Source of Hire

Recruitment teams spend money and time across several channels, and knowing which ones bring successful applicants helps plan the next campaign. Define a hire as people who actually started, or another explicitly named milestone, since offers accepted but later withdrawn answer a different question.

Define a source with clear categories for a referral, careers page, agency, event or job board, because too many overlapping labels weaken comparison. Choose attribution: first-touch credits the first known source, last-touch credits the final application route, and multi-touch methods split credit.

A person may see a social post, talk with an employee and apply through the website, and calling this merely a website hire hides earlier influence. Record the rule, because teams must use the same attribution method over time if they want a trend to mean anything.

Track unknown sources by showing a blank field as missing information, not silently assigning it to the website. Use candidate self-report carefully, since asking where someone heard about a role can help but recall and multiple exposures can make one answer incomplete, and tagged application URLs can identify a digital route though they may not capture offline discussions or cross-device journeys.

Check agencies and referrals as well, because contract and policy definitions can affect credit and fees and an automated source field does not settle a commercial dispute. Calculate share: if referrals account for 24 of 60 hires under a defined attribution rule, referral source share is 40%.

Report counts too, since 40% of five hires is very different from 40% of five hundred and small cohorts can swing heavily. Segment by role and by region, because a channel that works for entry-level operations may not work for senior engineers, labour markets and platform reach differ, and aggregate figures can hide differences.

Measure cost per hire by source, including agency fees, job advertising, referral rewards and relevant staff time where practical. Measure outcomes after hiring as well, since time to productivity, performance and retention can show whether a channel brings suitable people, though workplace conditions also affect those results.

Do not assume referrals are always best, because they may be inexpensive in one role and narrow the candidate pool in another, so test outcomes and fairness, and check diversity and access, since overreliance on one network can exclude qualified people and sourcing reach should be reviewed under local equality and privacy requirements. Avoid double counting, because a candidate may apply to two roles or re-enter a pipeline later, and watch data changes, since a new applicant-tracking system or revised categories may create a break in the series that should be labelled.

Ask what the decision is: if a team needs more qualified applicants, application-to-interview conversion may matter more than hire share alone, and an agency may deliver faster for a scarce role even at a higher fee, so cost and speed should be weighed with quality. Crosschq discusses source attribution, quality and cost, including how candidate journeys cross several touchpoints, and SHRM's business-driven recruiting guidance emphasises connecting sourcing decisions to business outcomes, so for an owner source of hire is a map of how people reached the organisation, used to test where to recruit next, not to declare a winner from one percentage.