In our previous post, we discussed Why Your Competition Is Placing Candidates and You’re Not
In that post, we analyzed how crucial it is to have a dedicated person that would build relationships with your Clients.
Whereas relationships are extremely important in your recruiting process they are not the only thing that will guarantee you a placement. If you have outstanding relationships with your Clients but can’t find a good candidate then you won’t have a placement.
The importance of numbers
Oftentimes, we recruiters, tend to fill positions for our Clients without having a real strategy. We might get some training from our company, read stuff online, and then just start executing. But how do you know if what you’re doing is the best approach that will bring you maximum results?
The only true way to know is to have numbers. Numbers will tell you a lot, whether your LinkedIn profile looks good enough to have candidates connect with you, whether your message to them is good enough to have them reply to you, and whether your interviewing system is good enough to assess their professional skills and sell them the position and much more than that.
How to measure recruiting efforts
Here’s a practical example of how you can run the numbers for your recruiting efforts.
Let’s say you have an open position for your Client and you go on LinkedIn to find candidates.
Process Outline
There are several steps involved in this process (this is a generic outline, there could be more steps):
- Setting up a LinkedIn profile or improving the existing one
- Creating/sending a message to the candidate
- Your interview with the candidate
- Submission to your Client
- Setting up/Assisting with the interviewing process for the Client
- Offer Stage
Each of these steps should be tracked. If you sent 100 invitations to candidates for this position, how many of those connected with you? Out of the ones that connected how many replied to your message? How many were interested in an interview? How many appeared for the interview? How many passed the interview? And so on.
A/B Testing
Run the numbers for a week or two and then do A/B testing by trying a different LinkedIn profile, a different message, a different interview process, a different submission message to your Client, etc.
Afterward, compare the two and based on numbers analyze what works better and WHY. Where is the bottleneck in your recruiting process, what is driving your numbers down and preventing you from making a placement? This might be at any stage. You might be getting high numbers and good results throughout all the steps and then lose candidates at the offer stage.
Conclusion
Or your sourcing team might be delivering high-quality candidates consistently, but candidates are withdrawing after your initial interview with them. There is a reason for that too. But without seeing the numbers over a significant period of time you really don’t know where your stumbling points are.
If you’re interested in creating a compelling message for your candidates make sure to sign up for our blog post where we’ll share some ideas that truly work.
