You recruit at diversity conferences and return to the office with stacks of resumes and a long list of candidate follow-up, but do you understand the event’s impact on hiring initiatives? Diversity conferences offer the opportunity for thousands of candidates to interact with your brand, but the events are a large investment of time and resources. How do you know if your diversity hiring efforts are paying off? Don’t guess about success; use these tools to track diversity conference metrics and maximize ROI for each event.

Event Management Software

Measures: Event expenses

Between posting job descriptions, booking travel, shipping swag, managing event timelines and meeting with candidates, it’s easy to lose track of exact costs for each event. But, you can’t measure diversity conference recruiting without event expenses; this data is necessary to calculate key metrics like cost-per-hire and cost-per-applicant. Don’t waste time searching for expense spreadsheets and piecing together costs. Use event management software to monitor all event-related expenses in one place. With all information in a central database, every team member accesses the same platform to update costs and document event initiatives, to leave each diversity conference knowing how every dollar was spent.

Mobile Recruiting Apps

Measures: Total candidates met

Diversity conference career expos are crowded with job seekers looking for their next opportunity. With long lines and hundreds of candidates, tracking how many of these candidates visit your booth can seem like an impossible task. Instead of guessing by the pieces of swag handed out or the number of resumes collected, implement mobile recruiting apps. Using the app, job seekers sign in and upload resumes the moment they step up to your booth, enabling you to collect information from each candidate who visits. After the event, quickly view how many candidates spoke with recruiters and report this data to hiring managers, without sorting through piles of paper resumes.

Find out more tools your team needs to effectively manage the hiring process.

Talent Relationship Management

Measures: Candidate-to-applicant ratio, candidate-to-hire ratio

If candidates you meet at diversity conferences get lost in your pipeline, or worse, never hear from you again, implement talent relationship management (TRM) software. Tag diversity conference candidates in the TRM to track the entire candidate journey, from first point-of-contact to final interview. After extending offers, easily report how many candidates from each event applied for a position and were hired, to gain insight into diversity conference metrics like candidate-to-applicant and candidate-to-hire ratios.

Measures: Pipeline growth

With thousands of engaged candidates in one place, recruiting at diversity conferences is a top way to build a pipeline for future positions. Don’t collect resumes and stuff them in a drawer; use the TRM to add these candidates to your talent community and build a passive pipeline to support diversity hiring. Monitor these talent pools before and after the diversity conference to measure pipeline growth and plan for future hiring.

Measures: Time-to-hire

Diversity conference attendees are often actively pursuing new positions. They may move through the hiring process faster than passive candidates who require more courting, but you’ll never know if you don’t track time-to-hire. View the entire hiring process in the TRM to understand the time from first meeting to final offer, and track time-to-hire for every diversity conference candidate. Find out if there are bottlenecks in your hiring process that slow time-to-hire, to speed the pipeline and secure top talent.

Evaluation Management

Measures: Candidate quality

Do you jot down notes on the candidate’s resume, only to return to the office unable to read your writing? Illegible candidate evaluations can lead to confusion about who to advance, which can slow the hiring process. Instead of sorting through notes or trying to decipher hiring manager feedback, leverage evaluation management software to evaluate candidates on-the-spot. Post-event, view how many candidates the team evaluated, candidate scores for each event and how many should move to the next stage of the hiring process. Report on evaluation activity and event-wide scores to gain insight into trends in candidate quality, and consider foregoing events where candidates don’t have the right qualifications.

Interview Scheduling Software

Measures: Interviews-scheduled-to-offers-accepted ratio

If paper interview schedules are often misplaced at events, leaving you without interview metrics, you’re missing an important data set. Use interview scheduling software to schedule and track every interview. Easily report on interviews completed, to understand the interviews-scheduled-to-offers-accepted ratio for every event, and the entire diversity conference season.

To increase the ROI of diversity initiatives, don’t stand at your booth and hope for the best. Proactively use these tools that measure every aspect of diversity conference hiring, to guide your conference strategy and achieve your company’s diversity hiring initiatives.

To increase your chances of securing top talent, continue to engage candidates after the diversity conference ends. Find tips in our guide, Talent Communities: A Roadmap to Success.