Evidence based recruiting

Following on from my The biggest, the first, the best, who cares post I am still hearing the same old crap from job boards; most visitors, most jobs, most CV's etc - hires, oh my clients don't share that with me!

Surely we need evidence to make the right decisions?  Evidence that employer X hired Y people from site Z which justifies whatever rate they want to charge.  Yet even without the evidence job board rates seem to be going up in price just because all the lemmings keep on keeping on because they don't have any decent measures in place to be able to know any better and just want to be seen amongst their 'peers'. 

Situation 1 gives me automated tracking so I therefore have (hopefully) more accurate data so media decisions can be made based on actual hires by channel.  This of course does have to be monitored as to trust the tracking implicitly would be somewhat naive.

Situation 2 gives me number/% of online hires but the actual tracking is the almost worthless 'where did you see this job' dropdown menu option.  This means I have to use volume of traffic by referring source and actual % ratios through the funnel and onto final completion; it does not however give me actual number of hires by channel but does allow me to calculate an overall online ROI.

So, getting the evidence is not always easy yet budgets are getting smaller and expectations higher!  Should the job boards take responsibility for providing this data?  Should the ATS vendors get some decent tracking system in place?  Should the client share the hire data with the job boards?  Typically neither party wants to collaborate in fear (False Evidence Appearing Real!) that one of them may lose out?

I have got evidence though where this sharing of data has helped the client reduce their cost-per-hire, retain the job boards that deliver, and identify where to invest their money.  It has not been easy but it has delivered year-on-year improvements.  But why does it have to be so hard when the technology is not actually that difficult to build?

Maybe without evidence we all remain free to make claims we do not need to prove?

Maybe some of the job boards could start getting this information to support their claims?

Maybe Fish4 does work for someone, anyone, maybe not!!