Recruiting Metrics You Should Be Tracking: Candidate Engagement

An individual in a Star Trek uniform engages with a computer screen.

Are you engaging the right candidates? How are you measuring engagement?

Making sure your job postings and communications reach the right audience of qualified candidates is a constant challenge in the recruiting and staffing industry. Addressing the needs of potential candidates is critical, and you should measure what’s working as well as what’s not, to stay successful in attracting and placing the best talent.

In this series, we’re looking at several metrics that recruiting and staffing firms should know and measure to ensure continued success. Our last blog post examined retention rate, and now we’re digging into candidate engagement and what it means for your team.

Measuring Candidate Engagement

For many recruiters, measuring candidate engagement can be a considerable challenge. For those who do measure it already, it can be an even larger challenge to identify the factors that you need to improve in your recruiting process. Engagement metrics can tell you a lot about your methods, but only if you measure them correctly.

Some of the simplest ways to measure candidate engagement are to watch the traffic generated to your social media channels and your website. The built-in tools on social media can tell you how far your posts are reaching and how many of those people are engaging with your brand. Google analytics can provide additional data for visitors to your website. You can easily gather data on the amount of time spent on your site, how they found your pages and demographic/geographic info.

The most powerful tool for measuring candidate engagement is your ATS. Not only can you gather data on the quality of candidate sources, but you can also keep tabs on your talent pool as well. Making sure your team is engaging with all candidates in your database can drive referrals for future candidates. The trick to getting the best candidate engagement data is having a robust ATS to work with, like Crelate. Not all platforms are created equal, so make sure you’re getting the data that is useful to you.

Engaging Candidates is Key

There are many conclusions you can come to using your candidate engagement data. The data you collect can tell you if your job descriptions are attractive enough, which platform your ideal candidates are most active on, or the health of your talent pool. The way you gather and interpret your data is the key to answering your questions. 

By using a range of metrics gathered from social media, website analytics, and email campaigns, you can identify the most effective medium to reach candidates and increase your marketing ROI. Once you’ve found the right approach for your candidates or specialty, you’ll be better at addressing their needs with targeted marketing campaigns and outreach efforts.

Candidate engagement can also identify effective language to use in job descriptions. If a position isn’t gaining traction on your website or job board, it may not be the position that is the problem; you may not be highlighting the things your candidates are searching for. Taking the time to test multiple job descriptions can ensure you are getting the most engaged and qualified candidates for your clients.

How to Improve Candidate Engagement

After analyzing the recruiting metrics you’ve gathered, there are a lot of things you can change to improve your candidate engagement. Building a strong employer brand is one of the biggest factors in candidate engagement. If you are known for being easy to work with and effective, candidates are more likely to engage with you.

If your data shows that your engagement numbers on social media or your website are down, you may look to job boards to boost engagement. Yes, job boards aren’t new or flashy, but they are effective at engaging candidates. Optimizing your job descriptions to appeal to the ideal candidate for each position can help bring those numbers even higher.

If you need software solutions to track, analyze, and improve your recruiting KPIs, Crelate’s combined ATS and Recruiting CRM solution is the right tool for you. Get in touch and see how our offerings can help your firm be more successful.

Filed under: Candidate Advice