Recruitment Intelligence: How to Analyze Your Recruitment Efforts

Data should be the cornerstone of an effective recruitment strategy for any organization. In the wor...



Posted by Lisa Farrell, Marketing Manager on May 19 2015
Lisa Farrell, Marketing Manager
big data
Data should be the cornerstone of an effective recruitment strategy for any organization.

In the world before data, all anyone had were best guesses, rough estimates, and eyeballed figures. How did we get by without hard numbers to back up what we believed to be true, or even to contradict our estimates? Though human intuition, personal experience, and inference are crucial aspects of any analysis, data must also play a significant role.

“How did we get by without hard numbers to back up what we believed to be true?”

For employers, a recruiting strategy must contain numerical analysis and data—otherwise, it isn’t a strategy at all, according to CareerBuilder. Recruiters can’t use the spaghetti method for hiring: throwing a job posting on the wall and hoping it sticks. As content strategist Mike Loukides pointed out, “The future belongs to the companies [that] figure out how to collect and use data successfully.”

With that in mind, organizations must answer this question: How exactly do we go about collecting meaningful data and using it to determine how to improve our recruitment efforts? There are three primary ways to do so.

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1. Don’t use a human to do a computer’s work
When it comes to number crunching, it’s hard to beat a machine. It’s true, there are math prodigies out there who can beat the computer in chess and solve equations faster than you can write them out, but for the purposes of recruiting, it’s best to leave the data gathering to the machines. Fortunately, there is software out there designed specifically for these purposes—to collect, trend, and analyze sets of data.

With the right applicant tracking system and software, companies can find out how many and what types of candidates they receive, from where they came, what trends emerge, and other valuable information.

Data analysis reveals trends the naked eye is unable to identify.
Data analysis reveals trends the naked eye is unable to identify.

2. Take a big-picture approach
In analytics terms that means: use Big Data. So many factors go into the success of any project, and recruiting is no exception. If an organization’s efforts aren’t yielding the right candidates and they don’t know why, Big Data can reveal peripheral conditions that could he harming staffing. But it goes beyond finding the right applicants, according to The Undercover Recruiter.

Big Data can also help a company know when it will need to recruit, and how many employees will be necessary at a given time in the future. In other words, Big Data provides crucial insights that may influence how an organization acts in a broad sense.

3. Be predictive as opposed to retroactive
Analytics don’t reach their full potential if they’re only used to determine what happened, how it happened, and why it happened. These three steps comprise data analysis, according to SmartRecruiters. Predictive analysis—as its name suggests—allows the user to determine what may happen in the future and how certain behaviors can influence the timing and outcome of these events.

The latter strategy is the clear winner. Knowing what happened in the past can help a company improve its future actions, but the ability to look ahead and predict conditions that have not yet arisen is truly what sets apart an excellent, data-driven recruitment strategy.

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