Data Driven Recruitment: What You Need to Know

Recruiting is tough. Every time you hire a new employee you take a risk: are they cut out for the job, will they enjoy working at your company and how long will they stay? Things haven’t gotten easier over time either; the average 2017 employee wants personal growth, flexibility and fulfilment from a job.

But 2017 doesn’t just mean more challenges, it also means more tools to help you recruit better. Data driven tools to be exact. Use them to your advantage and selecting candidates will become less like a game of roulette.

Programmatic Job advertising

This is where your recruitment process begins. You have a job opening and you need candidates, so you start advertising your vacancy online. We all know online advertising costs money based on clicks or views. So of course, you want your return on investment to be as high as possible. Meaning, if you’re looking for someone with a particular set of skills, you want only people that possess these skills to click on your job advert: Enter programmatic (job) advertising.

This new way of targeting an audience arrived first in the marketing world in 2009 and changed the digital marketing landscape drastically. Nowadays, instead of ‘spraying and praying’, many digital marketing strategies are based on targeting individuals that fit a certain profile. Examples of programmatic advertising are everywhere: Who hasn’t been surfing the internet, looking for that next tropical holiday destination, only to find exotic vacation ads pop up on every single website you go to afterwards?

Now what does this mean for your recruitment process? For starters, you’ll be able to define exactly what candidate profile you are looking for. You can set the target audience for the job advert and aim your ads directly at the people corresponding your description, saving a lot of time and money. Are you looking for a part time sales assistant with 2 years of experience in a similar field, around 10 km from the office? Sure! No more research for the best website to post a particular job on, or inquiring for quotes from different job boards to find out which one has the best pricing. Just create a campaign on one of the programmatic job advertising platforms out there and voila!

Scraper Tools

On the other side of the same coin as Programmatic Job Advertising, we find Web Scraping Tools. While programmatic advertising is used to make the right people come to you, web scraper tools can find you the right candidate so you can reach out to him or her yourself. Web scrapers — what’s in a name — scrape the web for candidates that possess all the traits the recruiters entered in their query. As such, it can be an effective way of finding the right people for a certain vacancy.

Preselection

Once the first part of your recruitment funnel has been sorted, it’s time to have a closer look at the second part: Preselection. As tempting as it may be, don’t just ask applicants to send you their CV and a cover letter. Think about ways to improve your preselection process, rethink it as if it were non-existent. How can you design an application procedure that helps you select only the best candidates? Will a resume do that for you? Most probably not, we dare say.

Then how do you ensure the best possible candidate selection? Well, that depends on your organisation, the role you’re recruiting for, turnover rates, culture fit and so on. All these elements are fields in which 21st century recruitment technology, such as the use of data in your selection process, could be of great use.

A data driven preselection tool, such as TalentPitch, uses predictive analytics, gives you insights that help you make better hiring decisions, and shows applicants exactly what the job will be like for them. As a result, you can make data backed hiring decisions. Candidates are likely to perform better and stay with the company longer, which will bring down your turnover rates.

Predictive Analytics by the way, is all about: ‘What could happen?’ A combination of statistical, machine learning, and modelling techniques creates a model that gives estimations about the likelihood of a future outcome. In your recruitment process this means it will predict how successful an applicant will be in the role he or she is applying for. You can create a talent assessment solution that is set up according to your organisation’s specific needs. Our own predictive preselection tool TalentPitch for example, helps companies identify personality traits required to perform well in a particular role, and adjusts its algorithm accordingly. This way, you can make hiring choices based on solid data, instead of gut feeling and a resume.

Interviews

After the applications and preselection comes the interviewing. An important part of the recruitment process, as you’ll meet the applicants in person. As they’ve made it this far, you want to make sure you give everyone the same treatment. Nobody is 100% unbiased though, so here are a few ways to tackle interview biases as much as possible.

1. Use Evidence

Certain information on a candidate’s resume can have an impact on your biases, whether you like it or not. Cutting out the CV and/or degree classification from the early stages of the selection process, the interview phase included, is a good way of reducing the risk of a biased judgement.

Instead, ask the applicants to solve a job related problem — before they come in for the interview — and evaluate them on how well they solved that problem. To eliminate the risk of biases during the interview, make sure the hiring manager asks the same set of questions in the same order to every single applicant. Sounds obvious, but this is unfortunately often overlooked.

2. Create a well-structured Interviewing process

You want to make sure every candidate receives the same treatment. Of course, when you’re face to face with someone, you might want to know a little bit more about that person’s background or a particular project, but try to level the playing field as much as you can.

As we mentioned earlier, introducing a job related problem for applicants to solve before they come in for the interview is a good start; it standardises the process and every candidate is assessed in the same way.

3. Data Back Your Decisions

Besides adding structure to your interviewing and hiring process, the use of data is another solution to interviewing biases. If we use TalentPitch as an example, its data and algorithms are doing the grading part of the job instead of human beings. This means that the candidate’s results and future success rate in the role -and in your workforce — are being calculated with the help of software. Together with the data from TalentPitch the hiring manager is able to make a much more reliable decision based on a combination of facts and hiring talent: the best of both worlds.

Tracking Performance Data

Strictly speaking this takes place after recruiting. The of tracking results however can help you improve your recruitment process and that’s why we think it’s worth mentioning here. If you measure how your employees perform once they’re on the job, you can observe significant differences or similarities in their preselection scores. These can give you useful insights.

For example: If after six months it turns out that 90% of the people that scored high on creativity perform exceptionally well, you can decide to let creativity weigh heavier in your preselection. You can do this for more than one aspect of course and hence optimize your recruitment process step by step.

Recap

Recruitment isn’t easy. A well-structured, data driven process can make it a lot easier though. Starting with the career website visitors, via the application stage right up to the tracked performance data of your employees. The right HR technology solution can do part of the work for you and strengthen you in your decision making.

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