Recruitment involves so much more than reviewing resumes and choosing who to hire. Recruitment has transformed into a complicated process requiring innovative strategies for attracting and keeping the best talent. One of these strategies is finding data-driven ways to optimize your process while measuring the right recruiting metrics. Implementing new technologies in your HR department can streamline these everyday processes while freeing up time and money to invest in more strategic efforts, like boosting engagement and improving retention.
In the past, a lot of HR data went unseen or, if it was seen, it was put into charts and tables for corporate performance packs. Now, in the era of big data and analytics, companies are turning their data into insights and profits. Understand our big data gives us the ability to predict where to find the most suitable candidates for you, how to identify and attract those candidates, forming a “super candidate” look-alike profile and evaluating the ROI of the recruitment and sourcing budget. Put simply, HR data is more valuable than ever before. This has made ‘intelligent HR’ a bit of a buzz phrase.
INTELLIGENT HR IS DATA-DRIVEN HR
Despite having access to a wealth of data, too many HR teams spend the majority of their time on administrative tasks or legal issues. In addition HR is traditionally seen as very people-orientated, and not as much into numbers and data. Even when data does play a role, it’s not necessarily being used in the smartest way and to the business best benefit. Nowadays, there are far more unique and valuable HR metrics – metrics able to deliver business-critical insights and have a significant impact on organizations’ performances and costs. Data-driven HR is expected to show significant advancement in the following HR factors:
Candidate experience: Candidate experience is the way candidates perceive your organization throughout the recruiting process. Improving your time-to-candidate by reaching & onboarding the most suitable candidates faster, will put them in favor of your company when considering which career path to take while empowering employer’s brand.
Cost per hire: Cost per hire is the average amount of budget allocated toward making a single hire. Using AI and data analysis is key to assessing the cost-effectiveness and efficiency of your recruiting process. It can help you figure out where to cut costs – or where you can afford to splurge a little on an exceptional candidate. Furthermore, it helps you determine the ROI on your recruitment budget and assess your sourcing channels. All of these can assist in better allocating that budget and increase ROI.
Offer acceptance rate: The offer acceptance rate is the percentage of extended job offers that are accepted resulting in filling a position. AI allows you to see how successful your team is in bringing a candidate on board. As much as you’d love to believe all candidates would happily accept an offer after going through your entire hiring process, that’s not what happens in reality. A low acceptance rate may be attributed to slow offer times. Reaching the most suitable candidates faster is key to increasing your offer acceptance rate.
Source of hire: This metric shows you where your qualified candidates are at – job boards, career pages, referrals or social media. Being able to analyze the quality (rather than quantity) is crucial for assessing the effectiveness of every sourcing channel. It’s also important for measuring your diversity sourcing efforts. Are candidates you’ve sourced from minority groups getting hired? If not, where is the drop-off happening? Using AI, you can identify unconscious bias as possible factor so you can deal with it.
Time to hire: Time to hire is the amount of time it takes to find and hire a new candidate. It’s often measured from the position posting day to the day a candidate is hired. Tracking the time it takes to fill is a great way to get an overall view of how efficient your recruitment strategy is. Using new HR technology will not only help you reach the most suitable applicants faster than ever before, but also show you whether your recruiters are reaching out and updating these applicants in a timely manner. Candidates want transparency and speedy communication in the recruiting process and in today’s war for talent, there isn’t any time to lose.
Data-driven HR focuses on the goal of adding value and driving performance across the organization – all of the time, not just every now and then or in a specific project. With intelligent, data-driven people management – the top priority is to add value to the organization in the smartest way possible, using all the tools at the HR team’s disposal: data, analytics, machine learning, artificial intelligence, and more.
This is where the idea of data-driven HR comes from. HR teams can use data to make better HR decisions, better understand and evaluate the business impact of people, improve the leadership’s decision making in people-related matters, make HR processes and operations more efficient and effective, and improve the overall wellbeing and effectiveness of the company’s employees. All of these have a huge impact on a company’s ability to achieve its strategic goals while significantly improving HR metrics, and that’s what makes HR data so valuable.
