As recruiters, the work we do to increase our job posting marketing relies heavily on our Web and engine analytics. This includes visitors, referring site, and keywords searches, just to name a few.

So you see, we spend more time on candidate analytics (i.e., how we get them, where they came from and how good they are) than anything else in our business. This article, therefore, is dedicated to your candidate analytics, and if you:
A. Understand them
B. Don’t understand them
C. Have no idea what I’m talking about
D. Want to learn more

What are candidate analytics?
Wikepedia describes “analytics” as the following: “Analytics is the branch of logic dealing with analysis. Business analytics is a term used for more sophisticated forms of business data analysis. Analytics closely resembles statistical analysis and data mining, but tends to be based on physics modeling involving extensive computation.”

So what is “candidate analytics”? Candidate analytics to me is understanding the source of a candidate, and being able to analyze how a candidate is obtained.

You may think this is a source of hire. I think it’s a bit deeper than that. Yes, we can all understand we got a candidate from the Internet, or a job board, but that’s about it.

Leveraging your ATS
Most applicant tracking systems do a very poor job of candidate analytics, and yet this is the most important part of the recruiting process.

You should be able to answer these questions with the help of your ATS:

• How did a candidate find you? Was it word of mouth, from a job posting, employee referral or newspaper advertisement?
• Where did a candidate find you? Did the candidate use a search engine, a particular niche site, a general job board or a free listing? The difference between how and where is how the candidate applies to your job.
• What made the candidate find you? Did they seek you out or did you seek them out? Were they looking for a new job or did your company entice them to apply?

Using these methods to analyze your candidate sourcing methods enables you to consistently track your results so that you aren’t reinventing the wheel.

Getting you better candidate analytics
Here are a couple of considerations to help gain you better candidate analytics.

• Job Title: I have seen more than my share of job titles that don’t relate to the job itself.
• Job Description: Each job description will attract a certain candidate. If you understand your candidate analytics, you will learn what job description you should be using all the time.
• Employment Value Proposition: This should be engaging, clear and concise. Look at your analytics and see which one attracted the best candidates and then utilize that one in both on- and off-line advertising.
• Keywords: Keywords are important to attract the right job seeker search. Make sure you’re using the right keywords, and that you are using them often. This way you can create your own keyword attraction model. (I will discuss this further in the next article.)
• Referring Site: You would be surprised, when you look at your analytics, where you get good candidates from. It could be a search engine or a classified site, but most importantly, we get people from direct hits – meaning they type in our URL. That means they found us, and know us, somehow.

If you are hosting your own career site, Web site, or ATS, then I would begin with your IT department or your webmaster. They should be able to pull these analytic reports for you if you have some type of analytical software running on your Web site. (If you don’t, then I’ve mentioned a couple below to get you started.)

If your ATS provider is hosting your site, then I would ask them about this, it may not be in your pricing, and they may want to charge you more, but if you are spending money to attract candidates, then you should spend wisely and understand where they came from.

This may seem like a lot of work. However, once you get the foundation in place, you can continually tweak the system to get the best qualified candidate, as well as track the effectiveness of your investment. Doing this means you will better understand where your candidates came from, and how they got to you.

Here’s to not reinventing the wheel each and every time you’re in a recruitment advertising budget cycle.

Web site analytics software: Where to start

• Webtrends
• ClickTracks
• Omniture

Jason Gorham is CEO of CareerMetaSearch.com, and also currently serves as both CEO and Managing Director for Sharkstrike, a recruitment process outsource company whose unique services include, among others, name sourcing, resume database mining and recruitment consulting.