The Value of Data in the Hiring Process

The HR department has always been home to a wealth of data that can deliver informed hiring insights.

However, hiring managers are often so busy tracking the financial and productivity metrics they’re measured on, that they are unable to find ways to utilize the other data available to them.  

The insights available in pre-hire data

Imagine being able to pinpoint the best way to source the ideal candidate for a job role. Consider the resources you’d save, how efficient your hiring process would become and the positive impact that kind of information could have on your business.

Well, hiring managers can, in fact, collect this useful pre-hire data by considering some very simple metrics, such as:

• Which channels did the best candidates use to apply?
• Which job posts attracted the best candidates?
• At what time of day did the best candidates apply?
• At which point in the hiring process did we lose the best/most candidates?

Tracking, comparing and analyzing this information allows managers to build a picture of where, when and how to attract the best talent.

Beyond understanding the steps that worked well, this evaluation can also uncover pitfalls in the process that cause candidates to abandon their application.

Factors such as delayed processes, a lack of transparency and minimal communication can damage engagement and cause candidates to move on to other opportunities. Noting where and when this has happened, can help hiring managers to focus their efforts on the changes that will improve the candidate experience.

The value of third-party insights

Practices such as manual reference checking increase the chances of a delayed recruitment process and the risk of losing candidates.

However, that’s not the only pitfall posed by this traditional approach. The conversational nature of phone-based referencing provides HR managers with limited information that is inconsistent and difficult to measure.

Using an online reference checking tool ensures an optimized and consistent questionnaire format is used and enables HR professionals to extract comprehensive data and make well-informed confident hiring decisions.

Once third-party references have been received and stored on a secure, cloud-based platform, online tools allow hiring managers to easily benchmark the information, spot trends and use the analytics for future hiring decisions.

The advantages of a post-hire evaluation

Once a candidate has been hired, data collected during the early days of their employment can help hiring managers improve the experience they offer future new recruits and reduce the risk of attrition.

To obtain valuable data at this stage of the process, managers should ask themselves a few questions about each new hire, such as:

• How much support was the new recruit given and in what areas - role-specific, cultural, technical?
• What did the recruit find beneficial in their first few weeks? And what didn’t work?
• How was the new recruit introduced to colleagues, and how do they now interact with others?

If a person who seemed like a great candidate decided to leave a role within six months of starting, it could be an indication that post-hire data hadn’t been used to maximize employee satisfaction and retention from day one.

No matter what phase of the hiring process, it’s clear that accruing the right data and knowing how best to leverage it can exponentially benefit businesses.

Manually collecting, storing and analyzing this data can be hugely time-consuming and can pose the risk of a data breach. To find the real value in data, HR teams must adopt tech-based solutions that provide consistent and reliable insights while also securely managing and sharing data.

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