How to Measure the Effectiveness of Recruiting Content and Why We Don't Believe in Analytics
We do not believe that clicks, views, and page traffic accurately represent recruiter efficiency or candidate sentiment.
1-minute 15-second read
This is how we (Before You Apply) view recruiting analytics within the context of creating and distributing content for the purpose of starting productive conversations with targeted candidates.
Notable: This is also how we advise our customers to measure the effectiveness of the content that we produce for them—and why we don’t use analytics.
First, content is not software. Therefore the effectiveness of content can’t be measured the same way.
Content is created for a recruiter to put to use in all of their sourcing channels: referral messages, outbound messages, social posts, and in niche corners of the internet where their candidates hang out.
Because of this, we believe that the recruiting data that matter is:
Increasing response rates to outbound messages.
Recruiter efficiency: Are your recruiters spending more time in productive conversations with the right candidates and less time using those same conversations as a method for filtering people out? Conversation time is expensive. It should be guarded and used productively.
Is your content filtering out the sourced candidates who aren’t a fit prior to the initial conversations with your recruiters? (To my point above.)
Are the candidates who consume your assets more informed, bought in, and excited than those who don’t?
Is qualified interest increasing month-over-month through scaling up the creation and distribution of assets? (This is a long-term metric. It should be measured over 6+ months. IMO it’s the thing that all recruiting teams should be measuring and optimizing for overall. It's a great North Star.)
We do not believe that clicks, views, and page traffic accurately represent recruiter efficiency or candidate sentiment.
Yes, most of the data that we support is qualitative. It doesn’t show up in a neat, friendly dashboard. It takes effort: conversations, documenting feedback, and challenging your own sacred cows of analytics.
But it trumps quantitative data when measuring the effectiveness of content that recruiters themselves distribute because it speaks directly to efficiency and productivity.
In other words: How are the dollars that you’re spending per hour of recruiter activity being used?
Therefore, in order to increase recruiter efficiency and productivity, we believe that designing content specifically for recruiters to distribute themselves—with the mindset of recruiter enablement—should be the focus of your creative efforts.
And the above is how we'd measure its effectiveness.