Recruitment Marketing KPIs Every Recruiter Should Know
Whether you are a recruitment agency or in-house team, you’re living in a world of data: candidate registrations, CVs received, time to hire, cost per hire, and more. When it comes to recruitment marketing KPIs, however, too often HR and recruitment leaders rely on metrics that may not be contributing to meaningful ROI – or often, they may not be relying on data at all! Metrics like the number of views a LinkedIn post receives or the number of followers you have may provide affirmation, but they provide little value if they aren’t contributing to meaningful business opportunities.
To help you sort the wheat from the chaff when it comes to recruitment marketing KPIs we’ve compiled a guide to the recruitment marketing metrics that are most useful for recruitment leaders and HR directors and a handy cheat sheet which you can find at the bottom of the page!
#1 Website Metrics
Your website should be at the heart of your all candidate or client acquisition activities. Whether you’re posting content on social media, emailing your database, or advertising your jobs or company, you should be pushing people back to your website where you can engage and nurture your customers, eventually enabling a candidate registration or client inquiry.
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Traffic volume
Knowing your traffic volume is important: if you don’t have enough people feeding into your sales funnel, you won’t have enough sales coming through at the bottom. Naturally you want quality, not just quantity of traffic, but benchmarking the number of visitors to your website and measuring this growth over time will help you determine if your recruitment marketing is working.
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Conversion Rate
Once you know how much traffic your website is receiving it’s important to know what percentage of that traffic converts into a CV, a candidate registration or client request for a call back. You can view which pages are getting the most traffic and track the flow of visitors through your site which can help you make strategic decisions about how to engage and drive visitors through the sales funnel to enable a conversion. If you’re getting a high number landing on a single page and leaving the site without interacting, it’s a signal that you need to use calls to action to drive your visitors to convert.
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Source
Just as you want to know how much traffic is coming to your site, you also need to know where it is coming from. Sources include traffic channels (organic search, paid search, social, direct etc); medium (the traffic source and medium from which the traffic originated, i.e. indeed/cpc, or google/organic); or referral traffic (the actual website that referred the traffic). This helps you see where your best sources of traffic and better yet, the best sources of customer conversions! You can then target your efforts, budget and time to those channels and mediums delivering the best return.
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Number of Returning Visitors
Are people coming back to your website? How much of your traffic is coming from new or revisiting contacts is important. A high percentage of returning visitors may mean that your platform is successful in engaging visitors, due to relevant content, job listings, or their ongoing interest in your services. On the other hand, an increase in new visitors might indicate a successful outreach campaign or enhanced visibility. However they reach you, if your visitors aren’t converting it might mean you need to work harder at creating those conversions.
#2 Email MetricsÂ
Email campaigns can be a great way to keep your CRM database clean, contacts warm and convert those leads into sales. However, it’s important not to let your emails devolve into being generic, poorly thought-out newsletters. These recruitment marketing KPIs will help you discover how successful your email campaigns are in engaging clients and candidates.Â
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Click Through Rate
This measures the percentage of email recipients who clicked on one or more links contained within an email campaign and is a crucial metric. CTR directly reflects the engagement and interest level of your audience. A high CTR indicates that your email content, calls-to-action, and overall messaging are resonating with subscribers, helping you understand what content is most appealing and effective.
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Click to Open Rate
This is the ratio of unique clicks to unique opens, providing insights into the effectiveness of your email content for those who opened it. Your CTOR helps you understand how engaging the content is to the audience that views it. A high CTOR suggests that your email was relevant and compelling to the recipients, guiding you in crafting more captivating and targeted messages for improved email performance.
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Bounce Rate
This is the percentage of emails that were not successfully delivered to recipients’ inboxes. There are two types of bounces: “soft” bounces, which are usually temporary issues like a full inbox, and “hard” bounces, indicating a permanent delivery failure, often due to an invalid email address. Monitoring the Bounce Rate is crucial for maintaining a healthy email list and sender reputation. A high bounce rate may negatively impact deliverability, so regular list cleaning and addressing bounce issues promptly are vital for effective email marketing campaigns.
