How to Create a Data-Driven Recruitment Strategy?

Excerpt: 2022 is the year of data-driven recruiting. Data is being utilized at almost every hiring stage, and there is no going back. So if you are still not familiar with this type of recruitment, here is your guide.

Long gone are when recruiters used to post a job advertisement, pray to get the applicants and hire the most potential ones based on their intuitions. It used to be frustratingly time-consuming and often led to bad hiring decisions.

But today, with many recruitment software and analytical tools, the data-driven recruiting method dominates the industry.

With proper strategies, anyone can build a data-driven recruitment system and grow their business drastically. But before getting the “How” of the process, you must understand what data-driven recruiting is.

What is Data-Driven Recruitment?

Data-driven recruitment refers to utilizing data and metrics for making most of the hiring decisions, from shortlisting the candidate to onboarding them. Using data increases the efficiency of the hiring process by reducing the time and cost-per-hire.

Data-driven recruitment employs data science to forecast future trends, extracts data to build suitable algorithms inspired by employee-candidate performance cycles, transfers data processing from one data service provider to another through cloud migration, etc.

Experimentation with different data patterns, predictive analysis, machine learning, and analysis of recruitment metrics forms a significant part of the data-driven recruitment process.

How Can Data Help Your Recruitment Process?

Here are a few manners in which data can enhance your hiring process:

• Increases the quality of hires: Since data is used to compare and evaluate candidates, outcomes are unbiased and more logical, which increases the overall hiring quality.
• Allocate your budget: Data can help recruiters make budget adjustments quickly and track their investments. This way, you know where you spent the extra money and where more investment is required.
• Diversify the hires: Through analytics, recruiters can track and monitor their recruitment funnel to analyze the diversity ratio.
• Increases Productivity: With every piece of data in your hand, you can quickly analyze what strategy worked the best and which failed. Improving the workflow to rule out the challenges can increase productivity.
• Predict hiring outcomes: Many recruiting tools utilize data to predict the future outcome of a particular hiring cycle.
• Making more objective and legally defensible hiring decisions: Data can be beneficial while setting up a referral program, gathering candidate feedback, etc. Candidate sourcing based on data rather than intuitions is much more efficient and reliable.

Data can significantly impact your hiring process but ensure that only clean and accurate metrics are used.

4 Steps to Establish Data-Driven Recruitment Strategies

1. Set up a Process

This step involves choosing the right recruitment metrics. Indeed, you can track any recruitment data, but choosing the right metric can help you yield better outcomes.

Writing down your challenges and goals can be the best guide to choosing recruitment metrics.

Ask yourself questions like:

• Should we opt for multiple job-board subscriptions?
• How long should we keep the position open?
• How can we attract the best candidate?
• How can we achieve a high acceptance rate for the outreach message?
• What are the major hurdles we see in our hiring process?
• What are the most reliable recruiting methods and channels?
• Which data do we present to the clients?
• Should we go for ATS integration? If yes, which one? And many more.

These questions can help you assess your current situation under four categories of metrics. These are:

1. Speed-based recruitment metrics: These metrics track the time spent on hiring, right from acceptance of the offer to approving or disqualifying the candidate.
2. Quality-based recruitment metrics: This metric is best to monitor the quality of applicants, shortlisting of candidates, retention, hire per channel, team performance, candidate experience, etc.
3. Cost-based recruitment metrics: You can track your ROIs, application per channel, investments in talent poo growth, etc. By keeping these data in check, you can adjust your recruitment work model and make the overall hiring process more efficient.
4. Social Engagement-based recruitment metrics: It will give you a clear insight into your advertisement performance on various job boards and brand engagement.

2. Collect the Accurate Data

Data collection is time-consuming, but it is one of the most critical steps in establishing data-driven recruitment strategies. Any mistake at this step can disrupt the entire process. Here is how you can collect data for your recruitment metrics:

• Use your recruitment software: An Applicant Tracking System can extract and store applicants’ information in its database. You can use this data for predicting various hiring forecasts.
• Analytics Tools: Some data like career page conversion rates can be retrieved from google analytics.
• Surveys or polls: You can use the data provided by candidates and clients in feedback surveys or online polls for analyzing candidate experience performance metrics, etc.

The primary goal should be the correct input. Whether you are using recruitment software or doing it manually, the data must be accurate.

Get feedback from your stakeholders on your current data aggregation strategies and regularly conduct audits to ensure you are on the right track.

3. Act Upon Your Data

After you have all the data, now is the time to build a solid data-driven recruitment strategy. Work on one issue at a time and use data to fix them.

Some possible issues may be:

• Longer time-to-hire than expected.
  If you are struggling with maintaining the average industry time of your hiring process, here are a few tips to follow:
  • Consider diversifying your talent pool to reach the candidates faster and keep the pipeline flow constant.
  • Include qualifying questions in the job applications. AI can filter out unqualified applications so the screening can be done quickly.
  • Use AI proctored interviewing tools to quicken your hiring process.
• Low job offer acceptance rate
  After sourcing the desired candidate, it is disappointing not to be able to turn the candidate into an applicant. Here are a few ways to fix this issue:
  • Create a perfect outreach message and check its effectiveness.
  • Present more competitive offers. Study the market to decide on these offers.
  • Use candidate experience performance metrics to make sure your engagement strategies are top-notch.
• High new hire turnover
  New hire turnover shows how many employees leave the job shortly after they were onboarded. The best way to retain such employees are:
  • Establishing a positive candidate engagement platform. Research which platform can be the most viable option.
  • Don’t make new hires feel misinformed. As an agency recruiter, if you present false information about the company to the candidate, they will leave.
  • Create an effective onboarding process.

There are many issues that recruiters face throughout the recruitment process. Thankfully, data can help you mitigate those issues.

4. Know the Limitations

Though data can help you streamline your hiring process, and eliminate most of the issues, there are a few limitations:

• Data won’t tell you why your process failed or worked. You can combine various analyses to get in-depth insight, but still, you will need to interpret everything on your own.
• Data can’t solve your problems. Using data, you and your team can find solutions to your issues, but that will ultimately depend on your chosen solution. Data can only tell you where the actions are required.
• Data can’t always be reliable. After all, you and your team are creating or retrieving data; human errors are possible, which can disrupt the entire hiring process.

The shift towards data-driven recruiting has helped the recruitment industry immensely, and it will only increase in the future. Hence, it is advisable to adapt to this approach as soon as possible. From bringing better quality hires to increasing the effectiveness of your hiring process, it will be worthwhile to give it a try.