How do you know if your recruiting process can be made more effective and what interventions you can implement to increase efficiency? Data-driven recruiting is the secret to onboarding new talent more efficiently and at a lower cost.
Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS) promise to streamline recruiting operations, but they are only effective if used properly. At their worst, an ATS becomes a tool that recruiting teams avoid and makes it nearly impossible to collect meaningful data from. At their best, an ATS makes it easy for recruiting teams to complete recruiting tasks, collects data that holds everyone involved in the recruiting process accountable, and drives informed decision-making.
In this article, we’ll discuss the two most common areas recruiting teams are asked to report on through their ATS data: time and money (recruitment sources).
Time: How to be more efficient
“The process takes too long” is one of the most common complaints we hear from recruiting teams, and to become more efficient, we need to understand what’s preventing us from shortening timeframes.
This chart shows that candidates spend too much time on the interview stage
“Time in stage” is a useful measurement that, when investigated, can trigger many effective interventions. In the next section, we list the main stages in the recruitment process and discuss possible causes for long time frames, as well as possible interventions.
Review Phase
If you have too many applicants and the review stage is taking too long, it could be due to:
- Recruiter workload
- The action will be postponed until the position is filled.
- Hiring managers aren’t screening candidates in a timely manner.
Possible solutions include:
- Implementing conditional screening questions or evaluation Covering key hiring criteria
- Tools like SmartAssistant generate AI-powered scores and recommendations to identify the best candidates.
- SLA for disposing of candidates within a specific time period
- Automation that advances candidates to the next stage based on specific criteria.
Interview stage
If an applicant is taking too long at the interview stage, it could be a result of:
- Delays in interview schedule
- There are few interviewer vacancies
- Interviewers do not provide timely feedback to candidates
- It’s hard to choose a candidate
- Scheduling a report meeting is difficult.
Possible solutions include
- Integrate interview schedules into your company calendar system
- Candidate’s own schedule
- Feedback reminders in Slack and Teams
- Introducing the Recruiting Scorecard for fairer candidate evaluation
- SLA for interview reports and hiring decisions.
Offer Stage
If the offer stage is too long,
- Non-competitive offers
- Long-term offer preparation
- Long offer approval
- Background and reference checks.
Possible solutions include
- Better market data on salaries
- Providing a template library within the ATS
- SLA for offer approvers
- Background checks andReference Check Provider integration with ATS.
compare
Comparing incremental times across team members, functions or departments, and regions can help your team discover where the process works best and where it can be improved. If one recruiter, department, or region typically moves faster than others, find out what others can learn from. Keep in mind that there are cultural differences across regions and practical differences in recruiting times for different types of roles.
Accountability
Regularly reviewing the phased data over time allows the team to monitor progress and discuss how the intervention is working.
Money: Procurement Analysis
Knowing which advertising channels drive the most adoption allows your team to allocate spend more effectively, justify investments in referrals and internal moves, and prove the ROI of tools like CRM.
Understand your employer
When researching hiring sources by role, ask these questions
- What are your best recruiting sources?
- What low-cost recruitment sources (referrals, internal candidates) can you invest more in?
- Can you allocate spend more effectively across procurement channels?
- What sources recruit diverse candidates?
- How consistently do your sources add value? There may be seasonality to certain sources. Are there ways to create consistency or leverage seasonality in your recruitment marketing campaigns?
Understanding ratios
When comparing recruiting sources, look at the ratios. Common ratios include:
- Interview applicants
- Applicants for the offer
- From interview to offer
For example, a source with a high number of applications but a low number of interviews may indicate a coverage mismatch, suggesting that funds could be better utilized elsewhere.
compare
As mentioned in the previous section, comparisons across time, role types, and functions often provide further insight. Combining qualitative information (subjective information about what is going on) with quantitative information (what the data tells us) provides a powerful entry point into developing actionable solutions.
Promoting transparency
Group discussions allow your team to troubleshoot issues and come up with ideas for optimization. You can export charts to presentations and host discussions with screen sharing and live drill-downs. Additionally, shared dashboards help build a data-driven culture. Getting everyone on the same page deepens engagement and promotes accountability within your recruiting team.
SmartAnalytics Powers Data-Driven Recruiting
SmartAnalytics by SmartRecruiters helps your team create effective reporting strategies that streamline report creation and delivery, allowing you to drill down into data to uncover insights that lead to faster hiring and potential cost savings. SmartAnalytics features include:
- Customized Dashboard: A library of “go-to” dashboards to keep your most important metrics in one place
- Automatic report delivery: Schedule report delivery with permissions to determine who can see which data elements
- Explore and compare: Ability to leverage data visualization to make detailed comparisons and explore data sets of interest
To learn more about SmartRecruiters and SmartAnalytics, sign up for a demo today.
The post How Data-Driven Recruiting Saves Time and Money appeared first on SmartRecruiters Blog.
