Source of Hire vs. Source of Influence

The still used “Source of Hire” seeks to prove what percentage of your overall hires entered your pipeline from each recruiting channel or source such as:

• Job Boards
• Referrals
• Direct Sourcing
• Cold Calls
• Career Fairs
• Networking events
• Partnering with Niche organizations
• University Recruiting etc…

At a minimum tracking the source of a hire helped me in the past consider two things:

1.      Where to direct more resources and dollars to the most valuable channels

2.      Drop dollars or adjust consistently lagging sources.

Here’s the thing though. If you stop and take the last candidate you hired and look at where he/she came from (for example; see the above list) this simply tells you one fact: Where you hired them from. It’s not so much source of hire as much as it is “Source of APPLY”. At the end of the day this metric tells you the last place a candidate stopped in their candidate journey.

Two Problems with “Source of Hire/Apply”:

• Source of Hire can be biased – “Bias” I realize is a hot topic buzz word these days but what I’m saying is this…Say you’ve hired a handful of quality hires from say Monster.com or a particular University. There’s a chance you’re going to always go back to that same fishing hole because you found 3-5 good hires from that one place that awesome for a hot second. This of course doesn’t mean it’s always going to be Gold. You could very well be missing out on quality candidates in other pools. As I’ve mentioned before there’s a minimum of 8 talent pools. Another example could be relying to heavily on referrals from one or two people jeopordizing your company's culture.
• Source of Hire may not always justify the dropping resources. For example your sourcing may result in a lower percentage of hires, but these specific hires may be the best quality or if it's a sales or marketing role the highest revenue-generating candidates who are well worth the investment.

Source of Influence:

Candidates treat the job search more like a shopping opportunity. They look for the right deal and in this case it’s a career which is a big decision. Decision's take time especially decisions that involve emotion and possibly other people (ever heard a candidate after receiving their offer say..."Let me talk this over with my family" ?). This means there are more and more touchpoints that are going to absolutely influence their decision of where to click and apply.

It’s no longer about posting a job, receiving resumes and the tracking who applies from where. It’s about a lot of other things:

• Creating content on social media
• Blogging
• Hosting a recruiting event
• Maintaining positive online reviews
• Building a talent network
• Awards & Rankings in your industry
• Brand Perception
• Messaging
• How many unique people from within you organization are creating content and talking about your brand?
• Video
• Creating a podcast or creating a company amazon alexa skill to give your employment brand a voice

Job seekers look to an average of 10 to 12 sources (Google). No one simply just goes to a job board, LinkedIN or a referral anymore. They go to those three and about 5 other places along the candidate journey.

You have to go all in on your EVP or Employment Value Proposition. Determine what it is your company does best and focus there and track how and where you’re communicating with that group of people.

Without tracking source of influence, you’ll never know how deep the talent pool goes.