Source of hire
Source of hire is the channel a team assigns to a completed hire, such as a job board, referral, sourcing activity, agency or careers site. The result depends on the attribution rule and data available.
Decide what “came from” means
A candidate may first encounter the company on a professional network, speak with an employee, then submit an application through the careers site. First known contact, last recorded channel and candidate self-report can therefore each name a different source. Choose the rule that answers the decision at hand.
XING/onlyfy’s source-tracking documentation distinguishes acquisition channel, technical origin data, manual input and dedicated tracking links. The example shows why two fields called “source” do not necessarily contain the same information.
Record the provenance of the data
For reporting, say whether a source was supplied by the candidate, captured automatically or entered by the team. JOIN’s candidate-sourcing documentation describes manually adding a candidate from a source and selecting that source as part of the action. That is useful context, but it is not an automatic reconstruction of earlier contact.
Keep an unknown category. Quietly allocating missing information to “direct” gives that channel a meaning the record does not support. Do not change attribution rules halfway through a period or compare results collected under different rules as though they were identical.
Compare contribution rather than volume alone
One channel can produce many applications and few hires; another may produce the reverse. Review applications, attributed costs and completed hires for comparable roles and an adequate observation period. A new campaign may not yet have had time to produce a completed outcome.
No universal ranking follows from the label. An employee referral is not inherently better than a paid placement, and a large attributed share does not establish what would have happened without that channel.
Use attribution with its limits
Source-of-hire data can inform spending and channel choices when the rule, data quality and role context travel with the report. It should not become a claim of causation. That limitation is precisely why an explicit definition is more useful than a long list of channels.