There was a time when candidates relied on local newspaper advertisements to find jobs. But, with digitisation, the recruitment landscape has drastically changed over the last few years. Now, candidates go through various social media posts, online job boards, and other digital job marketing channels for job hunting.
Though it has eased the hiring process, the target pool has also expanded drastically because people from across the globe can now apply for the same position. However, if you are implementing data-driven recruitment strategies, the chances of targeting the best-fit candidates increase. But if you’re unfamiliar with such approaches, this blog is for you!
What is a Data-Driven Approach to Hiring?
A data-driven approach to hiring refers to a recruitment process where you use tangible facts and stats to make hiring decisions. These include all your steps, from sourcing and selecting candidates to creating hiring strategies.
According to research, more than two-thirds of established companies track recruitment metrics like
- Time-to-hire
- Rate of offer acceptance
- Source-of-hire
- Retention rates
- Conversion rates
- Cost-per-hire
- Quality of hire
If you go back to some 10 years ago, you will find recruiters relied on luck and intuition while hiring talents. This had a huge possibility of engaging bad hires in business or choosing a wrong fit. But there was no way you could track the effectiveness of the recruitment strategies. This gave rise to the need to gather important candidate data using different tools.
Why? It is because these realistic insights will help you draft data-driven recruitment strategies for better hires. With them, you can target the right people, understand their interests, improve hiring quality, and reduce overall recruitment costs.
Data-Driven Approach to Recruiting Example
Let us take an example of how data-driven recruitment strategies can improve your hiring process. Suppose you are sourcing candidates from different channels like job boards, advertisements, agencies, social media, or your career page.
You can track the effectiveness of various channels by calculating their cost per hire. Whichever channel brings you more quality candidates is where you put your maximum money. For example, if you aren’t finding quality candidates from Facebook ads, you can scrap that out from your recruitment plan.
Similarly, during the selection process, your data-driven recruitment approach must gather data through resume screening, skills assessment and job interviews. This helps you make the right hiring decisions and ensure the candidate fits perfectly for the role and your organisation.
What are the Benefits of Data-Driven Recruitment Strategies?
There are numerous benefits of using data-driven recruitment strategies in your company. For example, you can limit your investments to channels that bring you the most number of quality talents.
It means such recruitment strategies help you connect with potential talents and reduce your hiring time and cost per hire. This further enables you to increase your overall company productivity and team efficiency.
Moreover, data-driven talent acquisition strategies can help you determine or redesign your hiring process. This allows you to hire the best-fit candidates, remove biases, and promote diversity and inclusivity.
Top Data-Driven Recruitment Strategies
Now that you know what is data driven strategy and how it is beneficial for your business, let’s look at some of its best practices.
Choose the Right Metrics and Data Sources
You may get overwhelmed with the huge volume of data collected by your recruitment software. Therefore, you must determine the relevant metrics to improve your recruitment process.
For example, you can consider your quality of hire, time-to-hire, cost-per-hire, retention rate, etc. In that case, you can review your business goals and list metrics that help you achieve these goals. Then, identify data sources like ATS, Google Analytics, or candidate survey feedback.
Develop a Recruitment Dashboard
Now that you have the required data, you must analyse them carefully for valuable insights. For that purpose, you need to develop a recruitment dashboard to visualise the data and market trends and determine issues in the recruitment funnel beforehand.
Therefore, by building a recruitment dashboard, you can quickly gain insights into your problems and opportunities. There are three main ways to create such a dashboard:
- Spreadsheet programs
- HR software
- Business dashboard software
Determine What Actions to Take
Tracking your recruitment data is useless until you take the necessary action. For instance, if you find a channel constantly sourcing low-quality candidates, yet you don’t stop using them, is the data of any help?
You must look into different recruitment metrics and determine what you want to do with them. Some common hiring issues that data-driven recruiting and HR analytics can solve are
- Longer time-to-hire
- Lower job offer acceptance rates
- Higher new hire turnover
Consider Your Data Limitations
Even though you can gain valuable insights by combining multiple data types, you still need to interpret your findings. It won’t solve your problems, but it will help you identify them so that you can solve problems with your knowledge and experience.
For example, your ATS may find work gaps in candidates’ resumes, but they cannot determine the reasons behind them. It means that by using only data, you cannot understand the whole story of a candidate and may end up losing a talent. Therefore, it is essential to understand and consider your data limitations and interpret your findings.
Analyse Your Past and Prepare for the Future
Data gives you valuable insights into your past recruitment strategies, their faults, and areas of improvement. It means you can clearly understand what recruitment strategies worked before and what hasn’t. Thus, it will further help you prepare recruitment strategies to improve your hiring process in the future.
How Does 6 Pence Help
You must implement data-driven recruitment strategies for hiring candidates today. This will give you valuable insights into the ins and outs of your recruitment plans and help you hire the top talents. However, if you are looking for the best source for connecting top talents, ask us!
6 Pence fulfills your temporary to permanent staffing needs and finds you quality candidates with nominal hassles. We are operational in Oman, Iraq, Bahrain and Dubai.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is using Data-driven recruitment?
Data-driven recruitment strategies refer to making objective hiring decisions depending on numerous data sources beyond your usual resume screening, interviewing, and providing job offers to candidates.
What is the Data-driven talent acquisition strategy?
A data-driven talent acquisition strategy is an approach to building a talent pipeline using tangible facts and stats.
What is the strategic approach to recruitment?
A strategic approach to recruitment refers to finding the right talent using three components, including employer branding, skilled selling, and recruitment marketing.
Also Read: Everything About the Talent Acquisition Specialist Job Description
