Is Dirty Data Impacting Your Hiring?

The Ultimate ATS Data Hygiene Checklist

Are you certain that you have great candidates in your pipeline, but don’t know how to surface them using your ATS? Do you know if you’re losing them somewhere in the process, or just wonder if that may be the case? When you calculate Time to Fill and Time to Hire, are you certain they’re giving you an accurate picture of your hiring situation?

Messy data could be killing your chances of identifying and engaging key candidates, making informed decisions and hiring the best – simply because of poor data hygiene. When it comes to your hiring pipeline, data provided by your ATS is a major driver, so data hygiene / cleaning is an undeniably critical best practice.

Key Takeaways:

1. Clean data can help you improve communication, processes, and outcomes
2. Proper data management can uncover insights that help you improve efficiencies
3. Ongoing data hygiene can help you develop better data strategies for the future

Top Data Pain Points For Recruiters

The data you add to and receive from your ATS can make or break your hiring funnel. Are you experiencing any of these issues?

• Spending hours trying to extract data and create reports
• Ending up with reports that are sluggish, out-of-date or confusing
• Bemoaning the poor accuracy of your ATS data 
• Realizing you and your team have no real idea what’s actually going on

The damage poor data hygiene can do is real. Check out these stats from industry leaders:

Realizing you hired the wrong person

According to a study conducted by CareerBuilder, 74% of employers admit to hiring the wrong person for a position, and one of the main reasons cited is inaccurate or incomplete data in recruiting software.

Fighting against increased turnover and decreased productivity

A survey by SHRM (Society for Human Resource Management) found that 69% of HR professionals believe that bad data hygiene in recruiting software leads to poor hiring decisions, resulting in increased turnover rates and decreased productivity.

Struggling with duplicate or incomplete records

A report by Aptitude Research Partners revealed that 56% of organizations struggle with duplicate candidate records in their recruiting databases, leading to confusion, inefficiency, and wasted resources.

Dealing with hiring inefficiency and increases in time-to-hire

The Brandon Hall Group conducted a study that found organizations with poor data hygiene in their recruiting software experienced a 23% decrease in overall hiring efficiency and a 36% increase in time-to-fill positions.

Missing out on great candidates due to messy data

KarmaCheck’s 2023 State of Hiring and Recruiting Report revealed that 71% of recruiting leaders report missing out on great candidates due to messy data in their ATS, increasing both time-to-fill and cost-per-hire.

Understanding What Impacts Data Hygiene 

Data hygiene can be negatively impacted by multiple factors, including:

Manual data input by members of your team

Humans make mistakes. When your team is entering data manually to add candidates to your hiring funnel, these mistakes can swiftly multiply. Common data entry mistakes include:

• Duplicate entries
• Incomplete entries
• Entries with typos
• Mismatches with your ATS format

Habitual checking and cleaning of data in your ATS can ensure all entries are correct, complete, and in the right format.

Reports that aren’t real-time

Another mess occurs when data doesn't update immediately between your ATS and whatever other tools and platforms you’re using as part of your recruitment strategy. If the data you’re looking at is out-of-date, you could be missing out on high-quality candidates who would be perfect for the role but aren’t showing up for you—or conversely, you could be wasting time pursuing candidates who have already withdrawn from the recruitment process.

Our Checklist for Taking Your Data From Dirty to Squeaky Clean

Ensuring data hygiene is an ongoing team effort. Here’s our ultimate checklist for clean data:

1. Collect comprehensive data

Ensure your ATS has the whole picture by mandating complete and accurate data entry. This means everyone on your team needs a refresher course on how to ensure any data they add to the system is accurate, complete, and in the right format. You may need to incentivize your team with a rewards system based on data hygiene metrics to drive home the importance of this step.

2. Organize your data correctly

Look at the visual pipeline from start to finish: are there information gaps that could be filled by organizing and utilizing your data more efficiently? Categorize your ATS data into useful segments that answer questions about candidate location, seniority level, and DEIB markers. “Bucketing” data into smaller and smaller containers can help you understand it more clearly and leverage it more effectively.

3. Eliminate data excess

Excess data is one of the biggest enemies of data hygiene. In addition to straight up duplication, you can have other types of excess data that muddy the waters. One of the worst types of excess data is outliers. Outliers mess up your metrics; they can skew your datasets in one direction or another. Finding and removing these outliers and using median over mean calculations can help you arrive at better averages when conducting metrics measurements.

4. Start benchmarking

Evaluate the metrics that matter. If you’re comparing qualified candidates to unqualified candidates, your results can be skewed. Qualified candidates, offer acceptance, time-to-hire, cost-per-hire, and Quality of Hire are examples of metrics that truly matter.  Benchmark new jobs against old ones, and compare pre-hire evaluations with post-hire success to reach meaningful conclusions. These key candidate quality indicators can help.

Benefits of Clean Data

Having squeaky clean data to work with can make everyone’s job easier. Here’s what you can expect once you clean up your data:

1. Get 10+ hours back a week thanks to eliminating repetitive manual reports 
2. Identify and fix your data errors immediately
3. Visualize your entire recruiting process step by step
4. See how long candidates have been in each stage 
5. Get alerts if a candidate is “stuck” in a stage for too long
6. Achieve real-time data filtering

With the right tools, you can sync your recruiters and hiring managers, significantly cut time spent on manual reporting, and reduce time-to-hire by 40% while improving Quality of Hire. 

Introducing Crosschq: Making Data Hygiene Easy

It's time to stop living with dirty data, and get the tools you need to clean up the mess and make recruiting easier.

Introducing your new data command center: TalentWall

Crosschq provides you with a real-time, interactive overlay for your ATS data, and surfaces what you and your team really need to know about your candidates and their status. 

Drag-and-drop functionality in TalentWall allows easy changes that update instantly and automatically in the ATS, while ATS activity also updates instantly on the Wall.

Your recruiters can back out of the ATS almost entirely and stay on the Wall, reviewing candidate data, watching candidates progress through the pipeline, and adding new notes and data points as they become available.  

TalentWall helps you:

• Improve recruiter efficiency with full visibility into the performance of every department, hiring team, hiring cohort and business unit. 
• Optimize your hiring process by identifying inefficiencies in your interview process with real-time insights into key hiring metrics. 
• Improve stakeholder collaboration with the ability to quickly and easily share reports and dashboards with your hiring team. 
  
  

Does TalentWall really work?

Don’t take just our word for it: here’s what companies using TalentWall have to say:

Roku’s Head of Talent says, “TalentWall lights up data from Greenhouse in a way that is actionable, sensible, logical, and transparent.”

“This is the best recruiting tool I've seen so far in my career. If it got taken away from us at this point, I’d cry. “ - Natalie Dannage, Head of Talent, Headway

Big companies like Pinterest, One Medical, and ZipRecruiter have gotten their data in order by using the Wall to highlight candidates falling through the cracks while clearly displaying passthrough rates, decreasing their time-to-fill. 

TalentWall provides a way to quickly and easily “scrub” your pipeline as needed and ensure best candidate management practices are being used. It has multiple modules specifically designed to make recruiting easier.

Are you ready to get rid of dirty data and start leveraging your ATS for faster, better, cleaner hiring? Ask for a demonstration today.