The Best Companies Are Embracing Data-Driven Recruiting – Are You?

With unemployment rates starting to recover after the COVID-19 pandemic, it’s natural to assume that employers are experiencing a challenging recruiting environment. The Great Resignation is also causing issues with hiring. While it can certainly appear daunting, taking this assumption at face value misses an equally crucial recruiting metric.

The other key market trend to consider is decreased employee tenure. As the chart below illustrates, median job tenure continues to decline across all age cohorts. The 20-30-year-old cohort is hovering at one year, and the 30-40-year-old cohort sits at three years.

Source: Conversable Economist

The combination of these two data points tells a much different story. The volume of employees moving jobs has never been higher, but the competition for those employees has also never been higher.

So how are the best companies winning in this environment? What they’re not doing is relying on passive or reactive recruiting tactics like posting on job boards or marketplaces. They’re rehauling the entire recruitment process by investing heavily in data, AI, and analytics to develop proactive, predictable recruiting programs.

Dr. John Sullivan’s recent ERE post does a great job highlighting where the top ten most desirable companies invest their recruiting dollars. Here’s a hint, even the most in-demand US companies aren’t relying on reactive recruiting strategies. They are investing in data-driven hiring capabilities and strategies. In fact, in the article, the first six of the top ten areas highlighted are all focused on hiring data.

1. Shifting to Data-Driven Recruiting

Commit to making all major talent acquisition decisions based on data. This will help your candidate by using data that focuses on the best factors that can attract the best candidates.

Include data into your candidate supply, sourcing strategy, hiring managers’ funnel, and applicant quality. Focus on optimizing the weak conversion areas throughout your entire hiring process.

You need to gather good data to run your AI and recruiting technology efficiently. However, ensure that you’re choosing good data. If you’re using bad data, then your hiring process will suffer.

2. Business-Impact Recruiting

Try to understand how hiring processes are directly tied to business performance. Measure how a reduction in time-to-fill or an increase in quality hires drives increased revenue (through marketing, sales, service) and product timelines (through engineers, product developers, etc.).

You should use data to help focus and prioritize recruiting resources and use data to fix that.

3. The Application of AI/Machine Learning

Use the latest data-driven technology to identify more relevant and diverse candidates faster, expand diversity, increase engagement, improve candidate experience, and ultimately increase new hires conversion rates.

You’ll have to come to terms with the fact that many of your recruiting tools might become obsolete. You’ll need to rehaul everything to include m machine learning and AI, but there are many benefits to taking the time to improve that.

For example, you’ll be able to use AI to screen resumes, help with interviews, reduce unconscious biases, improve communication channels, and have an effective sourcing strategy.

4. Other Technology Applications Beyond AI

Explore opportunities to leverage technology like automated interview scheduling, video interviews, candidate nurturing, and assessments to enhance a data-driven recruiting process.

You can use AI to conduct remote interviews, send out automated assessments, match candidates to ideal jobs, schedule interviews, chat with candidates, and source candidates.

5. Pipeline Continuous Recruiting

Getting away from a cold start to a continuous candidate nurturing approach, leveraging AI and automation to help drive the hiring process.

Your talent acquisition team will want to consider using data to create an online talent community or a corporate alumni group.

6. Targeted and Diversity Hiring

Companies are moving away from human bias and leveraging data-driven candidate identification techniques.

This isn’t the first time we’ve heard about data-driven recruiting. The heavily attended Greenhouse customer conference this past summer featured an entire track on data-driven recruiting for the first time. We attended each session and summarized the highlights, including sessions on forecasting/planning, sourcing, and screening.

If the most desirable and heavily resourced companies invest in data-driven recruiting, how can the rest of us compete? There are a few simple steps you can take:

• Go on offense. Don’t rely on job boards and hiring marketplaces. Get proactive by identifying and engaging qualified candidates, leveraging data-driven AI tools to improve productivity and success.
• Focus on funnel metrics. Develop a clear understanding of how many candidates you need to engage at the top of the funnel to deliver the end hiring results, and measure how they convert throughout the hiring funnel. Connect these results to actual business outcomes to show ROI.
• Leverage your biggest asset: time. Focus on high-value activities like talking with candidates and use technology to automate the more repetitive tasks like sourcing, screening, and scheduling.
• Test, Test, Test. Establishing a solid analytics process creates the ability to test and improve the lower-performing stages of your recruiting funnel. Focus on trying 2-3 different strategies in stages with the lowest conversion rates.

With the right data-driven recruiting strategy, companies of any size can win big and build powerful teams. That winning strategy will rely on adopting data and a proactive approach to competing in the market. With a few key focus areas, any company can get there.

Start Using a Data-Driven Recruitment Process Today

If you aren’t using data, creating a data-driven recruitment process can seem overwhelming at first. But Recruiter.com are experts in recruiting, and with our own AI technology, we know first-hand how to use it in the best way possible.

We also have an extensive network of recruiters that can augment your team to help you learn about this new type of recruiting process.

If you’re interested in learning more about using data to improve your recruiting process, contact us today!

Get the top recruiting news and insights delivered to your inbox every week. Sign up for the Recruiter Today newsletter.