The Benefits, Tactics, and Metrics of Data-Driven Recruiting You Can’t Ignore
Is your recruiting team stuck in a rut? It’s time to shake things up with a more data-driven approach to recruitment.
Leveraging jobs data to inform your recruitment strategy has many benefits, like improving diversity initiatives, opening talent pools you didn’t know existed, and hiring top talent before your competitors do.
To help you think more about how data-driven recruiting can improve your recruiting outcomes, we’re going to highlight the benefits, tactics, and metrics of data-driven strategies.
The Benefits of Data-Driven Recruiting
1. Combat Talent Scarcity
When the talent you need seems scarce, it’s easy to think the candidates you’re looking for simply don’t exist. The fact is they do — you just need to dig deeper to find them. Data-driven recruiting strategies provide the insight needed to cast wider nets and ultimately build larger pipelines, thereby fighting perceived talent scarcity.
2. Improve Diversity Hiring Initiatives
Collecting the right data can help you identify underutilized talent pools you might never have otherwise discovered. Data can also help you identify historical trends of unconscious bias in your hiring process in order to mitigate such biases in future hiring decisions.
3. Make More Strategic Decisions
Data helps recruiting teams make more strategic decisions, which in turn allows recruiters to get an edge over their competitors. Predictive analytics can help recruiting teams filter unqualified talent out of the running and zero in on top talent faster.
Because of their efficiency, intelligent recruiting systems can help recruiters make better hires while saving on recruiting costs. After all, recruiting is not just a matter of getting the right people, but of getting the right people while staying within budget.
The Tactics of Data-Driven Recruiting
1. Set Up Consistent Processes to Capture Data
Conduct an audit to figure out how current systems and processes are being used by everyone on your team. Gather feedback from users and then decide on a specific data aggregation method by which everyone must abide. This will ensure all recruiting data is logged consistently.
2. Build a Scoring System
In marketing, potential customers are assigned scores based on their interactions with the business. Specific actions like opening and clicking through emails, following the company on social media, and making purchases all influence a customer’s score. A similar system can be implemented to rank candidates’ interactions with your organization.
Set up a scoring system to identify the candidates most engaged with your career site, social handles, and regular site. Candidates’ scores should be based on specific actions they take, with more serious actions — like clicking through to job ads — being weighed more heavily. Set parameters so that candidates who meet a certain engagement threshold are automatically identified as recruitment targets.
3. Create a Structured Interview Process
Another great tactic for building a data-driven recruiting strategy is to set up structured, consistent interviews that produce measurable results. This will help you assess each candidate according to the same criteria, leading to better hiring decisions.
Once you have established a consistent set of questions and a ratings scale for your interviews, you can use the interview responses of your high-performing employees to help build benchmarks against which you can score the responses of candidates. The more closely a candidate’s responses mirror those of your high performers, the more likely it is that candidate will be a high performer, too!
The Metrics of Data-Driven Recruiting
1. Candidate-to-Employee Conversion Rates by Channel
With candidates coming from so many channels, you need to track which channels bring in the most conversions. Many recruits make the mistake of focusing on the channels that bring in the most applicantsrather than the ones that result in the mosthires. For example, social channels may be driving in 500 applications a day, but if the conversion rate from candidate to employee is low, then spend can be decreased or reallocated to a higher-performing channel.
2. Candidate Pipeline Speed
From the time a candidate first interacts with your brand to the moment they become a new hire, there will be many stages they must pass through. You should measure the speed of each stage to ensure your recruitment process moves along quickly. Time frames to track include:
– Time from application stage to screening stage
– Time from screening stage to interview stage
– Time from first round of interviews to second round (and so on)
– Time from interview stage to offer
– Time from offer to acceptance
– Time from acceptance to new employee onboarding
Identify slow-moving points of the funnels, and gather feedback from both recruiters and candidates to find solutions for speeding up those points.
3. Hiring Stage Conversion Rates
This is similar to the previous metric, except this time you will be tracking the numbers of candidates passing through each stage. Numbers to track include:
– Ratio of sourced candidates to applicants
– Ratio of applicants to candidates screened
– Ratio of candidates screened to candidates interviewed
– Ratio of candidates interviewed to candidates who advance to the second round (and so on)
– Ratio of candidate interviews to offers
– Ratio of offers to acceptances
– Ratio of acceptances to new employees in onboarding
One thing to focus on in all this data is your candidate drop-off rates. For example, if your offer-to-acceptance conversion rate is extremely low, you’ll need to investigate why you’re losing so many candidates near the end of the cycle. Perhaps you’re taking too long to move from interview to offer, which gives candidates more time to consider offers from competitors?
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Recruiting solutions that combine predictive analytics, data capture, analysis, and robust reporting can help you bring data to your recruiting strategy. Armed with the right insights, you’ll soon realize the benefits of a data-driven approach to recruiting.
A version of this article originally appeared on the WCN blog.
Jeanette Maister is managing director of the Americas for WCN.