What happens to a business when you don’t track any metrics? Performance stays undefined and growth cannot be attained as the business processes don’t improve. Whether it is sales, marketing, revenue generation, or recruitment – measuring multidimensional results is the key to optimizing your functions. For instance, you cannot work on improving your margins if the customer acquisition cost is unknown. Talent acquisition is one of the most critical verticals of a business and similarly, recruitment metrics play a decisive role. A company’s trajectory is driven by the hiring team, so it’s imperative that their performance is tracked.
Recruitment teams need to follow a data-driven approach today to produce long-term impact – 70% of hiring managers agree to this too. Not to forget – if one needs to beat the enormous competition over talent, and win the race against time, continuous improvement is a necessity. Intuitions and assumptions in recruiting don’t work anymore. Tangible facts have to be referred to build your hiring strategies. Although data-driven efforts were pretty difficult to execute efficiently earlier, a plethora of analytics software and tools are available now for analysis.
But why exactly do you need recruitment metrics? While three of the core factors are time, quality and cost of hiring – as they significantly contribute to the overall business optimization, you need to dig in deeper for extracting actionable strategy on your recruitment metrics. In this blog, we will discuss the top recruitment metrics, why they are important and how you can track them to step up your recruitment game. Let’s dive straight in.
What are Recruitment Metrics?
The evaluation of your hiring methodology and recruitment team’s success is done through measurements known as recruitment metrics. Not only do these metrics help you track hiring success, but also enable the optimization of your entire recruitment funnel through performance analysis.
At ground level, these metrics tell you whether you’re hiring the right people for your company and if you’re doing it the right way. In order to set quantifiable recruitment objectives, and help your hiring teams make educated choices and get the most optimal ROI – following recruitment metrics effectively is vital.
Why Do You Need to Track Recruitment Metrics?
The most common characteristic that differentiates top hiring managers in the world is the amount of analysis they do with data and metrics. It’s a more competitive landscape than ever and growth can sustainably be attained by taking foolproof decisions. As a recruiter or as a business owner, recruitment metrics can help you in multi-dimensional ways. Here are the primary reasons to track them:
- Boost Recruitment Productivity and Efficiency: Tracking your team’s outbound and inbound recruiting efforts tells you what needs to improve for getting better results. For example – some channels perform better than others in attracting applicants, by knowing that, you can divert more resources into the top-performing channel.
- Discover Recruitment Errors: Whether it is any part of the recruitment funnel - metrics help you identify the issues. If the number of applications isn’t increasing even after publishing your job on numerous platforms, there might be an issue with the application form length or complexity. There are a number of such areas where small errors could adversely affect recruitment – metrics help in digging them out.
- Forecast Your Hiring: While making your growth plans for the next few quarters, metrics can help you determine how your hiring will support those plans, what efforts you would need to put in, and the quantified outputs that can be expected.
Top 6 Recruitment Metrics You Need to Track
The list of recruitment metrics that you should track is fairly long. However, we did the heavy lifting for you in filtering out the most important ones:
- Time to Hire
The time (in days) between the application or sourcing of a candidate and the onboarding, is referred to as time to hire.
Did you know that top talent is available in the market for only 10 days before getting hired? It’s one of the many big reasons why you need to track and optimize your hiring time. As the metric reflects the time taken by a candidate to travel through the entire recruitment cycle for an organization, it directly conveys the efficiency of the recruitment process and the team. It is a significant measure because the entire growth strategy depends on it, and projecting the time required to fill a position becomes an important requirement.
All organizations ideally want to minimize their time to hire, but it’s a tricky metric – why? Because as an enterprise, you don't want to compromise on the quality of hire at the same time. Not to forget – time of hiring will also help you figure out the existing performance bottlenecks in your recruitment process.
- Hiring Cost
One of the recruitment metrics most organizations are concerned about, hiring cost is defined as the total cost incurred in the process of acquiring talent – from sourcing to onboarding. While framing the yearly financial plans, the hiring budget is taken as a priority. It is a crucial metric because there’s never a single source of sourcing candidates for your company. The list of hiring expenditures widely varies – job posting sites, social media ads, agency costs (if any), referral rewards, administrative expenses and more.
