What Can Talent Acquisition Learn from eCommerce

…ideas from Jeffery Giesener – SourceMob.com – CEO

Soon there will be a parallel between Talent Acquisition and eCommerce. First you will notice it in the world of Analytics. eCommerce measures Cost Per Order (CPO) and you know Talent Acquisition is beginning to focus on Cost Per Hire (CPH) or Cost Per Headcount.

When you work as an eCommerce Marketer you are all about driving new business (consumers) into buying from you. That starts with a marketing campaign. It could be through the use of email, social media, mobile marketing, Pay Per Click (PPC), Banner Ads or other.

In Talent Acquisition, if one looks close enough there are many overlapping paths surfacing with eCommerce. You start looking for your Candidate using a job campaign. And that could be an ad placed on LinkedIn, Indeed, PPC, Monster/Career Builder or anywhere you want to put yourself in front of Candidates.

So that is where the similarities begin.

It is also where the similarities usually end.

An eCommerce marketer knows down to the fraction of dollars what they want to spend for each of their individual marketing channel campaigns. They also know what each channel generates in Cost Per Order.

They are charged with optimizing (lowering) the Cost Per Order. But do you know how do they get there? These eCommerce companies have made the investment in a strong enterprise analytics platform and people to understand their Cost Per Order metrics. They know what their cost per open is per campaign, by channel, cost per click through, cost of defection, shopping cart opens, shopping cart abandons, where defection occurs in the check out funnel and then how many orders did they finally actually get by each channel and at what Cost Per Order. All of this is reported to them within seconds and usually on-demand through the Analytics platform.

Is all of this analysis working for eCommerce marketers? Absolutely…and it is saving eCommerce companies, depending on marketing budget size, millions of dollars in cutting underperforming marketing efforts. You merely have to go back just a few years, to the mid-2000s, and look at the shake out of eCommerce companies. Those companies that didn’t have the right analytic tools and people to review the CPO metrics are GONE!

How Are You Tracking Your Talent Acquisition Campaigns?

When you segment your various recruiting channels, do you know how effective they are? What your Candidate open rates are to your campaigns, your click through rates, your defection rates, your Apply rates and where Applies fall off in your Applicant Tracking System (ATS) funnel?

  • Do know how many Hires you make monthly against the number of visitors to your Corporate Career Site?
  • If you have Career Facebook Jobs Page (a separate one from Marketing) how is this page  working in relation to Cost Per Hire?
  • Do you know how many Hires you make against how many submit their applications to your ATS?
  • Do you know how many Candidates fall out of your Candidate (ATS) funnel?

This data is available or is it and where is it? How fast can you access it?

For eCommerce Marketers, without business intelligence (Analytics and analysts) they know they would be out of business. I suspect soon your CFO will bring pressure upon your Talent Acquisition division to lower Costs per Candidate or Head Count. He/She may be already doing this.

If so, why not get out in front of it. Why not become the champion.

Here are some staggering numbers to make my point. Let’s say your Talent Acquisition Department budgets $1Million for all expenses including headcount per year. You know your CFO would be happy if he/she could reduce costs in this area by 10% and return $100,000 back into the company treasury?

Now let’s say you outsource recruiting fees and that costs you $30,000 per $100,000 job year one. Just watch how fast could you recoup 10% of your budget ($100,000) with good social analytics, insights and staff who know how to measure metrics. If you could measure which campaign ads by channel are working, it would be easy just like in eCommerce, to do less of what isn’t working and more of what is. Additionally, you would then easily recoup this $100,000 target by saving just 5 outside recruiting fees in a year using these solid analytic tracking metrics.

SourceMob has been providing and studying Social and Mobile Analytics and Insights solutions for our clients for years now. We can either plug our analytics into your Talent Acquisition solutions and/or we can teach you how to improve your campaign metrics or you may ask us to do the Analytical Insights for you.

Either way, we are all about making sure Candidates (especially Passive and Active Social ones) are netted for your business at a lower Cost Per Higher and a demonstrable Return On Investment that any CFO would understand.

How many other solution vendors are even discussing Cost Per Hire or ROI with you?

Additionally, we help our clients develop and steer their social road map, which helps further reduce Talent Acquisition defection, provides a better Candidate application experience through our Social Solutions, which ultimately drives higher Apply rates. 

Let’s schedule a virtual appointment at your convenience. Simply reach me by email at jeff@sourcemob.com or by phone at 612-349-2740.

Best,

Jeffery

Jeffery Giesener

CEO/Founder

SourceMob.com

jeff@sourcemob.com

612-349-2740

Twitter: @sourcemob

http://www.linkedin.com/in/jefferyjeffgiesener