Recruitment Marketing: Does Your Strategy Measure Up?
by Creative
From job boards and niche media to social platforms and search engine marketing, there are more recruitment marketing options available today than ever before. This presents the challenge of determining which channels are best for reaching your top applicants and hires. However, one significant weakness common in recruitment is that many companies are failing to accurately measure the results of their recruitment marketing initiatives. Why? Some may be unsure about how or what to measure while others may believe that it’s too expensive or that they don’t have the right resources. However, measuring the return on investment (ROI) of your recruitment marketing efforts should be a top priority – even if you don’t have a perfect solution.
Where to begin building your recruitment marketing strategy
The key is to build your strategy around purposeful objectives and measure its success using the right metrics. Here are the steps:
Define your objectives
- It’s hard to measure anything if you haven’t figured out what you’re trying to achieve. Before you begin, identify what it is you’re trying to accomplish with this campaign. Are you trying to increase your quality of hire? Are you trying to fill positions more quickly? Lower the cost per hire? Whatever your objective, you need to establish what your end goal is before you progress to the next step.
Identify your measures
- You can try and improve on your results with each marketing campaign you do. However, you obviously can’t improve what you don’t measure. With clear objectives, you can now identify the appropriate measurement processes to get the data you need to evaluate your campaign.
Monitor and adjust
- As the media landscape has evolved recruitment processes have changed along with it. Recruitment marketing is no longer a “set it and forget it” thing. Marketing campaigns are fluid and it is important to monitor your campaign’s progress and make adjustments as necessary: tweak the wording, the images, the media choices, the volume of activity, etc.
Evaluate and start again
- The final step is where you tie everything together in order to analyze your data to determine if the campaign met your objectives. From here you can compare your results to benchmarks (your past campaign performances or that of a similar competitor). You can then take what you learned to establish best practices and plan your next campaign.
Perhaps the most important thing to keep in mind is that you are seeking progress, not perfection. Comparing your success to an external metric can be futile and self-defeating. Choose your goal, understand your past efficacy and focus on incremental improvements.