Citing Your Sources – Source of Hire vs. Source of Influence

While attending the ERE Expo last week, I was excited to learn that The American National Standards Institute (ANSI) has approved the cost-per-hire standard as the first American national HR standard:

This is a great “first” in an industry lacking in way of “standards.”

However, one of the biggest challenges we continue to face in benchmarking a client’s recruitment advertising performance in comparison to industry norms, is that there is no norm when it comes to the countless ways in which companies are tracking Source of Hire.

Every client has a different methodology for capturing source (i.e., different application processes, career site integrations, applicant tracking systems, media/source tagging conventions, etc.).

And even the exceptional clients, who have implemented the best available resources to track source, know that deep down they’re probably only capturing, at best, 50% of the true source of hires.

Worse yet, is that the Source of Hire is in most cases simply the “last source” the candidate came from prior to applying into the ATS.

So what about all of the other sources that helped “influence” that candidate’s decision to apply?  Where did they first learn about the company/opportunity?  Did they then go on to research the company on social media platforms (i.e., Facebook and LinkedIn) and employer review sites (i.e., Glassdoor and CareerBliss)?  Did they watch a video about the company/culture/position?  Did they seek out an employee referral from someone in their network?

Our more sophisticated clients are asking these questions…wanting to look at all of the “Sources of Influence” that led to a hire.

And in an industry where simply capturing the last source is difficult, trying to capture data on all of the touch points along the way is a huge challenge.   But there are methods to go about collecting this information (i.e., post-impression media tagging tools, etc.) and as an Agency, this is the hot problem we’re trying to solve for our clients.

And who knows, maybe in another decade or so, ANSI will release their second American national HR standard: tracking Source of Influence.