How to Achieve Agile Recruiting Using a Data-Driven Approach

Hiring in your business has tremendous untapped potential to become more agile with data-driven insights. Optimizing recruiting based on key performance metrics can help your organization make smarter, faster decisions, and spot any areas that need to be addressed to streamline your hiring efforts.

Recruitment metrics are designed to measure successes and bottlenecks in the recruiting process. Metrics include key performance indicators (KPIs) that help measure progress of your recruiting. These metrics allow for more agility, pointing out trends and potential issues as they happen.

In response to the challenging labor market, companies have to get even more nimble and learn how to analyze talent data in real-time to adjust and improve their processes. Recruitment software that automatically reports on key metrics can empower your company to make those data-driven decisions in real-time. In fact, leveraging recruiting analytics to drive greater visibility, smarter automation, and more predictable hiring results is the ultimate goal of using a data-driven approach.

From the number of open reqs to application source to candidate conversion rates, time-to-fill, quality of candidate, source of hire, DEI data, and internal mobility, there is virtually no end to the recruiting data you can track. So it’s critical to find out the most important metrics to your business and then keep a clear pulse on that data.

When you leverage a data-driven approach, you can more easily deliver better candidates faster, and continuously improve how you hire talent for your company. Let’s dig in a bit further on what data-driven recruiting is, examine the benefits for your organization, and give you some examples of the types of recruiting metrics to measure.

What Is Data-Driven Recruiting?

Data-driven recruiting is an approach to hiring that uses analytics specifically for talent acquisition to inform and improve the recruiting process. Getting a handle on recruiting analytics, creating visibility, and shining a light on the most vital aspects of hiring performance is critically important. By tracking metrics, such as funnel, source performance, quality of talent pool, satisfaction scores, and diversity you can see how your recruiting strategy is performing, fine-tune what’s broken in the hiring process, and continuously improve.

Interestingly, seven percent of a company’s total operating budget is spent on talent acquisition, and the average cost per hire is about $4,000. According to Aptitude Research, 82% of companies say data plays a critical role in driving talent acquisition decisions. Yet despite these big numbers, only about 50% of companies measure their recruiting effectiveness at all. Not being on top of your data in today’s technology-enabled world is a disaster waiting to happen. And it gets more pronounced when you think of the perceptions, or misperceptions, of your key stakeholders, including your hiring managers.

The right recruitment software offers the capability to collect critical talent insights and provide real-time information on key recruiting metrics, making the hiring process more efficient for recruiters, more impactful for hiring managers, and more desirable for candidates.

Recruitment software can bring the data together all in one place so you can see up-to-date candidate experience metrics, sourcing effectiveness metrics, and overall hiring metrics. Tracking recruiting benchmarks can also help your business understand where their best sources of talent come from, so you can deliver more predictable hiring outcomes and get even more agile in your recruiting approach. Remember, recruiting is all about speed and knowing how to make faster, smarter decisions is the name of the game.

Top Benefits of Data-Driven Recruiting

When an organization is dedicated to increasing agility by leveraging recruiting data and analytics, it can benefit greatly. Here are a few of the most common benefits:

#1: Improved Sourcing Effectiveness

For too long, recruiters and hiring managers have had to find candidates based on feel and previous experience. But the sheer volume of open positions and time required to source quality candidates requires a better approach. What worked previously may not work any more. And finding the right talent for your business requires a more informed approach.

Data-driven recruiting can help you uncover more quality candidates by specifically understanding source effectiveness and measuring items like number and quality of sourced hires. Having the ability to measure, analyze, and refine your sourcing function is a key component to optimizing your entire recruiting operation. With solid strategies, defined processes, sourcing technology and thoughtful analytics, sourcing can become a core competency for any organization. This means you can find more talent from the places that deliver better hires consistently for your business.

#2: Enhanced DEI Initiatives

Leveraging data-driven insights and analytics can also enhance agile recruiting by better supporting diversity, equity, and inclusion. When you are laser focused on expanding the inclusiveness of your workforce, recruiting analytics can help you track and report on the diversity of your hiring funnel based on key DEI data. With insights to help identify top DEI candidates, you take the time and guesswork out diversity hiring, while also eliminating unconscious bias. And that helps ensure you hire candidates who will widen the perspectives of your organization and contribute to higher performance levels in your business.

#3: Decreased Hiring Costs

By focusing on the best sources for talent and streamlining the hiring process using data-driven insights, your business can help decrease overall hiring costs. Ensuring you identify and tackle roadblocks to hiring, you can decrease time-to-fill or the elapsed time between a job opening is posted and when it’s filled.

Measuring time-to-fill can help you understand the real cost of filling a role, especially since productivity and revenue can both suffer the longer a job remains open. Plus, starting with more qualified candidates allows you to save time and resources on talent that may be a poor fit for the role. Having those key insights into where you should post your jobs and identifying which channels bring the highest quality candidates takes the guesswork out of hiring, helping you reduce hiring costs and empowering you to fill positions more quickly.

#4: Improved Candidate Experience

When you collect data regarding your hiring process, it can help you identify pain points for candidates and create a more positive candidate experience overall. Identifying candidate conversion rates along the recruiting journey helps you identify candidate engagement levels, especially as you encourage candidates to apply.

Perhaps you are not converting at the point of application or you are seeing candidates fall off after the interview process. Or maybe candidates are not accepting offers and your offer-to-acceptance ratio has decreased. Whatever it is, understanding key areas throughout the candidate experience can help you pinpoint areas where potential hires are not receiving an optimal candidate experience so you can work to improve their interactions.

What Recruitment Data You Should Measure

It’s clear that data analytics yield powerful insights, but which of those insights should you focus your efforts on? Assess your current situation by first measuring specific items in these three categories. Examples are provided for each type below:

• Speed-based recruitment metrics: Time-to-fill, time to disqualify, time to offer, time to acceptance
• Quality-based recruitment metrics: Source of candidate, source of hire, applications per requisition, application completion, submission to acceptance rate, quality of hire, hiring manager satisfaction
• Cost-based recruitment metrics: Cost per hire, cost per channel, cost per applicant, cost per job board, cost per candidate conversion

With leading recruitment software, you can accurately capture and analyze recruitment data and take charge of identifying where you can improve your hiring process and deliver an optimal candidate experience.

Get More Agile with Data-Driven Recruiting

To get the most value from your recruiting data, you need real-time analytics that will improve your responsiveness and ability to make better hiring decisions. When you leverage the right recruiting data for your business, you can become more in tune with the performance of your talent acquisition function and also outperform your competition in connecting with candidates.

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