If there's one ATS that does a nice job reporting trends, it's Jobvite. 

Every year they release a Recruiting Benchmark Report offering a unique combination of data and guidance: summary and analysis of industry benchmark data, along with strategic advice to help you measure, improve and optimize every step of the recruiting funnel.

They've got the data - the report is based on quantitative and qualitative analysis of 2017 data from Jobvite’s massive database of more than 55 million job seekers and 17 million applications and includes year-over-year benchmark data by company size, by revenue, by source of applicants and hires, and by industry. The report is objective, it’s free, and it’s your guide on how to improve your recruiting process.

Go download the Jobvite 2018 Recruiting Benchmark Report by clicking here!!!!

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The greatest lie the devil ever told the world was that you could get accurate Source of Hire info.

Let's start with what Source of Hire info is - Source of Hire, when done correctly, is data that tells you where a hired candidate first found out about your open position - the source of that lead, if you will.  Once you have accurate Source of Hire data, you've got the world in your hands, because you can add the cost of each channels and suddenly, you have cost per applicant, cost per interview and cost per hire by source.  

The holy grail.  I spent $21,000 on Indeed, and here's what I got for it.

That's great, right?  Too bad it's elusive as hell.  Getting source of hire right is like herding cats.  It assumes that you've got the technology down cold and you have a digital token on all your recruiting sources to the point where the data is 98% reliable.  For the sources you don't pay for, it assumes that candidates are good about telling you where they first heard about the role.

The technology described above doesn't exists for most of us, and candidates suck at accurately telling you where they heard about the opportunity.

This stuff is so hard that one of the titans of the industry - Gerry Crispin - stopped doing his annual Source of Hire report because he was tired of heading cats and had reservations about the consistency of the data across the large employers who participated in his survey.

Good news - Jobvite is looking at all the activity across their ATS solution and publishing their own Source of Hire data.  While this data likely suffers from the same limitations I describe above, it represents one of the cleanest looks at source of hire you'll find in our industry today - across 200,000+ hires.

Take a look at the chart below and click on it to blow it up (email subscribers may have to click the title of this post to see the chart).

Looking at the 2017 data, most applicants still come from Job Boards and Career Sites (which account for almost 90% of all applicants), followed by Referrals and Agency (job placement agencies.) However, looking only at the absolute numbers can be misleading if you are trying to find the most effective source.

The sources that deliver the highest percentage of applicants don’t necessarily translate to the highest percentage of hires. After all, it’s not about the quantity of candidates, but the quality of hires.  While most applicants still come from Job Boards (51.20%) and Career Sites (36.37%), the percentage of hires from these sources is much lower: 19.75% for Job Boards and 30.39% for Career Sites. Referral and "Entered by Recruiters" account for 27%—nearly 8 percentage points more than Job Boards.

The most efficient source of hires are Custom Campaign, Social Media Shares and Internal Hire. Compared to 2016, hires resulting from Referrals decreased slightly—with the power of custom, targeted campaigns and social efforts to build talent pools, referrals are no longer the number one source for finding high quality candidates.

Go dig around in the data and make sure to download the report at the top of this post.

The data in this report isn't perfect, but I applaud the effort -go check it out now!  Download here!