guide to being a source of influence, employer branding

THE GUIDE TO

SOURCE OF INFLUENCE:WHAT, WHY, AND HOW

2 THE GUIDE TO SOURCE OF INFLUENCE: WHAT, WHY, AND HOW

In this quick guide, you’ll learn:

The age of employer branding means that companies need to think of candidates as consumers.

The process of recruitment marketing begins with finding and attracting candidates to your brand,

engaging them with information as they consider your company as an employer, and nurturing

them to apply when an appropriate position arises.

Today’s job search process is rarely so straightforward as a candidate deciding to look for a job,

screening ads, sending in a resume, interviewing, and finally getting hired. The candidate journey

is much less linear, crossing the online and offline environments, with multiple touchpoints along

the way, including your website, career sites, news sites, blogs, social media, events, reviews,

and one-on-one interactions.

Source of hire is one of the most commonly used recruiting metrics, tracking the last source

a candidate used before he or she applies. Source of hire is useful to understand where candidates

apply, but it’s not the whole picture! And in today’s world of social media, employer branding and

digital marketing, employers need to understand the effect of all their recruitment marketing efforts

to gauge their return on investment.

Source of influence is a more than a metric; it’s a way of understanding the candidate

journey from attraction to application and tracking the effectiveness of each recruiting channel

your company uses. This quick guide will guide you in defining source of influence, why it matters to

your company, and how to monitor and track it in order to optimize your recruitment marketing strategy.

What source of influence is

Why it matters to your organization

How to track and use it to inform your recruiting strategy

INTRODUCTION

http://www.smashfly.com/what-is-recruitment-marketing/


Your applicant tracking system (ATS) likely has a mechanism to track the last source a candidate

used before applying to an opening at your company: source of hire, or source of apply. This metric

is often used as the sole indicator for recruiting budget decisions, but it’s only one touchpoint in the

candidate’s multi-touch journey to applying to your organization.

Source of influence tracks every touchpoint in the candidate journey, from first point of

attraction all the way through hire, in order to understand how specific personas find and interact

with your organization before they apply. Source of influence shows you the entire candidate journey

and informs your recruitment marketing strategy where to invest resources and dollars to attract

more quality candidates.

Recruitment marketing is the

top half of the funnel; recruiting is

the bottom half. Source of influence

touchpoints can happen in any order,

and on any path, from Awareness through

Application. Post-application, there are other

sources of influence that continue to build

advocacy and interest to accept an offer.

Source: 1Glassdoor U.S. Site Survey, October 2014; 2 SmashFly, 2015

WHAT IS SOURCE OF INFLUENCE?

Awareness

ConsiderationRecruitment Marketing

Recruiting

Interest

Application

Select

Hire

THE CANDIDATE JOURNEY


Once you compile data on source of influence

and analyze it as a whole, you can create

a complete picture of the candidate journey

from initial awareness to the application stage.

This process gleans insights that can be used

to further enhance your recruitment marketing

strategies.

Content marketing (including blogs)

Employee stories

Employer brand videos

Newsletter

Press outreach

Profile pages on employment sites

Career sites

Talent networks

Referrals

Reviews

Social media outreach

SEO and PPC

Retargeting

Email lead nurturing

Job boards

4 THE QUICK GUIDE TO SOURCE OF INFLUENCE: WHAT, WHY, AND HOW

Sources of influence include each element of your recruitment marketing program such as:

WHAT IS SOURCE OF INFLUENCE?


WHY SOURCE OF INFLUENCE MATTERS

Candidates act more and more like consumers in their search—

and research—for a career, which means there are more and more touchpoints

that influence their decision of where to apply and where to accept an offer.

If you don’t understand source of influence, you can’t understand the candidate journey! Here’s why…


Before making a decision to apply, job seekers use on average

18 sources and look at 7-8 reviews


Recruitment marketing and source of influence go hand-in-hand.1

2 The candidate journey starts long before they apply.

Organizations are shifting to a proactive recruitment marketing strategy that helps them find,

attract, engage, and nurture candidate leads across the myriad channels they use on a daily basis.

It’s not enough to post a job and track who applies; it’s essential to post on social media, host

recruiting events, maintain Glassdoor reviews, build a talent network, use PPC, create a personalized

career site experience and more to see which efforts attract which target candidates and influence

them to convert. Without tracking source of influence, you’ll never know where you really

reach candidates or how to optimize your strategy for what works best.

