Recruitment Metrics: Why They're Largely a Waste of Time!

Recruitment Advertising Metrics

Recruitment advertising metrics (aka analytics) may matter to some readers, but if you’re from an SME, save yourself the time and skip this article.

Sometimes, hiring managers ask, “Where did that applicant come from?” or “How many applications did that channel generate?” I appreciate that in a world obsessed with “measuring what matters”, recruitment advertising metrics should be helpful. Yet, the reality is fraught with pitfalls.

If you recruit infrequently, you don’t have sufficient data to provide actionable insights, so there is no point concerning yourself with metrics.

Even if you are frequently recruiting, data quality is often poor. Let’s look at examples of why application rates may fluctuate:

• You could get a free trial of a job site, get a great response, and sign a long-term contract. But subsequently, you get a poor response! Why? Perhaps the job site has turned off aggregator traffic because you’re locked into a long-term contract!
• A job site could launch a new advertising campaign. For example, I know a job site that got a cheap deal for outdoor advertising and delivery driver applications increased. When the deal was no longer cheap, advertising and the applications stopped.
• There are significant seasonal differences around school holidays, Christmas, and New Year.</li><li>Your employees may be exhausting their network for employee referrals.
• Your organisation may develop a bad reputation on review sites like Glassdoor.
• You may have negotiated a "great deal" with a recruitment agency, so now they send their best applicants to other employers who pay more!<

My main point is that it is challenging to find a correlation, let alone causality. But I don't want you to take this to extremes; if a particular Applicant Attraction Channel consistantly underperforms over a long time, it may be appropriate to stop using it.

While I’ve touched on measuring application rates, similar problems exist when measuring quality-of-hire, time-to-hire, cost-per-hire, etc. An Applicant Attraction Channel is unlikely to influence these metrics. Instead, other factors such as the selection process, employee onboarding, training, and management will be more important to examine.

While metrics can guide us, the human elements of recruitment – understanding, intuition, and the ability to adapt – are irreplaceable. Perhaps the most telling metric is how much time we waste trying to quantify the unquantifiable.

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Additional Resources

• Article; Find Employees: The Ultimate Guide to Maximising Applicant Attraction.