Why Source of Influence Metrics Matter In Recruitment Marketing

Candidates act more and more like consumers in their search – and research – for a career, which means there are more and more touchpoints that influence their decision of where to apply and where to accept an offer. If you don’t understand source of influence, you can’t understand the candidate journey!

Source of influence is an imperative metric to your recruitment marketing strategy because:

Recruitment marketing and source of influence go hand-in-hand.

It’s no longer about posting a job and tracking who applies; it’s about posting on social media, hosting a recruiting event, maintaining Glassdoor reviews, building a talent network, using PPC, creating a personalized career site experience, and more to see which efforts attract which target candidates and influence them to convert. Without tracking source of influence, you’ll never know where you really reach candidates or how to optimize your strategy for what works best.

The candidate journey starts long before they apply.

There is no single source of hire, only single source of apply, which is actually the last source a candidate touched before apply (important, yes, but not the whole story!). The candidate journey starts at attraction, and all the subsequent touchpoints influence candidates in different ways to take – or not take – different actions. Job seekers look to an average of 10 to 12 sources (Google & Inmar) and 7 to 8 reviews before they make a decision to apply (Glassdoor).

Certain channels are meant to influence and nurture, not convert.

Think about how your recruiting events allow candidate leads to talk directly with hiring managers, or how social media might encourage leads to ask a question, or how great content marketing and SEO will drive leads from a Google search to your targeted landing pages. These efforts might not have a link to apply, but they do influence a candidate to consider Tracking source of influence will allow your team to maximize the time and money spent on those key efforts because you can prove they attract quality leads into your recruiting funnel, and result in great hires.

Source of influence tracking reveals candidate motivations and behaviors.

Despite all the candidate experience hype, many talent acquisition teams are still missing the key necessity to improving it: understanding (not guessing!) what drives the best candidates to apply for their jobs. Source of influence data eliminates the guesswork and instead proves the candidate journey.  Even further, it gives insight into specific candidate journeys and helps to create targeted candidate personas. What channels influenced engineers? Veterans? Hard-to-fill? High-volume?

If you want to learn more about source of influence and modern data-driven recruiting strategies, Join us for SmashFly’s upcoming expert panel on Talent Analytics on March 14, 2017 at 3 p.m. ET. Save your seat now!