Data-Driven Recruitment: Scale Up Hiring Process

Recruiters today leave no stone unturned to ensure the best recruitment experience. Hiring managers think of new & unique ways to include in their recruitment best practices. Diversity at the workplace, hiring candidates with disabilities, and bringing back women to work after long gaps—are some of the highlights of a new style of hiring now. However, a few years back the recruitment scenario wasn’t like this. 

The traditional hiring process would mostly depend on intuition or luck—more than data or facts. There was no guaranteed way of knowing whether the hiring methods were working or not—HRs would only proceed on the basis of ‘assumption’. Coming back to the present times, when everything is based on data, with analytics tools available in the market—data-driven recruitment is a reality. 

What is Data-Driven Recruitment? 

While ‘data-driven’ has been a buzzword for many aspects for quite a long time, data-driven recruitment is the use of quantifiable data that creates, tracks and optimizes the hiring strategy of every organization. The whole point of using data in the recruitment process is to ensure that recruiters or hiring managers don’t make hiring decisions based on assumptions. 

Data-driven recruitment has proven to be an efficient method in attracting top talent, keeping note of recruitment metrics, and building great teams. By making only a few changes in the recruitment methods—you can reap the maximum benefits of data-driven recruitment. You need not be tech giants in order to use data-driven recruiting—you just need to have a team that knows about it.

How Data-Driven Recruitment is Helping Hiring Teams

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Using data in the hiring process improves the quality of hire. With data, it becomes easier to fast forward the hiring process and approach the most suitable candidates. Want to know in detail about how data-driven recruitment helps in hiring? Here’s how—

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• Set aside your budget. It’s important to keep track of your budget allotted for the recruitment process. Tracking sources helps in taking note of the recruitment channels that bring in the most talented or qualified candidates. 

• Improve efficiency. With the right tools, you can check the number of emails exchanged between your hiring teams and the candidates. By looking at the time taken at each step, you may want to bring on some changes—speed up wherever necessary.

• Modify hiring issues. Try modifying the set of questions prepared for interviewing candidates. Redesign the page or tweak questions as per the need. Again, look at what you might be missing out on. For instance, maintaining diversity—if you feel a few groups of candidates aren’t represented well.

• Forecast the needs. You need to assess the number of applications you want to flow in. it makes sense to keep a number in mind regarding the applicants you want to interview. In case, there are too few candidates, you may need to source again. 

• Structured interviews. To ensure an effective interview method, prepare a structured interview that makes the hiring process seamless. Secure the best results from the interviews you hold. 

• Make improvements. Include programs that can bring positive change to the recruitment process. For example, including employee referral programs may bring effective changes. Show your team supportive data on to how such a program can help.

How To Incorporate Data In Hiring?

We see organizations taking a different approach to hire these days. Most of it is data-centric, for which organizations are drawing huge advantages. For teams that are most likely to shift to data-driven hiring, we would suggest you few ideas to incorporate into your process—

Selecting the proper metrics

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Select a few hiring metrics that track your activities. Like many companies, it’s essential to know the quality of hire. The metrics you employ would let you know the overall effectiveness of your recruitment process. What you can possibly measure otherwise are— the budget for each hire, time is taken to hire one candidate, source from where a candidate is hired, candidate feedback, and rate of job offer acceptance. 

The importance given to each kind of data varies with each organization. It’s up to the senior leaders and hiring managers to decide which data they want to emphasize. To know which data hiring managers are more interested in, here are a few things to ask:

• What data is usually important to help in your hiring process?

• What challenges do you face while hiring?

• Which recruiting sources aren’t able to provide effective results?

• What would make a hiring successful according to you?

Efficiently collecting data

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As we know data collection is time taking, we appreciate efforts that would help us collect the best data in a short period of time. The aim is to make the process as quick as possible. Here’s how you can pace up the process of collecting data—

• Make the best use of ATS

Every recruiter is acquainted with ATS as part of their routine recruiting activities. The applicant tracking system has some amazing features that include reporting capabilities. With this, you’ll be able to analyze interviews better. 

