Recently we have been asked by one of our clients to analyse the performance of their online recruitment site. New Zealand has a real problem in finding candidates for certain positions and the Internet proves to be a very powerful tool in convincing potential recruits to send their CV your way as one of the ponds to fish in are kiwi’s currently working overseas.

In the process we were thinking about what KPI’s we could define for the recruitment site. Are they things like number of visitors or number of applications, or a combination of both?

One of the assumptions people often make is that what you learn from web analytics can only ever be applied directly back to the site or at the way you are marketing the web site. It is an easy assumption to make, certainly for those glaring at analytics reports all day. The reality however is that web analytics can provide all sorts of insights that can be applied across a business, often in areas not related to online at all. Often organisations don’t take full advantage of what is the potential of whatever web analytics tools available to them.

That is why we decided to have a broad look at possible KPI’s and measurements of success and here is a list of things we came up with...

• Conversions: This is may seem the easiest one to measure: how many visitors ended up sending you their CV? Which behaviours lead to conversions? Where are the stumbling blocks? Should you have additional soft conversions like newsletter subscriptions or keep-me-posted options?
• Segmentation: where do your visitors come from? Which geo-locations are good sources for traffic? Should you be directing your offline communications around these areas? What age, gender and overall “fit-to-requirements” originates from certain segments? Which ones convert, which ones don’t?
• Internal Search: Have a look at which job locations, sectors, job titles, etc. are most searched for on your site. Which non-job related topics are searched for? For which searches does your internal search tool offer no real results?
• Referrers: Which sites are sending most visitors to your site? Are these referrals consistent or do you find they are intermittent? Some referrers may also have off-line channels you could tap into. Combining certain referrers with your most popular content will lead to a better targeting of the audience they send your way.
• Most Popular Content: Which sections do visitors spend most time on? Is it your generic information (how to apply, career advice, testimonials…) or are they browsing specific job vacancies? It will indicate what information your target groups are looking for. Creating extra information may also attract visitors that are “latent” job seekers and you may well be the first to kick them into active mode.
• Quality over quantity: The challenge is to make sure you get quality applications, as assessing each and every submissions may be very time consuming when staff has to wade through a lot of quantity in search of quality. This will limit your options on how to motivate people to send in their CV. Offering a big prize in to those who click the submit button may have a very counterproductive result go against the overall business objectives.

This list is by no means complete and it is clear we may come up with a lot more learning’s later on, but they forced us to look at the overall conversion scheme from different angles. It also helped us understand the general recruitment issues our client faces and certainly avoids seeing the web as an individual, unrelated element in the mix.