To understand your hiring expenses comprehensively, you can utilize the ‘cost per hire’ metric which covers the following:
- Cost of human resources – managers, associates and other employees that are involved in this process
- Operational costs related to applicants – training, guest sessions etc.
- Candidate sourcing expenditure – job posting site costs, digital and physical advertisement costs
- Successful referrals rewards
It should be noted that hiring cost is also directly proportional to hiring time. The higher time it takes to hire a candidate, the more expensive it is because human resources costs add up. To optimize hiring costs, the time of hiring must be worked upon and the channels generating the best results for sourcing should be entirely focused on.
- Quality of Hire
Optimizing the time and cost of hiring is meaningless if the hired candidates do not satisfy the required skillset and competence.
Hiring quality is defined by the performance rating of a candidate usually given as the first-year performance report. Managers, team leads and vertical heads are often expected to review the hiring quality through performance ratings. The measured performance rating is further used as input to calculate the success ratio of a company. It’s nothing but the ratio of candidates with satisfactorily performance ratings to the total number of hired candidates. The quality of hire is undoubtedly the topmost metric that comes to stakeholders’ minds while analyzing recruitment performance. It helps in figuring out if financial resources and human efforts are being invested optimally or not.
- Applicant-to-Hire Ratio
As the name defines – it’s the ratio of the total number of candidates applying for a job to the number of candidates hired. Applicant-to-hire ratio is often overlooked but is a crucial metric. Here’s how – suppose you’re not receiving enough applications even after posting numerous openings, it’s a sign that the job specifications are not clear. It can also be about the hiring process is too complicated, or your job posting is not reaching the right candidates.
A data-driven approach like leveraging targeted advertisement can be a great way to improve this ratio. Additionally, recruitment marketing strategies along with automated email campaigns can be immensely helpful too.
- Source of Hire
Finding out the primary sources from which your top candidates and applicants are coming up is invariably important. Not only can you figure out where your target candidates are usually found, but it would also help you crack the recruitment marketing game. Keep tracking if it’s your website's careers page, certain job posting websites, third-party job ads or social channels that are bringing in more candidates.
Secondly, you should also track the sourcing channel's effectiveness. For each channel that you utilize for sourcing candidates:
- Measure how many applicants are you receiving for each job
- Among all the applicants through that channel, what was the number of qualified candidates?
Tracking your top sources of hire help you analyze the channels which are not producing positive ROIs for advertisement spending, and which job posting sites are delivering results. Hence, you can optimize your hiring budget while improving the results of hiring too.
- Attrition Rate
No matter how quickly you hire, how good the quality of talent is, or how much you optimize the hiring budget – if the talent isn’t staying in your company for at least more than a year. The attrition rate tells you about the rate at which your company loses employees over a given time period. A high attrition rate is often expensive for all companies regardless of their scale and headcount. Organizations also measure ‘first-year attrition’ because that’s where the hired employee isn’t delivering maximum value to the organization as per their potential. The first year is a lot more about learning the job and understanding the company culture.
Although a variety of reasons might force people to leave their employer, the attrition rate still tells you about the quality of the recruitment process. You will find out if the right roles, responsibilities and expectations are being conveyed by the hiring team or not.
Boost Your Recruitment with Automated Candidate Sourcing
Tracking metrics, analyzing the hiring process and improving it, are all aimed at one goal – acquiring the best talent for your organization. Recruiting teams have a plethora of tasks from posting jobs, and sourcing passive candidates to engaging with the candidates, assessing them via interviews and consistently maintaining the recruitment pipeline. It can very easily be overwhelming for you to do it all manually.
Wouldn’t it be absolutely satisfying if you were allowed to focus on the human side of recruiting, which is conducting interviews and evaluating candidates?
Nurturebox enables you and your hiring teams to comprehensively automate candidate sourcing, engagement and talent pipeline management. Safe to say - the three most hectic tasks of a recruiter’s alley. And not to underestimate – automating candidate sourcing will significantly improve your time to hire and quality of hire while cutting down costs associated with hiring. So as per both human efforts and business optimization metrics, automating your candidate sourcing is a smart decision.
