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Once candidates have been selected from the resume database, there are two other key factors to monitor:

• Candidate Conversion Rate (CCR) (Rate at which candidates are selected for interviews)
• Interviewee Conversion Rate (ICR) (Rate at which interviewees are selected as hires)

These two data points are best understood as measures of website database quality rather than indicators of the entire recruiting process. Although the employment website is the first place that people encounter the company, there will always be other routes into the hiring process. Being able to judge the relative quality of candidates in each flow allows you to optimize your investments.

Tying quality, all the way through the hiring process, to the website is critical. It is the only way that you can effectively control the allocation of advertising dollars (or, as we'd prefer, traffic acquisition dollars). Traffic purchased through advertising is what differentiates one level of quality from another. While your website can be a very effective filter, it's useless if you are not managing the flow of traffic to it.

Establishing a set of conversion rate measures is easy. But, you'll have to acquire the web logs from the organization that actually manages the physical computer that hosts the website. Once you have the "logs", there are a variety of analytical tools that you can use to convert the raw data into the statistics. The actual tool depends on the software used to host the site.

John Sumser