Over the last year we have been working closely with a number of clients in order to help them establish their return on investment from their chosen job board partners and that of their own recruitment website.
When starting this process it became apparent that a large volume of recruitment businesses based their perception of ROI on the level of traffic and applications they were receiving and therefore this is what they were tracking. However not all recruitment businesses were identifying their candidate source when making a placement.
We found this truly staggering, as without this simple reporting process it proves very difficult to identify where best to focus their advertising budget.
Many recruitment businesses advertise on a number of job boards and as mentioned many base their reasoning’s for doing so around the volume of candidates each job board generates. Yes this is one way of doing it, but we found the most accurate way to establish their money is being well spent is identify which applications lead to a placement.
Working exceptionally closely with a handful of clients over the last year we were able to calculate the value of placements made from applications that were a direct result of Google organic search traffic (not branded searches) to their recruitment website. In some cases this was in excess of seven times their yearly recruitment website and SEO spend.
This got us thinking that we could well be delivering similar results for the large majority of our other clients and so now we consult on this with each client quarterly to establish the return on investment they are achieving from their recruitment website.
Now, as par for the course, we ask all clients to educate their consultants/resourcers, if its not automated by their CV parsing software, to clearly flag the candidate source on their CRM. We also ask them to note the candidate source when a placement has been made. This will in turn clearly identify how effective our clients advertising mediums, recruitment website and recruitment website marketing processes are and they are then able to adjust their marketing spend and efforts accordingly.
Over the next six months we will be putting together detailed statistics based on the above and will share with you in due course.
