Data alone cannot cure your hiring woes.
But data is increasingly becoming a major point of competitive difference when it comes to hiring success…especially when combined with active, forward-thinking leaders who are obsessed with creating data-led recruitment strategies that create better, more meaningful connections between people.
So how exactly do we use data to improve hiring decisions?
In our view, you want to look at four key recruitment points of action:
- Understand where hiring can be improved.
- Choosing the right data metrics, and understanding how they intersect.
- Identify and invest in platforms to collect the right data.
- Aggregate and isolate this data for maximum human impact.
Understand where Hiring can be improved.
Identifying where hiring improvements can be made is a lesson in operational humility.
Typical metrics of successful hiring practice – things like healthy time-to-hire ratio, low turnover rate, affordable and sustainable ROI-per-hire (more on that below) – require up-to-date data sets and hands-on operational follow-through to maintain
In the last few years, HR teams have battled with an incredibly stormy recruitment environment – from the Great Resignation to the Great Rebound to, now, a country-wide push for higher wages (not to mention mass public sector walkouts) via striking in light of rising prices.
Hiring health, in this context, can be tricky to measure.
For example, if average candidate tenure within certain sectors is dropping, and turnover is rising sector-wide, how do you buck the trend? What do you need to identify to make improvements if everyone is suffering from the same problems?
Data analysis, aggregation and integration are your saviours here.
- Data analysis and integration require aggregating your digital data metrics – your recruitment ratios, budgets, CRM feedback, hiring metrics, all the digitally-generated data that inform your hiring models – and analogue feedback from workers in real-time, involving things like exit interview information, peer reviews, performance reviews, L&D feedback, skills budgeting, training, and management training under one roof.
- The combined weight of data should give you a full, if not slightly messy, view on your company health, retention health and therefore hiring health.
To correctly aggregate and simplify this information requires company-wide buy-in, some nifty tech, agile leadership and advocacy from departments and team members to better analyse where breakdowns occur.
Then it’s on the bosses to enact change.
Choosing the right data metrics and understanding how they intersect.
“Metrics set the parameters for the data your organisation will use to measure performance”.
Diving into the metrics of successful (or failing) hiring is your fuel for change.
The outcome of a little metric data identification and analysis should be simple – you identify which hiring metrics you need to improve. Those improvements should, in theory, lead to better hiring.
But, of course, as in all recruitment, nothing works in a vacuum.
Every metric and outcome of analysing those metrics, and changing company policy as a result, will impact other metrics. Without adequate oversight, changing how you measure and analyse data metrics can have a cascading effect on other measurements and outcomes and so on and so forth.
So choosing the right data means mapping every data channel and understanding the company-wide impacts of that data on hiring success.
The most typical data metric measurements to understanding hiring success are:
- Source of hire
- Time-to-hire
- Cost-per-hire
- CV-to-interview ratio
- Interview-to-hire ratio
- Staff turnover
- Candidate experience measurements
- Job offer acceptance rates
- Exit interview data
Our question for business leaders is always – do you know how each metric above impacts the other? Do you have the data to prove it? Can you or your team visualise their success, or identify where hiring could be improved, based on the raw data above?
Identify and invest in “platforms” to collect the right data.
Rectec prides ourselves on breaking down sometimes-complex hiring theory and tech implementation into neat, bitesize chunks.
So here is another chunk of knowledge: we know, better than most, how important recruitment data is.
We also know how important it is to understand the reach and effectiveness of platforms to collate and analyse that data.
But, above all else, we know that TA teams, recruiters, HR pros and business leaders don’t have hours to spend crunching data sets – they need clear visualisation, clear line-of-sight, and “cleaned” data to quickly inform hiring strategy.
Time is money, and data is money. So get yourself a hiring platform that collates the data YOU need to improve your hiring outcomes.
In fact, we know it’s so important we built a market-leading HR tech comparison tool and marketplace as a result!
Aggregate and isolate data for maximum human impact.
The result of having built a culture of hiring humility, of knowing your data metrics and of having a data platform that collates and displays it in a way that works for you is then isolating where change needs to occur.
This is where leadership nous comes to the fore – you need to isolate past failings and focus on future-proofing your hiring strategy.
Having a data-driven recruitment plan is a major part of it, but the best leaders in the business will know that data doesn’t do the hard work of consultant-led change.
Clients still want to work with a person who has their business interests at heart, and candidates are still putting their careers in the hands of a relative professional stranger.
So use data to improve these relationships and empower your consultants to provide better, more data-led, more empathetic services.
The bottom line.
We’re obsessed with data here at Rectec…but we also know data used without humble leadership goes nowhere.
We talk a lot about the aggregation of data and recruitment, metrics and outcomes…but in reality, how data aggregates with the human is the most important facet of a data-led recruitment strategy.
At Rectec we help organisations to find the best recruitment and talent acquisition technologies to suit your needs.
From Applicant Tracking System and Recruitment CRM comparison, to vendor snapshots, and technology showcases in our unique technology marketplace, we provide fee-free tools to help you build the perfect recruitment tech stack for your business!