5 Ways to Measure Recruitment Marketing ROI

Recruitment marketing and employer branding frameworks often appear promising on paper. Their approach appeals to talent acquisition professionals, and these strategies can showcase a company's technological savvy and thought leadership.

However, modern recruitment teams are increasingly focused on a single, crucial element: data, especially as it relates to Recruitment Marketing ROI. Recruitment Marketing ROI (Return on Investment) is a performance metric that measures the financial value generated from recruitment marketing activities compared to the cost of those activities.

We explore how data-driven insights are essential for measuring and maximizing the return on investment in recruitment marketing efforts.

Data tells a story, reporting drives action, and analytics push how recruitment teams deploy strategies or tactics in applicant sourcing. This means that proving return on investment in recruitment marketing and employer branding must be defined and communicated for recruiters to understand the value proposition in continuing to engage job seekers in a marketing-driven way.

But what are the critical metrics in recruitment marketing? How can today's recruitment specialists understand ROI? What data points should recruitment teams look to as proof of concept? With these questions in mind, let's examine five ways to measure ROI in recruitment marketing.

Time to hire

Time to hire is a recruitment metric that measures the number of days that elapse from when a job vacancy is posted to when a candidate accepts an offer. Perhaps paramount in a recruiter's dashboard, this metric is sometimes referred to as time to accept. In terms of a marketing funnel, think of time to hire in the same realm as the buyer's journey – the time from when a visitor to your blog or website became a lead, was nurtured, and then finally turned into a conversion via closing the deal of a sale.

It's a simple question: Did a recruitment marketing strategy for a specific position in a specific market with a specific amount of resources allocated for the campaign result in a shorter time to hire than a similar position in a similar market without a recruitment marketing strategy?

That's the question a recruitment specialist needs to answer to evaluate whether recruitment marketing effectively impacts the hiring time.

Cost per hire

Cost per hire is a recruitment metric that calculates the total cost invested to hire a new employee. This is perhaps the only metric that can dwarf time to hire, especially given the budget constraints and need for agility modern companies face. The elements that factor into cost per hire can vary by industry, but they typically include:

• Costs for promoting the position on job boards like Indeed.
• Fees for utilizing outside search firms.
• Expenses for leveraging a temp agency to fill a position while a long-term candidate is sought.
• Spending on other outreach methods, such as posting to a professional organization or using a third party to manage applications.

The costs of these avenues can range based on the depth at which recruiters deploy them. As with our time-to-hire example, it's imperative to judge the ROI of recruitment marketing in an apples-to-apples fashion. You can't judge how a recruitment marketing strategy fared with a highly-skilled position in a very competitive marketing compared with an entry-level position in a feast-and-famine market.

If all things are equal and your cost per hire decreases when you execute a recruitment marketing strategy, you have the ammunition you need regarding proof of concept.

Social media engagement

While the first two metrics relate directly to recruitment outcomes, social media analytics help prove how well your employer brand, narrative, and messaging are received by both passive and active job seekers. When measuring Recruitment Marketing ROI from social media, key data points include:

• Impressions: The total number of times your content was viewed.
• Engagement: The number of likes, shares, comments, or other interactions with your content.
• Spend: The amount spent per boosted post or ad, particularly on sites like Facebook and Instagram, as well as platforms like Twitter and LinkedIn.

In addition, regarding Twitter, another valuable metric is re-tweets or how often your Tweet was copied and Tweeted on other users' profiles. And, hey, if you can get your content trending (as long as it's positive), you're most likely golden in reaching the maximum number of eyeballs with your employer branding.

But social media platforms like Facebook can also help evaluate how effective content is regarding recruitment. The number of link clicks on a particular post (mainly if you drive traffic back to a specific job post or landing page) can also help you better understand the number of job seekers engaged with your social content and job posting.

Web traffic

Similar to social media metrics, web traffic analytics are key performance indicators (KPIs) to consider when examining the strength, depth, and reach of your employer branding strategy. Evaluating traffic to your main careers site, individual job landing pages, pillar pages, and other digital destinations is crucial for measuring Recruitment Marketing ROI. Key web traffic metrics include:

• Page Hits/Views: The number of times your career pages or blog posts are viewed.
• Click-Through Rate (CTR): The percentage of visitors who click on links within your blog posts or pages.
• Time on Page: The average amount of time visitors spend on individual posts or pages.

These data points can also help drive editorial decisions in terms of the content you publish. If specific entries drive higher traffic rates than others, your visitors signal the content that matters most to them.

Part and parcel to web traffic analytics are video views via your YouTube page or another third-party video housing service integrated with your website.

Brand awareness

Brand awareness metrics help you understand how recognizable your employer brand is to potential candidates. A strong brand can significantly improve your Recruitment Marketing ROI by attracting more direct applicants. Key indicators of brand awareness include:

• Branded Search Volume: Are job seekers using your company name in their searches on Google or job boards like Indeed? A high volume of branded searches indicates a strong employer brand.
• Social Media Following: How large is your audience on professional and social networks?
• Email Marketing List Size: How many contacts have subscribed to your talent network or email campaigns?
• Website Visitors: What is the ratio of unique (new) visitors to returning visitors on your careers site?

Analyzing these metrics is critical for measuring the long-term ROI of your recruitment marketing and overall employer branding strategies.