In this era of big data, companies are just beginning to understand how to leverage the complex and copious amount of information that they have at their fingertips. At the same time, vendors are just beginning to understand what specific analytics tools to make available. While using analytics to make informed decisions affecting labor and using analytics to predict turnover patterns has become somewhat mainstream, recruiting has been all but left out. Until now, that is.
What Is Recruitment Analytics?
Recruitment analytics is the predictive analysis of your data. Recruitment analytics tools take data from all aspects of your business and convert that data into insights by looking for patterns in your sourcing and hiring data. Using these insights, hiring managers can make better, and faster, hiring decisions. Recruitment analytics also helps you create hiring strategies that will ensure you’re hiring the best candidates, maintaining diversity in your hiring pool, and predicting your hiring needs.
How Does Predictive Analytics in Recruitment Work?
Predictive analytics in recruitment takes data from within your own organization as well as from social media and recruiting sites. Predictive analytics can also create algorithms from turnover numbers, unemployment rates, and more to evaluate your company’s future hiring needs. Using predictive analytics in your recruiting, you can more easily plan ahead and ensure that your hiring needs are met.
Uses of Recruitment Analytics
Companies can use recruiting analytics in a variety of different ways to meet their hiring needs. Analytics recruitment is the best way to ensure that you’re hiring enough or the right candidates at the right time. These data analytics recruitment tools can be used not only for recruiting but also to help you reduce turnover and personalize your staff training.
Rating Candidates with a Fit Index
Some HRIS vendors have made software available that profiles candidates’ resumes and other indicators against an ideal candidate profile, churning out a fit index. This fit index can help employers to look beyond traditional qualifications and hire someone that will really be a good fit on every level. The fit index measures many different characteristics and assesses how well an employee’s persona will fit with the company culture, expected behaviors, and expected knowledge.
Social Recruiting with Predictive Analytics
LinkedIn purchased analytics software that connects resumes to job openings on a broad spectrum. Working with this type of social recruiting mixed with predictive analytics can help companies to recruit from a large candidate pool, which may be extremely instrumental in finding exactly the right candidate for a specific position. Partnering with this type of operation and streamlining the system to connect to an internal recruiting feature in the HRIS may help to optimize recruiting beyond anything previously available.
Reducing Turnover with Smart Recruiting
When a candidate is matched to a position using analytics tools like the fit index, it can help to ensure greater job satisfaction. This can in turn reduce turnover and benefit the company in many ways. When employees truly love their job and fit well with the demands and culture right from the start, the company can become more productive and can grow quickly.
Personalizing Training Based on Recruiting Analytics
By using recruiting analytics, companies gain a wealth of data about each employee that they hire. Based on the employee’s qualifications, knowledge, and skills gaps the company can create personalized training programs that will get each employee up to speed faster and better. Companies can begin to move away from the “one size fits all” approach to training, which may save time as employees can skip over areas in which they are already proficient.
Paving the Way for Future Improvement with Data Analytics
Fit indexes and other analytics tools used in recruitment must be based on educated guesswork at the start. While the tools are likely to be more selective than recruitment systems used in the past, there may still be opportunities for optimization that do not become apparent until after a few employees have been hired using the tools. As employers see how employees pan out and assess different patterns, future improvements can be made to make the ideal candidate profile just a little more ideal.
Bringing predictive analytics into recruiting is a smart decision that many companies across all industries have begun to make. When doing so, however, it is important that the tools be used sparingly, as drowning in meaningless data and unnecessary reports will not help to improve processes. A strategy should be formed and utilized, with alterations being made only after initial results have been assessed.
Top Recruiting Metrics to Analyze
Recruiting metrics are different measurements that you can use to optimize your hiring. These metrics can be used to track the success of your hiring practices. Your company can also use these recruiting metrics to evaluate your hiring and make sure that you’re hiring the right people. But what metrics are there and which should you be paying attention to?
Source of Hire
The source of hire metric tracks the sources of your candidates. It looks at where you find your candidates and which sources result in the most hires. This metric can guide you to more efficient hiring practices in which you can eliminate sources, such as job boards and social media platforms, that aren’t as successful so you can instead focus on the sources that are most successful.
Time to Fill and Time to Hire
Time to fill tracks how long it takes to fill an open position. It measures from the moment you advertise a job posting to the moment you fill the position. Time to hire tracks how long it takes to hire a specific candidate and measures from the first communication with a candidate to the acceptance of the job offer. These metrics offer insights to hiring managers on how long it really takes to hire and fill open positions.
Candidate Retention Rate
Turnover is expensive. It costs the company money to hire an employee and the company loses money due to lost productivity if a position is left open. Measuring your candidate retention rate can offer insights into how long your employees are staying. If you have a low retention rate, then there may be some problems within your company or in your hiring practices that must be addressed before you can improve your candidate retention rate.
Quality of Hire
The quality of hire metric looks at how well your new hires perform in their first year of working for your company. The higher the performance ratings of your new hires, the more successful the recruiting. It’s important not just to fill an open position but to also fill positions with employees who will perform well for your company.
Job Satisfaction
Job satisfaction looks at how satisfied employees are with their positions. If you have a low job satisfaction rating, then you may have a mismatch between the actual job requirements and what was advertised for the position. Employees that are not satisfied with their jobs are more likely to leave the company.
Applicants per Opening Ratio
The applicants per opening metric looks at the ratio of applicants per job opening. If your job opening is attracting a lot of applicants, it’s possible that it’s just a very popular position, but it’s more likely that the job opening may need to be refined. Many of those candidates may not be suitable for the position. Including harder criteria for the job may help filter through some of the less qualified applicants.
Cost per Hire
The cost per hire metric looks at a variety of different cost structures within your hiring process and calculates how much it costs your company per hire.
Offer Acceptance Rate
The offer acceptance rate is the rate at which the job offers your company sends to candidates are successful. It compares the number of applicants that were offered a position at your company with the number that actually accepted the job offer. This metric can offer insights into how attractive your company is compared to your competitors in the hiring market.
Recruitment Funnel Effectiveness
The recruitment funnel effectiveness metric looks at how effective your entire recruitment funnel is from beginning to end. You can also examine the different steps in your recruitment funnel for a yield ratio to determine the effectiveness of each step in the process.
Time to Productivity
One of the reasons turnover is so expensive is because it can take a long time for new hires to be fully trained in their new position. The training period is one of lower productivity as the candidate is still learning the ropes. This metric looks at the time between the employee’s first day on the job and the time at which the employee is productive and able to fully contribute.
Are you looking for the best HRIS software that can provide your business with recruitment analytics? Visit our software match page to start your search. We will match you with the best software for your company’s needs.