Amidst today’s noisy digital world, brands find it challenging to create meaningful connections with their customer base and target audience. Getting the target consumer’s attention and persuading them to buy from you gets even trickier. Hence, content marketing has become more crucial than ever for brands to attract, educate, and retain customers.
Content creation is a top priority for 80% of marketers, and there is no reason it shouldn’t be. Consistent, high-quality, and engaging content impacts your audience’s decisions through education and persuasion.
Depending on your business goals and requirements, the role of Content Marketers you hire will vary. The primary responsibilities revolve around forming consistent brand messaging and deciding upon a unique and identifiable voice, style, and pitch across various distribution channels.
From raising brand awareness to attracting a relevant audience to your website, boosting social media presence and engagement, generating leads, and building brand loyalty – content marketing drives all the growth efforts for your brand. When done effectively, it can help you:
- Build positive brand awareness
- Make your audience stick around for longer
- Get better traction on social media
- Gain more trust of your audience than ever
- Generate qualified leads
- Improve conversion rates
- Boost business visibility with SEO
- Position your brand as an authority
- Cultivate loyal brand fans
While content marketing is a broad role with numerous areas of expertise involved, it’s vital to thoroughly understand your company’s current marketing goals and the related requirements. In this blog, we will dive deep into the step-by-step approach to hiring a Content Marketer.
What is The Role of a Content Marketer?
A Content Marketer must be deeply passionate about telling your brand’s story to the world. The objective is to educate and nurture the target audience to establish brand authority using thought-leadership and drive more people to buy from you.
As a candidate is expected to be a mediator between the brand and the target audience, they are primarily responsible for planning, creating, and sharing valuable content to grow their company’s awareness and engagement to bring more business.
To be more specific, the role of a Content Marketer requires a perfect blend of creativity and attention to detail in an individual. It’s a balancing role, as they need to ensure creating content that resonates and strengthens business relationships, using strategies that position your business as authentic and problem-solving.
Take a look at the core responsibilities of a Content Marketer that most businesses expect them to take over:
- Research and Competitor Analysis: The first and foremost step to creating a content marketing strategy is effective initial research. It not only helps a Content Marketer understand the nuances of the industry through competitor analysis but also study and understand the target audience thoroughly.
- Building Content Marketing Plans: Once the competitor research and target audience analysis is done, a Content Marketer needs to work on the different plans for all the business objectives, targeted channels, segments of the audience, and the bigger marketing strategy. A content marketing plan typically consists of:
- Specific goals along with a pre-decided timeline
- Various channels to be targeted for content distribution
- Types of content to be created
- Budget for the entire staff, outsourced services, and paid promotion (Collabs and Ads)
- Creating Editorial Calendar: Creating, managing, and maintaining a content calendar is one of the most crucial responsibilities of a Content Marketer. It is a centralized visual document that enables effective collaboration among the marketing team and helps Content Marketers ensure on-time production and delivery.
- Content Creation: Once the strategy and calendar have been approved by relevant stakeholders, Content Marketers need to do the on-ground work. This task usually depends on the scale of your company and content marketing strategy. Suppose an organization already has a set of writers, then the Content Marketer doesn’t need to create content by themselves.
- Search Engine Optimization (SEO): Producing quality content that educates your target audience and resonates with them, isn’t enough. You need to optimize your content creation to make it search engine-friendly. While most companies need a dedicated SEO specialist for keyword research and planning, Content Marketers need to closely collaborate with them and should be well-versed in the basics of SEO.
While the practices discussed above are primary responsibilities of a Content Marketer, they also need to be proactive with
- Content editing and ensuring adherence to a certain style guide
- Continous publishing and distributing content
- Measuring and analyzing performance
How to Hire a Content Marketer: Step-By-Step?
Content marketing has become the key to driving growth for businesses. Unlike a few years ago, it’s not possible now to get away with a one-person team for content marketing. You need deeply trained individuals for specialist roles.
