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Talent Acquisition Data: Why It’s Essential to Recruiting

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As you advance your talent acquisition career, you’ll quickly fall behind unless you understand the importance of data-driven recruiting and how it enables the right decision-making.

The recruitment process is a treasure trove of data. When mined carefully, it reveals critical information on how to hire, when to hire, how much to spend on hiring, and how well candidates will perform if they are hired. That pretty much covers all the bases – without the right data, you have no way of telling for sure if your recruitment process is broken or working. It also spots any bottlenecks in the process, which could cause an organization to lose a potentially great employee.

What Does Data-Driven Recruiting Look Like?

Data-driven recruiting is the use of data to optimize a hiring process and all the sub-processes behind it. As important as they are, it’s more than just looking at statistics like time to hire, pass-through rates, and quality of hire. It enables recruiting pros to dive deeper and produce fact-based evidence, versus relying on gut feelings or assumptions to make candidate selections. It can significantly reduce or even eliminate the chance of making a bad hire, which can be devastating on many levels, including the financial, morale, business, and reputational fronts.

  • The most important aspect of a hiring process should be the measurement of candidate skills and abilities in an unbiased, non-adverse way. Data doesn’t lie, nor does it play favorites. It allows recruiters to go beyond resumes and hiring based on proxies like education and previous employment or using tests created in-house. Again, these may all be good – just not always good enough.

Here are some basic steps in implementing or enhancing data-driven recruiting:

  • It starts with identifying a specific team within an organization to use as a prototype. It makes the most sense to start with one of the most business-critical departments or functions, such as engineering or product development.
  • All the steps in the recruitment process for that particular team should then be documented in detail. This includes role identification, job descriptions, job postings, the steps a candidate takes to apply, resume review, screening calls, in-person interviews, and reference checks. This is critical to getting team buy-in.
  • About that buy-in: You need collaboration if you’re going to improve recruitment. So, once the full existing recruitment process for a pilot team has been mapped out, a meeting should be held with everyone involved, to show them what’s been found and pitch them on the benefits of data-driven recruiting. Illustrate how it streamlines workflow, reduces bias, saves time, and effectively fills any skills gaps in their team. Once you’ve sold them – and it shouldn’t be hard – it’s time to design your new data-driven recruiting process together.
  • Success requires the right tools: analytics and dashboards that allow for data visualization and its use to predict future trends and actions. An HRIS is a great tool for storing, tracking, and organizing information and streamlining recruiting activities.

Grow Your Career

At Search Wizards, we represent top recruiting and sourcing talent. We have boatloads of additional resources for you – and we look forward to matching you with our amazing client network as you grow your recruiting career. Success awaits! Contact us today to learn more.

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