Candidate Source Tracking

Social Networks Over Search Engines?

I've been seeing a disturbing trend of employers including social networks in their candidate source menus when other high-traffic sources - like search engines - still remain excluded. I don't need to attack the integrity of this manual source reporting here - that's why this blog exists. And I also have no problem with companies tracking the effectiveness of Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. Rather, I highly encourage the measurement of all sources equally. But when both major and vertical search engines - where the jobs clearly are indexed and the sites are delivering candidates - are excluded, I begin to worry about the current "social media for recruitment" buzz. It's not that I don't believe in it, I just think all contributing sources should be compared fairly.

ATS Report Card Update - PeopleClick

I recently worked with Dawn and Eric at PeopleClick to better understand its candidate source tracking capability and how to implement it for clients. The good news is that it's automated in almost all cases, except when the client has added some custom fields for the purposes of tracking candidate source.

If you have any questions about how it works, please let me know and I can share examples or connect you with the right people there for implementation advice.

I have updated ATS Report Card accordingly to reflect the correct information for PeopleClick; I also added CATS and Sendouts as part of the update.

Charging for Tracking Sucks

At a time when companies finally are looking at the ROI of their recruitment advertising investments, I'm blown away when applicant tracking systems (ATS) use candidate source tracking as an upsell opportunity. Two recent cases I'll share:

• A retail client had $600 available to test search engine marketing (SEM). To add the proper site as a source in the ATS (among those already listed - not custom development), the ATS was going to charge the client $850. Needless to say, the campaign did not move forward.
• Similarly, a hospital wanted test SEM with a $650 budget, but upon finding out that its ATS would charge $500 per site to install the code necessary to track the effectiveness of the ads, decided to not move forward at all.

It's been very frustrating and disappointing that ATS providers charging for proper candidate source tracking - something you think they should offer already - is preventing companies from trying new recruitment advertising options.

ATS Report Card Update - Hodes iQ

The other day I updated ATS Report Card with a small tweak for Hodes iQ. With the help of my contact there (who also sits on the IAEWS tracking taskforce that I chair), I learned that some implementations of Hodes iQ support automated candidate source tracking to their job description pages. This was good news for a new Hodes iQ client I am working with, and hopefully for others that use or work with this ATS.

Automation - Hiding Source Menus

I would rather not have manual candidate source drop-down menus at all, but when they’re there, I’d rather do something (like populate them) than leave job seekers to figure them out, which we know typically doesn’t go well. At least I know the correct source is listed in these cases. Hiding candidate source menus is a nice option because it removes any opportunity for the job seeker to affect the source data – as long as the jobs are tagged properly. Two ATS providers that use this approach are OpenHire and VirtualEdge – I’ve included some screen captures on ATS Report Card that show how it works. One caveat on VirtualEdge – there are two versions or variations of the ATS that I know of, and only one has this ability. I’ll cover the differences and hopefully the details on why in a future post.

ATS Report Card Update - Kenexa Recruiter

Tonight I updated ATS Report Card based on a couple recent client projects with Kenexa Recruiter - you can see how we are hard-coding the candidate source rather than using drop-down menus in those cases. It's a very easy setup and implementation - well worth it for both the employer and the job site.

Automation - Populating Source Menus

When I look at ways to automate candidate source tracking for clients, using the manual drop-down menus they already have sometimes is an option, as the ATS supports populating those menus with the correct source data. Now, the question I always get from employers – and I honestly don’t know the answer – is whether job seekers take the time to change these preset menus when this automation is in place. In an ideal world, they would go away altogether (topic for my next post), but it’s great to take advantage of what the ATS offers to help clients get more reliable candidate source data. Two good examples of this approach are Taleo Enterprise Edition (7.0-7.5) and ResumeWare - you can see screen captures of how it works over at ATS Report Card.

Indeed and Jobvite Talk Tracking

This Wednesday, I am running a Webinar with the folks at Jobvite called "Get The Most Out of Your Sourcing Investments." A big part of the presentation is candidate source tracking - how Indeed and Jobvite have automated this for clients and how the Jobvite ATS tracks candidate source in an automated way across all types of sources. The Webinar is free for anyone who is interested - registration link here.

Candidate Source Tracking Group on RecruitingBlogs.com

Head over to RecruitingBlogs.com and join the candidate source tracking group.

Dealing with Source Duplicates

This week, I found a Taleo 7.5 client that had recently launched its new ATS. Upon checking it out as a job seeker, I noticed that the company already had duplicate sources listed for candidates to choose from (highlights added). This can cause some confusion with job seekers - which CareerBuilder do I choose? What's the difference between the two Absolutely Healthcare options? Why make this so hard for the user?

This seems to happen often when the company is using a job distribution product to send its jobs to third-party sites. In order to properly track the inbound applications from those sites, each of them is added as a new source, even if it already exists in the menu. Hence, our duplicates.

While this may help the company with tracking (I say may because differentiating the dupes can still be challenging), it worsens the user experience. If there are sources required for automated tracking driven by job distribution, why would you need to show those to job seekers? Users should only see options that they can understand ("AJE - Compliance?") and should actually choose - including duplicates only increases bad candidate source data.

Related Post: Let's Delete Candidate Source Duplicates