We are living in an age of big data and analytics. It has never been easier to collect and analyze information to optimize your organization’s business processes. Recruiting is no exception. Doing this will not only offer you fresh insights into how successful your existing recruitment efforts are but also provide clarity on how to make them more efficient to achieve better results.
Establishing and using analytics is a great way to figure out how to make your recruitment efforts as effective as possible. You can uncover that you’re spending hundreds or even thousands on resources that are not leading to the desired candidate pools where you wind up hiring from. Smart organizations leverage HR technology to gather the proper data points required for c-suite decisions for funds allocation and business process effectiveness.
There are lots of ways to capture data about your recruiting process. One of the easiest is to use an applicant tracking system that will automatically collect that data for you and display it back in an easy-to-understand dashboard. But, no matter how you collect your recruiting data, make sure that you focus in on a few key metrics:
Time to hire – is the amount of time to it takes from when a job is posted until a candidate accepts your job offer. While time to hire can vary dramatically depending on the industry you are in and the role you’re recruiting for, the longer the procedure takes, the more expensive it becomes.
Cost to hire – is how much it costs to fill a position, to calculate this you factor in advertising the position on paid job boards, paying for various other tools, and time spent on recruiting, vetting, and onboarding candidates.
Source quality – is the cost-effectiveness of the different sources you’re using to attract candidates. An easy way to calculate this is to divide the cost of each source (job boards, ads, etc.) by the number of successful hires for the desired time frame in question (quarterly, annually).
Together, these metrics will give you a fantastic initial understanding of how efficient and cost-effective your recruiting is. Once you’ve established some benchmarks for yourself or your recruiting partner like TPD, (i.e., how long it typically takes you to fulfill a job, how much doing so typically costs on average, and how cost-effective your distinct sources are), you can then get to work to optimize your recruiting efforts to get better results. When you have clarity through attribution analytics on your top candidate sources by job type, you can effectively build a case to increase ad budget for that job board platform and reduce spending on underperforming job boards.
There are many ways to leverage applicant tracking systems during the recruiting and onboarding. When done right this pivotal step in candidate experience becomes the stepping stone for your employer brand and the start of your new hire’s journey with you. TPD provides end to end solutions for organizations looking to improve their recruiting process internally or take over the entire function with total transparency into all of the analytics mentioned.
Anytime that you have data-driven analytics and metrics, you can use them to gain insights into everything you’re doing. If your time to employ is long and your cost per hire is low, then you should make some tweaks to your procedure, such as spending a bit more on advertising. A small investment can easily pay for itself if you are getting to better candidates faster, but you need to know your numbers to justify the action.
It may not be easy, but using analytics is a great way to figure out how to make your recruiting efforts as efficient as possible. For that reason alone, it’s worth taking a closer look at them.
About TPD
TPD® is an international Workforce and HR Solutions company that partners with our clients and talent pool to help people succeed and help organizations perform. Founded in 1980, TPD works with people, for people, and about people; providing scalable HR solutions that are backed by the best-proven practices in the industry.