HireClix Stories: Optimizing Effective Recruitment Marketing Results for Enterprise Organizations

The Challenge

An industry-leading Human Capital Management (HCM) company delivering a suite of technology and services in human resources, employee benefit solutions, insurance, and payroll faced significant challenges when assessing the return on investment for their $1.2M annual recruiting budget. The client’s various recruitment marketing vendors all claimed their products were generating quality applicants and hires but there was an absence of data available to objectively assess performance.

As the client approached a new budget season, they needed better clarity on performance to ensure they were making the best data-driven recruitment marketing plan for the new fiscal year. HireClix was tapped to provide an assessment of historical performance and ultimately collaborate with the client to build a customized recruitment marketing strategy to meet their hiring needs while operating within their budget constraints.

The Approach

Evaluating Existing Recruitment Marketing Investments

Since HireClix is an independent recruitment advertising agency, it comes naturally for the client services team to evaluate different job boards, media channels and recruiting solutions to assess their efficacy. The first course of action was to review all of the recruitment advertising investments leveraged by the client over the prior period. The HireClix team assembled a comprehensive list of the client’s annual investments with associated costs and available metrics to get a full picture of the overall recruitment marketing media mix and results. Although each investment (such as job board sponsorship, sourcing tools, company pages or social media advertising) may have been leveraged for different goals, the HireClix team worked to distill the available data to common metrics to assess performance across various channels and products.

Leveraging Applicant Tracking System (ATS) Data to Understand ROI

Next, the HireClix team needed to leverage the candidate data within the applicant tracking system (ATS) to get a better understanding of the volume and quality of applicants driven by the various investments.  In today’s labor market, many recruiting teams are stretched too thin and struggle to get the right amount of HRIS or data analytics support to truly understand recruitment advertising return on investment.

HireClix acts as an extension of the talent acquisition team and rolls up their sleeves when digging into multiple data sources to tell the right story. In this instance, the client was able to provide HireClix with access to their ATS whereby the team could create customized reports to evaluate the candidate data. Given the depth of experience related to ATS systems and the associated data, the HireClix team established reports sorted by applicant source, applicant date, quality applicant statuses and hire dates to tie back to the annual investments.

Ensuring Data Accuracy & Completeness

In addition to gaining visibility into historical candidate performance, the HireClix team was able to identify and implement appropriate ATS source codes for channels which had previously been missing. Therefore ensuring that all future applications from these channels would be accurately reflected in the ATS reporting for further evaluation. When there is an absence of data, the HireClix team focuses on finding ways to create as complete a data set as possible for each client given their unique investments and systems.

Developing a Comprehensive Recruitment Marketing Strategy

Once the ATS tracking and customized reporting was established, the HireClix team met with the Director of Talent Acquisition and senior TA leadership to better understand the recruiting initiatives and hiring objectives for the upcoming fiscal year. Additionally, job market research was conducted in order to gather additional intelligence on job seeker behavior and competitor presence related to the client’s recruiting priorities.

With a better understanding of the advertising and applicant performance for the prior period as well as the client’s upcoming business objectives, the HireClix team promptly built out and launched a comprehensive and competitive recruitment marketing strategy.

The Results

After working closely with the client to effectively launch campaigns and track down-funnel performance, the HireClix team had gathered enough information to enable the client to make an informed decision on which annual vendor agreements should be renewed and which underperforming contracts could be terminated in order to improve their overall return on investment and reduce recruitment marketing costs.

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As a result, the client was able to reduce their total number of annual vendor agreements by 50% due to overlapping services and poor performance. This allowed additional budget to be shifted to more flexible pay-per-performance and employer branding channels rather than being locked up in underperforming annual agreements. Continuously optimizing client investments is a key factor in the active management of a client’s recruitment marketing resources.

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Additionally, based on the market research and recommendations provided by the HireClix team, the client adjusted their strategy on direct response channels to improve exposure across job boards and enhance search engine optimization to ultimately drive stronger applicant conversion rates. Within two months, the client reduced the average cost-per-click on their sponsored jobs by 62% and tripled the volume of their apply start conversions.

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With a much stronger return on investment from their pay-per-performance channels and a reduction in the budget allocation towards ineffective annual vendor agreements, the client was able to reduce their overall annual recruiting budget by 34% and efficiently increase the volume of candidates within their applicant pipeline.