Be Visible
Attract
Inform

Visibility – making your talent market aware that your company exists and has openings. this is a combination of online visibility and alot of word of mouth! (want to start a word of mouth epidemic? try reading malcolm gladwell’s Tipping Point)

Attractiveness – what would make your talent market want to work at your company? what makes you unique vs your competitors? this is tricky as we talk about EVPs. lets remember that we need to appeal to both conscious and sub-conscious needs. Again this will be a combination of online and real-life word of mouth activity.

Information availability – job seekers are curious. you cant buy a car without knowing the specs right? same with deciding what company you want to invest time applying at. You cant cut and paste the usual JD’s. Lets all please understand whats important for applicants to know and lets not speak in company jargon!

All Sourcing and Recruitment Marketing activities should fall into the above 3 elements. If you can win on those 3 vs your talent competitors, then you have a good chance of winning the game.
Your sourcing strategy will depend on how your competitors fare on those 3 elements.

Let’s assume we all know what we mean by posting, advertising, tweeting, referrals, and other “sourcing” words familiar to all of us. Then we’d need to call this “Mistake #1”. The interrelatedness of these things is mind-numbingly complex. How many of us have hired the person who was an “employee referral” – cashing in on an internal friendship – who actually saw the position posted on the commercial board that scraped the original posting from the corporate site. He looked there because his sister got a tweet about the job from another friend so she did a web search in the local newspaper help-wanted ads and pointed it out to your new hire? Was this an Ad, a posting, or a referral? More importantly, who has the resources to determine this?

Mistake #2 works like this: I’m responsible for hiring. I’m responsible for the budget. I’m responsible for advertising. I’m responsible for posting. And now I’m responsible for gathering my own data to support (or not) my own performance! Does this sound just a bit biased to anyone? At the very least, it’s a bad way to objectively examine anything at all.

Mistake #3: The harsh reality is that I have a limited budget so I can only post/advertise in a limited number of places. By design, I may have completely missed the “best” place. This is “Wag the Dog” in any research design.

Mistake #4: Finding the “best source”- (a.k.a., the Mother of All Mistakes): Let’s assume a pristine methodology and we get 30 applicants, achieving the all-important “n” value out of “N” possibilities. We hire Joe who we are absolutely certain came from “Job Board Extraordinaire”. For this particular job group and/or job type, how many more times do we have to repeat this process before “Job Board Extraordinaire” reaches significance? Around 2026 you should have your answer.

This is social spaghetti wrapped in nuclear physics. Anyone who thinks “automation” will lead to better source analysis needs to hop in the trenches and recruit for a while. Track-backs, click-throughs, impressions… all great stuff, if you control for mistakes 1, 2, and 3. And if you do, welcome to #4.

Finding the “best” source is a volume and distribution issue guided by industry-involved thinkers with good gut feelings, a reasonably efficient filtering and recording mechanism, and a penchant for action. They call them “Recruiters”.

A tip-of-the-hat to Dr. Sullivan for identifying each and every one of these challenges. My opinion is that the resources to develop and control for accurate methodology coupled with the volume issue (#4) makes truly supporting the ROI on sources a proposition limited to a very few, very large organizations.

For employee referrals, most companies use some type of system (ATS-based or otherwise) to track the volume of referrals, the referrer, referral bonus payouts, etc. So it seems that source is not excluded from this type of tracking. Even SMBs I have worked at and worked with track this source very closely, as they know it’s so valuable.

I agree that we cannot expect 100 percent automated measurement of candidate source – direct sourcing and campus recruiting are tough areas, and sources like “career site” and “employer brand awareness” will never be totally clear. My goal in working with companies is to simply help them track what IS trackable – and even there we have a long way to go toward automation.

I commend Doug for not making such a claim!

For active job seekers that see a post on a blog, click through some recruitment advertising, and arrive at the companies online job application, we concede, you can track that source using automated means. However, for the applicant that heard about a company through a group of friends, read about the company in an editorial article, then ran into a representative of the company at a professional event and applied, tagging the source of hire isn’t nearly as easy.

Two sources in particular make up more than 50% of hires in the average organization, employee referral and direct sourcing. While some sourcing tools enable you to capture the search string producing the result that becomes an applicant, not all do, and not all recruiters direct source using a sourcing tool.

Can automated tools accurately identify the path to conversion for a subset of applicants, absolutely. Can automated tools accurately identify source of hire across the board, especially in organizations leveraging highly fragmented sources (kudo’s again to Doug for raising this issue)no chance!

