Strangely I have never written about this topic before, which is dear to the heart of Dan. With a few recent mentions on various blogs, I thought it was about time I put my ten pence worth in.

One of the reasons I have not mentioned this before is because I always assumed we all tracked our candidates, like any professional sales organisation! 

Maybe I was just lucky, as I have been trained to keep records of every candidate since I started in recruitment, and therefore I always knew my cost per candidate. If I remember rightly back then it was around £40, which was a wake up call for consultants who thought candidates were free. These days it’s so much easier to track candidates, as most come by email and have their own digital finger prints.

As a Recruitment Manager keeping records can certainly help your case when it comes to advertising budgets.

Probably the best example I can give is when I persuaded the management to spend £4,000, rather than the £600 we would normally spend. I managed to wing it by getting a client to pay half, which certainly helped.

Back then I would cut out the ad from the paper, stick it into a book and then record all the names of the candidates that applied. Later I was able to confirm that not only did this produce the most candidates, but more importantly they were of a high caliber and therefore we were able to place them more easily. In the end the ad produced the highest amount of placements and revenue of any recruitment advert. Of course the same applies to poorly written adverts too, so over the years you get to know what works and this helps you keep ahead of the competition. These days you can use software to track applicants with the likes of Broadbean (A free ad for you there Dan), which makes it all a tad easier to manage.  

So if you are not doing it already I suggest you start by keeping a copy of each advert you place,the name of each candidate that applies, the media you used, the date and its position and this will result in better written ads, less wasted advertising budgets, your cost per candidate will drop and higher profits, and of course you will be able to get the management to spend another £4,000 in advertising!