Hedging Your Bets

Freerangerecruiting talks to a lot of people in the industry who have a decided strategy of “live for today” when it comes to the success of their program. When things are good, they’re at their most confident - sure of every move they make, solid in their ability to spot trends and understand the market. When things are bad or challenging, it’s as if they never thought about trends in recruiting or cycles of driver turnover.

If you’ve ever caught yourself bailing water out of a sinking raft, you know the feeling of living for today. Wouldn’t it help if you had packed an onboard patch kit, a spare life jacket, and tools before you left the house? Of course it would.

It’s our nature to ride high in good times. And it can seem negative to always be planning for slow times. But if you’ve been in this business long enough, you know that cycles exist. Planning for them will keep those troughs from turning into valleys. Here are a few questions I’ve asked people to find out how they think:

- If you had to add 200 drivers tomorrow, what three things would you do?
- If your hiring market shifted this afternoon, would you be able to immediately gain traction in those areas?
- When the CEO asks if you’re ready to expand your hiring into different locations, do you feel a burning sensation run down your back?

Most people don’t think about tomorrow. Which is why you can have a leg up on your competition if can do contingency planning. You don’t need a bullet-proof plan. Just thinking throught these types of things is a step in the right direction, and they typically lead to simple action up front that will save your bacon in the future.

Here are a few things we’ve done to plan for the future:
- Database anyone and everything that you can. You never know when you can use it.
- Learn how to segment databases. Having data is one thing. Being able to use it is another.
- Identify a top 3 “hit list” of how to approach new markets. It might include newspaper or search engines or picnics or buying the naming rights to the local stadium (you’d have big bucks if you can do that). Whatever it is, at least this will get your head around the task in advance.

Keep in mind that this forward planning is better done as a generalization. Don’t waste time making contingency plans for every market in America. Do take time to execute broad steps that will hedge your bets on success for the future.

You can celebrate your successes. Just be sure they’re not blinding you to potential changes in your market or your company’s needs. It’s not pessimistic. It’s smart.

Be A Convert

Quick … what’s your conversion rate from calls to applications? Applications to offers? Offers to hires?

Don’t know? You’re not alone … but consider this a warning. You will be alone soon unless you figure it out.

With so many companies looking to drive cost out of their recruitment marketing these days, they often make the mistake of only thinking that it can be accomplished by slicing media. Sure, that’s part of it, but it’s not the whole story.

Think percentages and detail-laden reports if you really want to move the needle. Here are a couple of things that will earn you a rock-star reputation with your boss, and even better – will help you make some real progress in managing or lowering your costs.

Things to know (really know … don’t kid yourself):

> Number of calls in a week/month
> Number of applications from calls in a week/month
> Number of offers made from those applications
> Number of hires made from those offers
> Number of orientation completion from those hires
> All the same stuff, but from the Internet: # of visitors to your site, # apps started, # apps finished, # offers made, # hires, # of drivers completing orientation

Things to calculate:

> Divide each of the following by the bullet point that proceeds it. For example, dividing the number of applications taken from phone calls by the number of phone calls gives you a conversion rate for that particular area. If you have 100 people call and 20 of them complete an application – you guessed it – you have a 20% Call-to-hire conversion rate.

Not rocket science? Knew that already? Of course you did. But I’m going to guess you don’t have those numbers in front of you, or if you’re like some, you’ve imagined what they are, but never really gotten the cold, hard facts.

The reality is that the cold, hard facts and data exist. You can do a gut check and figure them out and give yourself an advantage over your competition and budget, or you can keep fooling yourself. The choice is yours.

If you do embrace this process, your next step will be doing something about it. That we’ll address later. For now, concentrate on benchmarking your conversion rates. You’ll figure out on your own how to improve them.

The Hype – Don’t Believe It

I was at an event recently and a magazine rep who shall remain nameless told a few of us that he had a client getting over 550 calls from his publication per month. I laughed. The person next to me said something resembling “golly” and bought it hook, line and sinker.

Rule number one in marketing … don’t be a sucker. If it sounds too good to be true, well, you know the rest.

Who’s there?

People are visiting the recruitment pages on your corporate website. Right now, probably. They’re wandering around just doing anything they want without asking your permission and without you knowing they’re there.

In doing so, they are leaving trails of activity that they’re begging for you to follow in order to build a better site for them to snoop around on. The problem is, most recruiting departments don’t know a thing about these people and their trails are invisible, because they do not track their websites.

Finding out this information is easy. If it intimidates you, find some young gun in your recruiting department to help you out. What you’ll need is the following:

1) Analytics software. You can go the cheap route and use something like Google Analytics (www.google.com/analytics/) or you can go for broke and use an industry juggernaut like WebTrends (www.webtrends.com).
2) Install said software. You’ll need some technical assistance. Ask anyone you know who has a Dungeons and Dragons figurine on their desk. You’ll also need to be able to access your files on an FTP server. Ask the same person, but this time he’ll have to have some permissions to get to your website, so make sure he/she also happens to work in your IT department.
3) Look. Learn. Look again. There are a lot of stats. Tons of reports and words and phrases that probably don’t mean anything. Don’t be intimidated. You’ll learn and then you can bore lots of people at cocktail parties with this information.

Primarily, focus at first on the number of visitors you’re getting. Pay attention to what days you’re getting the most traffic and whether it’s consistent from week to week. You should also be able to see what content people are viewing. This is your guide to understanding what people think is important. See if what you think is important is what they’re really looking at.

Whatever you do, just get started. Sooner or later you’re going to need to know this. Might as well be sooner. We’ll take it to another level at a later date.