Let’s now dive into the step-by-step approach of hiring a Content Marketer. But before you even source your first candidate, you should have a clear expectation of the skillset and experience to look out for top content marketing candidates.
Top Must-Have Skills in a Content Marketer
Apart from having relevant industry experience, a good Content Marketer must possess the following skills.
- Excellent Writing Skills
A Content Marketer’s prior skillset should be writing excellent attention-grabbing content. From long-form blog posts to website copy, ad copies, social media content, video scripts, emails, newsletters, e-books, whitepapers, and more – a Content Marketer should be able to adapt to the business’s specific requirements and create quality content.
- Audience Research
Identifying user behavior is vital for framing the story in the right direction. So a Content Marketer must know how to identify and analyze the needs and pain points to develop a buyer persona. User research can be performed through social listening, relevant communities, in-person calls with customers, analyzing sales call recordings, and more.
- Keyword Research
Creating valuable thought-leadership content isn’t enough. Researching the right set of keywords is an essential skill to further educate your target audience on the Whys, Hows and Whats of your business, and have your website rank on Google.
- Data-oriented Content
Content that’s not backed by relevant data points does not build enough trust. Experienced content marketing professionals would always prefer data over hollow claims. No doubt that only data doesn’t help a content piece succeed, but it’s essential..
- Project Management, Planning, and Publishing –
A Content Marketer is also expected to break down and analyze the pain points to turn keyword research into content ideas. So a professional must be able to identify and solve content gaps.
Further, they must know how to create a content calendar, decide the different types of content, and choose relevant platforms to publish and schedule marketing campaigns.
- Content Promotion
Creating a valuable content piece, for example - an ebook, isn’t enough. Your content marketing team needs to promote it proactively for bringing enough attention and engagement.
- Performance Analysis
Setting up goals and plans is one thing, but continuously executing, measuring, and analyzing content performance is another. A Content Marketer should always be monitoring key performance parameters to figure out the upcoming plans with the necessary updates required.
Not to forget - stakeholders and marketing heads need the performance reports regularly. So Content Marketers must be able to collect and comprehend all the data to make it worth presenting.
Step 1: Create a Candidate Persona
Let’s sort out the priorities first, and decide the type of content marketing candidates you want to recruit. From exceptional research skills to storytelling, communication skills, relationship building, audience engagement, and more capabilities must be comprehensively considered. Identify and break down the skill requirements for Content Marketers:
- What are the educational qualification criteria for the role?
- How many years and what type of work experience do you want in candidates?
- What are the specific skill sets you’re looking for?
- Which industry experience would you primarily prefer?
- Are there any tools your candidates should be hands-on with?
- What are some personality traits that will fit your company?
- Where do they look for a new job?
- What are their career and life goals?
Forming a candidate persona by answering all these questions would ensure you are not shooting in the dark while sourcing candidates. Further, it helps you determine the traits of the ideal candidate, and plan your sourcing and recruitment strategy further.
Step 2: Document the Role Requirements and Decide on Your Recruiting Process
Next step is determining your role requirements suiting primarily to organizational needs and business goals. A content marketing professional is expected to own the entire content strategy, creation, and distribution. But what about your business’s unique requirements?
You might need someone comfortable with frequently creating long-form content pieces like blogs, ebooks, or whitepapers, or creating engaging video content based on your industry trends.
Talk to various relevant stakeholders for seeking the complete detailed company requirements for the role.
Before you enter the recruitment funnel, outline your talent acquisition process. Identify various strategies, channels, and other informational insights you would need – and maintain a collaborative document.
As you update the tactics and tweak your recruitment process for meeting hiring requirements optimally – keep your document up to date.
Step 3: Prepare a Content Marketing Job Description
Once you have finalized the role requirements with respect to your current content marketing goals and team, you can start sourcing candidates. Preparing the job description is the first task you’ll need to do.
Here are the necessary components you must have in your job description:
- Job Title: The position you’re looking to fill. For example - Content Marketing Specialist or Content Marketing Manager.
- Roles & Responsibilities: An outline of the candidate’s day-to-day activities. From ideation to implementation and the impact on the organization, everything should be covered.
