Traditional recruiting is going the way of the dodo. This process where you use luck and intuition to find a qualified candidate for a role you have is just consuming too much time, causing frustration for both employer and candidates. Recruiters and hiring teams could only assume their hiring methods were effective, but now, with a wealth of software and analytics tools available on the market, anyone can create a data-driven recruiting process that eliminates any “gut-feeling” hires that may or may not play in your company’s favour.
When many small businesses and start-ups face finding and hiring the best possible talent, it’s crucial to create better efficiencies to bring in the most qualified candidates with you on your recruitment journey. Data is not only the now of job recruitment and development, but it’s also the future. Data-driven recruiting uses facts and stats to inform your hiring decisions. It’s a more cost-effective, time-efficient and improved approach to hiring. Data is helping fast-growing companies find their perfect candidates.
If you want to improve the quality of hires, decrease time to hire, decrease cost per hire, and improve candidate experience, it’s important to utilize data in your hiring processes.
But there are a few more reasons.
Minimize Legal Hiring Risks
When starting the recruiting process, it’s critical to be aware of specific legal issues. In some cases, you could be asking unlawful or even discriminatory questions without even knowing it. Questions about race, political beliefs, gender identity or expression are among those.
It is also necessary your hiring process follows procedures that are equal and fair to all candidates. For example, decisions made on data can be legally defensible in court, so all your hiring components must be consistently used across all candidates. And using technology can help you standardize a process for roles so that each candidate is being measured on a level playing field.
- Ask all candidates the same questions.
- Ensure all candidates complete the same exercises.
- Regulate all ranking and scoring concepts.
All of which are potential hazards that any unsuccessful candidate could potentially use against you in a court of law.
Leverage Data for Future Hires
Along with using data to grow and develop your onboarding processes for the next generation of “onboardees,” you can also use the data you’ve collected on candidates for future hires. And there are some incredible ways to use data for future proof.
From a recruitment marketing standpoint, you can also ask them questions about where they heard about the job to help you get a sense of where you should market your future positions to get the most awareness around them. This also gives you the ability to analyze your recruitment channels to find where the best talent is coming from.
Leveraging data gives you a sense of the trends regarding job titles and educational backgrounds for each role. This allows you to make continuous improvements to your postings.
But most importantly, you’re improving the candidate experience. Of course, it would help if you treated every candidate like you treat your customers, so finding efficiencies in your process is crucial to your employer branding. This allows your business makes you a more desirable company to work for. In addition, candidates can tell their peers about their experience driving more referral hires over to your company.
Data Eliminates Hiring Biases
Diversity, equity, and inclusion have become vital components of hiring in recent years. However, conscious, and unconscious biases often creep into the recruiting process, resulting in the rejection of deserving candidates.
Data ensures diversity. Technology can mitigate hiring bias as it helps screen candidates using large volumes of data points and predicts the best-fit candidate for a role – reducing assumptions and biases that humans often succumb to.As we mentioned earlier, data can help companies hire more objectively rather than using gut feelings to make hiring decisions, and that’s critical. Data can help bring in a greater diversity of background and thought, which allows for higher-performing teams.
Check out our previous blog on “4 Ways to Build High-Performing Teams”
Data, when used properly, is a good thing for everyone involved. Recruiters can save time, companies will get positions filled by suitable candidates more quickly, and your business will hire a variety of talent with diverse opinions and skillsets. Of course, using technology as part of the recruitment process is not necessarily a silver bullet for hiring. There will always be some extra admin effort to ensure it performs correctly and gets the most out of it, but the benefits far outweigh the time and financial cost.
Now, you can mine for data through platforms like LinkedIn, but to find the right candidate, you need the right tools to give you the meaningful insight you want. And see the right candidate. So it all starts with screening.
ResumeFree™ offers a screening platform that helps elevate your employer’s brand and streamline your hiring process.
