Recruiters are essential for companies struggling to source the talent they need to drive business growth. Candidates are far more likely to accept job offers when contacted directly by a recruiter. In fact, statistics show that 89% of applicants accept promptly when recruiters intervene. However, getting to the acceptance stage can be a long journey, and it’s one that’s easier with the right tools and techniques.
Hiring specialists can leverage a combination of modern data analytics and more traditional sales techniques to improve candidate experience and reduce time-to-hire. With the right tools, metrics, and communication style, recruiters can consistently provide excellent recruitment outcomes for clients.
The Connection Between Recruitment and Sales
Skilled salespeople take the time to understand the pain points of prospective customers. They understand what their leads need and how the product or service on sale is going to help provide that. Recruiters follow a similar path. They must understand what the job role can provide to a candidate that others can’t, whether that’s in terms of benefits, hours, or a better place to work. Hiring teams must sell a company and its job vacancies, making them more appealing than those of competitors.
Both recruiting and sales have a secret weapon – data analytics. The ability to collate client/candidate data and use business intelligence (BI) tools to sift it for insights is a game changer in both fields. For sales, data analytics provides actionable information like what demographics purchase certain products, time-to-commit, and customer lifetime value (CLV).
Similarly, the right applicant tracking system (ATS) and other tools can show recruiters what types of candidates are more likely to apply for certain roles, time-to-hire stats for clients, and overall recruitment performance.
Identifying High-Potential Clients
Collating, storing, and analyzing recruitment data makes it easier to source candidates most likely to take the job and perform well at it. Just like a salesperson wants a lead who will spend highly and frequently, headhunters and executive search experts need to focus on job seekers most likely to offer desirable recruitment outcomes. For recruitment as well as sales strategies, data analytics can be the answer.
Some ATS platforms have the ability, via artificial intelligence (AI) or machine learning (ML), to sift through historical candidate data and form patterns. The system can then use these patterns to accurately predict outcomes for current job applicants. For example, if a cohort of applicants perform well in interviews but don’t accept the role, an ATS may be able to define what their common characteristic is. Recruiters can then shift their focus away from candidates with that characteristic and funnel resources elsewhere – potentially sourcing better applicants who are more likely to take the role with enthusiasm.
Related reading: Building a Strong Talent Pipeline: Proactive Strategies for Anticipating Hiring Needs
Streamlining the Hiring Process
Aligning resources with accurate data in this way helps reduce the time-to-hire, cutting costs for businesses and their recruitment partners. In addition to the ATS gathering and analyzing candidate data, there are other metrics to consider and tools to assess those:
- Gain feedback from applicants on the recruitment and onboarding process whenever you can. Utilize surveys or feedback forms, ideally integrating the results with your ATS. This feedback is essential for honing recruitment practices and understanding what impacts time-to-hire from the candidate’s perspective.
- Cost-to-hire is another critical metric that clients and recruiters want to drive down. Reducing time to hire means hosting job postings for shorter periods of time and reducing resources used for sourcing top talent.
- Recruiters may also monitor their fill rate – how quickly jobs are filled over a period of time. Demonstrating an impressive fill rate to clients encourages them to utilize your team’s skills more often and can improve your reputation in your market.
Accurate, timely data also helps remove bias from recruitment. Hiring teams can quickly see if there is a particular gender, race, or age group gaining more interview opportunities or even preferential benefits packages. Recruiting specialists can feed this data back to clients to support a shift to fairer hiring practices.
The right data analytics tools help recruiters sell roles to candidates, but also sell themselves to prospective clients. Work with an experienced talent advisory team like MRINetwork to enhance your recruitment tech stack and gain access to tools and techniques that improve recruitment outcomes – for both candidates and businesses.