How to Measure Your Talent Attraction

With so much of the university recruitment process pushed online, hiring departments have access to more and better data than ever before. While you may be tracking statistics like the numbers of applicants, geographic information, and interview to placement ratios, knowing how to use this data is the key to optimizing your recruitment process. 

Data provides invaluable insights that can help you understand which aspects of your recruitment are working well and where you could make some improvements. 

Whether you work with an outside recruitment partner or rely on internal data, learning to measure your talent attraction lead to higher quality faculty and greater retention rates. 

Why Data is Valuable

So much of university recruiting depends on marketing your brand and creating greater visibility. These vital aspects of the hiring process however, are sometimes difficult to quantify. For example, a robust social media presence may not directly translate into more applicants immediately. However, over the course of a year or two, it could pay dividends as these social media strategies often target passive job seekers. 

Finding a way to measure your talent attraction with data points, helps you quantify and evaluate your recruitment success in a more tangible way. With concrete data across your most popular recruitment channels, universities can develop more effective means to attract and retain talent. 

Although you could try to pull this information together internally, working with an external recruitment partner with established means to collect data and interpret data can save your organization both time and money in the long run by improving your hiring efficiency.

How to Measure Your Talent Attraction Success

Benchmarking Data

Perhaps the most useful data regarding academic recruitment marketing is benchmarking data. Because university jobs have become so competitive, understanding how you rank against other schools puts you at a real advantage.

Benchmarking data allows your university to gauge where they rank in comparison to similar schools with similar open positions. Simply seeing how you stack up is essential to making improvements to your practices and processes. On reports like those provided by Academic Positions, you can toggle between metrics (like job type and job field) to see how you compare to all other universities in your country. Once you identify a weakness, you can turn those weaknesses into strengths.

You might see, for example, that while you have more pageviews on your PhD adverts than the average, your conversion rate is lower. Knowing candidates can find you but aren’t convinced to click through the advert and apply, will help you focus on improving the quality of your job descriptions rather than advertising you have an open position. This kind of knowledge will allow you to make smarter recruiting decisions that will ultimately save you time and money and set you apart from the competition.

Talent Interview Ratio

Your interview conversion rate tracks how many candidates you interview before filling the position. This is an important point because it helps you know how long it takes to fill open positions. If you find you’re conducting more than a few interviews and taking weeks to make a decision, perhaps there are weaknesses in your screening process that need to be addressed. 

Geographic Data

Geographic data can help you improve your future marketing budgets and potentially enhance your overall diversity initiatives. Knowing from which regions you have a high number of applicants can help you focus your efforts in those markets. Because there are rich applicant pools in those countries, these are areas where you will find highly qualified candidates. Conversely, you can use this information to try to attract applicants from more underrepresented regions.

Position popularity

By measuring pageviews per applicant and applications per advert your university can parse important data regarding the types of positions that are most popular. This data shows which jobs are in high demand and which perform well on your platform. Knowing which fields are most popular on your site allows you to think about whether you want to continue to target and invest in those fields, or focus on other fields to help them become more popular.  

Overviews of Website and Advert Performance 

A broad view of your overall recruitment strategies can help you set budget goals and prioritize your recruitment needs. An overview of data like alerts sent and the number of apply button clicks gives you a snapshot of your website’s overall performance. Seeing your most popular categories and publishing overview helps you make informed choices about moving forward. 

A recruitment partner who understands the value of data can provide these types of overviews to show your university the strengths and weaknesses of your current recruitment strategies. 

Managing and interpreting data can feel like an overwhelming and time consuming task. A recruitment partner with the know-how and experience to organize and evaluate the data generated from your recruitment processes will be an investment that will pay dividends in elevating your brand and the quality of your research.