• Find ways to collect data

Take help from Google Analytics—where you can get to know about the career page conversion rates easily. Else, it’s easy to gather data from surveys taken among candidates. 

Utilize data in the right way

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After collecting data, you need to decide what to do with the data. Determine how to include the data in your hiring process. There are certain recruiting issues commonly faced by recruiters—address those issues with data.

Long hiring time

There’s a standard industry time taken by organizations to hire. If you find out that you take more time than that, you might have to rework. Find out which step is consuming more time than required.  

• Sourcing. Try changing your sourcing methods—possibly the current method is taking up more time. Using a sourcing tool can help tackle the situation—leading to faster talent hire. Build a talent pipeline more efficiently than you’ve imagined.

• Shortlisting. Keep aside a set of questions to be included in the job application form. Prepare questions even for the phone screening stage. While speaking to candidates over the phone, you may well make the first step of screening. 

• Interviews. Make use of software that will schedule interviews with candidates and hiring managers. It becomes much easier to keep track of the interviews that are up in line.   

• Offer letters. Write exceptionally well-structured offer letters that perfectly cover details about the role. The letter should have the information that appeals to the candidates. It must entice the candidate to move forward with the offer. 

Decreased job acceptance rates

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When the best candidates turn down the offer, it leads to more expenses and uncertainty about the role. It’s almost a nightmare for every recruiter when they finally cannot get a candidate onboard. However, such a scenario can take place often as candidates always have more than one choice in their hands. But when this happens almost every time you’re hiring, you must make a few changes—

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• Create lucrative job opportunities. Like every other organization that wants to stay ahead in the hiring game, delve into the various platforms such as Glassdoor to find out what’s trending. 

• Get to know the interest of candidates. In the initial conversations with the candidates, try to understand their views on the role they’re interviewed for. It’s easy to assess an understanding of the role from phone interviews.

• Create a great candidate experience. Every team member that comes to talk with the candidate must have a positive attitude. The aim should be to treat the candidate properly. When a candidate feels comfortable during the interview, it creates a great overall experience. 

• Job letters should reflect the truth. Maintaining uniformity in the information shared with the candidate during and after the interview is considered optimal. Stick to what you’ve told during the interview, even in the offer letter.

Increased new hire leave rate

Most organizations witness the scenario of new hire turnover where candidates leave soon after they’re hired. There’s almost nothing one can do to put an end to this. But, there are remedies to possibly reduce such a number. 

• Informing candidates about the role. Candidates must know every single detail about the role—duties, responsibilities, and expectations. And, this should be informed before the candidate receives the offer letter. Everything a hiring manager says during the interview must reflect on the offer letter. If a candidate finds out anything different in the offer letter, they might outright reject the offer.

• Build a planned onboarding process. Make every step count while onboarding a candidate. Ensure that the candidate feels important and comfortable from the beginning. Start with a welcome email when the candidate is onboarding. Aim to make the candidate feel at ease with the steps. Candidates should receive the right training from the first day of their role. 

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Be aware of the restrictions on data

-Data is not useful to know why something happens. You may numerically get some results but you still need to interpret the data.

-Data cannot always solve your issues. It’s good to have data on how hiring teams are doing in terms of their performance. However, you would have to find solutions to some problems on your own.

-Rely on tools that grade interviews. For example, consider using NurtureBox which allows users to track applications & stages of interviews. 

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 Plan for the next step using data

Data-driven recruitment can be entirely based on data, depending on what you want to do with it. Hiring teams can make better decisions when they have strong data in hand. Data shows the way to what worked for the hiring team earlier & what didn’t. Improve future hiring decisions with reliable data. Utilize data in the best way possible. 

