by Sean Devlin, Front Rush
So often times you are just a test subject. You are part of a test to figure out how to make someone else a lot of money.
Its true. Decisions by enterprising companies are made depending on how you interact with something relative and how other people react to that same thing. If you react the way they want and so do many other people, then you have proven their hypothesis…if not, they will reiterate and try something else.
When you go to a site like Amazon.com and you bounce around searching for a book, or ski pole or whatever, Amazon is showing you one version of a page. Somebody else might be looking for the exact same stuff on Amazon but they will see a completely different version of the same page (or subtly different depending on the test). What’s happening is Amazon is testing which version of the same page converts to getting customers to check out and buy their items and which is making them more money. They may show two totally different versions of the same page, or they might be testing subtle differences like the size of the font.
The famous story in this space is the “$300 Million Button”. It’s a story of how testing a specific site and simply changing a few aspects of the checkout button caused an increase of $300 million in revenue. Click here for the link to that story.
So how does this apply to recruiting? Well if it has to do with marketing AND web, you get the double wammy of direct correlation. Just like Amazon tests its web pages for conversion, you should be testing your campaigns for the same. It doesn’t necessarily have to apply to your web-page (although if it did, that’s awesome). It can apply to your emails, your phone calls, everything. So the next time you send out a mass email to recruits…send out 2 versions. Fifty percent of the recruits get one version of the email and fifty percent get another. You should try different subject lines, different email content, different email templates (with pictures). Try them all. If you are using email tracking software, then you can see which had more opens, which had more people click links, etc.
If you want the recruits to fill out online forms, track which email induced more completed forms. Once you do one test, then do another and another…keep reiterating and improving and keep testing. Then once you get the testing process down with email, try it with phone calls, text messages, everything.
The technical term is A/B testing and there are a million resources on the web relative to the same. Definitely check it out.