Recruiting has changed dramatically in a very short space of time. In the past it was common to get a job through seeing an advert in the newspaper, but now social media, headhunting, and job sites are much more likely routes. On the recruiter end, it was previously much more difficult for companies to verify that their hiring methods were effective. 

With the growth of big data and software and analytics tools, businesses are using data-driven recruiting to make sure that their strategies are effective. 

The use of statistics means that talent attraction efforts can be optimised to be more efficient and produce better hires. In this article we’ll be going over the most important benefits that data-driven recruiting can provide, as well as providing some first steps for making your hiring process more data informed. 

Improving the quality of hires

When your company’s hiring decisions are based off of data, they stand on much more solid ground. Rather than going off the back of their written statement alone, or their interview, employment assessments and competency tests offer the chance to learn more about candidates and their strengths and weaknesses in a manner that can be quantified. 

When relying upon candidates' own self-reported experience and their performance in interviews, it is much more likely that individual biases can creep into the process. Affinity bias, the tendency to prefer people who come from backgrounds similar to one's own, can mean that subjective hires can be influenced by unconscious bias, potentially reducing the diversity of your intake and meaning that you miss out on some great hires. With data-driven data, these issues can be minimised. 

Identifying future trends

Hiring isn’t just about hiring the right people, it’s about hiring the right people at the right time for your business. Forecasting what your business will need in the future is much harder without a concrete data system which takes into account annual turnover and hiring time, as well as intra-business movement of workers. 

When you know how many people you need to hire in each quarter, you’ll be able to tailor your recruitment budget to these targets, and make sure that you don’t underspend and leave yourself short, or overspend and use money that could’ve been used elsewhere paying workers that your business doesn’t need. 

Reducing the cost of hiring

Data driven hiring can help to cut down time in the selection process, labour intensive activities such as interviewing or calling candidates can be cut down in favour of screening candidates more thoroughly before they get to that point. 

Once you’ve hired candidates, data driven hiring will help make sure that they are suited to the task at hand, as well as being suited to your unique business culture. That should mean that your retention rate is higher, eliminating the need to spend time and energy replacing employees who leave early. 

If you’re interested in benefiting from data driven hiring - forecasting your business’s needs more effectively, reducing the cost of hiring candidates, and attracting better workers - then you should be interested in inploi’s Analyse module. It features end-to-end candidate journey tracking with data insights that your business can act on, and data visualised in a clear and accessible way. Our bespoke dashboards mean that the information most relevant to your business will be at your fingertips, enabling you to optimise your recruitment strategies. To learn more about Analyse, look here. And for more articles on the world of work, make sure to keep up with inploi’s community page, where articles are uploaded weekly.