It is challenging to make hiring decisions based on resumes and cover letters. You don’t know if the CV tells the truth about actual skills and experience. For that reason, every recruiter must develop a data-driven recruitment strategy.

Data-driven recruitment uses data to assist you in improving the hiring of the best individuals and the whole recruiting process, rather than depending on guesswork to find and assess candidates. It seeks to use all the data that a recruiter can access, not just resumes and cover letters.

It is more accurate, assists recruiters in hiring better prospects, and saves money. In this post, we will provide some guidelines to assist you in developing a successful data-driven recruitment strategy.

1. Establish a framework

Your teams must begin by gathering data and building a framework to analyze the outcomes and quantify what is significant. A recruiting framework is a set of standard components and guidelines that you must include in each recruitment process. The main goal is to improve the effectiveness of all the channels you use to recruit candidates.

There are three crucial parts you should include in your recruitment framework. Every aspect should be customized from company to company, depending on their business strategy.

The first is your hiring team, which will manage your virtual telephone to communicate and filter potential candidates. The second section contains everything you’ll need for your business, including processes, paperwork, and stakeholder involvement guidelines. Finally, the third component is a data repository, which includes more tools like scheduling software options and instruments, analytics, and metrics.

2. Select your key performance indicators

Recruiting KPIs are particular metrics used to assess the efficiency of your hiring process and team. They can highlight areas for development and demonstrate the value and ROI of specific recruitment efforts. For example, to get better at writing for the web, you must consider candidates who can boost writing KPIs like traffic, engagement, and link building.

KPIs should be tied to particular organizational goals and serve as a tool to demonstrate progress toward those goals. Cost per hire, time to hire, source of hire, candidate experience scores, job offer acceptance rates, and so on are all examples of hiring metrics that you must routinely evaluate.

A KPI, for example, will show the number of qualified individuals who can contribute to your organization instead of just looking at a measure like the number of people that apply for an open position.

So, you must begin by identifying a few key hiring metrics to monitor. Then, you turn the hiring criteria into measurable goals to assess candidates during the interview.

data-driven recruitment strategy
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3. Focus on industry research

Industry research may help you develop your behaviors to hire effectively and smartly and deliver human resources services to existing workers from a place of genuine knowledge. 

Having a general idea of the industry, compensation, and position, the specific time-to-fill, offer acceptance rate, and interview rates can set the right expectations for yourself and your managers in terms of recruitment. For instance, when hiring a content writer, you should look for questions in the SEO interviews to help you find the best writer for your marketing goals. 

Also, when you have a good understanding of what matters to employees, you will be in the best position to recruit the top candidates. That will give you an indication of how competitive the market is for the roles you’ve specified. It will show you whether or not you should provide additional employment advantages to your prospects.

4. Measure your recruitment marketing ROI

Recruitment (ROI) is a recruiting statistic that compares the financial value added by your employees to the money spent on them in terms of salary and other benefits. You should ensure that you have systems and tools to track the outcomes of your efforts and outreach to the talent pipeline.

You must include the cost of a paid advertising campaign if you run one, your team expenditures, the time spent gathering resumes and negotiating offers, the tools you use, etc.

There are several strategies to save money and enhance your ROI with each hire, like identifying the most effective advertising channels, generating word of mouth, or implementing AI technology to search candidate CVs for relevant skills and experience.

5. Analyze past recruitment data

To get the most out of your investment, dig into your data. Your historical data will allow you to see what worked and what didn’t in previous hiring processes, helping you make better hiring decisions in the future.

Past-hire data, such as their tenure in the company and engagement level, can provide you with essential information that will help optimize the candidate experience and maximize your recruitment advertising money.

So, to finalize the salary expenditure requirements and create a talent sourcing strategy for the hiring plan, you must prepare data for an annual hiring plan and analyze the various fields.

6. Forecast your hiring requirements

Recruitment forecasting shows what the future holds for the recruitment profession. It is done by search consultants, both individually and collectively. It enables human resource professionals to be more strategic and productive in their jobs.

Recruitment forecasting considers skill gaps, current employee qualifications, and the company’s needs for future success, among other things. You must determine your company’s goals to focus on the right forecasting aspect.

You must also dig deep into your applicant tracking system to uncover historical patterns, current pipeline activity, recruiting targets, goals, candidate flows by source, and other factors influencing recruitment outcomes. Then, since one department influences another, you must map the impact of your forecasted recruiting. You should also consider the employees you might lose throughout the course of the year.

In closing

An excellent applicant may do poorly in an interview, but, in a data-driven model, they can provide you with additional information to help you decide. From assessments to personality testing and skills competence exams, data-driven recruitment is a far better predictor of quality than a CV or face-to-face interview.

You may construct a repeatable, more informed, well-functioning recruiting model by adopting a data-driven recruitment strategy. So, follow the steps outlined above, and you will do it correctly and improve your hiring process.