There is no single source of hire, only single source of apply, which is the last source

a candidate touched before apply (important, yes, but not the whole story!). The candidate journey

starts at attraction, and all the subsequent touchpoints influence candidates in different ways

to take—or not take—different actions.

With so many touchpoints throughout the candidate journey, you can’t rely on a single source of

hire to determine where your budget and resources should be spent.

Sources: 1 Inavero, 2015

1



Certain channels are meant to influence and nurture, not convert. 3

4 Source of influence tracking reveals candidate motivations and behaviors.

It makes sense that source of application comes mainly from a job board or career site job search—

but what attracted and influenced quality candidates to get there? Think about how your recruiting

events allow candidate leads to talk directly with hiring managers, or how social media might

encourage leads to ask a question, or how content marketing and SEO drives leads to your targeted

landing pages. These efforts might not have a link to apply, but they do influence a candidate to

consider applying. Tracking source of influence will allow your team to maximize the time

and money spent on those key efforts because you can prove they attract quality leads and result

in great hires.

Many talent acquisition teams are still missing the key necessity to improving the candidate

experience: understanding (not guessing) what drives the best candidates to apply for their jobs.

Source of influence data eliminates the guesswork and instead proves the candidate

journey. Even further, it gives insight into specific candidate journeys and helps to create targeted

candidate personas. What channels influenced engineers? Veterans? Hard-to-fill? High-volume?

By tracking every source of influence from first touchpoint all the way to hire, you can drive a better

candidate experience for specific personas and duplicate success for future campaigns.

Source of influence data brightens the black hole of what happens before a candidate clicks apply. Now that you know you need it— how do you actually track it?


HOW TO TRACK SOURCE OFINFLUENCE: THE TECHNOLOGY FACTOR

In a perfect world, your talent acquisition team would make a hire and be able to

see all the touchpoints that drove that candidate lead to your organization.

Think of all of that insight! This is what marketing automation technology enables

marketers to see: how their leads funnel into prospects and customers.

Technology can enable that type of insight for recruiters too.

The most accurate way to track source of influence is with technology purpose-built for candidate engagement and recruitment marketing (not your ATS!).


OLD VS. NEW

THE OLD WAY OF TRACKING SOURCE OF INFLUENCE

THE NEW WAY OF TRACKING SOURCE OF INFLUENCE

Relying on candidate self-selection (eek!)

or source code passing in the ATS. Both leave

your organization with a limited view into your

recruiting strategy when you need the entire

picture to make effective decisions and

allocate spend.

Relying on candidate self-selection: How often

have you accurately marked (or remembered): “How

have you heard about us?” Exactly. There is too much

potential for human error or subjectivity to rely on

self-selection in reporting.

Using source codes: Leveraging recruitment

marketing technology will ensure that accurate source

codes for each applicant are passed into your ATS,

but that data is still only part of the picture—the last

source of application, not the entire candidate journey!

Using technology, like a Recruitment

Marketing Platform, to track each

candidate’s journey from what content they

viewed to what job boards they visited to

every interaction they had with you on

LinkedIn or Twitter or Facebook to what links

they clicked in your emails to every other

engagement that influenced their decision

to apply, all in one dashboard.

Using Recruitment Marketing Platforms: You can

understand what’s working and not working in your

recruiting process while also piecing together how the

best candidates interact with your employer brand.

Complete integration with the ATS: You can see

all the sources of influence plus final source of apply

for an end-to-end view of the recruiting funnel.

vs.

What Source of Influence metrics look like:

How many visitors come to your career site, from which social networks or job boards, on a mobile device or desktop, and what content they engage with before applying?

How your latest college recruiting campaign performed in terms of email opens and click-throughs, how many of them joined your talent network, and how many converted into applicants from your pipelines?

How many sources a candidate interacts with before they apply?

http://www.smashfly.com/why-recruitment-marketing/

http://www.smashfly.com/why-recruitment-marketing/


USING SOURCE OF INFLUENCE DATATO INFORM YOUR STRATEGY

The first thing you learn from tracking source of influence is what channels, tactics, and strategies are

influencing candidates to apply. But in order to get the biggest value for your organization, you need

to understand where your best hires come from and where your quality candidates come from.

The aggregate of quality candidates and hires is beneficial, but with the right technology, you can also

dive deeper to slice the data by job category and candidate populations.

Identify your quality candidates based on your own criteria (specific statuses in your ATS hiring process), as well as your new top hires and look at the results for all past jobs.

Figure out:

• What was their first point of attraction?

• How many sources of influence did they touch before they applied?

