How to Measure the ROI of Your Recruitment Marketing

Posted by Kameron Hurley on May 10, 2021 at 3:00 PM     Recruitment Marketing
How to Measure the ROI of Your Recruitment Marketing

Good talent is hard to find. That’s why it’s so important to have an effective recruitment marketing strategy. A recruitment marketing strategy can streamline your talent search and hiring process, leading to finding more qualified talent in less time. Wins all around!

When you do recruitment marketing right, you’ll spend less time weeding through resumes and see higher quality applicants walking through your door. Yes, top talent will come to you!

But how do you measure the results of your recruiting efforts? Is there a way to determine which strategies are working and which need to be adjusted? As with all things digital marketing, the answer is… you better believe it! 

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5 ROI Measurements for Your Digital Recruitment Marketing Strategy

1. Social Media Metrics

Word-of-mouth can help spread your company’s reputation as a great place to work. There’s no way to track it, though, because you can’t possibly tell how many people hear about your company from friends or acquaintances.

Unless, of course, those conversations take place online.

METRICS TO TRACK:

  • Reach
  • Engagement
  • Impressions
  • Audience
  • CTR (Click-through rate)

On your social media channels, you can track how many people see and engage with your posts, as well as who is commenting on them and sharing with friends.

If your recruitment marketing includes social media tactics (and I would definitely recommend it), track how many impressions and engagements each post gets. This will show you (and your boss) how many people are coming into contact with your brand.

What types of posts and conversations are resonating with your intended audience? Which fall flat? It’s not enough to keep throwing content at the wall and hoping something sticks. Measure what’s working so you can do more of what works and less of what doesn’t. It sounds dead simple, but we often get so carried away with posting nonstop content that we don’t take the time to measure its effectiveness. 

2. PPC Metrics

A great way to put your brand in front of potential recruits is through online paid advertising. When top candidates search for keywords related to your open position, you can ensure your company is at the top of the page with paid placement. 

METRICS TO TRACK:

  • Clicks
  • CPC (cost per click)
  • Submissions
  • Hires compared to spend

To gauge whether or not those ads are worth the cost, monitor how many clicks they’re getting. If one ad is not getting many clicks but another is, stop the first campaign and divert funds to the second. 

Take the cost of the campaign and divide it by the number of clicks. If the ad has a high cost per click (CPC), that probably means there’s a lot of competition for the keywords you chose.

A high CPC doesn’t mean the keyword isn’t worth it to target, though. So long as you’re receiving a healthy amount of conversions and your hires are worth the spend, a higher cost per click can be justified.

What’s a good CPC? Average CPCs vary by industry, but to give you an idea, the average CPC for AdWords is $2.69 with CPCs ranging from $1.16 on the low end (for e-commerce ads)  to $6.75 on the high end (legal ads).

3. Time-To-Hire

Time-to-hire is the time it takes from the day someone applies for an open position to the day they accept your offer. To measure this, you’ll need to keep track of those dates for each successful applicant.

Ideally, your recruitment marketing efforts will show a reduced time-to-hire, as candidates from a recruitment marketing strategy are often better informed and more engaged before they apply than other applicants. They will also come to you having been nurtured by tactics like automated email follow-ups, which makes it easier for them to stay engaged with your company throughout the process.

Why is this such a strong ROI metric to prove the value of your recruitment marketing strategy? Because the best candidates are off the market in an average of 10 days. And, increasingly, the best talent is being actively pursued by multiple companies - even when they aren’t on the market. So not only will a shorter time-to-hire window mean a more efficient process for you, but it will also increase your chances of capturing top talent.

4. Manual Time

How long would you say it takes you to find someone for an open position? That includes posting the open position on your website and job search websites, promoting the open position on social, reviewing resumes, scheduling interviews, conducting the interviews and checking in with job candidates.

That all probably adds up to a decent chunk of time. However, with helpful digital tools such as email automation, a company advocacy program and PPC, recruitment marketing (when done right) can cut down on the manual effort you have to put into the hiring process. But you’ll only know this if you keep track of it!

5. Larger Candidate Pool

Last but not least, I recommend keeping track of the size of the candidate pool you’re working with for each open position. At the end of the day, if all of your recruitment marketing efforts aren’t leading to more candidates finding their way to your job posting to apply, you need to step back and ask yourself if it’s really worth it. 

Better yet, ask what you can do to tweak the program to get the results you want. You can find the answer to that question by looking at the metrics above. If one metric is performing below the others, that’s where to start your optimization efforts. 

🙋 Recruiting on LinkedIn? Here’s How to Find the Best Candidates

Start Recruiting Top Talent Today

In this increasingly competitive hiring market, there’s no time like the present to start a recruitment marketing strategy. Remember that recruitment isn’t only about the hot jobs you have to fill immediately. It’s also about setting your company up for a strong workforce into the future. 

Our team at Marketing Essentials can help you get started! We’ll work with you to build a results-driven recruitment marketing strategy that can deliver the strong ROI you need to keep business moving. Contact us to get started