Ready for better data driven recruiting? Follow these tips from talent leaders

3 mins, 39 secs read time

Without data, recruiting is just guesswork. If you want to get a real sense of how your team is performing, make accurate forecasts for the future and earn the trust of your executives and other stakeholders, data has to be part of your recruiting toolbox. But where do you start? Which metrics matter most and how can you get the rest of your team on board?

Mona Khalil, Data Science Manager at Greenhouse, recently had a data deep dive discussion with Tony Payne, Head of Talent at Oodle Financial Services, and Duarte Ramos, VP of Global Talent Acquisition at Gympass, as part of the Open Forum: Transform Your Hiring Practices (EMEA) event. You’ll find some highlights from their conversation below or you can catch the full recording, available on demand here.

Starting with the basics

In order to create trust in your data and reporting, you first need to standardize it. Teaching everyone to input data consistently is a critical first step. “We have a conversation about the rigor that is needed to input consistent correct information,” says Tony. “We highlight the need to stick to templates and ensure that everything is filled out, because when you have gaps in your data, that causes just as much of a problem as inaccuracies.”

All members of the talent acquisition team at Oodle receive a crash course in reporting basics. They learn how reports are put together and what happens when things go wrong so they can dig into the data to work out where the problem is and then backtrack and start again. Creating this foundational knowledge on the talent acquisition team means everyone follows the same best practices and builds trust in the accuracy of the reports they generate.

The recruiting metrics that matter most

At a basic level, most stakeholders want to know what’s going on with their open and recently closed roles, says Duarte. This can include time to fill, time to hire and time spent in each stage. It’s also helpful to segment this by region and vertical.

Drilling down to specifics, Tony explains why Oodle made the shift to measuring time to fill instead of time to hire. “We felt that that was better for the business, because it gave a much more reliable estimate on time needed to actually get someone in a seat. So from the minute the business releases a job, we can fairly accurately – depending on the location and department – predict how long it’s going to take.”

Another metric that Oodle uses is time to reject. “We wanted to look at why people were rejecting our offers across the business,” Tony shares. This led to a significant discovery. Candidates who rejected an offer from Oodle had typically been in the process for 20% longer than those that accepted. With this insight, the talent acquisition team could make the case for minimizing the time between interviews and speeding up the hiring process. What a great reminder of how powerful data can be!

Future trends for metrics and data

As reporting capabilities grow within the talent acquisition function, what might the future of recruiting and data look like? Duarte says there’s one topic that comes up consistently in his conversations with other talent acquisition professionals: quality of hire. “It’s a sensitive data point because it cannot be granular to the point where you identify individual performance or individuals, so how can you tie recruiter performance with hires’ performance?” He’s hoping to develop a robust set of data points that can be used to define quality of hire moving forward.

“Ultimately, having a more holistic approach to data across different people areas, comparing hiring, HR, training and performance data, can give you a level of quality overall, but it’s hard to get that all together,” explains Tony. Each solution provider tends to have a certain focus for their data and it can be difficult to get a cohesive view. He’s hoping it will be much easier to bridge the gaps between different data sources in the future.

Discover even more helpful tips from Duarte and Tony on presenting data to different stakeholders, using data to inform performance reviews and much more. Watch the on-demand recording of their conversation.