Enhancing Your Recruitment Process With Data

How to Leverage Data to Improve Your Recruitment Process

Regardless of your industry or the size of your business, people sit at the heart of your organization. Without the right people in the right positions, you’d have no way to future-proof your company and ensure its success.

However, as any HR specialist will tell you, finding the right people isn’t always as easy as it seems, especially if you’re taking your applicants through the recruiting funnel based on gut instinct and mere luck alone.

You need facts and accurate data to make excellent hiring decisions that will drive your company forward. You need to start relying on data-driven recruitment practices to ensure that the entire hiring process is streamlined, effective, and, at the end of the day, affordable.

Learn how to leverage data to improve your recruitment process and find out what benefits it brings.

Key metrics to track

To make data useful in every stage of your recruiting funnel, you need to learn which data to keep an eye on. Some of the most critical metrics to track include the following.

The time it takes to make a hire

At first glance, the time it takes to make a hire seems straightforward enough – you just have to measure the amount of time between a candidate getting to the first stage of your recruiting funnel and them accepting your job offer. On average, it takes companies about 36 business days to make a hire.

Still, that metric alone isn’t enough if you want to identify potential problems and roadblocks in your recruiting funnel. You’ll need to measure the time to hire in stages, such as the length of the application submissions, the length of interviews, negotiations, offers, and ultimate acceptance.

It will be easier to solve recruitment issues when you know exactly which stage of the funnel takes the most time and resources.

Your costs per hire

Hiring a new employee isn’t cheap – most companies spend around $4,000 per hire. However, it’s always good to assess your company’s accurate costs. The better insight you have into your recruitment expenses, the easier it will be to properly allocate your budget and keep your finances in the clear.

When calculating the costs, don’t forget to include both internal and external expenses, including recruiter salaries, the costs of your referral programs, office-related expenses, job marketing expenses, travel costs, job fair fees, and more.

Your source of applicants

Data on your source of applicants can help you better distribute your resources and identify your best recruitment channels.

In all likelihood, you’re using job boards, internal and external ads, referral programs, and even placement agencies when trying to fill a position.

Regardless of how many channels you have, their performance data can tell you whether you need to make any changes. Investing too much in job boards that don’t lead to enough new hires, for example, and not enough in referral programs that have an 80% success rate, will leave you wasting time, money, and valuable resources.

Your turnover rates

Finally, you’ll want to pay close attention to your turnover data. High turnover rates could indicate a problem in your recruiting funnel and applicant selection process or even that your onboarding program isn’t adequately developed.

This data will help you pinpoint hiring problems and develop solutions that will improve your quality of hire.

The benefits of using data in the recruitment process

Data is the key to building a solid team that shapes your company culture, improves customer experiences, and gives you a competitive edge. Data-driven recruitment offers various benefits that will impact every level of your organization.

Cut costs

Although hiring new employees will always be costly, relying on accurate recruitment data will help you minimize your expenses. You’ll perfect the hiring process, identify the best sources of applicants, reduce the waste of resources, and even improve turnover rates. Ultimately, these will lead to a significant cost reduction.

Attain the right talent

Perhaps the most significant benefit of using data in your recruitment process is that you’ll improve the quality of hire.

Without data, you’d have to guess which applicant seems well-suited to your vacant position, then hope for the best. The problem is that even though an applicant may do well in interviews, that doesn’t always translate to excellent performance once they get the job.

To attain the right talent, you’ll need to look into your source of hire, percentage of good hires across departments, average turnover rates, how long it takes a successful candidate to become productive in the workplace. With such detailed insights, you’ll know what qualities to look for in applicants.

Remove bias

Unfortunately, the hiring process can be highly biased. Consciously or not, many recruiters make biased decisions based on gender, race, ethnicity, even hair color, clothing style, and the way an applicant talks, ultimately leading to poorer quality of hire.

With data, you can eliminate at least some bias from your recruitment process since you’ll receive factual information on an applicant’s skills and competencies.

Quality of data is always more important than quantity

Although data-driven recruitment can provide you with gigabytes upon gigabytes of data, you always need to keep in mind that quality is more important than quantity. Dedicate resources to ensuring that your data collection and analysis are precise, not ensuring that you have as much data as possible.

Rely on quality solutions that minimize the risks of human error and offer accurate, actionable insights.

Final thoughts

Data-driven recruitment helps you cut costs, find new applicants faster, attain top talent, remove bias from your hiring process, etc. It enables you to build stronger teams that shape your company culture. The key to better recruitment lies in data, but it’s up to you to put it to use.