Career page — Source tracking

When a visitor lands on your career site, Nextal tries to work out where they came from based on the site that sent them. That guess works for the large, well-known platforms — Indeed, LinkedIn, Facebook, Google — but it fails for everything else: a newsletter, a paid campaign, a QR code on a poster, a recruiting partner, your own website.

The ?ref= parameter lets you name the source yourself. You add it to the address you hand the source, and the label you chose follows the visitor into your reports and onto the application.

How to do it

Add ?ref= followed by a label of your choosing to the end of the address.

https://your-career-address/?ref=Newsletter-September

It works just as well on the address of a specific job:

https://your-career-address/job/68f2c1a4d9?ref=JobFair2026

Note

If the address already contains a question mark, add ref= with an & rather than a second ?: …/job/68f2c1a4d9?domain=yourcompany&ref=JobFair2026

The parameter name is lowercase — ref, not Ref or REF.

That is all the source has to do. Nothing needs to be switched on in Nextal, and nothing needs to be declared in advance: a label that has never been used before is accepted the first time it appears.

Where the label shows up

A single ?ref= value feeds three different places, and they do not follow the same rules:

Where	What gets recorded	Rule
The application	The application’s source — the one behind the “Applications by source” and “Hires by source” charts on a job’s Reports tab and in the sponsorship report	Recorded on every application. Someone who applies three times through three different links produces three applications carrying three different sources.
The candidate profile	The source of the candidate themselves	Recorded once, when the profile is created. If the candidate already exists, their original source is kept.
Visits	The “Visitors by source” chart on the Career page analytics report	Recorded on every visit, even without an application.

This split is the opposite of what people usually assume: the application carries the most recent source, and the candidate profile keeps the very first one.

Tip

To measure how a campaign performed, read the “by source” charts on a job’s Reports tab: they are built on the application’s source, which changes with every new application. The source on the candidate profile answers a different question — “how did this person first hear about us?”

What happens without ?ref=

Without the parameter, Nextal classifies the visitor based on the site that sent them. Recognized: Indeed, LinkedIn, Facebook, Glassdoor, Jobillico, Talent.com, Twitter, Workopolis, SimplyHired, WowJobs, Jooble, Google and Bing. A visitor with no originating site — a hand-typed link, a bookmark, a messaging app, a PDF — is classified as Direct.

Everything else is recorded verbatim, as the full web address of the originating site. That is the explanation for the long, unreadable addresses that sometimes appear in your “by source” charts: they are not glitches, they are origins the automatic detection could not name. Each one is a link that would have been better off carrying a ?ref=.

Rules worth knowing

• ?ref= always beats automatic detection. A link tagged ?ref=Partner-ABC posted on Indeed is counted as Partner-ABC, not as Indeed.
• The value is stored word for word. There is no allowed list, no correction, no normalization. Indeed, indeed and Indeed.ca produce three separate rows in your reports. Agree on one spelling per partner or campaign, and insist on it.
• Choose readable labels. They are shown to recruiters exactly as written, in the charts and on the applications. Quebec-Job-Fair-2026 reads; qjf26-a3 does not.
• One link is enough. The label follows the visitor through the whole career site: from the job list to the job itself, then to the application form. You do not need to add it to every link.
• Avoid spaces and accented characters. Use hyphens. A label such as Summer campaign has to be encoded in the address and is more fragile to send by email or print into a QR code.

Tips

• Give each partner its own label. It is the only way to tell which one sends you applications that turn into hires, rather than just volume.
• Tag your own channels too. Your newsletter, your company Facebook page and the careers section of your website are three different sources; without ?ref=, the last two often collapse into a single row.
• Settle the naming convention before the campaign, not during. A label renamed halfway through splits the campaign into two rows across every report, with no way to merge them afterwards.
• Test the link before you distribute it. Open it in a private browsing window, apply to a test job, then check that the label shows up on the application. That is quicker than discovering a typo after 5,000 posters have been printed.