Jobs as Products
Each candidate interaction is a touchpoint. Each touchpoint carries with it a value. And that value is specific to you, your org, and your intended outcome—not to the entire industry.
30-second read (+1:58 video)
Converting a job candidate into a job buyer is not the result of:
Your careers site
Referrals
Word of mouth
Your job ad
Your job description
A job board
A recruiter
Your tech stack
An event
A video
A blog post
A webinar
Content...period!
Thinking that it is creates assumptions. And these assumptions trick you into believing that things matter when they actually don’t.
Side note: Assumptions are a safe and easy way to validate your own beliefs. They’ll certainly help you justify all that money you spent on your fancy new careers site. I digress.
Over-valuing last-touch attribution keeps you blind to human behavior. It doesn’t allow you to identify the quickest path to a predictable outcome.
Each candidate interaction is a touchpoint. Each touchpoint carries with it a value. And that value is specific to you, your org, and your intended outcome—not to the entire industry. This is where you have to do the unscalable work first and look at the data (quant and qual) in order to identify what works and what doesn’t with your specific audience.
View a job like a product. This is the only way to truly be efficient with your time and money.
This is the stuff that vendors won’t tell you. If they did, you wouldn’t buy their thing. At least not until you ran some experiments on your own to determine what you actually need.
Stop following industry norms and best practices.
The secret is figuring out which touchpoints actually matter and drawing the straightest line between those and a conversion. That’s where you invest.
Bottom line: Last-touch is just an indicator. It doesn't explain human behavior. And anyone who tells you that it does is trying to sell you a feature, not a solution.