The answer to what is data driven recruitment is quite simple. Data-driven recruitment is the process of using techniques and technologies to analyze ample talent and find the most suitable candidates to help your company achieve its goals. Therefore, recruitment analytics is the process of discovering and interpreting the meaningful patterns for sourcing, making a selection, and hiring.
Still, to achieve the desired results effectively, it’s crucial to know how to incorporate the data in the process of recruitment. Once you can do that, the recruitment process will be much easier, but more importantly, a lot more effective.
In this post, you'll learn how to incorporate data into your recruitment process; we'll also mention some of the most common challenges you may face along the way.
Let’s begin.
Table of contents
Why Is Data-Driven Recruitment Important?
Before we get into the steps to incorporate the data, first, let’s see why data driven recruitment is valuable for your company.
Increases Hiring Efficiency
One of the vital benefits of data driven recruitment is that it increases hiring efficiency, which practically is the primary goal.
You will be able to identify specific stages that will make the process faster since the data will show you the proper amount of exchanged info between the candidates and your own hiring team. Furthermore, by receiving this type of data, you will also have the opportunity to make a more constructive interview.
Helps You Cut Costs
Other benefits of data-driven recruitment is cutting costs. Once you have the correct data, every aspect of the process will become more straightforward as the proper info will show you precisely where you found the most suitable candidates. You will be able to discover your best sourcing channel and administer your budget directly to that channel. This moment is critical because you can focus your budget on the proper channel without wasting money on other recruitment channel analytics and channels that actually don’t bring anything to the table.
Consider using these several methods to collect data:
- Focus on ATS: Your Applicant Tracking System records the source from which an applicant entered the pipeline. Еxtract a report to see the one that attracts the most candidates.
- Maintain surveys: Create short questionnaires to ask job applicants how they find out about the job position.
- Inspect web analytics: You can track candidate engagement across channels through recruiting marketing platforms. You can also use UTM codes for your ads, and use Google Analytics to track how much traffic each post brings.
Once you find the most effective ones, you will be able to save costs even more.
Effective Analysis of the Large Talent Pool
In essence, more talent means more potentially great employees. And once you have a large talent pool that allows you to have an enormous amount of potential employees to choose from, the data eliminates all the biases, which lets you focus only on the candidates that matter the most.
What's more, the data helps you make a talent pool analysis. It is much easier to find the right talent with the most relevant skills since you can do more effective recruiting when you have the right data.
Hiring Predictions
Recruitment data helps you make fantastic hiring predictions. For one, you will know how many applications you need in order to find the proper hire. And don’t worry, even if you are a little bit behind, you can always re-advertise or re-publish.
You can predict hiring needs based on current ones, and here are several ways to do so:
- Make a list: List the skills you were hiring for in the past several months. You'll identify the positions you need to hire more often. Check your ATS for more insights on your past needs.
- Plan ahead: Make a plan of your hiring needs for the upcoming six months and start the recruiting early on to fill out every position before it becomes critical.
- Make a gap analysis: After collecting the forecast data, compare it to the current reports and look for the gaps. Will you need to expand or downsize? Аre there any skills you’ll need in the future that you don’t have now? Can the existing employees meet the projections?
Steps to Incorporate the Data
Before we see the most valuable steps you should follow and how to overcome the challenges, let’s discuss recruitment metrics and their importance.
What Are Recruitment Metrics and Why Are They Important?
Recruitment metrics analysis are the measurements used in order to optimize the hiring process of candidates and track the hiring success. If you use these metrics correctly, they will help you evaluate the process and identify whether your company is hiring the most suitable candidates.
They show you every single detail of the recruitment process, such as what challenges you may face along the way and which aspects are most important. They are perfect for making an evaluation of the process and how it’s performing, which shows the proper ROI and knowing the level of success.
With that out of the way, it's time to see how you can set up the proper metrics for your recruitment process.
Set Up the Proper Metrics
Without setting up the proper metrics, the incorporation will be a failure. You have to take the following metrics into account in order to calculate the effectiveness of the hiring process:
Time-to-Hire
In essence, this refers to the so-called time-to-hire, which is the total amount of time you will need for a certain prospective applicant from the moment of applying until they accept the offer. In order to know the time-to-hire, you should take away the day when they entered the pipeline from the day they actually accepted the job offer.
