How to find out which job boards are most effective for your team

Caro Griffin -

I spend most of my week running the Tech Ladies Job Board, where I help our partners make great hires from our community of +100,000 women in tech. Before we post their job openings, I often ask clients to send over unique tracking links for each role.

These unique tracking links are easily generated by your Application Tracking System (ATS) and allow you to see which applicants are coming from which source.

This data can help us make the most of our recruiting budgets, especially on small, scrappy teams.

Unfortunately, in my experience, only recruiters know about this feature. When I work directly with founders and department heads, they’re often surprised to hear that they can track interest in this way.

When posting a role to a job board, ask potential applicants to apply via the unique link. When they click on it, their source will be captured, sometimes alongside other helpful data.

This in turn helps you figure out:

  • Where your best applicants are coming from.
  • Which channels are best for which roles, e.g. Maybe one job board is better for technical roles, but another is better for biz-side roles and skews more senior. Allocate your $$ accordingly next time!
  • If there’s a significant drop-off between the number of people who click and the number who apply - some drop-off is normal, but a bigger drop might indicate that your application is too long or that something is turning off applicants who were initially interested enough to click through.

If you’re using an ATS to manage your hiring, there’s really no reason not to use these links when sharing your roles externally on Job Boards, in Slack communities and newsletters, etc. They take 30 seconds to generate!

Below are instructions for a few of the most popular tools. (I send these particular links out so much that I now have them saved as keyboard short cuts. 😂)

If you’re using a different ATS, you can probably Google, “create unique tracking links [name of ATS]” to find the relevant wiki article.

And, if you’re not using an ATS at all, you can use a free link shortener like Bit.ly in order to provide much of the same data.

Hope this helps the new hiring managers out there!