Hit the Ground Running with your Recruitment Media Buying

When you evaluate your job advertising successes from the last year, there are a few ways you can slice and dice the data to identify what you paid for, versus what your returns were.

To determine your first set of benchmark data, start by reviewing these questions:

1. What was your average cost per hire per source?

   If this source had both organic and paid for advertising, split these into two separate groups to understand the impact of sources that you paid for compared to those you didn’t pay for.

2. What was your cost per applicant per source?

3. What was your cost per quality candidate per source?

4. What was your effective cost per click from each source?

5. Did your cost align to the level of difficulty of hiring the position?

Setting these benchmarks will help you understand your spend from the previous year. Before you can evaluate how much you should pay for recruitment media in 2017, you must first consider how much it cost you last year, and its level of impact on your business.  Quite honestly, you have to consider this in terms that have real, concrete business value to you, not to the vendor. Vendors will choose to show data in the best way to support their business model.  Many times this varies from job site to job site.  As an informed consumer, your best approach is to re-calculate each of your sources on an even playing field – being careful not to let ‘source of hire’ have an overwhelming slant on the data.

The reason I make this argument: your vendors are paid to produce candidates – good quality candidates – and, as a recruiter, your job is to make hires.  Holding your vendors to a recruiter’s standard is inherently unfair, and if you do, it may mean you end up making decisions based on data that is irrelevant to your own business model.

Now, when you reassess the benchmark metrics based on your own business model, you may see some interesting trends in the data:

1. Your cost per applicant might be low, but your cost per hire may be high.

2. Your organic traffic may be clouding your picture of your real costs.

3. Only considering the hires you’ve made may have you eliminate vendors who produce a high volume of quality applicants.

4. Only considering applicants may have you keeping vendors who produce volume, but not quality.

In this part of your data analysis, something else might then hit you: why are you paying for job ads based on models that don’t necessarily align your vendors priorities with your own success?  In fact, if technology can help you decide where you should put a job, it should also help you determine the amount you should pay.  It’s simple… you should pay lower amounts for easier to-fill positions and higher amounts (begrudgingly), for harder-to-fill roles.  Technology that knows where the right candidates are should also know how many of them are available, and at what price point.  This is essential in determining the supply and demand of your job ad traffic and market bid rates.  This is programmatic job advertising.

Finally, the last points you should consider when looking at your jobs from last year are:

1. How many applicants did you need for each job?

2. Did you get the right number overall for each job, and in a timely fashion?

3. Did the source(s) you used provide too many, the right amount, too little or no candidates?

4. Did the source(s) you used provide too many, the right amount, too little or no quality candidates?

5. Did you overpay for your job ads because you got too many or too few candidates?

Running through this simple set of questions can help you accurately evaluate your spend and performance in 2016 and start 2017 with your best foot forward. Look beyond just one job board or source, and see instead the aggregate of all of your jobs – i.e. be smarter than any one job board or source to make the best buying decisions.