Innovation comes by trying new things and measuring them!

I love the saying “Throw spaghetti against the wall and see what sticks!”  That’s experimentation at it’s finest in trying to solve important problems.  But the real key in this statement that I think gets missed most of the time and is the most important is the “see what sticks” part.  Sure deciding what to throw (i.e. the viable choices) is important but ultimately measuring (or seeing what sticks) is the key to really driving innovation from these types of experiments.

Deciding what to measure and how to measure it is key to making educated and better recruiting decisions and we stress this on a daily basis.  We are consistently asked by clients and prospects questions about their recruitment marketing strategy.  What new job boards should we be using?   How long should our online application be?  What should we include in our job advertisement?

The answer we always give is “it depends”.  While we have a good deal of important collective data that can help answer these questions, all this data is ill-equipped to answer these questions for a single company / scenario.  We’ve seen time and time that collective data is imperfect for these types of questions and that in-house personalized data is the best way to ultimately decide the best way to go with most recruiting questions.

So try out new job boards in your job ad distribution, test out new job ad messaging, shorten your online application, start using social networks for recruiting and experiment with a whole slew of new recruiting initiatives at your company to foster innovation within your recruiting organization.  But don’t do it blind, set up a process to collect key recruitment metrics for each of these new initiatives to prove if these experiments are true innovations or rotten ideas!