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How To Choose The Right Data Points

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There are a variety of recruitment data to choose from. Such data typically includes time-based metrics, costs, and recruitment channels. The best is to know which performance indicators are key to your recruitment process. With this knowledge, you can go ahead and create the perfect plan for data-driven recruiting.

If you’re wondering what could possibly be the key performance indicators, here are some of them— It could be cost-based techniques. Much like the cost per hire, talent pool growth, and applications on each channel. Source of hire, retention rates, candidates in each hire, and submission to acceptance rate are some of the quality-based recruitment techniques. Of course, the time is taken or the speed with which each step time to hire, job acceptance, and approval time—all are taken into account. 

You’re bound to have an overwhelming influx of data. Sit down with your team to discuss the relevant goals & decide on the KPIs required. Focus on the data that suit your requirements the most. For instance, if your goal is to reduce costs on recruitment, optimize hiring strategy, and improve the quality of hires, then take a look at the metrics. 

How To Improve The Recruitment Process—Collect & Analyze

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The goal behind every recruitment strategy is to have a successful hiring process. Recruitment process must be efficient & effective for both the candidates as well as hiring teams. Additionally, there are few other things that can be done to improve the recruitment process—

1. Craft attractive job ads

Job advertisements must be clear and have all the information necessary for the candidates. Hiring managers should work with other teams to think about what they want to include in their job ads. Remember to include specific details about the job. Choose job titles that are easy to understand. Provide description about the company culture for candidates to get idea about work ethics. Use clear language & avoid any kind of jargon. 

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2. Work on your candidate sourcing

Candidate sourcing is a hot topic among recruiters now because professionals want to discover new opportunities. You can approach passive candidates with sourcing techniques & increasing the chances of hire. Sourcing can be done through various ways like by using social media, attending events, using boolean search, and investing in sourcing tools. For sourcing tools, try NurtureBox that comes with sourcing automation features to make hiring easier. 

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3. Building resourceful talent pipelines

Keep your pipelines ready for near future hiring. Fill the pipeline with skilled & talented professionals. Sourcing candidates before any vacancy, gives you enough time to engage with the candidate. When a suitable role opens up, you know whom to hire. Candidates that have interacted with you are also on a better position to opt for the role. Decide on the roles that would fill the pipeline, look for ex-employees, source passive candidates, and engage with candidates.

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4. Improve at every stage of recruitment

Having checklists handy makes your recruitment process more organized. Use the checklists to prepare interview questions. All that is done to have candidate information before you speak to them. Personalizing emails are crucial to instigate interest among candidates. Recruiting email templates must be updated regularly. For that you can try personalized JD feature of NurtureBox that has built-in templates & the option to create more templates. 

Benefits of Having Data-Driven Recruitment 

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As Clive Humby nicely points out that data is the new oil—it’s valuable than ever & has to be refined to be put to use. The truth is data has to be analyzed to know its worth. 

We have discussed in detail about how data regulates the recruitment space and what it brings for a seamless hiring process. Recruiters are grateful for the immense benefits that data contributes to their daily recruiting tasks. The idea is to build a strong data-driven recruitment strategy to experience efficient recruitment process. Data-driven recruitment embraces the advantages of emerging technologies—such as artificial intelligence and machine learning. 

With a perfect AI-powered data driven recruitment strategy, you should be able to achieve these for your organization—

• Hire without human errors
• Increasingly reduce cost per hiring
• Improve hiring results
• Much better candidate experience
• Lesser candidate drop-offs
• Hiring happens faster
• Quality of hire increases

For organizations that haven’t yet thought of focusing on data-driven recruitment—now is your time! Data has brought huge changes in the different industries and recruitment is no exception. The ideal way forward is to think about the best possibilities that data brings. Make things a reality with the right data in hand. Data driven recruitment has proven to be the game changer in shaping the future of talent acquisition. 

Deciding on whether you want to see the change in your recruitment strategy—include the valuable data insights. Know what your organization is missing out on the growth possibilities.