Knowing which metrics to use to ascertain the performance of your recruitment campaign can often be overwhelming, especially if recruitment isn’t part of your daily role.

If you’re looking to understand your recruitment advertising in more depth, you need to go back to the basics and review how the recruitment process went in order to make decisions for future hiring requirements.

Many hiring managers are often satisfied with knowing that the interview went well, or that the candidate is showing progress in the early stages, but for those who want to understand the process in more detail, Webrecruit Ireland has explored 3 essentials that you may want to consider reviewing once your campaign has finished.

1. Overall time to hire

In most businesses, time is money and this will particularly resonate with those in the recruitment industry. The length of time that it takes to fill a role in a business will have a knock on effect on many other employees and their workloads, throughout other departments.

Take a note of the date of the first advertisement that you have placed, and how long it took to fill (i.e. find a candidate and offer the job). If you do this for all the roles that go live, not only will you understand the difference in time to hire by job function (for example a customer service position, against that of an accountant) but you can also take an average of all roles that your business advertises as a whole . 

This will highlight whether there is simply a difficulty recruiting for in demand skill sets or whether the business as a whole needs to reconsider how they carry out their recruitment process.

2. Overall cost per hire

Many growing companies will be advertising a large number of roles at any one time. This can make it difficult to truly understand the value of the mediums you have used to advertise. The best way to gain this knowledge is to take a monthly cost of each recruitment source, such as job board or social media platform, and divide it by the hires that you made directly from that job board/outlet.

Not only does this paint a picture of your recruitment trends, but it also allows you to focus efforts on the job boards that truly work for you, and you can then cut out any job boards that appear to underperform. If this is too general, you can look at it as showcasing that one job board may prove to be cost effective for roles in a particular industry that has perhaps a high starting salary, but for any other roles, it is no use. 

3. Social media conversions

Social media advertising is not just a case of posting every single role you are trying to fill, numerous times a week and then a little more if they aren’t hitting your application targets.

Understandably, the most important aspect of social media advertising is the actual application rate and engagements that come from it. Therefore it is important to track how people are engaging with your content through monitoring shares, comments, likes or any questions and feedback that you receive for that particular role.

There are other measurement metrics that you can also report on to give you a more rounded understanding of your recruitment strategies. It is through measuring these that you will gain an insight into where your recruitment strengths and weaknesses lie. As a result, you can look for any additional help that you may need; whether it’s recruiting for a specialist role in a niche industry, or if you are looking to take on a large number of employees at one time, there online job advertising tools out there that can help.

For more information on how you can make the most of your recruitment in 2016, download our 2016 Guide to Online Recruitment Advertising.