I was speaking to a client yesterday about the return of investment of their new site, they were not overly impressed with the level of responses since launch, even though the traffic is good and we have achieved 16 key page 1 rankings in less than 3 months (take a bow
Recruitment SEO team!).
Feedback from the consultants was ‘I’m not getting many responses to my job ads’, and obviously they felt it was underperforming.
Digging a little deeper we soon found that the website was delivering 10 – 20 new CVs each day, but using different conversion methods such as sending their CV directly and registering, so these CVs are not going directly to consultants, but into the searchable CV pool, which explains why they felt it was not delivering for them.
Superb, as 70 – 140 new candidates per week is fantastic, right…
Well no, because the next point raised was that ‘70% of these are not of significant quality to be placed’.
So another negative…or is it?
Let’s be cautious, and say that 20% of candidates generated are of sufficient quality, this means the site is generating between 14 to 28 ‘placeable’ candidates each week.
A placed candidate can make between £5k and £20k in fees, this means the website is supporting at least £70k of possible revenue every week.
In reality the amount will be lower, as these candidates will be competing with job boards and the rest of the candidate database. But by changing the way of thinking we managed to switch perception of an underperforming website into one that is making a significant contribution to the business.
Some key points:
- Don’t expect every candidate that comes through the site to be perfect, ranking on search engines is like advertising and you have to accept the rough with the smooth.
- Assess your site using all conversion channels, not just applications. Websites are more sophisticated than job boards so ‘responses per advert’ does not cut it as a KPI.
- When candidates call ask how they found you and make a note of it and add it to your KPIs. Many people will find you using your online marketing then pick up the phone and these are not tracked though normal sources.
- Keep a tally of all placed candidates, and find out how many of these came through the site. Then you can tell the return on investment in £££.
- Focus on the positives, 20% of candidates being placeable is much more significant than 80% not being suitable.
- Feed the success back to your team, internal PR is important if you want people to believe in what you are doing.
