Who you calling stupid, stupid?

I wonder how long it will be before people stop bleating on about the ROI of social media or in our case, social recruiting.  Oh, of course, you don't need an ROI because it's free - stupid of me!

Recruiters pay to use job boards but ask most of them about the ROI of their chosen job boards and they have no idea. Or the ROI of their career site, or ATS, or talent pool...... The recruitment industry needs to look at the entire ROI rather than a single new channel such as social media. Until this happens, we'll just sound like a load of lost sheep.

Social media is a channel.  Job boards are a channel.  Search is a channel.  There are many channels.  But we need to be looking at the ROI of every channel all the way to hire as a minimum.  I'd hope employers will look at longevity and performance as well and link that data back to the channel but that one could be a few months away!  So back on planet short term; recruiters need to get some kind of ROI data in place and here are a few starters:

• Install Google Analytics on your career site.
• Set-up the dashboard to include key reports to include traffic splits and referring sites.
• Have those reports sent out on a monthly basis using the report scheduling tool.
• Set up some goals and review the funnel to see where people leave and convert.
• Get clever with event tracking to look at applications per vacancy by channel.

This will give you some decent stats to start with.  For example, you may see more applications from Twitter than you expected.  Or more traffic from Indeed (free) than you get from Monster (not free).  Your search traffic may be really low or very high so you can make SEO decisions around this.

This is of course just a start and does not track hires but until we can offer that level of tracking you at least need to know something and this would be a lot more than nothing.  So going back to the original point of the post - ROI - how can you be worrying about the ROI of social recruiting if you don't know the ROI of anything?

BTW:  All recruiting is social; it's no longer "social OR normal" recruiting any more.  The party is happening with or without you and your name is getting mentioned - you may want to be there to hear what is being said.