Worldwide recruiting processes are currently in a stage of significant change. No longer is the process merely in the hands of a solo recruiter, but, instead, data analytics are playing a substantial role.
Recruitment analytics is one of the best ways for a firm to use big data, as it makes it easier to assess potential candidates, track current employee efficiency, and helps ensure that you are hiring worthy candidates.
However, before you set out on a large-scale change process, you want to take some time to reflect on what your recruitment process looks like currently and analyze what is working and what isn’t.
Here are four steps to take before investing in analytics for recruitment.
1. What analytics does for firms
In general, analytics help your firm understand where your strategy stands in current time. In this regard, it enables you to understand what you as a firm are doing well and what aspects you need to improve on.
From this information, you can begin to develop a more accurate view of the future and make plans based on the trends that the data provides. When used correctly, analytics can produce hundreds of useful insights into different scenarios and circumstances.
Analytics also assists your firm in quickly determining the success or the failure of any new initiatives.
Specifically, talent analytics can help your firm discover your model employee, determine which current employees are in their peak position and who may need a promotion, and allow supervisors to devise and explain a realistic career path for all members of the team — all factors that lead to employee retention.
2. Brainstorm how you are going to capture the data
Once your team has understood what analytics can do for your firm, it is time to brainstorm how you are going to capture the data that is created from the analytics.
Unfortunately, securing the information that is required to make perceptive correlations and comparisons isn’t always as straight-forward as it seems. If you are like most companies, your recruitment strategy consists of many separate threads (job boards, social recruiting, SEO initiatives, Career Fairs, mobile recruiting, etc.) — meaning that your recruitment data exists in multiple places.
This in itself makes the task difficult as there are several different moving parts. Before you look at investing in analytics for recruitment, take a step back and evaluate the technologies you are already using and how they currently integrate with your systems.
This may mean consolidating the threads that your recruitment team utilize, or merely reshuffling some strategies. Whatever it means for your specific business, you want to ensure that your recruitment team can take all the different threads of data and comprehensively compile it into one database.
3. Create a culture of insight
Today, the candidate landscape is more competitive than ever before. For this reason, you want to ensure that each and every person in your firm is an active participant in recruiting strong talent.
In order for this to be successful, everyone must be clear about who and what you are looking to hire, as well as the level of experience you are expecting. These characteristics should be communicated openly and regularly.
Members of your business must also know how and why to drive talent to your business (in a practical way), as well as the expectations you have for them in this regard. Select members of both the senior and the junior staff to act as first-hand voices for what it is like to work at your company.
There is no better advocate for your firm than someone who already works there and loves it!
4. Deliberate on what you want your analytics to help with
There are several specific applications of recruitment analytics that your firm can decide to capitalize on. These include;
- Fine-tuning hiring policies – data will help to shape an organization’s knowledge of where to hire from and at what cost;
- Focused recruitment marketing – data can give insights into questions such as what day of the week is the best to post job listings? And specific factors that entice potential candidates to reply to a job ad;
- Increased quality of hire – analyzing data over an extended period can help your recruitment team evaluate metrics such as top talent characteristics, new hire. performance by lead source, involuntary turnover or resignations after less than three months of overall service, and qualified applicants-per-requisition – a metric that indicates whether your sourcing practices are producing efficient employees; and
- Diversity targets – far more accurately than traditional recruiting strategies, analytics can continuously monitor whether you are hitting your diversity targets in necessary demographics such as gender and ethnicity.
Talent analytics are critical in ensuring your organization maintains a competitive advantage in your talent strategy. That being said, just having the analytics isn’t going to get the job done, as to really achieve success in your recruitment process, your firm must be able to consume the data and then act upon it astutely.
Author
Matthew Zane
