Data Driven Recruiting - 14 Recruiters Share Their Advice

We have crowdsourced some tips and advice from our network to help if you’re thinking about upskilling this year:

Driving decisions and influencing change with data is one of the biggest gaps we see when interviewing recruiters today. We have crowdsourced some tips and advice from our network to help if you’re thinking about upskilling this year:

Keith Moran, Director of Talent at Gousto: “Data doesn't necessarily = insight. The right data, at the right time, simply stated and cutting through as to why it matters to the audience is for winners.”

Elizabeth Murphy, TA Business Partner at Brightflag: “Recruitment should speak the language of the business and data should align with the business drivers. Sometimes there is a tendency in recruitment to get hung up on metrics that don't speak to this. So my advice is to partner with stakeholders to get these strategic perspectives and tailor your data appropriately. Time, speed, quality, market factors driving change, external competition inward and outward talent flows, etc. are all important to consider when having these conversations.”

Ash Hogan, Global Talent Acquisition Director at Walmart: “Every hiring conversation starts with data. Funnel metrics never lie, and if you're using your ATS correctly and dispositioning candidates in a timely fashion, you'll quickly see downstream issues come to light both for the recruiting team and the interview team.”

Daniel Martos, TA Operations Lead at Preply: “Take the time to think about what the business wants to measure, and what data you need for that. Clean your ATS (99% have messy data, and are badly implemented), integrate their party tools and automate as much as you can. Then you'll be able to play with data.”

Cahir O’Leary, EMEA Recruitment Lead at Johnson & Johnson: “Think in terms of 2 types of metrics: Critical to Quality and Critical to Process. Critical to Quality is what your stakeholder cares about. Do a “Voice of Customer” exercise to find out what matters most. For Critical to Process, map your process and think about what can be measured at each step. Some examples are; time from job post to candidate screen, number of screens, ratio of candidates sent for review, time for review, interview slate, time to feedback, time to offer are more depending on what your stakeholder cares about. Opportunities to improve can be found where measures in process steps are inconsistent, sporadic, or not available.”

Richie O’Brien, Senior Program Manager at Amazon: “Recruiters should invest time to partner with HR and share data. HR can share diversity insights, list of high potential candidates, impacted colleagues from a reorg or mat leave returners available to start immediately. You can proactively bring these insights to the hiring briefing and show you’re ahead of the game. Imagine being able to approach that conversation and look at the last six months of hires, examining gender balance, ethnicity, experience, etc. and proposing a shortlist of candidates that cover these gaps. I have seen great success and gratitude from hiring managers with this approach. It’s all about partnering with HR!”

Célia Sauthier, Senior TA Program Manager at Amazon: “Quality of hire is often overlooked. It’s another metric to build in along with process efficiency measures (time to hire, conversion ratios at all stages of the process) and customer experience metrics (post phone screen/onsite survey, idle time where candidates are waiting for feedback, drop out rate at each step in process). Looking at the % of new hires that are put on a performance improvement plan within the first 6-12 months or attrition can be ways to get an understanding of the quality of hires."

Heidi Wassini, TA and Employer Branding at Vivino: “Be sure to measure what you can influence and what you can control. Ensure your metrics complement each other. You can have an awesome time to hire, but if everyone leaves within the first year, then perhaps it is not the best metric for success.”

Ruth Balfe, RPO Director at Korn Ferry: "There is nothing stronger than showcasing actual data during tough conversations with your stakeholders. We often encounter misalignment of the market and perceptions of recruitment effort versus the hiring expectations of hiring managers we’re supporting. By embracing and utilising data to support your discussions around the market and the work you have done to date, you can have more informed, constructive conversations to agree on a realistic recruiting strategy to fill the hiring need going forward. It's ideal if you can display this data visually during your hiring conversations, it will help add weight to the impact of the data you are bringing to the meeting and ultimately, your ability to positively influence the hiring process."

Claude Loeffen, Founder at We Like Talent: “Turn your hiring efforts into a data-driven process based on candidate feedback. Treat your candidates like customers. Sales and marketing teams try to understand every aspect of how their customers think and feel so they can cater to their needs to increase sales. The most successful businesses out there have adopted this way of thinking and have applied it to their hiring process. (Re)design your recruiting process based on the feedback you receive from your candidates. Make CX a key metric rather than treating it as a nice to have. It will automatically improve your other key hiring metrics like time-to-hire, cost-per-hire, offer-acceptance rates etc.”

Ollie Hayes, Recruitment Lead at Google: “It's all about the funnel and using data to see how processes can be improved from time to hire to pass-through rates and diversification of pipelines. Turn data into insights and use that to tell a compelling story to business leaders.”

David McDonnell, TA Manager at SOTI: “The candidate's journey is the most important data to track. Track the time in each step, identify and rectify the bottlenecks and everything else like Time to Hire will follow.”

Grishma Dalal, Talent Partner at ClearScore: “The quality and competency of interviewers often gets neglected, but I think it’s super critical whilst analysing a hiring process.”

Rob Campbell, Technical Sourcer at Facebook: - “Data is important when making points about diversity. Diversity is an emotional topic naturally, and emotions can be debated. Data can't be. The earlier you understand the implications of hiring methods by using data, the easier it will be to break from entrenched industry-wide biases.”

Reach out if you’d like to add to this list!