Enhancing Your HR Reporting with Centralized Hiring Data

Your small business is different than larger enterprise companies in several ways.

One key difference is that bigger businesses have — well — bigger human resources teams. And within these HR departments, there are multiple people focused on HR reporting.

Your SMB likely has just one or maybe two HR professionals who tackle important tasks daily, with HR reporting tied to your recruiting efforts possibly one of them.

Although it may be challenging to find the time, collecting, analyzing, and taking action on HR data to ensure your business can make informed decisions is critical.

Using analytics to drive data-driven improvements requires insights from your human resources metrics that will also enhance your entire hiring process.

What HR reporting involves today — and why it’s so important

If you’re worried about falling behind in leveraging human resources analytics, don’t worry. It’s something that many small businesses struggle with.

“New HR professionals … are just starting to dip their toes into data,” Employee Cycle CEO Bruce Marable wrote for SHRM. “In fact, most HR leaders are tracking reports and metrics in spreadsheets. They aren’t sure what should be measured, how to calculate data, or even what to do with data.”

The good news is you can get going with HR data collection with relative ease using recruiting software with built-in recruiting reporting capabilities. Once implemented, you can then connect this solution to your other HR systems that house workforce data.

This connected human resources tech setup offers two big benefits for your small business:

• 1) Your hiring team can track candidate movement from one hiring stage to the next and ensure roles are filled quickly and efficiently, all from one platform. Data tied to new hires can then sync from this solution to your workforce-centric HR tech to create employee profiles.
• 2) From your small business recruiting software, you can send business leaders and other hiring stakeholders custom HR reports that highlight the best channels to source candidates and get applicants, which workflows slow down and speed up recruiting cycles, and other elements of your hiring process. Once candidates are hired, you can sync their profiles to your employee database to create new employee records and custom reports there as well.

The 2023 Employ Recruiter Nation Report found 24% of HR decision-makers plan to increase investment in reporting and analytics technology in 2024. This includes many human resources leaders at small businesses who know the importance of data to their HR teams’ success.

If you’re looking to get going with HR reporting, the best place to start is to learn the core HR metrics to monitor and invest in leading tech.

On the hiring side of your HR operations, you need a purpose-built applicant tracking system (ATS) with out-of-the-box talent analytics that every hiring team member can easily use.

Understanding key metrics tied to your HR reporting process

Before explaining the tech you need to succeed with HR reporting, let’s cover the basics around human resources metrics. There are two types of HR data your team must monitor regularly.

HR metrics associated with your workforce

First up, consider data that focuses on your employees, including:

• Employee productivity. These metrics can be analyzed by individual workers, entire teams, and your small business at large. Basically, you can see how employee output, and even the number of hours worked, contributes to revenue growth and other improvements company-wide.
• Employee engagement. The number of employees who quit, worker absenteeism, and employee satisfaction are just a few core HR metrics small businesses track and report on over time.
• Employee retention. Tracking turnover and retention over time gives SMBs insight into bigger-picture trends they need to address. For example, if employees in certain types of roles are leaving at a high rate, small business leaders can figure out what’s causing that. This metric also informs short-term hiring needs for high-priority positions.

Remember: Your small business leaders need to be kept in the know regarding workforce trends.  

Yet, Sapient Insights Group research found 40+% of HR teams only shared some critical HR metrics with their leaders monthly in 2022. This included compensation reports and performance management reports.

Your small business leaders need to be in the know regarding all workforce trends.

Conducting regular human resources reporting around these metrics is the best way to ensure you can make decisions that improve both your company culture and bottom line.

HR metrics related to your recruiting efforts

Th above part of the HR reporting process focuses on your workforce. But, you also need an ATS with built-in analytics that supports reporting on your SMB’s recruiting outcomes as well.

Advanced Visual Reporting (AVR) from JazzHR simplifies the talent analytics experience for small business recruiters. Easy-to-navigate dashboards offer insights into three facets of recruiting:

• Sourcing effectiveness. See how far applicants and sourced candidates move through the hiring funnel, including how many job seekers are extended offers and hired. Get more granular with source analysis to see which specific channels attract the best talent, including job boards, career sites, internal referrers, and social media sites.
• Workflow stages. Some small businesses use the same recruiting pipeline stages, including initial screening calls, panel interviews, pre-employment assessments, and offers submissions to candidates. Other SMBs create additional custom stages for more specific parts of the recruiting cycle where candidates are awaiting feedback or have completed a final interview. Regardless of the workflows they use, JazzHR customers can track candidate progression and easily report on recruiting outcomes using AVR.
• Hiring process speed. There’s time to fill — the number of days between when a requisition is approved to when a new hire starts. And then, there’s time to hire — the number of days between when a recruiter engages an applicant or sourced candidate to when they accept an offer. Both HR metrics can both be easily monitored in AVR and used to identify issues with certain Workflows to speed up your overall hiring process.

The Employ Recruiter Nation Report said it best. Human resources professionals at companies of all kinds, including SMBs, must routinely identify “where bottlenecks exist in the recruiting process and uncover opportunities to speed up time to hire and boost the quality of candidates.”

With an ATS like JazzHR, you can put an HR reporting process in place that helps you do just that.

Why an ATS is the perfect HR reporting software for your business

Of course, our best-in-class applicant tracking system offers much more than just HR reporting capabilities. JazzHR is a robust ATS with many features that help small businesses, including:

• Universal role posting to free and paid job boards with just a single click
• Resume uploader and parser to simplify and streamline applicant review
• Seamless data imports from spreadsheets and exports to HRIS software
• Email syncs to organize historical candidate communications in one place
• Searchable database to resurface previous applicants and sourced talent
• Integrations with LinkedIn, Zoom, and many other recruiting and HR tools
• Self-scheduling functionality to allow candidates to schedule interviews
• Customizable, pre-set job offer templates and offer documentation storage

But, it’s the in-depth, easy-to-use analytics that provide insights into these capabilities that makes ongoing improvement with your recruiting and hiring possible. And it ensures you can regularly share custom HR reports with your leadership team.

Discover how small businesses develop numerous types of HR reports and enhance their data-driven hiring efforts with Advanced Visual Reporting. Chat with our team today to learn more.