- Skill Requirements: Skills and abilities a candidate must have to perform the job successfully.
- Perks and Benefits: The compensation details, perks of the job, and any other benefits.
- About the Company: Why should a candidate consider working with your company?
Content Marketer Job Description Template
Role
The job of a Content Marketer is to perform competitor research, create user persona, and write plagiarism-free content for blog articles, social media, and the company website. They need to stay updated on the latest SEO techniques.
Responsibilities
- Develop, write and deliver persuasive copy for the website, email marketing campaigns, sales collateral, videos, and blogs
- Build and manage an editorial calendar; coordinate with other content crafters to ensure standards
- Measure impact and perform analysis to improve KPIs
- Include and optimize all content for SEO
- Contribute to the localization of processes and content to ensure consistency across regions
- Review and implement process changes to drive operational excellence
Requirements
- Proven content marketing, copywriting, or SEO experience
- Working knowledge of content management systems like WordPress
- A well-maintained portfolio of published articles, blogs, copy, etc
- Proven experience of working under pressure to deliver high quality output in a short span of time
- Proficiency in all Microsoft Office applications, Google Suite
- Fluency in English or any other required language
Soft Skills
- Excellent verbal and written communication skills
- Excellent writing and editing skills
- The ability to work in a fast-paced environment
- The ability to handle multiple projects concurrently
- Strong attention to detail and the ability to multi-task projects and deliverables
Step 4: Source Candidates
Once you have the tailored job description in hand, it’s now time to do the groundwork and source candidates. Create an attractive job post to promote your job across job boards and social channels.
- Begin with what to expect from the role at your company?
- Why should candidates apply for the position?
- Highlight the growth opportunities
- State the company vision and mission
- Briefly describe the recruitment process
Prepare an impactful job post and also execute paid job ad campaigns if required. The next step would be promoting your jobs on various job boards and hiring platforms. You can leverage the following platforms for hiring Content Marketers:
- LinkedIn
- Indeed
- Instahyre
- ZipRecruiter
- Monster
- GlassDoor
- CareerBuilder
Not to forget - almost 3/4th of the workforce includes passive candidates, so you cannot miss out on passive talent sourcing as well. Reach out to qualified candidates on communities, LinkedIn, Twitter, and even Facebook to offer them suitable opportunities.
Step 5: Evaluate Candidates and Interview Shortlisted Ones
Once you have filtered candidates based on their experience and skills listed on their profile, it’s time to evaluate them deeply. Ask them to create a content strategy for your website, along with a value-adding content piece like a small blog. The topic of the article must fall within the scope of the strategy.
Interview the candidates whose profiles got shortlisted. Keep in mind the parameters covering skills, relevant experience, and personality traits of candidates.
Step 5: Make the Hire
Reach out to selected Content Marketers and communicate about the compensation.
Further, extend your offer letter to all the candidates who have been selected. In the case of passive sourcing, extend to only those who were aligned with you on the compensation and are willing to move forward.
Ensure having a deadline for the joining date and mention the necessary documents required by your recruiting team.
- Get the required documents and set up the offer agreements with candidates
- Organize an orientation session for the onboarded candidates
- Introduce them to the entire team and the marketing teams they will be working with
- Guide the new candidates about your company management tools and communication channels
- Provide candidates with forms for benefits and perks like Health Insurance.
Supercharge Your Hiring for Content Marketer with Nurturebox
Inbound candidate sourcing doesn’t work effectively anymore. Do you also find challenges in closing quality candidates through job posts even after spending on ads?
Don’t worry, passive candidate sourcing can be an optimal solution for hiring top content marketing candidates.
Nurturebox is a one-stop talent sourcing and engagement platform which is powered by automation. Here’s how you can source product managers from LinkedIn using Nurturebox:
- Install the Nurturebox Chrome plugin and sign up.
- On your LinkedIn profile, start sourcing Content Marketers with boolean searches stating the required experience from targeted locations and including other criteria
- Add the qualified candidates to your sourcing campaign pipeline with just a click
- Automate the candidate engagement through email, Whatsapp and LinkedIn direct messages for reaching out and nurturing candidates at scale.
