Rethinking Recruitment Reporting

Applicant tracking systems (ATS) are widely adopted in higher education recruitment to streamline hiring by automatically screening, sorting, and filtering candidates. While they promise a faster and more effective process, their limitations become clear when evaluating the effectiveness of job boards, a critical component of recruitment in the digital age.

Human resource departments often subscribe to multiple job boards to reach a broader pool of candidates. When applicants apply for a job they select the platform where they found the listing. This provides data for HR teams to track which boards bring in the best and the most candidates; however, this approach is complicated when job boards partner with other job boards and aggregate listings across these multiple platforms.

Applicants who view a post on a secondary job board can only indicate that site as their source, without an option to select the original board. This data gap prevents institutions from fully understanding where their applicants are coming from.

While an ATS can be useful for managing tasks like application sorting and creating databases, they don’t always offer a comprehensive view of recruitment sources.

HR teams can make more informed decisions about which job boards are truly successful by tagging job postings on job boards with a unique identifier, using parameters Job Board Jigsaw Rethinking Recruitment Reporting By Courtney Mullins on a vendor’s website that can be monitored through Google Analytics, creating unique links for each job board they contract with, and asking applicants directly where they found the job listing.

The best hiring practices will combine the benefits of technology with thoughtful human evaluation, ensuring that recruitment remains equitable and mission driven.

By rethinking their job board strategies and refining how data is tracked, colleges can create a more transparent, inclusive, and effective hiring process that aligns with their core mission.