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The days when you posted a job vacancy on your website, and the job applications just started rolling in are long gone. Nowadays, it takes more than that (far more) to put your organisation on the map as a potential employer for your ideal candidates.
Which is of course why Recruitment Marketing exists. However, running effective recruitment marketing campaigns also brings new challenges. One such challenge is data collection and assessment. Understanding what the impact of all your efforts are is one of the biggest challenges recruitment and HR teams face today.
Where is new talent coming from? Where are your highest quality candidates discovering your organisation? What marketing efforts have contributed most to this? What needs to be done to increase the quality or quantity of applicants for a specific role?
These are questions that can all be answered with a Recruitment Marketing Data Hub. But what is a Recruitment Marketing Data Hub?
A Recruitment Marketing Data Hub is a central database where your organisation can store and retrieve all data related to your Recruitment and Recruitment Marketing efforts. From this database, data can be shared with business intelligence and marketing platforms in order to gain accurate insights and effectively optimise your recruitment marketing efforts.
Data in the Recruitment Marketing Data Hub is automatically linked to all relevant systems (such as marketing channels, ATS systems and BI dashboards). All website events, paid marketing data, job board data, as well recruitment process and hiring data from the ATS are brought together in 1 central place. This makes it possible to string all the data together and gain an accurate picture of where you are succeeding and where you can improve.
For the nerds out there, a Recruitment Marketing Data Hub is essentially a data warehouse integrated with a Customer Data Platform (CDP) specifically for recruitment efforts.
A Recruitment Marketing Data Hub can solve some of an organisation’s most significant recruitment challenges at the root. Including:
Central data storage
A Recruitment Marketing Data Hub ensures that all data from online marketing platforms, your ATS, Job Boards and website come together into 1 place. This makes it easier for the entire organisation to gain a 360-degree view of the entire recruitment process. From employer branding campaigns to successful hires.
In-depth analyses
Having the entire recruitment journey tracked in 1 central location makes it easier to perform in-depth analyses. Where did the candidate's journey begin and end? Which campaigns performed well, less well, and which recruitment and marketing channel now offers the most opportunities? Accurately calculating acquisition costs per application, interview, and hire becomes possible within a matter of hours instead of days or weeks.
Segmentation and personalisation
By connecting the Recruitment Marketing Data Hub to your marketing channels, you can not only see where applicants are coming from, but you can also send important performance signals back to marketing channels. We call this process “offline conversion tracking”. By telling marketing channels which in your ATS are qualified, or hired, these channels can then optimise accordingly. You will train your ads channels to deliver higher quality applications for the same budget.
Improved decision-making
This may go without saying, but having all the data available allows you to answer all possible questions around the recruitment marketing strategy. This makes it easy to improve your strategy, tactics, and processes. More importantly, it allows you to create accurate hiring forecasts so your organisation can grow predictably in an unpredictable market.
Building a Recruitment Marketing Data Hub consists of five components.
Note that this process assumes that you have tracking set up correctly on your website and marketing channels. If not, that should be step 1.
1. Data links
Step 1 is scoping out what data is all available and required for the Recruitment Marketing Data Hub. For instance, marketing data from Google, LinkedIn, Facebook, JobBoards and also your ATS.
2. Safeguarding/transforming data
Now that you know what data exists and where this data is located, it is important to create a place where you store all this data. The most common solutions for data-storage are Google BigQuery, Microsoft Azure or Snowflake.
Storing this data does not have to be expensive, but it always costs money. Choosing the solution that best suits your organisation depends on the infrastructure already in place. Your organisation's IT department or an external specialist should be able to help you decide which solutions best fits your needs.
An indispensable part of data management is transforming the data so that it can be linked together. This is done in a so-called ETL or ELT process (Extract, Transform, Load / Extract, Load, Transform). For example, all applicants from a job board can be linked to the applicant in the ATS and a visitor from Google Analytics.
Note that by storing data from all channels here, you yourself have become 100% owner of this data. It's essential to be aware of the implications this has on your responsibilities in relation to GDPR. Though you may stare at a broader variety of data-points, your responsibilities regarding security and consent are more stringent.
3. Analysing and visualising data
Now that all the data on the candidate journey is available, the fun begins; Analysis and visualisation.
To analyse data from a Recruitment Marketing Data Hub, it is important that all data is available in a visualisation tool. Commonly used for include purposes are Google Looker Studio, PowerBI, Qlik or Tableau.
We advise using a tool which is easy to understand across your organisation. Thereby enabling everyone from management, to recruiters, and marketing to HR to better understand their work and forecast their performance.
4. Activating and returning data
Now that you have a 360-degree view of specific / potential candidates, you can also segment them based on the behaviour they have shown. Some possibilities with this data include:
- Creating 1st-party audiences and sharing them with DSPs, Google Ads and other marketing channels to deliver highly customized ads
- Building more effective email automation for specific audience segments
- Enriching conversion data with post-application data in order to dynamically adjust bids and more effectively train ads-channel algorithms:
- Application is/is not qualified
- Application has/has not passed interview
- Application has/has not been hired
- Rating visitors in advance based on pages visited or other behaviour.
- Segment these visitors and treat them differently on online marketing channels.
For segmenting the available data, there are some tools that make this process easy, for instance Census or Hightouch. Feed management tools like Channable can also be used to reliable send data to your different channels.
5. Data quality and retention
Last but definitely not least; data retention and quality is a key component for a usable Recruitment Marketing Data Hub. The main reason is the dependency that exists after the data is made available for analysis and influences decisions within the organisation.
After transforming the data, do you still know where that one metric came from and which dependencies need to be monitored? We call this Data cataloguing, and there are a few tools to use for this.
To continuously monitor quality, there are also tools that analyse incoming data 24/7 for anomalies. This way, the data team is immediately alerted when there is an anomaly in the data and it can be resolved as soon as possible.
Additionally, removing data for which consent has expired and/or asking for renewal of consent. Are important processes to ensure you remain GDPR compliant.
By using a Recruitment Marketing Data Hub, you ensure that all the data you need is directly at your disposal in a few clicks without having to log into each individual system. In addition, all data is also directly linked, giving you a 360-degree view of the entire recruitment journey.
This saves a huge amount of time, and provides insights you wouldn't otherwise have. Additionally, by sending data from your ATS back to marketing channels, it allows you continuously improve the quality and quantity of new applications. Saving you money and ensure predictable people growth.
There are many benefits to building a Recruitment Marketing Data Hub. Setting up can take some time in the beginning, which is why we recommend starting by connecting only the most important channels and building out from there.
Start with specific questions you need to have answered about the candidate journey, and ensure the insights are available to answer those questions.
Are you curious about how this may help your organisation grow? Feel free to get in touch with us here, and we’d be happy to explore what solutions makes most sense for you.
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