Employers: your career sites are not sources of hires

How some employers track source of hire is just plain wrong

“The customer is always right,” right? Wrong. We’ve fought few battles with our employer clients since 1994 when we launched an employment magazine and this website that morphed out of that. But one that we do fight is the misconception by so many employers about how they can and should track their source of hires. Don’t get me wrong: unlike some of our competitors, we want our employer clients to track their sources of hires because we’re confident that for the vast majority of our clients, we are an efficient, effective source of hire. But how some employers choose to track them is just plain wrong. Some of our clients know better and choose to stick their heads in the sand like ostriches while other clients are sold crap by their applicant tracking system or other vendors (and those vendors should be ashamed of themselves). Let me explain.

Employers who know where their candidates came from are at a distinct advantage over employers who are ignorant to that fact, because the employers who know their true hiring sources know where to spend their advertising and other recruitment dollars. Quite simply, those employers will get more bang for the buck.

Would you use a drop-down list in consumer marketing? No. 

But how do many employers track their source of hires? In a word, horribly. Those involved in employment marketing should walk down the hall and ask their colleagues in their consumer marketing departments if they would ask their customers to identify their source using a drop down list. Any good consumer marketer would be aghast at such a suggestion, yet many employers still cling to the wish, the hope, the dream that asking candidates to self-identify their source is a valid, reliable way to track their source. If only it were so easy.

You’d think that a candidate who is on a web site or just talked to a friend or just read a newspaper would be able to accurately identify that source when they go to the employer’s website and immediately encounters a drop down asking how they heard about the employer or the opportunity. But those drop downs are rarely complete or understandable and even when they are the candidates simply don’t remember or care to provide the correct answer the vast majority of the time. Don Firth of JobsInLogistics.com published a study showing that 83 percent of candidates misidentified their source of hire when they clicked directly from the job board to the employer site and the job board was actually listed. So to the employer who told us last week that the information provided to them by their drop down list was “better than nothing:” that’s wrong. In fact, you’re better off not knowing any sourcing data if 83 percent of the time that data is going to be wrong.

So where are your candidates coming from?

Gerry Crispin of CareerXroads released data that give a picture. One of the great things about data coming from Gerry and his partner Mark Mehler is that they have no axe to grind. They created their CareerXroads Colloquium in 2002 to bring together corporate staffing professionals who share a passion for critical analysis and sharing what really works (and what really doesn’t) in their firms. They don’t sit on “for-profit” boards, advisory or otherwise, and have no stock in any of the firms in the industry. Nor do they represent any firms in the industry but their own. The closest they come to any type of conflict of interest is that Crispin leads a standards task force as part of his volunteer activities with the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM), and if you regard that as a conflict of interest then you’re likely enamored with drop down lists. But I digress.

In this particular study, they sent surveys to a couple of hundred large organizations and received back usable information from about four dozen. They admit that their sample is not representative of employers at large, but the data is still instructive. CareerXroads discovered that employers identify their own websites as the source of hire for 22.3 percent of external hires even though those sites are properly regarded as destinations and not sources of hires. The source would be the website, media, friend, employee, etc. that referred the candidate to the corporate career site. So if a candidate searched for job information on Google, found your company’s website, and clicked through, Google would be the source. Similarly, if one of your employees suggested to their friend that they should apply, the employee would be the source.

Crispin and Mehler have been fighting the source of hire battle for years and although they still believe that corporate career sites are destinations—not sources—they’ve given up that fight because they realize that they’ve been trying to push a boulder uphill. Instead, they’ll now regard corporate career sites as channels yet remain mindful that doing so creates a significant data problem. When 22.3 percent of external hires are attributed to this channel, where did those candidates come from? And how many came to the corporate career site as a result of multiple referrals, such as hearing about you from a current employee, using Google to do some research, going to a site like Glassdoor to learn more about you, and then going to your web site? What’s the source in a case like that? Most employers would shrug their shoulders and attribute it to Glassdoor as that was the last link in the chain. But shouldn’t the employee referral and Google count as both were instrumental in getting the employer to your site so they could apply?

As the president and founder of niche job board College Recruiter, I naturally wanted to see what percentage of hires the CareerXroads sample attributed to job boards. With almost 1/4 of the hires misidentified, job boards still came in as one of the best sources with some 12.3 percent of external hires being attributed to job boards. Yet even those numbers are suspect as only 61 percent of the respondents were able to track any of their hires back to specific sites. Why? Hmmm. Maybe because they’re using drop downs and only asked the candidates if their source was a job board? Also, a number of employers insist when I’ve talked with them that there’s a difference between a “job board” and a “niche job board” so their drop downs often include both options. Do they really think that a candidate understands or cares that Monster and Careerbuilder are “job boards” and Dice and CollegeRecruiter.com are “niche job boards?” The survey by CareerXroads found that major job boards such as Careerbuilder and Monster accounted for 57.3 of the hires from all types of job boards.

Employers rely on data that is fundamentally flawed 

Despite 22.3 percent of hires attributable to job boards and only 0.2 percent attributable to social media, 65 percent of the employers surveyed indicated that they were making efforts to reduce the percentage of money they’re spending on job boards and shifting that money to social media and other sourcing tools. Crispin and Mehler believe that this is a mistake and that “counting out job boards is premature. There is much life in this category. Arguably, both large and small firms have difficulty in measuring the true impact of job boards and may not be giving them their due for their efforts in driving prospects to company sites.”

Although I’d be disappointed, I’d agree with the decision by some employers to reduce the percentage of their recruitment spending on job boards of all types IF job boards were not as good a source as other tools. But these employers are relying on data which is fundamentally flawed and they either know it or should know it. More data is not always a good thing if that data is misleading. Drop down lists and other forms of candidate self-identification leads to terrible decision making, whether those decisions mean more or less spending on job boards.

So what’s the solution?

Again, talk to your colleagues in your consumer marketing departments. Use fully automated tracking systems where every ad that you place has a unique URL that the candidate isn’t even aware of. The candidate simply goes to that URL and your applicant tracking system automatically and always knows the source. If you post an ad to CollegeRecruiter.com or have us deliver a targeted email on your behalf, the candidate clicks the apply button, goes to your site, and applies. And if the candidate sees the job posting ad on one of the other 11,000 sites in our network and the candidate clicks the apply button there, the candidate’s application will automatically be properly attributed to CollegeRecruiter.com because the candidate is clicking on the URL that you provided to us. If you have an employee referral program, each employee who wishes to participate should be given a unique URL. They provide that URL to their friends and family and when they come to your site to apply, you’ll automatically know not only that it was an employee referral, but which employee was responsible for the referral.

If you use fully automated tracking with no candidate self-identification, you’ll get better data that will help you properly evaluate where your advertising and other recruitment dollars are being best spent. And then spend more on those sources and less on the ones which aren’t as effective.