The Evolution of Job Advertising Performance Data

See how you can lower your costs and drive more of the best candidates into your pipeline.

Remember when posting a job was as simple as copying and pasting a job description on the site that you felt was the ‘best’ for your job?

You’d post a job based on intuition or where you thought it might perform well. Or, you’d stay with the status quo and re-sign with your existing job board contacts to avoid the work associated with finding new or better vendors.

Then… you started counting clicks. We, as an industry, started expecting job sites to provide a clear, tangible return on investment from our recruitment vendors.

With this framework, metrics like “number of impressions” or “number of clicks” or “number of applicants” were the only measurement currency.

But, job advertising performance data is continuing to evolve again.

Closing the Gap Between Job Board Advertisers and ATS Platforms

Now, metrics like “number of qualified applicants” and “number of hires” are the lifeblood with which hiring organizations must be making decisions around where they advertise their open jobs. With a third of your recruitment budget going toward job advertising, small changes in your job board selection will yield significant returns.

Gone are the days of the chasm between job board advertisers and ATS platforms – job advertising is no longer a one-way street. To be clear – there is still a gap – but it is one that can be crossed with a bridge rather than Robbie Kenevil on a dirt bike over the Grand Canyon.

Jobvite and other providers have stepped up their game to build out the full funnel of candidate interactions to better measure performance inside their ATS by 1) supporting the job advertising process as a recruiting activity rather than a marketing activity and 2) providing hiring organizations with data that reveal where they get the best value from their budget. The key is to share down-funnel conversion data (metrics such as number of qualified applicants, number of hires, etc.) so that your job advertising partners can understand if the clicks – and ultimately, candidates – are the ones you hired.

Uncover Better Applicant Quality with Appcast

At Appcast, we are hard at work optimizing our customers’ recruitment advertising by obtaining and leveraging this “down-funnel” data. This data, combined with a leading programmatic solution like Appcast, can drive improved applicant quality for employers at a lower cost, and allow for more time to focus on the best candidates in your pipeline.

You may ask, “how much of an impact can this make for me?” It depends on how fast an employer’s hiring process runs, also known as their time-to-hire, and how diverse their set of open roles are. Regardless, moving towards quality is a way to align your job advertising partners directly with your own efforts and measure against it. Even more importantly, this metric allows you to source the right number of candidates (and pay for less) while getting the best, most qualified ones first.