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.

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