Understanding how candidates interact with your career site is crucial for optimizing your recruitment strategy and improving the candidate experience. This guide will walk you through everything you need to know to get Google Tag Manager recording the right events and how to configure GA4 to receive them.
If you are running any ads via platforms such as Meta, follow this guide to set up the right initial configuration to send events in your ad platforms.
Setting up Google Analytics (GA4)
You may already have a GA4 account set up, but we strongly recommend setting up a new property to keep your analytics clean and avoid any conflict with differences in tracking configuration to your existing properties.
Go to Google Analytics at analytics.google.com
Create a new property in the Admin section
Enter your details:
Property name: Something descriptive like ‘YourCompany Career Site’
Select your time zone and currency
Choose ‘Web’ as your platform
Set up your web stream:
Enter your Pinpoint career site URL
Give it a clear name like ‘YourCompany Pinpoint Career Site’
Keep ‘Enhanced measurement’ enabled
Click the settings cog for this section, then ‘Show advanced settings’ under ‘Page views’. Toggle to disable ‘Page changes based on browser history events’.
Configure tag settings:
New GA4 configuration recommends using a Google Tag. Click this section and create a new tag or link it to an existing tag.
Leave all settings toggled on in the manage automatic event detention
Check and update cross-domain tracking under ‘Configure your domains’
Add your domains in this section e.g. yourcompany\.com|yourcompany\.pinpointhq\.com’
Once you've completed this, you'll get a Measurement ID that looks like "G-XXXXXXXXXX". Keep this handy—you'll need it for the next steps. You will also require your Google Tag ID if following this route.
Now we’ll configure Google Tag Manager before coming back to finish up the GA4 event configuration.
Setting up Google Tag Manager (GTM)
As with the GA4 setup above, you may already use GTM. We recommend creating a new, clean container for this step, but you can also merge changes into an existing account.
If you intend to merge into an existing container with existing GA4 / Google Tag configurations setup, you will need to remove the configuration tags provided by the template below. The preview function in GTM is then necessary to ensure the right events are still flowing and not duplicating data sent to GA4 or other platforms. If you have any queries on how to alter existing configuration settings, please speak to your CSM who can advise.
If creating a new account and container:
Go to Google Tag Manager at tagmanager.google.com
Create a new account and container:
Account name: ‘Company Name - Pinpoint Careers Site’
Container name: Something clear like "Pinpoint Careers Site GTM"
Target platform: Web
Accept the terms and you'll see two code snippets that include your GTM container ID (e.g., "GTM-XXXXXXXX").
Copy both the <head> script and the <body> script and send these to your CSM.
Your CSM will add these to your careers site.
If working from an existing container:
Click the ‘Admin’ tab and the select ‘Install Google Tag Manager’
Copy both the <head> script and the <body> script and send these to your CSM.
Your CSM will add these to your careers site.
Importing our GTM container template:
Request the JSON file from your CSM. They will send you this upon adding the GTM scripts to your careers site.
Open your GTM container and click the ‘Admin’ tab.
Click ‘Import Container’ and select the JSON file you have been provided.
Select ‘Merge’, whether this is a new container or not.
Select ‘Rename conflicting tags, triggers, and variables’. There shouldn’t be any conflicting tags unless you are importing to an existing container. This is possible, but may need some careful tweaking to ensure that no conflicting or duplicating of tracking is in place.
Review the summary of what is to be added and click ‘Confirm’.
Once imported, it’s time to replace the container variables with your Google Tag and/or GA4 Measurement IDs;
Open the user-defined variable ‘Pinpoint Careers Site - Google Tag ID’ and update the value field with the Google Tag created earlier
Open the user-defined variable ‘Pinpoint Careers Site - GA4 Data Stream Measurement ID’ and update the value field with the Google Tag created earlier
We now need to test the installation by previewing your careers site:
You will need at least one live job for this test.
Click the ‘Preview’ button at the top right of the GTM window
Enter your careers site URL (e.g. https://yourcompany.pinpointhq.com)
Wait for the preview window to load. If it fails to load, this indicates an issue with the install of GTM. Please notify your CSM.
Once loaded, select a job from the job listings.
In your preview window, you should see two events on the left hand side; pageView and job_detail.
You should also see that the ‘Pinpoint Careers Site - Job Page View’ event has fired once.
On selecting the job_detail event, you should also see values in the ‘Variables’ section for any job details. While these details can vary like displaying compensation or not, the job title will always be a constant (see dlv - job_title). These details will carry over to the application events, along with page view events to be used in GA4 (and other analytics/ads platforms you send the data to).
Next, click the ‘Apply’ button, fill in the application form with a test candidate and submit the application
In your preview window, you should see a form_start event after clicking into any application form field. Click this event and you should see that the ‘Pinpoint Careers Site - Application Started’ GA4 event has fired.
In your preview window, you should see a form_start event after clicking into any application form field. Click this event and you should see that the ‘Pinpoint Careers Site - Application Submitted’ GA4 event has fired.
Finally, in a different tab, and keeping your GTM preview window active, open the GA4 admin view and under ‘Data Display’, click ‘DebugView’. Repeat steps 4 and 5 above to check that the GA4 events are being registered.
If anything looks off here, or you are not seeing the above events, please notify your CSM who can investigate.
Finalising your GA4 setup
For this next step, recommend waiting 30-60 minutes for the test events sent in the earlier step to be recognised formally by GA4. You'll use this table in first step.
Dimension Name | Description | Scope | User Property/Parameter |
Job Title | Job title from the posting last visited or applied for. | Event | Job title from the posting last visited or applied for. |
Job Application Deadline | Closing date for job posting. | Event | job_application_deadline |
Job Compensation | Salary or pay information. | Event | job_compensation |
Department | Department listed against the job. | Event | job_department
|
Employment Type | Part-Time / Full-Time etc | Event | job_employment_type
|
Job Location | Location listed against the job. | Event | job_location |
Workplace Type | On-site / hybrid / remote. | Event | On-site / hybrid / remote |
Back in GA4, head to the ‘Custom Definitions’ tab under ‘Data Display’ in the settings screen.
Next, navigate to the ‘Events’ tab under ‘Data Display’ in the settings screen.
Select ‘Recent Events’
Your new events should be listed in here; the minimum being ‘job_page_view’, ‘application_started’ and ‘application_submitted’.
Click the three dots next to each of these and then click to ‘Mark as Key Event’.
If you wish to add other standard GA4 events like file_download, copy the configuration of one of the existing GA4 events in GTM and set it to fire with a trigger that waits for ‘file_download’. The reason it is recommended to set this up in GTM, is it means we can always send the additional parameters for the job details with the event.
Optional: Go back to the data stream settings from the first step. Click ‘Configure tag settings’ and then select ‘Define internal traffic’. List any IPs here you wish to be excluded from analytics data (e.g. the company office). A quick search can find your IP to be used here.
Installing Other Third-Party Scripts
We recommend adding other third-party scripts through GTM in a similar fashion. For example, for LinkedIn and Meta, use their guidance on installing scripts to add these tags to the GTM container. You can configure the same events to be sent to any one of your downstream analytics or ad platforms.
If adding a custom event via GTM, use the tags for the GA4 events as a template to then configure similar tags to fire at your ad platforms.
If you need any support with configuration here, please contact your CSM.
Additional: Review our Content Security Policy (CSP) and raise any change requests with your CSM if needed.