83% of Candidates Incorrectly Self-Identify Their Referral Source

There’s been a significant increase in the number of employer clients would prefer to pay for postings and other recruitment advertising on a for performance basis so that they only pay if they hire someone from the ad. I’d love to get there as well as it would ensure that the interests of the candidate, employer, and CollegeRecruiter.com would be well aligned but we can’t get there until the employers make the proper investments in their applicant tracking systems.

Of the hundreds of clients we have, we’d be hard pressed to count on one hand how many of them are properly tracking the source of their hires. It is really pathetic, actually. We have one client who spend $200,000 on an applicant tracking system but didn’t spend $20,000 to add the module that would give them fully automated tracking with unique URLs. So instead they have those horrid drop-down boxes. Don Firth at AllRetailJobs.com and JobsInLogistics.com published a study showing that 83 percent of candidates misidentified their source when they clicked directly from the job board to the employer site and the job board was actually listed.

I can only imagine how much higher the percentage would be if the study included candidates who saw the posting on sites to which it was crossposted. For example, if an employer posts a job to our site then we crosspost it to thousands of other sites in our network. It is part of our selling proposition so there’s full transparency with our clients. If a candidate sees the posting on one of our partner sites and then applies on the employer site, will the candidate know to identify CollegeRecruiter.com? No way.

The only solution is fully automated tracking where the employer provides a unique URL to every board and other source to which they post the opportunity. Then regardless of where the candidate sees the posting the source will be properly tracked. Of course, that assumes that the ATS is setup to properly track those URLs and that the HR people using the ATS are properly trained on how to make that work.

We’re talking with a client right now about a pay-per-hire deal. We are confident that the client is properly tracking. We’d welcome more such deals as they’re great for all concerned, but I suspect that we’ll get a lot of interest from employers whose systems don’t measure up to their desires.

Originally posted by Steven Rothberg