Recruiting is soooo far behind marketing

Is anyone in recruiting measuring intent?

If you knew which candidates showed the most interest behind the scenes: Would it matter?

Would it change how you ranked them?

Or alert you that you dropped the ball with the ones who didn’t?

When it comes to measuring intent, marketing runs laps around recruiting. I’m not sure recruitment even started the race.

The technology exists to know exactly which candidates were re-reading your job descriptions. Reviewing your benefits. Looking up your team’s profile. Scoured your job seeker FAQ. (If you haven’t created that last one yet, c’mon now…)

For marketers, these are the basics. They know exactly who’s coming to their site. Who clicked what link in their newsletter. Who left what in their shopping cart.

Look at which companies follow you around social media pumping out ads of the products you just looked at.

👉I’m not talking about clicks (which are arguably vanity metrics.) I also mean time.

What if you knew exactly which software developers watched a 10 minute interview with your CTO? Or which account executives spent 20 minutes reviewing your team’s profiles and job seeker FAQ?

Would having an idea of who’s more interested change your decision process in offer time?

Would knowing who isn’t reviewing anything at all be helpful in knowing where you haven’t done your job?

Would it help you gauge which recruiting enablement assets (read: follow up items) resonate vs fall flat?

My answers to those last 3 questions: I don’t know, yes, and hell yeah it would.

I don’t know anyone actually doing this. I yet don’t know how useful measuring intent would be, or if it’s even possible.

But I do have a pretty good idea that knowing where you’re falling flat – either with a specific candidate or with your follow up items – would be invaluable.

The real question is: why isn’t recruitment doing this?

(Hit me up if you are, I’m dying to know how this plays out in the real world.)

Full episode of The Employer Content Show, ep 27, “What The Hell Is Recruiting Enablement?” with Nate Guggia, here.

James Hornick

Partner at Hirewell. #3 Ranked Sarcastic Commenter on LinkedIn.