If you think recruiting is all about writing job descriptions, or screening and interviewing candidates, you had better think twice. A key part of every recruiter’s job is monitoring recruiting metrics to render the process faster and more effective.

If your organization isn’t tracking these metrics, you might be missing out on many opportunities for optimizing your recruiting process and wasting money on ineffective strategies. Here are 7 critical recruiting metrics you should start tracking right now to get top talent and take your business to the next level.

1. Influence

Your reputation as an employer powers your recruiting strategy. You can boost your employer brand by using social media – and that’s where the influence metric comes in. Monitor your social media activity with tools like Twinfluence or Facebook Grader to learn more about the reach of your posts. Optimizing your social media presence, you’re bound to build a stronger employer brand, exercise more influence on the online scene and engage more talented candidates.

2. Social engagement

This metric is closely tied to your social media activity as well – but this time you’ll be focusing on your audience. Tracking social engagement, you’ll see how many followers join the discussion and how many leave negative or positive comments.

RELATED: How to Know if Your Recruiting Strategy Stinks (And How to Fix It)

But social engagement isn’t limited to social media – you should also measure the engagement on your careers website. Check how many candidates visit it and what the average length of their visit is – you can do it with Google Analytics. All this will show you whether your recruiting message resonates with your target candidate pool.

3. Blogging data

If you’re smart, you’re probably running a blog on your company website. But have you ever thought about using it to build a stronger employer brand? Once you publish a smart employer brand blog post, you should monitor user activity on your blog with tools like Google Analytics to learn what type of content your audience prefers.

Make sure to track the source of these visits as well – are candidates looking at your company blog because they discovered your social media profile first? Or perhaps they Googled you? Knowing how people learn about your company and which channels inspire them to check you out is really valuable.

4. Cost-per-acquisition (CPA)

This recruiting metric shows how much it costs you to acquire a candidate. Take the expenses associated with your marketing and employees, and then divide them by the total number of your followers.

When you’re measuring CPA, you can check cost-per-application as well. This metric shows you how much it costs to get a candidate send in an application. Analyze which platforms bring you most candidates and are most cost-effective at it.

5. Click-through-rate (CTR)

CTR is a metric you can calculate by dividing the number of people who saw your job ad with the number of users who clicked on your posting. This metric is of prime importance as it shows you the quality of your job ad titles.

If your postings receive many impressions but few clicks, it’s clear that there’s something wrong with your job titles. They might be unattractive, unclear or simply irrelevant. A high CTR means that your titles engage candidates and inspire them to check out your posting.

How to boost your CTR? Try different title formats to see what works for your audience – you can use calls-to-action, play with punctuation or add job locations.

6. Conversion rate

You had better take this metric seriously. Conversion rate refers to the number of people who clicked on your ad and completed the application via your applicant tracking system. This metric basically shows whether your postings attract candidates.

Conversion rate is essential for pinpointing a technical problem in your application process. If you’re developing it, you should always check its conversion rate – how else will you know whether the system is working?

7. Return-on-investment (ROI)

This final metric is a key indicator of the overall performance of your recruiting strategy. It basically shows you if all the elements add up to create an efficient recruiting process. Measuring ROI is quite challenging – calculate how much you’re spending on recruiting and compare it to how much you gain in return.

You can do it by checking the business impact of your new hires. Once you’ve got all the data in one place, you can generate a report to show your supervisors that the investment in recruitment paid off.

Recruitment metrics should become a fixed part of any recruiting activity. Monitoring the performance of your recruiting strategy is a sure way to quickly adjust any issues and optimize processes to make the most from every hiring opportunity.

Elizabeth Lee is a blogger and content marketer who shares her passions for writing and spreading business knowledge with a desire for constant self-improvement. Currently, Elizabeth is supporting PACK & SEND – professionals in the field of logistics.