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Recruiting Analytics Must-Have – Google Analytics

As our work in recruitment and hiring becomes more digital, we need tools, reporting, and metrics that help us understand the needs, interests, and activities of our candidates for the positions we are recruiting for—not to mention our specific company brand. There are ways to accomplish this with recruiting analytics. While it requires planning, it provides talent acquisition leaders with a more holistic look at the digital recruiting landscape.

Google Analytics is a free tool for websites to monitor online web activity and visitor reporting. The reporting tool allows for recruiting teams to monitor activity on their site allowing them to better understand online job seeker behaviors and habits. This tool allows recruiters to gather more data and information around online sources of job seeker traffic including social media, job boards, and employee reviews sites which then allows recruiting teams to better assess the ROI of your digital recruiting tools and strategies.

How Google Analytics Focuses Your Recruitment Efforts Online

Google Analytics provides you and your talent acquisition team web-specific activity data, including the following five reports that should help you get started:

Type of device and browser used to access your web pages

The tool provides you data on browser usage like Chrome vs. Safari and device type. This includes desktop, mobile, and tablets providing you insights into how many candidates are accessing your site with a mobile device.

Time on site

How many minutes or seconds are candidates spending on your website? What pages are they lingering longer on and how deep within your website are they digging? The pages on your career site should be “sticky” and lead the visitor through an informational experience or engagement. Including links to “learn more” and “about us” can help keep a user on your site longer, as it makes it easy for them to navigate to other information they might want to find out about your company.

Bounce rate

If you notice a specific page on your career site has a high bounce rate, consider re-evaluating the page content, meta data, and SEO title. You can surmise that a high bounce rate means 1) visitors aren’t finding the content useful or easy to navigate, so they leave, 2) organic search results (meta description) is not matching the page content, or 3) the page with a high bounce rate should be redesigned, rewritten, or changed to better appeal to your job candidate audience.

Traffic sources

One primary function of web analytics is to tell you where your site traffic comes from. No matter how much traffic you attract to your careers page, if you don’t know where your traffic came from, you won’t understand which of your campaigns and channels are effective. Common traffic sources include:

  • Organic traffic (from search engines like Google and Bing)
  • Paid advertising
  • Social media (LinkedIn, Facebook, etc.)
  • Job boards
  • Direct traffic (visitors going right to your website)
  • Email

Conversion rates

It’s important to remember that the channel that brings the most traffic to your site might not be your most effective platform. Your end goal is not to boost traffic, but to boost applicants. So, a channel that brings a lot of people to your site might seem effective, but if none of those site visitors submit applications, how valuable is it actually?

Related: Must-Have Recruiting Metrics to Show Off to Your Boss

Setting Up Google Analytics for Your Job Postings

Setting up Google Analytics is easy and free. The hardest part is working with your IT department to add the required code to the career site itself. You or IT will need a Gmail account in order to set up. From there you and your IT team can decide whether to allow for shared access between IT and recruitment or if you want to share reporting access to other Gmail accounts. IT teams tend to like the shared reporting access option because they can control security and revoke reporting access should someone exit the organization who had access to the reporting and data information.

You can use Google Analytics to set up cross-domain tracking between your ATS, career site, and CRM. It can track all of them at the same time in order to give you a full line of sight from initial candidate entry to a completed application so you can deeply understand candidate behaviors and optimize your recruitment marketing funnel. It may seem complicated when you first get started, but Google Analytics can help you achieve your primary goal of understanding your candidates and learning the best tactics to find them.