Source of hire
Also called: hiring source, channel attribution
The channel categories that matter
For an SMB, the useful split is:
- Career page direct: candidates who came straight to your website.
- Indeed (organic): free organic listing.
- Indeed (sponsored) or paid job-board placement.
- LinkedIn (organic posting + outbound sourcing).
- Local boards (StepStone, HelloWork, Infojobs etc.).
- Referrals: from current employees.
- Agency: external recruiters.
- Other (events, alumni network, talent pool re-engagement).
Tag every application with one source. Sub-channels can come later.
What it reveals
The pattern most SMBs find when they actually track source:
- Referrals are the highest-quality channel by most measures (acceptance rate, retention, time to productivity). Often under-invested in because they don’t show up on a spend line.
- Paid placements often look efficient on volume, but quality of hire is mediocre. Cheap when normalized for outcome, but expensive per actual hire.
- Career page direct is small in volume but quality is high. The candidate took initiative to come to your site.
- Agencies produce strong individual hires but at high cost.
The reporting trap
The most common mistake: tracking source only for the moment of application. A candidate sourced via LinkedIn outbound who later applied through the career page often gets attributed to “career page direct” — which inflates that channel and starves sourcing.
Track the first touch, not the last.
Where Join fits
Join records the source at first contact and preserves it through the funnel, so the attribution doesn’t drift. See the features page.
