….ideas from Jeffery Giesener – SourceMob – CEO
Here is a case study from talking to a SourceMob prospect last week. The company is a $12 Billion company in the hospitality industry.
We asked what their career page defection rate was.
We then asked what was the defection within their Application Tracking System (ATS)?
The answers we got were not a surprise to us since we ask the same question on every sales call. The answer, “Well… geez… I don’t really know. I know we know, but I haven’t looked of late. My gut is that if I knew it… it isn’t good…probably if I really knew, I wouldn’t want to know.”
I often need to step back from these conversations and wonder…really wonder, what is our industry missing? Just imagine if your C-Suite officers knew that you didn’t know your basic career and ATS metrics? From my seat, if they are not asking you for this data today, they soon will be in an economy this tough and especially since your department takes up a big part of the budget for the company. Talent Acquisition/Head Count!
Another Case Study: Imagine if you were a marketer. In fact, why don’t you invite your marketing colleague to lunch and ask them a few simple questions? My sense is the experience will be eye popping for you.
Without missing a beat, your marketing colleague lives and breathes on continual testing around marketing campaigns that drive traffic. As a result the number of website visitors, bounce rate (defection), number of shopping cart opens, defection within the shopping cart, sales and cost per order all need to be tracked at a detail level and all the time. A delta change in anyone of these metrics will dramatically change the marketing person’s P&L. I personally have seen marketers removed from their positions because they missed their P&L performance targets. I am sure you have too.
Now why can’t our industry think and work this way, becoming Talent Acquisition marketers? Why can’t Talent Professionals task themselves to get their heads out of the sand and at least start to understand their Key Performance Indexes (KPI)? These are metrics like candidate visitor count, mobile visitor count, visitors to your career pages (each of them), referring links traffic to your jobs and from where, your bounce rate/drop off rate, ATS defection rates, costs per campaign, cost per apply and cost per apply, at a minimum.
A question for you Talent Pros…can you get to some, any or all of these KPI’s for your business?
Or worse, if you say you can get the information, when was the last time you checked your data? Ouch…I sense I know your answer! Your marketing colleague would tell you she checks daily or at least weekly and runs her marketing according to these numbers. She’d better.
But getting to the analytics is just one of the critical components in the equation. Getting the data from a 3rd party analytical reporting infrastructure, and that means not relying on your ATS provider to give you your tracking and analytics data, is more than key. If you do rely exclusively on your ATS provider to give you your answers, it would be like hiring an Investment Advisor to invest your money without you ever looking at your bank balance.
So the key question is, if you are not looking at your KPI’s or don’t easily have it or do not have 3rd party reporting and proving your numbers, you need to start fixing this problem today.
So what do you do?
First, you need to step up and find an ATS partner who can provide you with a deep dive into analytics (3rd party) and make it easy to get your numbers on a daily basis. Again the importance of this can not be understated. These need to be 3rd party numbers, not numbers baked into the program by your ATS.
Next, you also need your ATS to be smartphone and tablet accessible so all candidates can easily and elegantly send you an application, whether on a desktop, laptop, smartphone or tablet.
Why? Because ERE.net has recently reported that ATS defection is ramping from the mobile and tablet world. It currently stands at between 40-90%. Did you also know Google has reported recently that more than 70% of candidate searches are being done on a mobile platform?
Imagine with new tools where your candidates can apply through their mobile smartphone and Tables you will reduce candidate defection, obviously increase applies and hires. The result…we have clients lowering their cost per hire by as much as 40%.
SourceMob clients are also reporting the same. Now mobile visitation to SourceMob client career and social sites are north of 20%.
So did you know that SourceMob’s Mobile DirectApply enables your candidates to apply wherever they are online (web, desktop, laptop or on their mobile devices). Now for the first time in our industry, you can have a fully integrated solution, which enables your candidates to apply regardless whether they are on their desktop, laptop, smartphone or Tablet device. Also your SourceMob analytical and candidate data (3rd party reported) is tied to our enterprise Talent Community and Candidate Relationship Management (CRM) solutions.
For a live presentation of SourceMob’s Social, Mobile, Community, Mobile DirectApply and Applicant Tracking Solutions simply email me at jeff@sourcemob.com or ring me up at 612-349-2740.
Best,
Jeffery
Jeffery Giesener
CEO/Founder
SourceMob.com
612-349-2740
Twitter: @sourcemob
http://www.linkedin.com/in/jefferyjeffgiesener