• How long did it take them to eventually apply?

• Were they part of your talent network?

Pick a specific job family that your recruiters are prioritizing, like engineering or high-volume roles.

• How many qualified candidates are coming in through which source?

• How do engineering candidates differ in their touchpoints than finance candidates?

• How did specific email messaging drive conversion?

This information will help you spend more in effective areas for certain roles versus using the same tactics for every candidate.

ACTION

ACTION


USING SOURCE OF INFLUENCE DATATO INFORM YOUR STRATEGY

While a lot of the value of capturing source of influence lies in retroactive analysis of your

candidates and hires, source of influence can also help you determine fit in real time.

The strongest value of understanding source of influence is in reallocating spend and

shifting tactics throughout the year.

Say your retroactive analysis found that a higher percentage of quality candidates spend more time on your career site and click on more articles in your emails. Within your Recruitment Marketing Platform, you can filter and sort leads in your pipeline that fit this activity criterion. This might help you target certain leads to source when certain reqs open.

Global engineering company CH2M focused on content for veterans on their social media channels. Using SmashFly’s Total Recruitment Marketing Platform, they found it was their least engaging content on social. After trying different types of content and messaging, they realized the effort wasn’t warranted, so they changed their social strategy for military recruiting and allocated more posts to content that was reaching a different audience. The end result was more engagement with potential applicants.

ACTION

ACTION


THE BIG INFLUENCE OFSOURCE OF INFLUENCE

12 THE QUICK GUIDE TO SOURCE OF INFLUENCE: WHAT, WHY, AND HOW

The collective interactions you have with candidates greatly affect who applies and who doesn’t— and influence candidates’ perception of your employer brand. Source of influence data will provide more insight into the candidate journey, helping you identify leads that are more qualified and more interested in your organization, which means more potential quality hires (the biggest win!).

Source of influence tells the entire story of a candidate’s path to your organization—not just the end. Its biggest value is informing your recruitment marketing strategy of the initiatives and campaigns that attract specific types of candidates that ultimately convert into your greatest hires.

Sources: 1Glassdoor Internal Data, June 2015; 2Brandon Hall Group Report: Understanding the Impact of Employer Brand, November 2014

ABOUT SMASHFLYSmashFly provides the first solution to manage your outbound sourcing, inbound recruitment marketing and employer branding all in one purpose-built system that integrates with any ATS. Customers use SmashFly’s Total Recruitment Marketing Platform to unite their previously disconnected recruiting tools into an integrated software platform for Job Distribution, Candidate Relationship Management (CRM), Talent Networks, mobile-responsive and SEO-optimized Career Sites, Employee Referrals, Social Recruiting and Recruiting Analytics. Candidates have choices. We help ensure they choose you by empowering your talent acquisition team with modern recruiting software that’s purpose-built to dramatically improve the front-end of your recruiting process, so you get great hires to fuel your growth.

For more on how a Recruitment Marketing Platform can automate, manage, measure, and optimize your recruiting strategy,

Stay in the recruitment marketing loop by following us on Twitter @SmashFly.

ABOUT GLASSDOORWith millions of company reviews, salary reports, interview reviews and benefits reviews on more than 500,000

1 companies worldwide, Glassdoor is a trusted and transparent place for today’s candidates to

search for jobs and research companies. Glassdoor helps employers across all industries and sizes advertise their jobs and promote their employer brands to a well-researched, highly selective candidate pool. By advertising jobs via mobile devices, email alerts and throughout Glassdoor, employers influence candidates at the moment they’re making decisions. This resultsin better applicant quality at a significantly lower cost-per-hire compared to traditional job boards.

2

To get involved in the conversation on Glassdoor and start managing and promoting your employer brand,

For the latest in recruitment marketing tips, best practices and case studies, follow us on Twitter @GDforEmployers

Sign up for a FREE Employer Account

Check out The Buyer’s Guide to Recruitment Marketing Platforms

Sources: 1Glassdoor Internal Data, January 2016; 2Brandon Hall Group Report: Understanding the Impact of Employer Brand, November 2014

https://twitter.com/SmashFly

https://twitter.com/gdforemployers?lang=en

http://www.glassdoor.com/employers/index.htm?source=mktgasset&utm_source=b2b-fea&utm_medium=asset-b2b&utm_campaign=b2b-fea-mktgasset-fea

http://www.smashfly.com/resources/guide/buyers-guide-to-recruitment-marketing-platforms-2016/

guide to being a source of influence, employer branding

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