Cost Per Employee
The cost per employee shows the cost-per-hire, and it is the entire cost you spend in the process of bringing the new employee to your company or organization. The cost-per-hire involves all the expenses of your recruitment process like onboarding, sourcing, recruitment advertisements, and so on.
Of course, to calculate it, you have to sum up all the costs for the recruitment process and then divide it by the total number of hires in a particular period of time.
Acceptance Rate
The acceptance rate is the percentage of accepted job offers, which is also vital for the process. That’s why you have to calculate the offer acceptance rate (OAR) by dividing the applicants’ number who accept the offer by the number of job offers extended to the applicants.
New Hire Turnover
This step is about the number of employees who leave your company in the first year of work. Don’t underestimate this number because today, employees change their work more often.
How to Take Action Once You Have Your Metrics in Place
There are several crucial steps you can take in order to take action once you have your metrics in place:
Establish Your Benchmarks
Your recruitment metrics have to be actionable, and in order for that to happen, you first need to establish benchmarks for each one. There are internal and external benchmarks, and to create internal ones, you should track your metrics quarterly to find out the average for each. As for externally, they should be compared against the standards of the industry.
Use the Results for An Action Plan
Now you have both the benchmarks and the recruitment metrics, so since they are tracking the success of the recruitment function, you can use them to see the recruitment behavior.
For instance, if your retention rate has declined 5% quarter over quarter, you now know that you should search deeper for the reason for the decline. And if the reason is not so clear, you should see the retention programs and make an action plan for how to reduce the turnover rate. Once you create this, you can measure its ROI by measuring the change in the retention rate.
Discuss the Metrics Regularly with Your Team
In order to identify breakdowns and trends in the recruitment process on time, you should review the metrics quarterly. Most of the metrics are concentrated on past performance and what has changed through time. And even though these numbers are valuable, it’s essential to dig deeper. Discuss with your team why some issues happened and what caused such challenges.
As you are measuring the recruitment metrics over time, you should also compare the averages of the entire industry since this will provide you with the chance to benchmark and compare your performance against the competition in the market.
Challenges That May Occur and How to Utilize Them to Improve the Process
Since there isn’t anything that flows without any challenges, let’s see which challenges may occur when you take action and how to overcome them to improve the whole data-driven hiring process.
Longer Time Than Expected
As it sometimes happens in any recruitment process, you may need more time to hire. This can be a problem in the long run, and you have to find a way to make this time shorter.
That’s why you should make the screening process better by creating qualifying questions on your form of application. Even if your screening process is excellent, you may have to improve the actual interview process. You will be able to make the time-to-hire faster if you focus and optimize the process.
Elevated New Hire Turnover
If the new hire turnover is elevated, this can be an issue since it shows the number of employees who leave a company right after they were hired. One thing you can do to make sure they will stay longer is directly communicating the responsibilities, duties, and expectations before you send your job offer.
Also, it’s valuable to mention that you should create an effective onboarding process by making your new hires feel welcomed by giving them meaningful work, which will make them feel they are contributing significantly.
High Rejection Rate
Maybe the most unpleasant challenge to overcome is the high rejection rate. This situation happens when the most suitable candidates reject your job offer, and the general acceptance rate is low. In this situation, your positions will remain empty for a longer time, and you will also have higher costs. But even though this is a challenging issue, there is a solution for it as well.
One of the most underestimated and yet so beneficial aspects is getting back on time. Make sure to provide them with an answer on time. In addition, make sure your data driven hiring process is short and effective and your candidates feel comfortable during the interview, communicate your purpose and values and create an attractive benefits program to increase the acceptance rate.
Also, rewriting the job description can be an effective way to change the course of the negative rejection pattern of your data driven recruitment process. You can accomplish this by excluding unnecessary skills, excluding the skills that will be learned on the job, or by including some specific expectations.
Final Words
As you can see, the data-driven recruitment process is more than valuable. When you set up the proper metrics and analyze the data, you will know precisely the main issues that your company has to face when hiring new employees.
And once you know the biggest challenges, it will be a lot easier and faster to overcome them. Use these steps to incorporate the data in the recruitment process and find the most suitable candidates for your job positions.
