Have you ever applied for a job? Then chances are you will be familiar with the ‘Candidate Journey’, even if you have never heard of it before.

What is the candidate journey?

The candidate journey is simply the process candidates go through in which they get a job. This process starts from the point of no awareness about the company, all the way until he or she becomes a loyal employee. Basically, it is the entire job-hunting journey.

Why is it important to get a 360° view of the candidate journey?

By knowing what contributes to hiring success, you can make smarter investment decisions to get more hires and fill more jobs via online channels.

In today’s digital age, the majority of job searches happen online, involving various touchpoints and channels. When recruitment processes become increasingly fragmented, companies that have a 360° view of the candidate journey have a competitive advantage to attract higher-quality candidates. Having actionable insights into the performance of each channel also gives you a higher return on investment.

The ability to leverage the power of your online recruitment data is key to winning in the digital age.

There are three measurements that help you to better understand a candidate’s journey:

End-to-end (E2E)

Recruitment doesn’t start from the application fill-out process by candidates. It starts from the candidate’s research process on search engine and job aggregators, to the point of getting hired as an employee. This is where the term ‘end-to-end’ comes from.

However, most companies measure success performance only until the application process.

It is essential to measure not only channels that are bringing you more applications, but the ones that are bringing you interviews and hires. This way, you’ll have a better insight in which channels are bringing you the right type of candidates.

Say you allocate 50% of your advertising investment to Google and the other 50% to Facebook. From this, you’d assume both platforms perform equally well in attracting candidates. But in reality, Google brings 75% of the conversion rate, outperforming Facebook by 25%. It would make sense to invest more of your advertising budget to Google ads instead of investing in both channels equally.

Getting actionable insights on every touchpoint will help you optimize your advertising budget.

Cross-Channel

How many touch points does it take before a candidate makes up their decision to apply for a job at your company?

Pre-internet, around two: the newspaper and the mail.

Post-Internet? At least a dozen.

The average candidate will explore multiple websites to research your company before deciding to apply. Post-internet, the candidate journey is a complex course that involves a series of channels and website visits.

For instance, Jon may stumble upon a job ad on LinkedIn. Then, he logs on to his Facebook and was ‘retargeted’, seeing the same ad on his computer that nudges him to finish the application. Later that day, he Google-searched that job and finally submitted his application. Without the retargeting effort on Facebook, Jon would not have remembered to apply on Google.

As the recruitment process becomes more complicated, the ‘last-click’ attribution becomes the most convenient and commonly used metric to assess the effectiveness of a campaign. The problem with last-click is that it only gives credit to the touchpoint before conversion. This may lead you to inadvertently stop investing in the channels that are actually bringing the results.

Cross Devices

Would you want to take the extra effort to take that tablet downstairs when your phone is within your arm’s reach? I wouldn’t.

These days, the average working person owns at least two devices. By always having these devices within reach, users conveniently switch devices more often than they change clothes. Today, many candidates prefer to search for jobs on mobile, and apply on their desktop at a more convenient time.

Let us illustrate an example. Sally is on the train, scrolling through LinkedIn job ads on her mobile. She clicks on an ad that directs her to the company’s website. Later that night, she logs on to her desktop and starts writing her resume and cover letter, then proceeds to apply for that job. Without connecting these data together, you’d assume that the two activities on mobile and desktop are done by two different people. It is essential to connect these data sets together to avoid user duplication.

Only by measuring cross-device will you be able to properly measure candidate journey end-to-end and cross-channel. Thus giving you a better insight on what to do in the future to hire the right candidates.

In short: Better insights = higher return on investment

With the existence of multiple channels and devices, candidates use to apply for jobs at your company, determining which online channel you should invest in to fill in more jobs becomes increasingly challenging.

Without knowing which channel is attributing to your company’s hiring success, how would you optimize the recruitment process in the future?

In the digital age, companies that have a 360° candidate journey have a competitive advantage. Having better insights into the candidate journey lead to a higher return of investment to fill more jobs online. You will get a better insight into the performance of each channel you need to invest in for attributing to hiring success.

To learn more about how you can get a better insight into the candidate journey, contact us here!