It’s hard to find anyone in candidate sourcing and recruiting who isn’t familiar with Google Search. But when did your department last review the performance of your corporate job site? Indeed, have you ever reviewed it since IT finished building it? I bet you have for content – prose, graphics, and navigation. But I also bet you haven’t for detailed performance data, the kind now easily provided by Google Analytics and other software.
Basic click-stream analytics have been available for some time and there are numerous providers. They started out tracking traffic flows - clicks, page views, time on site – that have since become part of the common Internet lexicon. Analyzing this basic data is still fundamental, but software functionality has improved greatly in recent years. So now, more sophisticated, complex data that once cost thousands is available for next to nothing. Basic Google Analytics in fact is a free service.
Spending time with Google Analytics or one of its competitors is like being fitted with a proper pair of contacts after years of nearsightedness. Suddenly you have clear views of how your job site is actually operating: detailed, daily information on the five critical “W’s” – Who is coming and When, What are they looking at, and Where are they coming from and going to? This information, coupled with some short pop-up surveys and perhaps some competitive intelligence, enables you, perhaps for the first time, to arrive at some documented, financially astute conclusions about Why your site is working (or not) and how you can improve it. Here are some of the questions you can answer.
Benefits
Our research tells us that the corporate website is well on its way to becoming the universally consulted reference for a computer literate job candidate, in other words, the hub of today’s corporate staffing. Having this hub work efficiently and deliver the right candidates to your applicant pool is therefore critical. Understanding how candidates find your site; which messages pull them in; what employment information they find useful; and where roadblocks exist to turn them away is now a core competency of 21st century staffing. Google and others can now tell you all these things. Some examples:
Visitors
- What percent of my site visitors are new, unique or repeat?
- How does this compare to other sites like mine?
- Where are these people located?
- What URLs do they come from?
- What are my traffic trends (daily, weekly, monthly)?
- How many times does each visitor visit?
- If they visit repeatedly, how frequently?
Traffic
- How many people use basic search to find me?
- What keywords do they use?
- Which search engines do they use?
- Which sites are referring candidates to me?
- Which job ads from which sources are pulling in candidates?
- Which job marketing campaigns are working and which aren’t?
- How many people viewed which job descriptions?
- Which job descriptions prompted the most/best applications?
Content
- How deep do visitors go into my site (depth of visit)?
- How long do they stay (length of visit)?
- Which content pages are the most popular?
- How do they find that content?
- What path do they take through my content?
- Where do they leave the site?
- How does the site perform against my business objectives?
Excuses
There are no valid excuses for not vetting your job site with today’s analytical tools. The lame ones, however, include:
- It’s too expensive. Some enterprise analytical software can be expensive, but Google’s powerful basic software happens to be free.
- IT won’t allow it. They’re probably guarding against having to tinker with complex enterprise software. Google only requires tagging individual web pages, which is very easy to do. A freelancer can handle this in a day or three depending on the size of your site.
- I’m not a data person. Well, heads up, you’d better become one. 21st Century staffing is all about efficiency, effectiveness and accountability. Those things in turn are all about measurement. Becoming familiar with these tools is now as job-critical as learning WORD or EXCEL once was.
- I already know what’s working. I hope you do. But this is about making what’s already working well, work better. It’s also about pitching management for additional support and proving to other C-suite executives that you understand how business allocates dollars.
Google gives you powerful insight for pennies. Or less. Sounds like a commercial, but it’s true.
Related Reading
Google Analytics
Why every recruitment department should be using Google Analytics
Using Google Analytics
Segmenting Data Using Google Analytics
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