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The alpha and omega of your recruitment marketing activities is measurement. With measurement comes the ability to plan. With planning comes the ability to use measurement to refine the plan. Marketing is not flash and glamour; it is measurement and improvement. Branding is not messaging and a media plan; it is research, targeting, measurement and improvement. It is the desire to understand the conversation that is a brand. 

Without measurement, there is no understanding. Accepting that marketing is a learnable science is the only real transformation that is required. Marketing is, indeed, a learnable science.

Measurement, as we have been saying, gets more precise the more that you measure. Your first endeavors will look silly in hindsight. Clumsiness is a sign of learning. Repetition converts clumsiness into graceful effectiveness. Effectiveness creates an environment where more learning is expected as a component of performance.

The race is always won by the organization that learns the most the quickest. Fast learning follows from good questions. Good questions arise rapidly from measurement processes. The transformation required from HR in general and Human Capital acquisition processes in specific involves putting oneself under the microscope and measuring real effectiveness. 

It all starts there. Always.

Measurement means public accountability. The reason that outsourcing is taking off as a trend is that the rest of the organization is tired of waiting for HR to start really measuring and improving itself. Ironically, HR, which is usually the champion of ideas like "the learning organization", is the last remaining isolated silo that refuses to hold itself accountable in public. It's the last bastion of the non-learning organization.

- John Sumser