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Number of Unsubscribes
The number of people who have opted out or unsubscribed from your email list after receiving a campaign. While it may be disheartening to see subscribers leaving, tracking unsubscribes is vital for maintaining list quality and respecting users’ preferences. It also serves as a valuable feedback mechanism, helping you evaluate the relevance and frequency of your email content.Â
#3 Social Media Metrics
Many businesses make the mistake of treating social media as a vanity project, becoming more concerned with going viral than how their content drives ROI. While brand awareness and reputation activities are important, if you’re not acquiring more business as a result, then they aren’t delivering overall value. These recruitment marketing KPIs will help you learn how and why your social media content is engaging audiences and how your social engagement strategy can help you grow.Â
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Engagement Rate
To show you the level of interaction and involvement your content receives, the engagement rate includes views and impressions as well as likes, comments, shares, and clicks on your posts. A high engagement rate means that your content is resonating with your audience. By monitoring this metric, you can see if your content strategy is working, identify popular themes, and strengthen your social media presence by creating more of what your audience finds valuable and engaging.
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Audience Growth Rate
A growing audience not only expands the potential reach of your messages but also offers the opportunity to convert more followers into customers. Measuring the percentage increase in your social media followers over a specific period. Steady and positive growth indicates a healthy and expanding social media presence.
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Click Through Rate
If you are posting on social media, you’ll be familiar with metrics providing you the number of views or impressions. But, as we said above, your content should always be driving back to your website. This is why it’s essential to be posting website links in your social media posts. You want these customers to come to you, not a third-party site. Click Through Rates will also help you quickly see what content is getting the most engagement and ROI so you can develop similar content.Â
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Time and Day
There is an urban legend that recruitment engagement goes up on the weekend as people apply for jobs that often creates chaos as recruiters scramble to post jobs on Friday afternoons. But the truth is that the most common time for people to search for, and apply to, jobs is in fact… midday on Tuesdays! The point is that you should be looking at your engagement data to tell you when the best time is to be posting content, specific to your network. Your target audiences, occupation, level of seniority and even geography, will change when people are most likely to be online and engaging with you. As LinkedIn posts typically have a shelf life of 48 hours, data that’s specific to your target audiences will help you ensure that your content is seen.
#4 Conversion or Goal MetricsÂ
Goals are the holy grail of recruitment marketing analytics. They are specific to your company and what you consider a ‘goal’ for your website. Typically, a candidate CV, candidate registration or client request for call-back – but these can and will vary. If your marketing isn’t driving tangible outcomes in the form of ‘customer’ acquisitions or candidate applications, then why are you doing it? Goal oriented recruitment marketing KPIs allow you to reflect upon and measure the outcomes of your marketing activities, but also analyse these results and use them for strategic decision-making for future campaigns. What’s working, what’s not? What’s yielding the best candidates for the lowest cost and where should you focus your efforts and budget?
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Leads Generated
Measuring the number of potential candidates or clients who have expressed interest in your services and job opportunities and have taken a specific action, such as signing up for newsletters, attending webinars, or downloading resources quantifies the effectiveness of your recruitment marketing efforts.Â
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Number of Applications
This KPI directly reflects the interest and engagement level of candidates with your job openings and employer brand. Tracking this metric is essential for evaluating the reach and appeal of your job listings, allowing you to optimise your strategies to attract a larger pool of qualified applicants and make data-driven decisions that improves candidate lead generation.
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Lead Conversion Rate
This is the percentage of leads who successfully transition from expressing initial interest to becoming a client or succeed in getting a job. A higher conversion rate indicates that your recruitment marketing strategies are successful in not only generating interest but also persuading potential clients and candidates to take the next step.
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Cost per Conversion
Next, you’ll need to know how much those conversions costs you and the efficiency of your marketing spend in generating business. Monitoring this metric is crucial for optimising budget allocation and ensuring that marketing resources are being used effectively. A lower cost per conversion indicates that your recruitment marketing efforts are efficient, generating a higher ROI. Â
Implementing Recruitment Marketing KPIs Â
We’ve also got some key tips on how to implement recruitment marketing KPIs to make sure they work for you and keep your recruitment marketing efforts delivering: Â
- Choose the right recruitment marketing KPIs for your goals
- Use accurate and consistent sources 
- Use your analytics together with your industry knowledgeÂ
- Learn from your analytics! Â
Ready to better inform your decision making? Download our guide to gain further insight.Â
Recruitment marketing KPIs should constitute a key component of your marketing strategy as after all, you can’t prove if something is working if you don’t have the metrics to back it up! Â
Interested in learning more about recruitment marketing KPIs and how you can use them to elevate your strategy? Check out our blog Navigating Recruitment Marketing Metrics.Â
If you’re looking to leverage recruitment marketing KPIs to improve your marketing and don’t know where to start, Thrive provides a free marketing recruitment ROI consultation and review. Â
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