Purpose

The purpose of this article is to outline the source tracking implementation checklist and configuration setups required at each phase.

Audience

This guide is intended for the Recruitment marketing/advertising team and Eightfold’s solution architects.

Implementation checklist

With SmartApply PCS

For customers with SmartApply PCS, following are the best practices as per the source tracking process:

1. Sources:
   • Enable referrer on your CMS to track traffic from CMS
   • Set up UTM parameters in your PPC campaigns
2. Eightfold PCS
   • Enable SEO for Google to index your PCS pages
   • Enable XML job feeds to post job to job boards
   • Set up referre_src_map to send the right source codes to ATS
   • Ensure ats_config using the right field
3. ATS
4. Eightfold Talent Acquisition
   • Ensure ats_config using the right field

With linkoff PCS

For customers with linkoff PCS, following are the best practices as per the source tracking process:

1. Sources:
   • Enable referrer on your CMS to track traffic from CMS
   • Set up UTM parameters in your PPC campaigns
2. Eightfold PCS
   • Enable SEO for Google to index your PCS pages
   • Enable XML job feeds to post job to job boards
   • Set up referre_src_map to send the right source codes to ATS
   • Set up apply_redirect_url to pass source to ATS
   • Ensure ats_config using the right field
3. ATS
4. Eightfold Talent Acquisition
   • Ensure ats_config using the right field

Configuration Setup

Enable referrer on your CMS to track traffic from CMS

Your career site for ‘branding’ is your CMS. For example, Eightfold’s own CMS is Eightfold Careers; a website that introduces the company's job opportunities and benefits, and links to Eightfold PCS via the ‘view job openings’ button.

Kindly work with your IT team who manages your CMS to enable the HTTP referrer in your proxy server. When a visitor comes to PCS from your CMS, if your CMS’s HTTP referrer is enabled, PCS will be able to know that this visitor comes from your CMS; otherwise, PCS will not be able to know where this visitor comes from, and thus this visitor will have ‘source not tracked’.

An alternative solution will be: always include a utm_source in the redirect url in your CMS.

Set up UTM parameters in your PPC campaigns

UTM (Urchin Tracking Module) Parameters are standardized URL parameters you can add to any URL to track source & campaign info. For source and campaign tracking specifically, Eightfold tracks and saves the utm_source and utm_campaign URL parameter associated with each user activity session.

To ensure that job clicks from these job boards are correctly attributed for campaign tracking, ensure that the job feed URL which you are giving to your job board has utm_source and utm_campaign URL parameters with whatever values you’d like to use to track clicks from the relevant job board.

If you aren’t using our XML job feed to publish your jobs on job boards (highly recommended), please tell your job boards to append “utm_source=<XXXX>&utm_campaign=<XXX>” to any job URL you’d like to see associated with the campaign you’re using.

PPC campaign reporting

You can see user activity and funnel conversion for each of your campaigns in the Career Site Dashboard.

Set up cross domain tracking (optional)

If we want to pass the UTM parameters from the customer’s brand site (or company site) to Eightfold PCS, we can utilize some plugins to capture the UTM parameters and pass it to PCS. Please reach out to Eightfold’s support team on such implementation.

Enable the ad platforms to track PPC campaigns by adding tracking pixels to PCS

Ad platforms such as Google Ads, Facebook Ads, etc. provide tracking pixels to enable their analytics. Customers can add tracking pixels to PCS following this documentation:

Update referrer_src_map accordingly

When an application is submitted in the session from a utm_source, the utm_source value will be sent to your ATS as the application source. As indicated in the ‘referrer_src_map’ section above, the utm_source value will go through the referrer_src_map mapping process before being sent to the ATS. Make sure you have added the utm_source value and a key (and its corresponding value) to the referrer_src_map; otherwise it could be defaulted to the default value in the referrer_src_map when sent to the ATS.

Enable SEO for Google to index your PCS pages

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. To configure SEO, use the ‘Admin Console > Talent Experience > Career Site & Referrals > SEO & Job Feed’ SEO section and enable Publish to Google option.

Enable XML job feeds to post job to job boards

To enable XML feed, use the Admin Console > Career Site & Referrals > SEO & Job Feed > Job Feed and enable the Enable option.

Once the job feed is enabled in Admin Console, customers can generate a feed in two formats, LinkedIn and Indeed. Customers need to provide the XML feed links to LinkedIn and Indeed respectively:

• LinkedIn: https://jobs.booking.com/careers/feed
• Indeed: https://jobs.booking.com/careers/feed?target=indeed

Set up referrer_src_map to send the right source codes to ATS

To configure the referer_src_map for your career_site,

1. Go to Admin Console > Talent Experience > Career Site & Referrals
2. On the Configuration tab go to Application Flow > Source Tracking > Application Source Mapping section.
3. The Source Name is the value of the utm_source or the referer. Please refer to your utm_source set up in the job boards that you post on to get the utm_source values.
   Below are some additional details:
   1. There should not be any spaces, special characters, or certain punctuations (such as : , /) in the ‘source name’.
   2. All matches on the ‘source name’ are case insensitive.
   3. Order of the entries in the map matters in partial matches. When there is no exact match, the first ‘source name’ that partially matches the ‘source tracking value’ will be selected.

      Read Source mapping process and rules for more details.

      1. The ATS Source Code is the source code that PCS sends to your ATS. Please check your ATS for the source codes that it can recognize.
      2. The ‘Free text referer mapping’: ‘use_free_text_referer’ in smartapply_config. This config is default off. But if it is turned on, when there is no match in referer_src_map, instead of sending the value of the ‘default’ key to ATS, the raw source value will be sent.

Set up apply\_redirect\_url to pass source to ATS

(Linkoff PCS) set up "apply_redirect_url"

To configure the apply\_redirect\_url for your career_site, use the ‘Admin Console > Talent Experience > Career Site & Referrals > Configuration > Application Flow > Mode: ATS Apply section:

(Linkoff PCS) enable ‘upload resume’ modal before visitors redirect to ATS

Enabling the ‘Upload resume’ modal (asking visitors to upload their resume before getting redirected to ATS to submit their application) will let PCS build a profile for the visitor based on the extracted information from the resume, and thus allows PCS to connect the visitors who start the application (clicked on ‘Apply’) on PCS with the applicants who submit the application on the ATS.

To enable this config, go to Admin Console → Talent Experience → Career Site & Referrals → Application Flow → General Apply Setting → Prompt for resume on Apply click (strongly recommended: on)

Ensure ats_config using the right field

Please make sure that in the ats_config, PCS is sending the source data to the right fields to ATS (especially when there are several fields related to ‘application source’). Also make sure that Eightfold Talent Acquisition is pulling from the right ‘application source’ fields in the ATS.