Integrating idibu's tracking and reporting with your landing pages
This article explains how to retain idibu's applicant tracking functionality when redirecting candidates to your own websites (or landing pages). In such workflow, candidates won't be applying directly on the job boards, but instead, they will be re-directed to a corresponding landing page, where they will complete the application process.
Let's take a moment to analyse the pros and cons of this workflow:
PRO's
- The ability to introduce 'landing pages' that are relevant to your business, process, and candidates
- Improve your brand awareness - inject your company culture into the applicant's journey
- Create questionnaires to auto-reject irrelevant candidates and reduce applicant 'noise' (i.e.those without a work-permit, relevant qualifications to the role etc)
- Additional application data provides great custom analytics
- Many other bespoke features
CON's
- redirect can often irritate your applicants or confuse them. In fact, this will happen to 60-70% of your applicants. So if you are a volume recruiter, this workflow might not be for you
- you are forced to look over your website very closely. If it fails, you will get no applicants and confuse the ones trying to apply from other job boards when your website is down.
- additionally, your website's idibu integration has to be bulletproof - if a job is successfully posted to other boards and not on your board, no one will be able to apply!
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Now then - if you decided to go through with the landing page approach, you will need to issue some additional development work to retain your idibu's tracking and reporting functionalities. Long story short - candidates that apply via your landing page will also need to be passed on to idibu. Don't worry though - we have this all figured out! The process is illustrated in the following chart:
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Don't worry if it's confusing! We'll go through this diagram step by step now.
In order to begin, first, let us know of your intentions by starting a ticket on support@idibu.com.
Also, your website developer will need to craft following elements on your website:
- ability to obtain idibu job id (base64 encoded) when you post your ad to your job board. It is to be provided as any other parameter that allows your website to create a landing page, i.e. job title, reference, etc.
- ability to open right landing page based on this parameter ( for example http://www.yourwebsite.com/ad.php?idibu_job_id=123a4 ). Important part! This part of the link: http://www.yourwebsite.com/ad.php? is called "landing page default URL". idibu will need to know that link.
- ability to obtain source parameter from the URL that landing page is being accessed ( for example, source code from http://www.yourwebsite.com/ad.php?idibu_job_id=123a4&source=linkedin is "linkedin")
- functionality, where idibu job id and source parameters, as well as candidate's name, surname, email and base64, encoded CV are uploaded to idibu using our CV Upload Webservice.
Your developer can decide on the names for both variables (idibu job id and source) and values for different sources. However, we do have default values too and can provide a lookup for them. Just be sure to pass them over to your idibu account manager.
Your idibu account manager will have to do a few things for you too:
- enable Application URL field on your account (that's the landing page URL field we'll use to let job boards know where to redirect your candidates)
- enable and set up job and board tracking fields (more on that soon)
- set up your landing page default URL (also, more details coming)
- enable force posting to your private website.
Interested in lot simpler new redirection process? We got you covered! Click this link to find out how you can very easily use your own website as the place where candidates would apply for your jobs.
Ok, so, back to the figure above. The process works like this:
Your consultant posts to idibu, let's say to Jobsite, Reed and Total Jobs. Apart from this, he is forced to post to your private board http://www.yourwebsite.com . On step 2 of the posting process, there will be an application URL field pre-populated with a landing page default URL.
Consultant completes the posting process as per usual.
Now, idibu posts to all 4 boards. idibu's job id is sent to your private job board (i.e. idibu_job_id=123a4). At the same time idibu sends posts to 3 other job boards and provides customized URLs for you landing page, so they carry idibu_job_id and a source field, i.e:
- for Jobsite: http://www.yourwebsite.com/ad.php?idibu_job_id=123a4&source=jobsite
- for Reed: http://www.yourwebsite.com/ad.php?idibu_job_id=123a4&source=reed
- for Total Jobs: http://www.yourwebsite.com/ad.php?idibu_job_id=123a4&source=totaljobs
In the next stage of the process, let's follow a candidate that found your ad on Jobsite. Candidate clicks "apply" and is redirected to your landing page on http://www.yourwebsite.com/ad.php?idibu_job_id=123a4&source=jobsite. Your website is able to identify the correct landing page based on the idibu_job_id parameter.
Candidate completes the form the clicks apply. Now, apart from doing everything you wanted your landing page to do, it will also need to pass the candidate to idibu. As already stated, this will require using our CV Upload Webservice. Here is an example XML that will need to be sent along with field explanation:
<idibu> <job> <id>123a4</id> <portal>board_source_code_here</portal> </job> <cv> <name>cv_name.doc</name> <contents>BASE64 ENCODED CV FILE</contents> </cv> <email> <from>candidate email</from> <subject>String</subject> <body>String</body> </email> </idibu>
and... that's it! Worth to note here, that applicants will be delivered to your consultants the same the always had, depending on your idibu settings. If it used to be by an email, make sure to populate subject and body fields with helpful information. This will be passed to your consultants, so good to have something useful there!
As you can see the process went full circle and it has been tested and used by many idibu clients with full success. If you still have any questions, be sure to let us know in the ticket! We're more than happy to help!