Recruiting and data: A match made in business heaven. Your recruitment strategy has to deal with the fact that most job-seeking is now done online and across diverse platforms. Having the right data means you can streamline your recruitment efforts, align your talent searches with your organizational goals, and make the whole process vastly more cost-effective.
The Benefits of Data-Driven Recruitment
Job hunting is heavily skewed towards candidates, currently, with many more roles than there are people to fill them. The Great Resignation led to many more people seeking “gigs” or freelancing rather than committing to new, permanent roles. Employees are still quitting at a 25% higher rate than before the pandemic.
Despite the shortage of talent available, experts suggest that many organizations are relying on traditional recruitment methods that simply aren’t as effective any more. Embracing a wholly digital strategy that combines recruitment and data from various sources has the following benefits:
- Reach a more targeted audience
- Reduce costs associated with recruitment advertising by maximizing the potential to reach candidates
- Meet candidates on the platforms they prefer or use the most
- Track the success (or lack of) of recruitment drives and campaigns
- Provide candidates with better recruitment experiences
- Increase time-to-hire
- Present stakeholders with accurate recruitment costs and provide justification for additional budget requests
- Combine recruitment data with other business data to help create complete and accurate reports
One of the most compelling reasons recruiters should invest heavily in combining recruitment and data is that it increases the quality of the candidates who come to interviews. The higher the quality of your employees, the better your business performs.
Platforms Recruitment Specialists Should Leverage
How can recruiters start to utilize the available data? This depends on the platforms you have available, and the partners you work with.
You may have an applicant tracking system (ATS), This is usually a platform or suite of software that collates and tracks all candidates and the data relating to them. This type of software may use AI-powered or manually coded rules to filter resumes, for example, by searching for or ruling out certain keywords. ATS systems also help source candidates, allow them to upload documents online, or even extend job offers.
Because the ATS holds a wealth of information on the recruitment process, it can work in tandem with business intelligence (BI) tools to create reports and patterns on ideal candidates, successful recruitment strategies, or reasons applicants rejected job offers. Recruitment leaders can use this data to hone processes and improve the likelihood of successful hires.
Recruiters can also leverage social media to gain info on the types of people interested in particular roles. Sharing job postings on Facebook, for example, could garner likes and shares from various demographics. Comparing those with impacts across other social media platforms creates a wider image of the audience your posts are reaching. Recruiters can work with social media managers or digital marketing specialists to tweak posts to attract a more specific audience.
Your business website or recruitment-specific pages may also carry large volumes of usable data. Tools like Google Analytics can show how many clicks a job posting gets, how many conversions, and the overall audience figures for any aspect of online recruitment.
Combining data from multiple platforms using data integration tools or BI suites helps recruiters give accurate figures for:
- Time to hire
- Cost to hire
- Sources of hire
- Job offer acceptance rates
- Experience scores from candidates
This last point will depend on the feedback process you have in place for gathering feedback from prospective candidates. Feedback is an essential part of understanding what’s working in your digital recruitment processes and what’s not.
Utilizing Data You Already Have
One of the biggest challenges within modern organizations is the culmination of data siloes. Historically, data gathered by different departments or teams within a company would be kept separately, making it difficult to access for cross-team collaboration.
Recruitment data, for example, might be held in a very different place than HR data on existing hires. If a recruitment specialist wants to know how many staff hired in the last five years stayed for more than six months, for example, extracting this data could be problematic.
Encouraging business leaders to incorporate systems that encourage the sharing of data (where appropriate and legal) could help recruiters gather data on exactly what type of candidate tends to perform best, stay longest, or have the fewest absences. The more granular this data, the more targeted recruiters can make their job postings. Plus, they can use that data as justification to business leaders for the budgets they for improving processes.
More targeted recruitment practices are better for everyone, helping skilled workers find their way into meaningful work rather than settling for lower-paid work outside their skillset.
Effective recruiting and data integration, data management, and the reduction of data siloes are all closely connected. Recruiters who have access to relevant, accurate data can become marketing wizards with the power to attract top talent who might otherwise head over to the competition.
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