What metrics do you base your job board’s performance on? Do you measure your monthly traffic? Or do you base your assessment on how well your job board helps your clients achieve their recruitment KPI targets? While monthly traffic and client satisfaction may be good indicators of your job board’s performance, they are not the end-all, be-all job board or recruitment KPIs. To truly affect change and make your job board more sustainable and competitive, you need more tangible and actionable information. To do so, you will need to assess your job board performance along with a few key performance indicators such as follows:
Traffic and sources of traffic
Measuring the total traffic generated by your job board is an indicator of how valuable you are to third party advertisers. The monthly changes in traffic is also a fair indicator of how your job board performance is changing from month to month. While minor fluctuations and known seasonal changes don’t warrant being looked into, sudden spikes and dips in monthly traffic or trends continuing across several months should be investigated to identify their causes. This can help in determining what you can do and what you can stop doing to see a month-on-month improvement in traffic.
Identifying your major sources of traffic is even more important than just measuring your overall visitorship. Job applicants can find your job board through multiple channels, viz., social media, organic search, paid ads, word of mouth, and referrals, among others. Knowing where most of your traffic comes from will help you fine-tune your marketing strategy and capitalize on channels that give you the most traffic. You can also identify the channels where you are not effectively attracting applicants and improve your results by changing your approach. For instance, you can track your SEO performance — with tools like Google Analytics and SEMRush — to see how your content, job posts, and keywords are attracting traffic. If you find that your keyword phrases are not attracting enough people, it may be time for you to invest in tools that offer greater tagging capabilities.
To be able to tag your job postings with accurate, descriptive, and search-friendly keywords, you’ll need premium job board tools to process job data. By using these tools, you can ensure that your job postings become easily searchable through search engines like Google. In fact, using such tools to improve the searchability of your job postings will also ensure that you rank well on the new Google for Jobs search engine.
Applicant quality
The key factor that attracts more job seekers to your job board is the quality of job postings. Similarly, what attracts more employers to host their job postings on your job board is the quantity and quality of applicants you can attract to your job board, which are highly important recruitment KPIs. While tracking the number of job applicants is a pretty straightforward affair, measuring applicant quality can be a bit tricky.
To begin with, we’ll have to define a high-quality applicant. A high-quality applicant can be defined as someone who meets the skill, experience, and cost requirements of the employer. And how does a job board measure that? While there is no standard way of doing it, a simple way is simply surveying your employers to find out how many hires they made through your job board. You can even get specific by analyzing the number of applications per hire to gauge the ratio of high-quality applicants.
To measure and improve this metric, you need to use tools that can directly interact and communicate with employers’ recruitment systems and applicant tracking systems. To do so, you can use job board platforms that offer an advanced API integration with your client’s recruitment tools. That way, you can ensure that you measure your job board’s ability to keep up with and effectively serve employers’ evolving recruitment strategies and improve the same.
Job alert performance
Job alerts have become a standard feature of almost all present-day job boards and recruitment platforms. These alerts, mostly shared as email alerts, and in some cases, as push notifications and text messages on mobiles. The effectiveness of your job board platform in customizing these job alerts to your individual users is a key driver of job board performance. That’s because regularly sending your subscribers irrelevant content can lead to them:
- Not opening your emails,
- reporting your communications as spam, and
- stop seeing your job board as a reliable job data source.
To prevent such outcomes, it is important that you share job alerts with postings that meet the skills, experience, and preferences of individual job seekers. And to do so, it is vital to track the number of people who click on the recommendations in your job alert messages and visit your job board or the employer’s site. The number of people clicking through to your job board is a clear indicator of how relevant your email job alerts are. Similarly, keeping track of clicks or engagement with other job alert media such as push and text messages can help you assess and improve them.
Another way of your job alert performance is to assess the number of direct applications through your job alert notifications. To improve the rate of applications from job alerts, it is essential to make it easy for job seekers to apply through these notification messages. A simple way of doing it is directly linking individual job postings from the alert messages to the corresponding employer sites.
User retention
The average tenure of employees with organizations diminishing and, as a consequence, hiring cycles are increasing in frequency. As a result, job boards will have the opportunity to serve job seekers on a recurring basis. To make the most of this opportunity, they will need to first assess how good they are at keeping users engaged. Measuring metrics like the number of repeat customers visitors and the ratio of repeat users to new ones can help you to know how well your job board does at retaining customers.
By assessing how good your job board is at retaining customers, you can devise measures to further improve it. In addition to always having a collection of job postings that are valid and of the highest quality, providing additional value to your users can help you engage and retain users. For instance, offering tools like resume builders and blogs on topics like career and interviewing can keep your users coming back to your job board.
Additionally, measuring the average time and cost per hire are also effective indicators of job board performance. Such metrics can also help your clients, the employers, to have a clearer assessment of their recruitment strategies, giving them more value from your partnership. However, be it for you as a job board owner or an employer, measuring performance is only the beginning of the perpetual, reiterative process of improvement. The next step is comparing your current job board performance, with respect to all the aforementioned performance indicators, with your desired outcome. And the final yet most significant part of the process is active. By devising process improvement plans based on the data you’ve gathered and, more importantly, implementing those plans, you can ensure that your job board always remains competitive.
