Data-Driven Recruitment: What It Is and How to Use It for Hiring Success

Traditional recruiting is primarily dependent on luck and intuition rather than data. Gathering and analyzing data is a time-consuming affair in this type of recruitment. Recruiters can only hope that their analyses and traditional recruiting methods are moving in the right direction. The recruiting scenario has changed drastically over the years. With plenty of data analytic tools available in the market, HR recruiters can leverage their recruitment process by choosing a data-driven approach.

While data-driven recruitment may seem like an old concept to tech-driven recruiters, there is still plenty to explore and understand about data and analytics to help you achieve desirable outcomes for your organization.

Collecting data and generating actionable insights can be used to upgrade recruitment models used in companies- from finding and engaging candidates who are most qualified and are a perfect fit for the open jobs to converting them into new hires in a much more efficient way.

Though, keep in mind that establishing an effective strategy cannot happen overnight. It takes the joint effort of a team that includes recruiting leaders, talent specialists and hiring managers to build an effective, intelligent, data-driven recruiting process leading to smarter hiring decisions based on real-time insights of the hiring tunnel.

What is Data-driven Recruiting?

Data-driven recruitment is the process where recruiters employ data analytic tech tools and a range of recruitment metrics to base their hiring decisions to make the hiring more effective.

A data-driven approach will help you hire new talent with your hiring decisions based on clear measurable skills and job-relevant criteria.

Leading companies such as Uber, Robinhood, and Facebook/Meta have resorted to data-driven recruiting to seek help screening resumes and identifying the best candidates according to skills rather than educational background.

Benefits of Data-driven Recruiting

The top priority for a recruitment team is to find a way to connect all employee data- from sourcing to hiring to their strategic workforce planning. Being data-rich gives organizations a competitive edge to make better hiring/recruiting decisions.

There are several advantages to the data-driven method-

1. Quality hires

A data-driven approach helps you track new hires across the employee lifecycle giving you Intel about what makes an effective job candidate and what makes a bad one. Data-driven recruiters delve into metrics such as –

• The number of qualified candidates selected through your sourcing practices
• Resignations of employees and involuntary turnover for less than 3 months of service
• Performance tracking of the new hires
• Finding out the characteristics of top talent by running tailored algorithms through advanced workforce applications.

2. Fast hiring

With proper data enhancement, workforce analytics helps you calculate the time required in each stage of the hiring process to conclude a hire for a specific role, providing stakeholders with credible timelines. A data-driven approach can explore the problem causing the hiring process’s slowing down and help you fix it.

3. Improved candidate experience

Putting the candidate first drastically helps deliver high-quality talent, improve recruitment efficiencies, and see through aligned business objectives.

While many organizations still struggle with achieving plausible candidate experience, this has been a hot topic in the industry for decades. How can data analytics help improve candidate experience?

Via data analysis, it is easier to assess the likelihood of a candidate withdrawing their application and devise strategies to increase the inflow of candidates rather than lose them.

4. A diversity, equity and inclusion-based recruiting process

Hitting the right diversity target is challenging. And with traditional recruiting methods, it is even more difficult to guarantee that you’ll reach the target or not. Using data analytics, you can continuously monitor your hiring funnel for demographic ratios like gender, ethnicity etc. It will help you track the implementation of diversity in your recruitment methods and increase your diversity and inclusion efforts.

5. Balanced recruitment to deliver on the required capacity

Often, employers tend to over-hire that costs or under-hire which can either cost them or lead to lower productivity. To strike a balance, recruiters need fact-based hiring plans that are updated to reflect the existing state of the company. Workforce planning that embeds a data-driven approach in collaboration with talent acquisition and finance is the ideal hiring plan to deliver better recruitment outcomes.

A data-driven approach gives you a picture of your total spending on the recruiting efforts- whether you are over-spending or not spending enough, because it is easy to compare the total costs of your recruiting activities.

How to Incorporate Data into Your Hiring Decisions?

Here’s what you can do to make a successful shift towards data-driver recruiting:

• Inform yourself about the correct data and metrics

Select a few essential hiring metrics to keep track of. Measuring the Quality of hire is beneficial for all organizations as it shows the overall effectiveness of your hiring process. Some of the standard metrics are

• Hiring cost per candidate
• Hiring time
• Hiring source
• Candidate experience scores
• Acceptance rates of job offers

Every company pays attention to a particular type of data depending on their business needs. Asking the senior leaders about their first data type preference can give you an idea about what matters the most.

• Efficient collection of data

To efficiently collect data

• Use software like ATS (Application Tracking System), which has reporting capabilities that take supervision of most of your work.
• Collect data in different ways- use Google Analytics or other simple surveys.

• Determine how you’ll act on the data collected

How you’ll go about the data that you’ve collected is critical. Some of the recruiting issues that need your attention are-

1. Hiring time

If your time to hire is greater than the bare minimum in comparison to industry standards, here are a few stages that need overlooking-

• Sourcing- Try sourcing methods by using social media recruiting or a sourcing tool that can help you reach and hire diverse candidates from a big hiring pool
• Screening- Include qualifying questions in application forms and prepare the right set of questions for the phone screening round
• Interviews- Use software that will help you schedule interviews with hiring managers effortlessly and effectively
• Job offer- Compose the best job offer letters to encapsulate your positions perfectly and attract the candidates to accept

2. Job offers acceptance rate

Here are a few fixes that can help in increasing candidate job offer acceptances-

• Create competitive job offers by researching benefits and salaries from trusted sites like Glassdoor and PayScale.
• Gauge the candidate’s interest in the offered position by communicating effectively during phone screenings and interviews.
• Ensure positive candidate experience.
• Ensure that the job offer letter reflects the candidate’s job expectations.

3. Turnover of new hires

To reduce the new hire turnover-

• Communicate effectively with the candidate regarding the job duties, requirements, and individual and team performance expectations before you roll out the job offer.
• Create a smooth onboarding process and endure your new hires feel welcomed, receive proper training and are given the right opportunity.

• Understand the limitations of data and plan the next step

Remember that data can give you in-depth insight but can’t predict what can happen further. That’s for you to interpret. While it can point out the problems, it doesn’t solve them. You need to decide and choose what you do with that data.

• Evaluate a plan using the data

Data can help recruiters see what worked and what didn’t in their past hiring processes and can guide them in making better hiring decisions in the future by helping devise better recruiting strategies.

A final word

Regardless of the kind of method you engage in, remember that analytics is not a one-shot process. To make recruiting successful, you must look for new ways to improve hiring. A data-driven approach will give you solid insights into the strengths and weaknesses of your current recruitment methods, but to reap the full benefits of data-driven recruitment, you need to act on the data and use it effectively to help your recruitment process.

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Amit Saproo

Head Operations: RPO

Amit Saproo is the Head of Operations at ALP Consulting with nearly 17 years of experience in Executive Search, RPO, Leadership, and IT & Engineering recruitment. He leads nationwide recruitment programs across Technology, BFSI, and R&D domains, driving strategic hiring solutions for diverse client needs. Amit excels in building and managing high-performance teams that deliver scalable, end-to-end recruitment and consulting services.