I seem to be continually asked what the next big thing for online recruitment is going to be. There seems to be an obsession at the moment from clients and agencies alike to be “cutting edge”, innovative and to be the first people to use a particularly innovation or technology in the recruitment space. Now this is not necessarily a bad thing, the UK online recruitment market is about to under go an inevitable seismic shift as the true potential of emerging Web 2.0 methodologies are realised for recruitment. However I’m still amazed that in their rush to seize the digital high ground a lot of people still haven’t got the basic building blocks of their strategy in place.
Now I’m not talking here about companies and organisation that don’t use online recruitment at all or those who think that just by using job postings alone they are going to solve their recruitment issues. That’s a whole new blog rant in its own right! I’m referring to companies and organisation that spend reasonable amounts of money on their online presence but have no proper tracking or means by which to measure the return on their sometimes considerable investment.
The unprecedented growth in online advertising has in the most part been driven by the high level of accountability of the medium in other market sectors. Online recruitment though really seems to be missing out on its true power. Most job boards will provide basic statistics on everything from click throughs to “online applications” which some companies use to help their purchasing decisions. There have also been some recent moves to try to audit and standardised these stats; this is certainly progress but is it genuinely going to be that useful?
There is absolutely no substitute for using independent third party tracking that tells you exactly what you need to know about your online recruitment advertising rather than what someone else thinks you need to know or what your job boards want to tell you! The other advantages of using a third party tracking system is like for like measurement across all your activity including search engine keywords and the fact you can track all the way to a genuine online application on your own web site and sometimes beyond.
How’s it done? Well there are lots of options out there including third party ad serving via companies such as Atlas and Bluestreak, in built tracking within many ATS systems and tracking within multi posting tools such as Broadbean. Very often a combination of all these provides the best information.
So before you run away and build your own recruiters office in Second Life or create a podcast telling people how great your company culture is, invest some time and money in third party tracking for the presence you already have. It’ll pay for itself ten times over I promise!
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