Data mining your recruitment process

Decision making is hard and comes with its own stresses. Making the right call at the right time, especially when business success hangs on those decisions is a big responsibility, but it doesn’t need to be as hard as that. As recruiting teams evolve their tool kit and understanding of data practices, agencies are becoming more reliant on the information brought into the business to make the right decisions. Ensuring your recruitment agency is set up to gather that information, across sales, marketing, back-office and finance gives you the best chance of building a profitable company that makes smart decisions. Making the right call doesn’t have to be a struggle, and in today’s world of access and information, shouldn’t ever be.

Posted 23/10/2018

Mine your talent pipeline

Take a look at your pipeline of candidates and use it to pull out information that will help you optimize your hiring cycle. With the right data you can understand who is being offered initial interviews, which candidates are passing, who is dropping out at specific stages in the process, how long an average hire is taking and what the cost per head is. If you find your talent pipeline is long with a heavy drop rate, it’s time to take your data and analyse the different stages to understand where you can iterate and improve the process, and your own ability to place candidates quickly and efficiently.

Use data to improve diversity

As the struggle to hire diverse candidates continues, and as agencies struggle to attract and retain their own diverse talent, it has become more important than ever to use your data in the right way. With data analytics you can help remove unconscious bias and roadblocks to ensure objective decision making is happening at every stage of the funnel. You can also use your data to understand what percentage of gender are reacting to job adverts and if there is a dominate split, alter your application process or ads accordingly.

Data will save your internal talent

Most agency owners know that attracting and retaining their own talent is one of the biggest blockers to their growth and this is one of the key areas data mining can help. We often use data practices to make decisions regarding external stakeholders, forgetting about our own people who need as much attention and monitoring, if not more. Conduct regular employee engagement fact finding searches and start measuring the peaks and lows of your internal talent. Without the knowledge to understand why work attitudes might shift or productivity drop, you’re unable to find the right solution.

Data can improve your managers

Leadership can be difficult to navigate, especially coming from big biller status to sudden manager. Regular feedback from employees regarding managers allows for constant growth and development, resulting in higher performing teams. Collect data on the performance of your managers by measuring the productivity and bill rates from their individual teams, as well as the dips and peaks to understand how employees are reacting to managerial styles.

Data in recruitment certainly isn’t as rudimentary as application rates and CVs sent, but rather masses of opportunity to make the right decision.