Is the Increasing Use of Data in Recruitment a Positive Thing?

The use of big data and analytical tools has provided one of the largest changes to the recruitment industry since the internet boom almost two decades ago. For recruiters and businesses searching for new staff, the implementation of big data and use of databases to find the best new workers is changing the recruiting game.

Recruiters are right to worry that they might soon be out of a job unless they adapt their approach. While for businesses, using data is offering a more effective way to hire the best workers. There are many pros and cons for this new phenomenon.

Efficient and Time-saving Recruitment

Many business people who are hiring make their decisions in the first few minutes of meeting a potential candidate, often based on a gut decision or unconscious bias. A lot of the time these decisions are instinctive and can be the wrong choice. Recruiting can therefore take up a lot of time, interviewing candidates, crawling through CVs and cover letters.

Using data streamlines the entire process, with recruiters able to find the closest matches a lot quicker. For example, retention data will show which employees not only possess the appropriate skills but are most likely to stay in the position for longer.

Interpreting the Data

It’s fantastic that so much data can be collected when recruiting, but recruiters and companies on the lookout for fresh talent need to know how to interpret it all. Using the right data points will reveal the skills, values and behaviours that are required to fill the role you have available and also who would make a good fit.

Keeping a record of existing employees in a database and analysing their performance can help you decide whether it’s better to recruit internally or externally. There have been cases where this has been used to show that hiring those with experience can cost more and they will last shorter in such roles.

Challenges

The main challenge to using big data in the recruitment process is learning the skills and technology to analyse it all and utilise efficiently. There are already many software products that can do this, but some are better than others.

There is still a lot of data that needs to be collected too, and for recruiters they will need to adapt their working model to incorporate all this. Otherwise, more and more businesses may begin hiring their own internal recruitment teams to work with big data.

The Future of Recruitment

Big data is expected to rapidly accelerate in the coming years, with the increasing ease of connecting and analysis making it more and more popular. The rise of analytical tools has also made it a lot more cost-effective to use.

In the same way that big data and technology have worked together well to improve the process of trading, overall the increasing use of big data in recruitment looks set to be a positive thing, making the entire process a lot easier and more effective.