Google Analytics is Your Recruiting Secret Weapon - Workology

Google Analytics is Your Recruiting Secret Weapon - Workology How Recruiters Can Use Google Analytics As our work in recruitment and hiring becomes more digital, we need tools, reporting, and metrics that help us understand the needs, interests, and activities of our candidates for the positions we are recruiting for not to mention the specific company brand. Thankfully there are ways in order to accomplish this that require some planning, but provide talent acquisition  leaders with a more holistic look at the digital recruiting landscape. Ive said before that at the center of your recruitment strategy is your career site. Its the one piece of online real estate your company owns and controls. You are in charge the experience and not just renting space. Because thats exactly what is happening with employer review sites, social networks, and job boards. You are paying for access or are using their platform if it is free. However, they are in control and can dictate the terms of experience, the collection of data and information, and for a fee, your competitors can use advertising to drive your community members and profile visitors to another place. How Recruiters Can Use Google Analytics Google Analytics is a free tool for websites to monitor online web activity and visitor reporting. The reporting tool allows for recruiting teams to monitor activity on their allowing them to better understand online job seeker behaviors and habits. This tool  allows recruiters to gather more data and information around online sources of job seeker traffic including social media, job boards, and employee reviews sites which then allows recruiting teams to better assess the ROI of these digital recruiting tools. Google Analytics provides you and your talent acquisition  team specific web-specific activity including the following: Type of device and browser used to access your web pages.  The tool provides you data on browser usage like Chrome vs. Explorer and device type. This includes desktop, mobile, and tablets providing you insights into how many candidates are accessing your site with a mobile device. Time on site.  How many minutes or seconds are candidates spending on your website? What pages are they lingering longer on and how deep within the website are they digging. Traffic sources.  This is important when considering paid vs. unpaid traffic not to mention your sources of hire that are netting the highest quality candidates. If you arent using Google Analytics, you are probably unaware that both Indeed and Glassdoor can provide free job seeker referral traffic. This data is important to have because it helps you plan on the type of digital recruiting investments your talent acquisition  team wants to make. Web traffic.  Sources are important but so is understanding which days have the highest traffic on your site. This helps with job post planning and other digital as well as in person recruiting campaigns. For example, you might find that a landing page for a career expo produces better results before the event versus after the fact leading you to do more pre-marketing and planning with job seekers using social media or with the local college, university, and chamber of commerce. Secrets to Setting Up Google Analytics Access to all this data and information from Google Analytics can provide you so many insights and nuggets of wisdom in your recruitment planning. For example, one of my clients made a simple change to their job postings adding a second apply now button to the top of the every job posting while also changing the button color to draw more attention to the call to action. The company wanted higher candidate conversion rates after spending so much time and money driving them to the postings. With the small change of button color and adding an additional one, we say an increase in 200% conversion over a period of 90 days. Setting up Google Analytics is easy and free. The hardest part is working with your IT department to add the required code to the career site itself. You or IT will need a Gmail account in order to set up. From there you and your IT team can decide whether to allow for shared access between IT and recruitment or if you want to share reporting access to other Gmail accounts. IT teams tend to like the shared reporting access option because they can control security and revoke reporting access should someone exit the organization who had access to the reporting and data information.