Is your recruiting process data-driven? How about everyone involved in recruitment? Data-driven recruitment starts within your organization, by building a collaborative hiring team focused on what data tells them about potential hires.

Getting your hiring team to become data-driven is step one when shifting your focus from filling seats to targeting individuals who are uniquely equipped to help achieve your business' goals and drive revenues.

When your hiring practices aren’t driven by data, the results can be abysmal:

• 74% of managers and recruiters say they’ve hired the wrong person for a job

• 75% open seats in an organization are due to employee attrition

• A bad hire costs on average $14,900 in replacement costs, including lost productivity

Distributing recruitment across a collaborative team and reducing unconscious bias (often mislabeled as “gut instinct”) in the hiring process can improve not only quality of hire, but overall retention, diversity, and performance across the board.

[ See Quality of Hire Checklist and Quality of Hire Scorecard ]

What Is Data-Driven Recruiting?

A data-driven approach to recruitment leverages data sets and analytics using technologies and techniques to surface the best-match candidates from the talent pool. Top candidates are those who have the right skills, experience, and motivation to help your organization achieve its goals, and who also have the attributes that help predict quality of hire.

Talent intelligence weighs into data-driven recruiting; in fact, 22% of global organizations say that they made a bad hire due to a lack of talent intelligence information. Other important components include digitization of common steps in the recruiting process, automation of the recruitment funnel, and analysis of the existing workforce to help define what makes a good employee. 

Today’s available data is overwhelming. So is the number of applicants to the typical job posting. By using a data-driven approach to hiring, you can filter through the unnecessary data and zero in on the information that can help you make the best hires.

Data-driven recruitment has the power to redefine how your organization hires by leveraging all of the data available to make the right decision. From collecting and analyzing external candidate data to factoring in data in your own HR systems, Data-driven recruiting has the capability to uncover efficiencies and trends that can transform your hiring processes.

Examples Of Data-Driven Recruiting

There are key steps of the recruitment process when data can become invaluable. 

Sourcing

Tracking where you are getting your applicants from is a good starting point. From there you can evaluate which sources deliver the most candidates, which deliver ones that make it all the way through the hiring process, and which end up being the source of your best hires. Evaluating this data can help you track the effectiveness of different channels, calculate cost per hire, and learn where to focus your efforts in the next round of hiring.

Selection 

Recruiters must select those individuals best suited for a particular position from the broad group of applicants. Data is being collected from the moment applicants begin responding, and there is plenty to work with:

• Resumes: verifiable historical data regarding education and work experiences
• Skills assessments: Measurements of each candidate’s skills and competencies 
• Job interviews: An evaluation of interpersonal skills, and potential cultural add

Data can be skewed, and contribute to unconscious bias. Tools like Crosschq 360 can help reduce bias by replacing traditional reference checks with candidate checking that starts with a baseline from a candidate’s self-evaluation, then develops a score by adding results from peers and managers. These scores can be compared with other candidates' results across the same range of attribute-based questions.

Surfacing

Each step of the recruitment process provides more data. How can you surface the information that really matters? There are several steps to narrowing the field to a final slate of candidates, each providing a new set of data to be interpreted.

Resume review

Applicant tracking systems (ATS) are starting to feel like a game to beat for many applicants. They know automated systems and AIs are being used to filter resumes before a human even looks at the final lineup, and that 75% of resumes are never read. This leads to attempts to outwit the ATS filters, which encourages some employers to set those filters even tighter. Could you be filtering out prime prospects? Rethink what data really matters, and consider changing your ATS settings to widen your talent pool and add diversity.

Interviews

Taking a collaborative approach with interviews can help you get a more well-rounded sense of a candidate. A single point of contact makes it all too easy for unconscious bias to sneak in. The more individuals who get to meet an applicant, the more likely it is that “gut instincts” will cancel each other out, and a consensus can be reached based on attributes that matter.

Candidate checking

Reference checking used to be both a time suck and a seemingly futile endeavor. Hours spent trying to make phone contact with a listed reference often yielded not much more than a verification of employment. Crosschq 360 turns traditional reference checking on its head, by having a candidate check their own skills and then having peers and managers follow suit for a holistic view of each candidate. The data gathered in this way is free from bias and provides for apples-to-apples comparisons.

[ Free Talent Acquisition Dashboard ]

Benefits Of Data-Driven Recruiting

The benefits of data-driven recruitment will depend on how committed your organization is as a whole to the process, and whether or not you manage to get buy-in from every stakeholder. For companies that take data seriously as a cornerstone of best hiring practices, the benefits include:

• Objective decision-making, unclouded by personal bias or assumptions
• Better quality of hire, based on new hire performance and increased retention
• Decreased hiring costs, due to larger talent pools and downturns in attrition
• Enhanced candidate experience, thanks to time freed up to nurture top applicants
• Improved vacancy and hiring forecasts, based on trends identified via data analytics

Getting Your Team On The Same Page

Building a data-driven recruitment team requires the following:

Getting buy-in from all stakeholders

This means everyone who touches recruitment or has a stake in it within your organization, from the CEO to department heads to team members and crossover personnel. Without collaboration, data-driven recruitment doesn’t happen. 

Making data accessible to all parties 

This means not just making the physical data physically accessible, but making the idea of data psychologically accessible. You’ll need tools and systems that chop your data up into bite-size pieces for the lay people in your organization and any outside recruiters to understand. Not everyone is a data analyst, but anyone can learn to understand and use data to achieve business goals.

Crosschq TalentWall is the ideal tool for companies wanting to institute data-driven hiring. Anyone in your company can access the hiring funnel and view reports to “see how hiring is going” at a surface level. 

A single click lets viewers drill down into any individual piece of data as needed for clarity. Best of all, it integrates fully with your chosen ATS and updates bidirectionally and in real-time. This means hiring managers, recruiters, and other team members can make notes, move candidates forward in or out of the funnel, and see where the data shows gaps in diversity.

Are you ready to implement a data-driven approach to recruitment? Crosschq can help you transform your recruitment funnel, and start using all of that overwhelming data at your disposal to drive better results in hiring. Contact us and ask for a demonstration today.