Evaluating programmatic recruitment campaigns: the recruiters' headache

Even the best recruiting team can find themselves trapped by relying on incomplete data to assess their recruitment campaign. HR marketing. In the past, evaluate its programmatic recruitment campaigns was relatively simple: the traffic data arrived in your ATS or your analytical tool, and UTM links made it possible to identify the most effective sources for generating applications. Today, this approach is no longer sufficient, and may even cause your recruitment strategy.

RGPD and privacy: lost data from Analytical Tools and ATS

We have fully entered the age of privacy. The GDPR was just the beginning: browsers that prioritize respect for privacy, anti-tracking plugins and the iOS 14 update (which has considerably strengthened tracking prevention) are all elements that reflect a simple truth with important consequences:

• Users are being followed less and less.
• Attribution established through cookies has become a relic of the past.
• Because of its variability and poor traceability, your candidate's career path can no longer be analyzed in a simple way.
  

What does that mean in practice? What if you rely exclusively on traffic established on cookies for evaluate your HR Marketing campaigns, you need to find a new approach very quickly.

In fact, your analytics tools can only show you the data they capture. And today, very few users agree to be followed (up to 55% of visitors refuse cookies if they are given an explicit choice (as required by the regulations). These visitors then simply disappear from your analysis. As a result, you risk abandoning what works and investing more in channels that don't necessarily work.

Combine this with an inability to analyze cross-device and multi-channel journeys, and you are joining the scourge of marketers and recruiters, so decisions are based on false, incomplete data and far from the reality of things.

Passive candidate: An inexhaustible resource with multiple paths

It's especially important to keep in mind that when you're doing programmatic recruitment, you work with passive candidates ! They represent 80% of candidates and are the lifeblood of intelligent acquisition. Your best candidates are already thriving in their current roles and are not actively looking for work... but the majority of them are still open to an opportunity.

This vast pool of qualified and untapped talent does not consult job sites. Only the HR marketing allows it to be reached on a large scale on its social networks. If you want to know more about how to Seduce passive candidates, but above all how to reach them, and why social media is so effective: You can take a look at our Ultimate Guide to recruitment on social networks.

“Passive” and “Social Media” are key terms here: these candidates interact with your HR marketing primarily on mobile by scrolling through their news feeds. And, unlike people who are actively looking for a job, Passive candidates will not make significant efforts to overcome the obstacles they face. You must therefore seduce them by developing a convincing career path, just as any marketing specialist would. Online application processes are still often poor, sometimes even impossible on mobile. Many of these processes require so many steps to go through that simply applying is a demoralizing task for candidates. The good news is that optimizing your conversion funnel is an incredible opportunity. We also propose to put our expertise at your service to carry out an audit and optimize it. Do not hesitate to perform a free simulation to get our first feedback. More simply, you can also start by optimizing your job offers thanks to our AI for generating job offers.

Attribution models: a partial solution

It's tempting to think that because tracking tools and channels provide us with attribution data (information about where your candidates come from), that data also represents the typical candidate journey. In reality, it is now virtually impossible to get a precise idea of the cross-device and cross-channel behavior of candidates by traditional means. Therefore, these data are incomplete and represent only a portion of the total data.

In theory, candidates see a job offer, click on it, and then immediately fill out an application on the same device. In practice, it's a perfect scenario that (almost) never happens.

This is especially true for passive candidates who interact with your programmatic HR campaign on mobile and who you require to download their resume when applying. Despite the great effectiveness of HR marketing, even the most active job seeker won't always have a resume ready to be downloaded to their phone. The real paths of candidates thus extend over several weeks and see candidates move from one device, one social channel and one physical context to another.

Let's say your ATS or Google Analytics tells us that 80% of applications come from organic search. What this data doesn't always show is information about the first, second, third point of contact with the prospect... and how these touchpoints contributed to the final conversion. If your offer appeared on your target's Facebook news feed while they were having lunch and using their private mobile phone, then they went to your career page for a few minutes from their professional computer after seeing an ad on LinkedIn, and finally, once at home, search on Google” your company + your position ” from his personal computer...

What channel is the conversion going to? Hard to say! But what is certain is that you have chosen the right mix of channels for your programmatic recruitment, since the candidate will have applied.

However, for your tracking tool, that same journey will make organic search feel like your best channel - as if your carefully designed social media campaigns had nothing to do with it. However, this is a serious error of hasty interpretation. So is there a way to conclude what works and what doesn't?

The solution to the tracking problem: Artificial Intelligence

We think that a Artificial intelligence powerful would make it possible to meet these challenges by combining channels and their various appropriate levels of investment in the right way. It's hard to take traffic data at face value, but we can use AI for valuable analyses and comparisons. It is therefore possible for us to draw precise conclusions about which channels and creative content work for a specific campaign, as well as on the number of applications to expect per recruitment campaign. But, just like experts, even this AI needs a baseline to give a clear answer of the expected results. This baseline means that you have taken stock of your key recruitment performance indicators:

• How many applications do you receive on average?
• What is your qualification rate?
• What is your cost per click and per application?
• Are you using traditional channels?
• etc.

With this baseline, a tool and analysts could use this data to give you an idea of which touchpoints contribute the most to your results and predict what results you are likely to get by investing in a specific combination of channels.

You can also try to draw your own conclusions using A/B Test systems: exposing similar job offers to different treatment in order to identify the best one. You can have 20 of the same vacancies and try your new approach on 10 of them. Maybe you want to see what happens if you add Facebook retargeting or use a different visual. However, it is best to change only one thing at a time, but the most important thing is not to change anything in the control group.

Too good to be true? And yet, this technology exists. Today, Seeqle Is the only HR Programmatic Technology to be powered by cutting-edge AI, powered by more than 30,000 data points analyzed across all business sectors.

It's almost as simple as choosing to “boost” half of your job offers on your preferred channels, then measuring the impact on application volume, qualification rate, and hiring time for boosted offers. Did your experimental group perform better than your control group after the campaign was over? If yes, perfect! You know that you need to invest in this approach. And if that's not the case? It's good too! This means you can confidently say that this specific approach did not work for this type of position, but it will certainly work with a different combination of channels and communications. For all of your recruitment marketing, Seeqle is a fantastic management tool. Thanks to its automation, it is the simplest and most effective way to take stock of the situation and optimize your employer brand and your recruitments with a minimum of resources. Enjoy the advantage of working with a solution that manages the automated HR marketing for dozens of clients, and benefit from expertise taking into account the specificity of candidates, sectors, geography and the fluctuations of the times of the year.

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