On September 30th, recruiting and talent leaders gathered at Milk Studios in NYC for a day of learning and insights at Greenhouse's Open Roadshow. We were on hand to share details about our integration with Greenhouse and hear the top-notch lineup of speakers discuss the challenges and opportunities in today's talent landscape. 

 
One of the day's key themes was measuring and proving the results of recruitment marketing efforts and people initiatives. Here are three key takeaways from the speaker sessions that people teams should have in mind when defining performance objectives and measuring success, along with some of our favorite quotes from the day.

On the “Meet the New People Team” panel, our very own Conrad Rushing explained why events are the secret sauce in recruiting - not only do they give you a chance to measure creativity and passion in a candidate, they force your hiring managers to behave and speak like leaders.

The creation of excellent corporate experiences and spaces, right down to badass interior design, can make the difference in helping convince top talent to work for you over the competition. Don't believe it? Ask Conrad why he came to work for Splash!

Companies often replicate the people practices that they see others doing without thinking through how to measure the ROI. “Google gives free lunches, so we should too” isn’t a winning formula for justifying such an investment.

To gain support and investment for people initiatives, recruiting and talent teams should instead focus on articulating a story around the expected return in terms of Employee Lifetime Value (ELTV). But rather than try to calculate ELTV for every employee, which is nearly impossible, they should compare the relative difference in ELTV between two subsets of the employee base (those who took part in a particular initiative vs. those who didn’t). This approach keeps things simple, while also providing a meaningful way to assess ROI.

Recruiting has more sources of data than ever before, but spending too much time analyzing the wrong data can lead to false conclusions and inefficient use of resources. Recruiting teams should instead stay focused on a handful of mutually agreed upon measurements that provide a true indication of performance.

“We look for horsepower, passion and openness.” - Christina Kane, Director of Talent Acquisition, Betterment, discussed how replacing their standard cultural interview with questions that anchored back to “hiring fit” competencies got everyone involved with the hiring process more closely aligned.

“Spreadsheets make people miss their referral bonus payouts.” - Shannon Zwicker, Recruiting Systems Specialist at Yext, discussing the power of custom Greenhouse fields.

“We didn’t realize how much time we were spending on the requisition until we pulled the funnel data from Greenhouse.” - Malak Moon, Head of Talent at Checkr, explaining how Greenhouse helped their team get more efficient.

“We could only do it if we knew it would contribute to measurable candidate pipeline.” - Kenyon Cory, Director of People, Squarespace, on how they use Greenhouse’s database to collect and understand data they collect from the thousands of students they interact with at campus recruiting events.

“The hot sauce was too hot!”- Mike Werch, Marketing Manager at Splash, offering a theory for what caused the event’s extended post-lunch break.

As the lines between recruiting and marketing continue to blur, people teams face the increasing challenge of building and nurturing relevant pipelines of talent. Success requires a robust suite of integrated tools, rich candidate profiles, proactive approaches to engagement and measurable results.

To learn more about how Splash can help you build and engage your talent pipeline, drop us a line here.