Climbing the Maturity Curve: Mastering Hiring Intelligence

The latest advantage recruiters and people leaders have in the battle for top talent is Hiring Intelligence. With the right data and analytics, Hiring Intelligence helps you hire the right person for every job, every time.

Hiring Intelligence can transform your recruitment experience, and its impact on the company bottom line, but there is a maturity curve for doing it right.

Whether your organization is already halfway up the curve, or you are starting at the bottom, working your way up will give you improved results by helping you identify top talent early in the hiring process, move quickly to get an offer on the table, and prove your results with higher post-hire performance and Quality of Hire.

What Is Hiring Intelligence?

According to our own Definitive Guide, the simple definition of Hiring Intelligence is “the use of data and analytics to continuously inform and optimize the entire hiring process.”

If you aren’t hiring the right people or aren’t hiring them fast enough, Hiring Intelligence can help. The definition itself can be broken down into three distinct actionable steps:

1. Leveraging data and analytics to their fullest potential

What’s working and what isn’t when it comes to your recruiting processes? The answers lie in data collected from:

• Candidates
• Recruiters
• Internal Diversity Datasets

Each phase of the hiring funnel can be analyzed for insights and discover patterns that signal high Quality of Hire potential.

2. Informing and optimizing for better hiring decisions 

Armed with these insights, you can start applying your new found knowledge to:

• Recruitment pipeline management
• Top talent surfacing
• Ultimate hiring decisions

You can also optimize your hiring process for faster, more effective candidate processing, targeting and securing  top talent from the interview stage to offer acceptance quickly enough to avoid losing them to a competitor.

3. Transforming the entire hiring process

Data and analytics can be implemented at every stage of the hiring funnel, starting with job descriptions and candidate sourcing and following on through:

• Sourcing
• reference checking
• Interviewing
• Offer letters

Even post-hire, this information can continue to yield positive results during the onboarding period and beyond. The true power comes when you connect your pre-hire data and decisions to post-hire outcomes and job performance. In other words, you can see which processes in the hiring process lead to great hires. 

What Is the Hiring Intelligence Maturity Curve? 

There are five different stages of the Hiring Intelligence maturity curve, spread across three phases: operational, strategic, and transformational. Each level serves as a stepping stone to the next. As your maturity increases, so does your ability to attract, hire, and keep top talent.

Level 1: Basics Tools and Processes

At the bottom of the maturity curve sit businesses that haven’t yet embraced Hiring Intelligence in ways that support recruitment. There’s no survey or feedback mechanism in place, and most existing tools and processes in use are basic and likely outdated and unintegrated.

• Standard ATS metrics
• Unreliable data
• Manual reporting
• Old-school spreadsheets
  
  

Benefit: There’s no real benefit at being behind the curve, but there’s no time like the present to move up – improvement in outcomes is almost a certainty once you get started.

Level 2: Reliable Monitoring and Reporting

The next step up brings data consistency and new efficiencies. You gain access to data and tools that help ensure stakeholder buy-in and collaboration. 

• Accurate data from multiple sources
• Reliable, real-time reporting
• Robust pipeline health monitoring
  
  

Benefit: By investing in these foundational building blocks behind Hiring Intelligence, you are able to become more operationally efficient and start to understand what data-driven hiring should look like.

Level 3: Advanced Reporting and Collaboration

As the move up the maturity curve continues, more strategy comes into play. You can start using the data you’ve analyzed to deliver and apply deep insights. 

• Recruiter and interview process management
• Executive reporting for high level takeaways
• Automated report sharing and distribution
  
  

Benefit: Advanced reporting and collaboration create a positive stakeholder/candidate feedback loop, leading to increased team collaboration.

Level 4: Optimized Planning and Hiring

Optimizing planning and hiring is the next level of the hiring Intelligence maturity curve. 

• Improve source spend targeting
• Establish improved interview programs
• Institute hiring plan tracking and reporting
• Track recruiter Net Promoter Scores (NPS)
  
  

Benefit: From strategy optimization to cost of hire tracking, you’ll begin to see how all parts of your recruitment pipeline work together and where you should focus next.

Level 5: Outcome-Based Hiring Intelligence

At the top of the maturity curve is the complete transformation of your recruitment process, where outcome-based Hiring Intelligence gets firmly behind the wheel. This is where you can truly predict Quality of Hire. With the integration of pre- and post-hire survey data, you’ll be able to fully achieve:

• Programmatic sourcing
• Continuous program optimization
• Team capacity planning
• Improved Quality of Hire metrics

Benefit: With predictive Quality of Hire analytics and modeling, you’ll uncover trends and operate strategically from start to finish, making it easier than ever to find, recruit, and retain top talent.

Why Care About “Climbing the Curve?”

Moving up the curve will directly impact your success in hiring the best people as quickly as possible. As you move up the curve from operational to transformational, you’ll be able to see the difference in your employees, your company culture, and your diversity initiatives.

Benefits of Hiring Intelligence

Embracing Hiring Intelligence can lead to an awesome future state, where your company enjoys a workforce full of peak performers and would-be leaders. The less likely loss of a critical employee won’t mean breakdown in production, because you’ll already have the next in-house expert ready to step directly into their shoes. 

From Reactive to Proactive
With full integration of data, analytics, optimization, and predictions, you’ll be able to identify potential skills gaps years in advance and take workforce planning to a completely new realm, where you’re thinking not just in terms of headcount as you scale, but expertise to match your growth and future needs.

Quality of Hire

One of the best things about climbing the curve is that as your Hiring Intelligence matures, your Quality of Hire—that all-important measure of an employee’s value to your company—starts to rise as well. 

With increased Quality of Hire comes another host of benefits: 

• • Decreased employee churn
  • Greater retention rate
  • Higher performance levels
  • Improved company culture
  • Better employee engagement  
  • Fast-tracked onboarding
  • Continual recruitment optimization

Is your company on the far left side of the curve? That’s not a problem. It just means you need to get started now on climbing to the next level, and then the one after that. 

With the right tools, data and support, taking your Hiring Intelligence to the next level is well within reach. Crosschq’s platform helps in many areas, but more than anything, we want to arm you with the information you need to make better hiring decisions. So, if you haven't already, join us on the journey by subscribing to our blog and following us on social.