ule No. 1 for those counting on accurate source-of-hire information: Don’t assume
that applicants will remember how they found your company.
Aimee Brizuela, senior vice president of Aon Consulting’s
RPO practice, knows that issue firsthand, and offers an example from consultations
with a client on its applicant tracking system.
The company had hired several new employees and asked where
they learned about the job vacancies to help determine future ad spending. Three
of the new hires said they learned about the job openings through radio advertisements.
Problem was, the company had stopped its radio ads three years before that.
"It was an embarrassing incident that let the company know
there were glitches in its source-of-hire data," Brizuela says.
There are measures that companies can take to protect the
quality of its data, Brizuela says. Employers need to pay particular attention to
online drop-down boxes. Applicants often mistakenly enter information, either because
they forgot where they learned of the job or are careless about supplying the answer.
Companies can get more accurate data by regularly updating
drop-down boxes so they reflect the media where vacancies are being advertised.
An employer that advertises on BusinessWeek’s site and doesn’t add it to the drop-down
box will have a difficult time gauging its effectiveness.
"If you are not diligently updating, then you may as well
not bother collecting the data," Brizuela says. "Companies spend millions of dollars
on ATS platforms with all of the bells and whistles, but they fail to understand
these systems require maintenance to perform their job properly."
The drop-down boxes should be timely, but they should also
be succinct, because job applicants can easily become overwhelmed with exhaustive
lists. Companies can help candidates by limiting the number of responses they can
choose.
If the company is dealing with online applicants from the
Northeast, it should configure its ATS to display only the advertising tools that
are used in their geographic market, such as newspapers.
"Don’t bombard them with menu choices that they never would
have come in contact with, because it makes the process more daunting," Brizuela
says.
There are other measures employers can use to safeguard the
value of their information, says George Ozenne, principal consultant at Mercer Human
Resource Consulting in New York. He believes companies should make a point of using
identification numbers tied to specific advertising campaigns.
When all else fails, Ozenne says, there is also a common-sense
approach: cross-verification. An employer can ask candidates to name the source
of hire at the time of an interview. If their response corresponds with the choice
that they made on the drop-down box, a recruiter can be fairly certain the information
is correct.
Workforce Management, July 23, 2007, p. 40
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