Recruitment Media Metrics details the number of impressions, clicks, applications and hires, as well as the cost per applicant and hire, so employers can see the effectiveness of their media choices in converting prospective candidates to hires. We’ve designed this solution to make determining the correct source of hire easy for employers. It incorporates with their ATS, is web-based and password-protected so there’s no software to install, and provides real-time reporting.

“If you rely on weak sources, chances are you’ll get weak results.” – Exactly!

I shared your article with my marketing team – to show them just how poor of a job they are doing.

Our job distribution and resume processing software includes sophisticated source tracking software. With 100% accuracy we know the exact source of any online candidate; it’s not a subjective pre or post survey.

We are integrated with virtually every ATS; for many clients we can ping their ATS to tie candidate source reporting to actions (i.e. interviewed, offer extended, hired, etc.).

Let me know if you are interested in a follow-up article describing what reporting now exists in the industry….Keith

When volume blesses you with the chance to analyze your data with systematic, objective, and thoughtful statistical analysis, there is no better way to do it than post-hire. In my experience in these cases, it often isn’t your “sources” at all that you discover. Rather, it’s the ’6 degrees of web-site, print, and social media separation’ created by great marketing and coupled with good old word-of-mouth. At that point, pick the one with the biggest buzz because exponential math is on your side. Investigator bias? Maybe. My feeling is that “all’s fair in love and recruitment” so when the math is fuzzy by design, go with volume.

When the new-hire can tell you flat-out, “Here’s how I found out about the job…” thank your lucky stars, record it, and wait for validation.

We’ve been working on this at Jobs2Web, and help our clients get visibility even to pre-apply visitor traffic so that companies can understand what’s driving brand oriented, and passive candidates to their career sites.

There are solutions such as ours that do isolate exact source of applicants online, and pass the data into nearly any ATS system online, so I agree with Jason W at Indeed, that there is solutions that can capture this data on the front end, instead of hoping that candidates will remember the flurry of online sites they visited, or what the process was that they used to initiate contact into any company.

Here is a link to our Recruiting Dashboard to learn more: http://www.jobs2web.com/solutions/recruiting-dashboard/

Also, here’s a link to a video that shows how our Dynamic Source Tagging engine captures visitor data, and passes it into any ATS system: http://www.vimeo.com/6054553

I think you undersell what’s possible with recruitment technology today. While this absolutely is a challenge in online recruiting, it’s also solvable and many companies are stepping up to do so. You’re right that some corporations have no idea what’s possible with their ATS, and do a poor job of tracking source of candidate, source of hire and the ROI of their recruitment advertising. But rather than bail on a technical solution, we need to be educating companies and challenging ATSes to properly train their clients, and even update their products to provide the proper tracking functionality.

This white paper – The Four A’s of Recruitment Advertising – is a step-by-step process to help companies deal with this challenge. It’s something I am passionate about and have been working with companies to solve for years.

https://ads.indeed.com/pdf/recruitment_advertising.pdf

While I agree that confirming source of hire is an important step in the recruiting/hiring process, I also hold out hope that we will get recruitment technology to the point where this is no longer a problem.

I enjoyed the article, but would really like to challenge you on your final thought of

“Using a post-hire source capturing approach is cheap, quick, and much more accurate than pre-hire source identification. It’s a slam-dunk.”.

I am a firm believer in recruiting analytics – when they are valid. One of the challenges that we face in our industry is not having the same validated analytical details that our counterparts in sales, accounting, etc have when determining budgets and true ROI to an organization.

The point of post hire source gathering is a valid one – you know where the people you have hired come from. On the more realistic stage, people often are unsure of where they came from when you ask them directly – especially if they were in a search and could have seen the posting in many places, on top of that(corporate) recruiters are often posting positions on a variety of sites to suit requests of hiring managers or because it is a company standard to do so. Having valid metrics – regardless of whether the person was hired or not – is important for determining proper budgets and having quantitative data to prove why you are making the decision you are.

I think equally as important are the ratios of candidates per source phone screened, interviewed, etc – if candidates are getting to that point then you have a quality standard from that source. Anyone can apply by one method on a fluke – it doesn’t mean it is your slam dunk site or resource.

One of the reasons that I joined HRMDirect (I am so sorry, I really hate to do this and NEVER do – so bear with me) was because of the advanced sourcing tracking they offer that none of the other ATS vendors have grabbed hold of yet. The sourcing tracking process should be completely seemless and not involve any self identification or recruiter guesses at all – including PPC/Google Ads, Job Boards or your own website.