media
- Email open rates and clicks on content
- Applications from people in your talent database
- Referrals from people in your talent database
- Reputation
- Online reviews (from sites like Glassdoor)
- Awards
- Candidate experience scores (i.e. automated survey at the end of an interview)
Without proper structure, keeping track of (and reporting on) Recruitment Marketing efforts can get messy fast.
There is also a less defined way of presenting the progress of these metrics, often causing teams to resort to manually inputting their data into a spreadsheet (or not really reporting on this at all).
Other than being tedious and requiring more work to turn this data into a presentable report, spreadsheets also create opportunities for data holes and inaccuracies, especially as more and more people contribute to the spreadsheets.
A better alternative is to use a tool like Rally Inside, which we created to address this very issue. Instead of using spreadsheets, you can automatically track reach and engagement and present your progress in a simple dashboard, similar to what you would find with a job ad platform.
Rule #4: Constantly learn from your data
Finally, Keriann’s final rule: analyze, learn and repeat!
Set a regular cadence to analyze your data for ways to improve your strategy going forward. Depending on the data you’re tracking, use it to readjust time lines, the content you’re creating and putting in front of talent, your communications strategy, your EVP and everything else you possibly can.
For example, did day-in-the-life blog articles written by employees get the most clicks in your talent newsletter? Trying creating more of those. Did one type of post do well on LinkedIn but not Twitter? Try adjusting your content strategy for both of these channels. Did the increased number of employer reviews on Glassdoor lead to more hires ? Try generating even more.
A simple way to prove the impact of your Recruitment Marketing work on applications and hires at your company.
But similar to the issue raised in the section above, gleaning these kinds of insights from spreadsheets can be difficult, especially if you’re looking at data from multiple sources at the same time. The last thing you want to happen is to base your strategy going forward on data with holes in it.
Again, this is where an analytics and benchmarking tool can really save the day. Through one dashboard, which shows both paid and organic efforts, you can see what content receives the most reach and engagement, from the campaign to individual content level. You can also see content topics producing the most engagement for all Rally Inside users at an aggregate level.
As a result, you don’t have to worry about the kinds of data holes associated with compiling data manually from many different sources. Your data is tracked automatically and shown in your dashboard, making for easy analysis and confident decision making.
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There you have it! In applying Keriann’s professional organization tips to Recruitment Marketing, you can start separating the signal from the noise, establishing Recruitment Marketing goals that your leaders can get behind and tracking your progress in a clear way that allows you to constantly glean insights to improve your strategy.
To learn more about effectively tracking Recruitment Marketing data, get your free copy of our How To Guide, How to Track Your Recruitment Marketing Strategy!
