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As recruiting is becoming increasingly digital, recruitment teams have turned to HR tech tools to help their companies hire faster. This is where a careers site analytics tracker can come in handy.
Your careers site is one of the anchors of your recruitment strategy since that's where job seekers can learn about open opportunities and your employer brand.
After designing your careers page, tracking the metrics will help you measure the type of talent your company is attracting, how they behave, why they may leave a job application incomplete, and many other things. All of this data will help you to turn your careers site into a job seeker to applicant conversion engine.
That's why HR and people teams must track and investigate what’s happening on their career sites. These insights enable them to understand what strategies are working and how to make decisions that lead to more inbound applicants!
Tracking your career site's key metrics will allow you to grasp the candidate journey better and add more quality applicants to your hiring funnel.
Here's more on why you should be tracking careers site metrics and, more importantly, what metrics to track:
Benefits of tracking your careers site performance
Career site metrics are among the most critical recruitment metrics you should constantly track. These tell you how well your careers page performs and help you to improve and elevate your career site's anatomy.
However, career site metrics can help you achieve more than that. They can provide valuable insights into:
- Your entire hiring process
- Your specific hiring marketing strategies and campaigns
- Where and when job seekers drop off in their job search
Based on this insight, you can discern which hiring strategies are working the best for your company and which need to be adjusted.
Ultimately, tracking these key metrics will help you to:
- Identify the weaknesses and strengths of your candidates' journey, even before an application, so that you can make better data-driven decisions
- Optimize your recruitment, budget spending, and time and achieve a higher return on investment (ROI)
- Stop investing in job boards that don't work or improve your job descriptions for open positions
- Achieve a faster (and cheaper) time-to-hire in a hassle-free way.
- Measure your employer branding efforts
Which careers site metrics should you track?
There are several careers site metrics you can track. Each metric can deliver valuable insight for data-driven recruiting.
Here are some of the most crucial metrics to track:
1. Visits
One of the most vital metrics you can measure is visits: e.g. the total number of people who visited your career site in a particular period like day, week, or month.
Tracking this metric regularly helps you easily see if the number of visitors to your career site is constantly growing. If not, it could signify that you need to shift strategies.
Similarly, tracking the source of your visitors is important. This includes the number of visitors that came to your site from various sources such as:
- Organic search (from search engines such as Google)
- Job boards
- Direct (by clicking your career site URL)
- Social media
This will help you know exactly how many visitors come from each source. It's also essential for evaluating the success of your specific hiring marketing campaigns.
2. Visits over time
This metric involves the number of times visitors visited your career site. This metric is crucial because it tells you how many opportunities you had to convert a candidate into an applicant.
Tracking visits over time can help you determine whether or not SEO and other marketing or promotional efforts are working. A candidate visiting a career page more than once might be one who has a genuine interest in the company's job listings.
If there is a high number of visitors re-visiting your career site, then consider having done an excellent job capturing candidates' interests.
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Comparing visits over time and visitors can also give you an idea of how often people return to your career site. If you have 200 visits in a week and 100 visitors, that means that many people are visiting more than once, which is generally good.
3. Visit duration
It's strongly recommended as part of marketing practice that you must develop a separate page for every job posting. This makes it easy to measure the visit duration on the specific job listing.
The time visitors spend on your career page will show different trends and help you understand what tactics are working and what are not working for you.
4. Applications
This is arguably the most important metric. It's all well and good that people are visiting your career site and viewing your job listing, but it's all for nothing if they aren't applying. Tracking and monitoring application rates help to provide you with a clear view of how effective your career site and recruitment marketing strategies and campaigns are.
Tying applications back to their source makes this metric even more valuable. This is because it can help you calculate the cost of your specific hiring marketing campaigns and optimize your budget spending.
For example, if you know that you got ten applications in a specific month from visitors from a particular job board, you can calculate the value of the job listings there.
Based on this information, you can stop wasting money on job boards that aren't effective and invest in others instead.
5. Applications over time
Tracking how many applications are reviewed can also give insight into your career site's performance. It's essential to view the number of applications that come in daily and have a method to scan through the incoming applications quickly.
When you start receiving a healthy number of new applicants but still have difficulty finding relevant candidates, you may need to look at your career site. Your strategies likely need a bit of tweaking.
Measuring the number of new applications helps you to optimize your job descriptions to reach your target outcomes.
6. Applicant conversion rate
When an applicant applies for a job posting or signs up to join your talent network, it's called a conversion.
Your applicant conversion rate tells you how many candidates applied compared to the total number of people who visited your career site. Tracking this metric will help you measure the success rate of your site's ability to capture new candidates. All your other content encourages people to apply to your job postings, and conversions show your success in that goal.
7. Application form drop-off rate
An application form drop-off or abandon rate metric is the number of candidates who applied for your job divided by the number of candidates who started filling out an application form but never actually completed or submitted the form.
Tracking this metric will help you know whether you are losing potential candidates because of your application form and process. A perfect career site doesn't mean much if you can't reach your ultimate goal of converting potential candidates into applicants.
Thankfully, there are several things you can do to improve your application drop-off rate and get more applicants from your career site:
- Shorten the application forms
- Make them mobile friendly
- Provide precise and clear instructions
- Enable applicants to attach resumes in different formats.
8. Views
The next step beyond visits is to track what those visitors are doing. One of the most important actions that visitors can take on a career site is viewing jobs. After all, you put the jobs out there for people to see. Therefore, more job views or increasing views are better than fewer or declining job views.
Similar to visit duration, job views measure engagement and awareness. They show you how many different pages candidates viewed within your career site. Pages with higher views may be more engaging or contain content that's most important to candidates.
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However, remember that views will be affected by factors like the number of jobs on the career site and the time of the year.
You can also calculate how many jobs your visitors view on average. Simply divide total job views by total visits to figure out how many jobs people look at during an average visit.
9. Views over time
While it seems easy to aim for higher job visibility and more views and traffic to your jobs, it doesn't translate to numbers. You need more people viewing your career site for new job postings. Your views over time allow you to measure your career site's effectiveness and how well it captures the candidates' interest.
10. Career page bounce rate
The bounce rate shows how quickly a user exits the page without interacting with anything else during the session.
Your bounce rate is a metric that measures engagement. It tells you whether the page visitors landed on is what they expected when they landed there.
For instance, if your career site's bounce rate is high, you may not be effectively describing jobs in your job description or recruitment marketing. A lower bounce rate means better engagement.
Creating individual pages for each job will help you observe which one has the highest or lowest engagement rate.
Want to learn deep dive into metrics? Read our complete guide to tracking the right recruitment metrics
Make data-driven decisions with Careers site analytics
With the ability to track and report on your careers site analytics, you can learn more about your careers site visitors and see who converts to candidates.
After all, your company careers site is likely where the majority of your candidates come in from, so understanding how to improve your page to increase candidate conversion will do wonders for your employer brand!
The metrics mentioned above can be measured using Google Analytics or by using an ATS like Recruitee, which offers a simple-to-use analytics tool for data-driven hiring. This makes it easy to access and understand these metrics.
In summary
Ultimately, tracking career site metrics aims to help hiring teams assess the effectiveness of a career site as well as recruitment marketing efforts. Once you understand where you've been and where you are, you can take action to enhance your results and ensure that your improvements have the desired effect.
With the right effect, careers site metrics can help you know which source channel to utilize for what job in what demographic or geography. You can direct your efforts in the right direction for maximum qualified job applications. Using career site analytics is an effective scientific approach to recruitment and can save you a lot of money and effort.
