Making the Most of Source of Hire Metrics

Not all metrics are created (or measured) equally. Data-driven recruiting made it possible to look at a range of data points, historical data, machine learning results, and statistical algorithms. But in today’s recruiting world, the most important of these are quality of hire metrics. 

A necessary aspect of quality of hire is sourcing, or where you find your candidates. If you can identify the best channels, sources, and talent pools, you can identify and secure quality hires and winning teams. 

What is source of hire?

Source of hire metrics let you know what hiring channels and sources (job boards, forums, social media outlets, references, etc.) your candidates enter your pipeline from. Source of hire analytics will usually present you with the percentage of candidates that came from a specific channel, providing you with easy-to-read visuals and charts to share or use in presentations.  

Other sourcing metrics include source quality, percentage of referral hires, and sourcing channel cost. 

Why are source of hire metrics important?

Source of hire metrics can help you in a myriad of ways. For one, they can tell you where you’re finding most of your candidates. They can also tell you which sources/channels yield the highest quality of hire rates. 

Not only can source of hire metrics help you find better quality talent, but they can also save you resources and time. When you know where to look for top-tier talent, you can allocate resources accordingly and avoid ineffective channels. 

Source of hire metrics can also tell you which recruiters are most effective on which channels. Some recruiters might be better equipped to navigate social media hiring platforms, while others are better suited to traditional job boards or other hiring channels. Understanding the efficacy, cost, and overall impact of your recruiting channels will help you make smarter hiring decisions and source talent more efficiently. 

The importance of channel attribution for candidate sourcing

Channel attribution/marketing attribution basically tells you how successful your marketing efforts are at encouraging candidates to enter your pipeline, landing new hires, and increasing candidate engagement within a specific channel. Attribution analytics can tell you where a candidate initially saw your job post, even if they decide to apply through a different medium. For example, they may have found your ad on Facebook but ultimately applied to the job via LinkedIn. 

If your new hires are finding out about your open positions predominantly through Facebook or another social media platform, you would know to prioritize your marketing efforts on Facebook, not LinkedIn. 

Source of Hire Guides Your Marketing Investment

Modern tools do more than give you percentages on hiring channels. Source of hiring analytics can segment data and tell you what kind of candidates came from specific sources. For example, your sales hires may be coming from Facebook and other social media platforms, while your customer service representatives might be finding you through referrals. 

This kind of specificity can help you make data-informed marketing decisions by identifying target candidates within ideal hiring channels. You’ll also know which sources have the highest source of engagement, which typically yields the greatest ROI in your marketing efforts. 

Source of hire metrics will enable your marketing efforts by:

• Helping you identify which hiring channels to prioritize your time and money on. 
• Telling you where your candidates are proactively reaching out to you. 
• Breaking down your candidates by background, demographic, and position. 
• Letting you know which channels are the most costly, so you can determine whether a source is worth the investment. 
• Determining source quality, so you know which channels yield the best quality of hire. 

Ensuring accuracy of source of hire metrics

One of the biggest challenges of source-of-hire metrics is ensuring accuracy. Source of hire metrics could encourage bias to specific channels and candidates that come from those channels, provide misleading data, and neglect other important aspects of the hiring process.

It’s important to note that metrics are only as valuable as your application and understanding of those metrics. When you isolate any metric and use it to justify a hiring decision, you likely won’t get the full picture. You need to couple your source of hire metrics with other KPIs and analytics, like 360 digital reference checking insights and quality of hire metrics, to develop a well-rounded and holistic hiring strategy. 

Using Crosschq to measure candidate sourcing metrics

Crosschq is a powerful, all-in-one hiring platform that leverages proprietary machine learning technology to give you the most accurate and seamless insights and analytics. 

Crosschq’s Talent Sourcing technology uses candidate references to automatically build high-quality talent pools and opt-in networks of engaged candidates. 80% of candidates in Crosschq’s opt-in network were active in the past 90 days, and of those candidates, 70% accept a new role within 30 days. 

Rely on source of hire metrics and the KPIs that matter with Crosschq today.