This past week, Google purchased Web analytics firm Urchin.
Through its current AdWords service, Google already does an adequate job of tracking users’ pay-per-click campaigns. However, buying Urchin could enable Google to take their PPC analytics to a whole new level.
Plus, this move puts Yahoo’s PPC tracking solution on the defensive.
That said, how will this help an employer’s Internet recruiting strategy? In short, it could be a great tool to help track career center traffic and, in turn, the cost-per-resume / cost-per-hire.
I’ve never met an employer who knew how many visitors their corporate career center received on any regularity. In turn, most have no idea what they’re paying for a resume or a new hire.
It’s not so much that they don’t care as much as it is they don’t understand tracking, don’t have the right tools or don’t feel comfortable going to IT. And, let’s face it, few high-priced applicant tracking solutions (ATS) help all that much either.
Being able to track recruiting activity via Google in a way that’s easy, and aside from the corporate tech department, could help change that, and make HR more efficient in the process.
April 1st, 2005 at 9:28 pm
Joel:
Great post, isn’t it amazing how bad a job the expensive HR and applicant tracking systems do reporting back to their clients? It seems that they often put the tools in place but then pass the responsibility on to the customer to do the reporting, which in big corporations, just does not happen.
And to the Urchin purchase, having their reporting built into Google would truly be the next level of PPC reporting. Keep up the great analysis.
April 8th, 2005 at 4:05 pm
Your comments i.e. tracking Career site data is quite timely for me. We have been discussing this topic quite a bit in prepration for a Careers site redesign. We know the numbers in terms of visitors to my current client’s Career site but alot of the important data is lost due to firewall isseus (referring sites data) and the hand-off from the corporate careers site into the ATS systems providers site. The ATS/HMS providers should provide dashboards to their cutomers that show application abandonment rates etc. so they continuosly improve the application process. There are alot of assumptions made regarding best practices of online application processes but this would be best delivered to customers through evaluation of web statistics.