Talent Acquisition Analytics: A Complete Guide

A LinkedIn study found that at least 50 percent of hiring professionals use big data, which has helped them increase employee retention by 56 percent. How did they utilize that data? By developing strategies with the help of their talent acquisition platforms.

Below we’ll cover everything you need to know about talent acquisition analytics and how to integrate a talent acquisition strategy into your hiring practices.

What is talent analytics?

Talent analytics refers to a process of crunching recruitment and employee data to improve your hiring practices, performance, and other important business metrics. Talent analytics is initiated through an advanced talent analytics platform, which can help you gain insights on key metrics (quality of hire, time to hire, retention rate), predictions, and pipeline efficacy. 

How do you measure success in talent acquisition analytics

You can measure success in talent acquisition analytics by establishing benchmarks, tracking key acquisition metrics, and setting actionable goals that serve as your yardstick for success. Talent acquisition analytics should enable you to fill skills gaps, land better quality hires, and reach your strategic goals.

For example, if your goal is to improve your quality of hire or boost performance, then a talent acquisition platform can track things like:

• Retention rate
• Quality of new hires with reports and visuals
• Which hiring channels have given you the most success
• Which of your interview panels is most accurate at predicting top talent
• Segmented data between departments, offices, and users

Talent Acquisition Analytics to measure recruiting efficiency

If you’re not sure where to start, the following talent acquisition analytics metrics can give you a good idea of your overall hiring efficiency.

Retention rate

Often confused with turnover, retention looks at how long your employees stay employed within a specified period of time. You can calculate retention with the following formula:

Retention =  number of employees who remain employed during a period of time divided by # of employees at the beginning of the measuring period multiplied by 100.

Retention is helpful in showing how stable your workforce is during specified time periods. It can lead you to a number of talent management processes like onboarding, employee satisfaction, and quality of hire, among others. 

Cost per hire

Your cost per hire is a good measurement of your efficiency as a recruiter. You can determine your cost per hire through a simple formula: external cost plus internal cost divided by your total number of hires within a time period. 

Hiring analytics should help you hire better candidates, but they should also allow you to hire smarter. They can highlight the best talent pools for the kind of candidates you want, help you avoid costly hires, and allow you to find candidates more quickly. 

Quality of hire

As a hiring team, it’s important to measure pre-hire metrics to determine the efficacy of your match-making capabilities. Quality of hire is the number one pre-hire metric to do this, and you can measure quality of hire in a variety of ways. Turnover rates and new-hire performance metrics are the two most common ways to measure quality of hire. 

With turnover, you need more information because a high turnover rate might be an indication of poor management or an ineffective onboarding process. But new-hire performance measurements, like meeting sales quotas or maintaining customer satisfaction ratings, are fairly straightforward. 

Talent acquisition analytics to measure candidate experience

You are more likely to land quality hires who have a positive candidate experience within your hiring system. You can measure the candidate experience with the following metrics and strategies. 

Candidate surveys

You can create your own survey questions or use a platform, like SurveyMonkey, to find out how candidates experience your hiring process. If you’re concerned about candidates not wanting to respond after a poor experience, keep track of what people say about you on social media or hiring platforms like LinkedIn. 

Application abandonment rate

Your application abandonment rate will tell you how many candidates started filling out their applications but never actually go through with applying. You can measure your abandonment rate with the following formula:

Application abandonment rate = number of candidates that did not complete their application divided by the number of candidates that began filling out an application multiplied by 100. 

If you have a high abandonment rate, you may want to look at how your application is structured and why potential hires aren’t getting past the point of the application. 

Visitor conversion rate

At what rate do candidates who visit your career page actually apply to your job? A low visitor conversion rate can be an indication that something about your job description, job board page, or website isn’t communicating the job clearly or attractively enough. 

You can determine your visitor conversion rate with the following formula: total number of job page visitors divided by the number of visitors who applied to your job equals your visitor conversion rate. So if 80 apply to a job posting with 1,000 visitors, you have a visitor conversion rate of 8 percent.

Final thoughts: Talent acquisition analytics

One of the best ways to improve your hiring capabilities is through a transparent and collaborative talent acquisition analytics solution, like Crosschq.

Crosschq’s TalentWall integration will allow you to make better hires, more quickly, and with more transparency. Get a bird’s eye view of how well your recruiters are performing by department, office, user, and date. 

Try the demo today to learn more about how TalentWall and other Crosschq features can transform your talent acquisition analytics strategy.