Chief Strategy Officer, SEI Boston.
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If your recruiting strategy consists of listing a position on a job board and sifting through the stack of robo-applies to find the one diamond in the rough, it’s time to change. The talent climate isn’t what it used to be and will continue to evolve as prospective hires flood the market in search of better pay, flexible schedules and companies that align more closely with their values. Applicants have more bargaining power than ever before and are turning the tables on hiring teams by being the first to ghost a company if the recruitment experience doesn’t deliver.
With companies vying for the attention of millions of job seekers, leaders are feeling the pressure to find and retain top talent. Because hiring is such a volume-based competition, many teams are simply throwing everything at the wall and hoping something sticks. The truth is, something probably will stick—but that something might turn out to be someone who wasn’t suitable for the position and may even quit within a few months. Now your company is back to square one.
As the job market morphs, so should our recruitment models. In the age of big data, it’s time to take a data-driven approach to hiring and pair our intuition with tangible metrics.
To Be People-First, You Need To Be Data-Driven
Data can say a lot about your recruitment strategy and, more importantly, it can reveal game-changing insights into your company culture. Given that 86% of job seekers are looking for companies actively investing in DE&I initiatives, it is crucial that we consider what our data tells us about how we're recruiting, who we’re recruiting, and where and why. Employees want a company that’s people-first, and while utilizing a data-driven hiring strategy may sound counterintuitive to reaching that coveted distinction, it’s quite the opposite.
Recruiting Generates A Lot Of Data
For many companies with a dedicated talent acquisition (TA) team, the recruiting process generates huge amounts of data daily—data that can provide invaluable insights, if leveraged correctly, that a lot of aggregators would pay good money to access. An applicant tracking system (ATS) can compile compelling submission data, including age, where people live and work, their career trajectory, the length of time they held previous jobs, certifications, software proficiencies and more.
By categorizing and analyzing that data, TA teams can begin to identify areas for improvement. If you’re getting a lot of one type of applicant, how do you need to change your strategy to be more inclusive to a broader group of candidates? If most of your submissions are from entry-level professionals for a senior-level position, how can you change the phrasing of your listing to clarify the nature of the role?
With well-organized data, you can streamline your screening, sourcing and recruitment processes and better position your brand’s people-first practices to attract the right talent.
Overhauling Your Candidate Sourcing Strategy Using Data
Hiring is costly—not only from a monetary standpoint but also because it affects productivity. Research from SHRM shows that the average cost per hire can range up to $4,700 and, shockingly, that number could be even more than three to four times the position’s salary thanks to indirect costs. As outlined by SHRM, if the hiring process for a position with a salary of $60,000 costs you as much as $180,000 to fill, you want to ensure you’re getting the most for your money.
Using data to overhaul your talent sourcing strategy doesn’t just save your company time, effort and money. It could significantly impact how talent views your brand, too. According to findings from Greenhouse, 60% of job seekers are bothered by time-consuming recruiting processes and want companies to refine the candidate experience. More than 60% said that if a company provides interview feedback, they’d be more likely to apply to other open positions within that same company. In a competitive job market, that means better brand perception and a wider pool of passive candidates for your team to source from.
Other ways you can use data to optimize how you hire include:
• Maximizing the effectiveness of inbound recruiting, which is ordinarily the least productive
• Establishing a better rapport with recruits from the start
• Benchmarking metrics you can use to track the success of campaigns
• Giving senior-level members and stakeholders insights into what the current talent climate looks like
Overcoming Recruitment Challenges
As you begin testing and understanding how data can help elevate your hiring process, you may encounter a few challenges. Knowing these from the outset can help you develop ways to avoid them and make the most out of your next hire.
Getting Bogged Down By Data
TA teams can quickly become overwhelmed by the massive amounts of data generated by applicants. Simplify the process by designating a few KPIs that are important to you. Whether that’s time-to-hire, acceptance rates or even the median age of applicants, picking a few generalized metrics to track can help you sift through the granular details and develop actionable next steps.
Forgetting About Internal Mobility
Focusing on data from external candidates can sometimes lead you to forget about nurturing talent you already have in-house. Continue using data to your advantage here and consider using internal surveys to gauge how many employees would be interested in a promotion or transfer. Then, set up a talent marketplace to start actively recruiting from within.
Go With Your Gut (And The Data)
Even the most comprehensive data can’t match your human intuition for sensing whether or not a candidate will align with your company’s values and become an important member of the team. If you want to improve your recruiting process and build a solid foundation of talent to grow your company, compare those gut feelings to your data and see how they measure up. Ultimately, you’ll find that maybe you were doing the right thing all along, and now you have the data to prove and improve upon it.
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