Virtual Recruiting Event Success: Measuring Engagement

As talent acquisition teams shifted hiring activities online in response to COVID-19, virtual recruiting events quickly became a main source of candidates. Today, organizations are using tools designed specifically for virtual recruiting to host everything from internal mobility events to information sessions focused on internship and early-career needs.

While getting an events strategy up and running following established best practices—especially given the range of event formats being used to attract, nurture and engage talent—is a top priority, it’s just as important to make sure your team has a clear plan in place to measure virtual recruiting event success. If you’re not sure where to begin, a good place to start is event engagement.

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When measuring the effectiveness of an event experience, you want to go beyond engagement during the event itself and cover every aspect of the event experience. After all, virtual recruiting event touchpoints include email outreach, event landing pages, registration forms and post-event communications, so breaking your metrics out into touchpoint metrics and day-of engagement metrics results in a more meaningful understanding of engagement across the candidate journey.

Touchpoint Metrics

As detailed below, most of your touchpoint metrics will reflect the activity that is generated by your pre- and post-event communications.

• Email Open Rate: Tracks the % of recipients who open emails for all communications, from initial invitations to reminder emails and post-event outreach. You can use the results to evaluate messaging effectiveness and determine when—and where—improvements are needed.
• Email Click Rate: This measures the % of recipients who click-through an email to complete the desired activity, whether they are asked to learn more about an upcoming event or to complete a pre-screening questionnaire as a step in the registration process.
• Landing Page Views: Since nearly all virtual recruiting events will involve landing pages in order to convey event information and manage registration, make sure to track the total number of views that these pages generate, as well as the source of those views when using more than one channel to promote the event.
• Registration Conversion Rate: This measurement captures the % of potential attendees who visit the landing page and then complete the event registration form. Note that this rate can also be calculated for the % of candidates who were invited to register—a rate that will likely be much smaller but tracking this can help teams begin to estimate how many target candidates, on average, need to be invited to an event in order to realize attendance goals.

Day-of Engagement Metrics

In addition to touchpoint metrics, you’ll want to keep track of key performance indicators for the event itself. Since most enterprise organizations are using various types of virtual recruiting event formats, there’s an opportunity to tailor the metrics to each unique event format. So, start with the baseline metrics below and then build out from there with metrics that make sense for specific events.

• Attendance Rate: This tracks the % of registered attendees who show up on event day or, if your event doesn’t require registration, the % of people invited who attend.
• Event Retention Rate: Gaining insight into the % of attendees who stay for the entire event allows recruiters to assess how effective the event was in retaining the attention of attendees throughout its duration.
• Primary Drop-off Points: One of the most revealing aspects of engagement is when people lose interest and drop off. While it’s not necessary to obsess over every single drop-off point, the ability to identify common points during which attendees leave the event will uncover opportunities to improve the format, content or both.
• Attendee Interaction Rate: What % of attendees asks questions of moderators during the experience? What % answers an in-event poll or submits a comment via the chat functionality? Assessing how often attendees interact during your event leads to a better understanding of how effective it is in engaging attendees and sets the stage for successful hiring outcomes.

Of course, talent acquisition can always develop a brief survey to gather feedback on how attendees perceive the event as another means of evaluating engagement. Ideally, attendees will be prompted to provide their feedback as soon as they leave the event, although, if this isn’t possible with the tools that are currently in place, send a request for feedback as part of the event follow-up communications.

Want insights into essential virtual recruiting event metrics for candidate quality and hiring process efficiency? Download our GR8 Guide to Measuring Virtual Recruiting Success and get all the details you need in one spot.