The importance of data for making decisions

Data and analytics are at the top of most company agendas, and for good reason - they offer large potential increases in performance and optimisation if used correctly. Despite the acknowledged importance of big data, using it correctly can still be a point of competitive differentiation, allowing your business recruitment to pull away from the crowd. 

Traditional recruiting can take more than a few educated guesses to target the best applicants, but now recruiters no longer to assume that their methods are working until the results come in. Instead, they can test their strategies in real time to determine if they’re optimal or not.

If recruitment is improved, businesses will reap the benefits in the form of better future employees, filling positions faster and with people who suit your business better. It will also save on wasted time and money on recruitment strategies which just aren’t cutting it. In this article, we’ll be examining the three essential ways that your business should be using data, so you can see if you’re making best use of it. 

Using data to inform your decision making

Data can be confusing when it’s not packaged or presented in a clear way. There’s a definite need for data analytics which is clear enough for managers to make use of, rather than being something only those skilled in IT can understand. But once managers do start making use of data in their decision making, to solve real business problems, it can be a massive boost to any business. 

If you’re aiming to invest in your business, data can let you predict what the outcome of a given investment is likely to be, such as how much streamlining in one area of logistics could save your company. Even prior to deciding to invest, data driven thinking can help with pre-identifying a business opportunity, and showing you just how much a given model can improve performance. Though no models are perfect, this way of thinking can keep you one step ahead. 

Using Data as a source of revenue

The market in big data is expected to be worth over $220 billion by 2025, in terms of how much companies are investing in the field. So, it couldn’t be clearing how much companies value the ability to gain insight, either into their consumer base, into their key areas of interest, or into recruitment for their field. 

If your company is collecting large amounts of data in one area - for example if your business operates around improving health outcomes - then there may be a market for the data your organisation produces, so long as it is properly aggregated and treated for sale to strategic partners. In 2016, Microsoft bought professional social media company LinkedIn, in part for LinkedIn’s huge amount of data about its users, and more generally about how people’s job search habits. It doesn’t take selling off part of your company to monetise your data, and it might not net you $26 million, but using data as a source of revenue can be a great way to find money to reinvest into your business. 

Improve your talent attraction efforts

Recruiters are always forced to consider how best of allocate their budgets, but data-driven recruiting offers a real time insight into how your current allocation is working. This includes internally - you can see how well your team are engaging with candidates via email at different stages of their journey and see if there are any stages where applicants could be better supportive, or you can see if you recruiting is reaching a diverse audience of people. 

One example of how data can aid recruiting is in targeting. If it’s the case that particular universities or particular areas are producing highly skilled candidates, the decision can be made to target these, or to ramp up recruitment in certain periods of the year. Inploi’s attract module offers the ability to determine how much a given hire costs, allowing you to see the most productive channels for your recruitment process. 

Moreover, inploi’s attract module offers companies complete oversight of their data for all stages of the talent attraction process, giving you the information needed to maximise your ROI and create a successful recruitment strategy. Our bespoke dashboards let you view your recruitment activity in a simple and easy to digest form, and our audience analysis lets you see in-depth what your candidate cohorts look like, and to keep engagement high. 

To find out more about inploi’s attract module, and discover how you can revolutionise your hiring, look here. And if you’ve found this article useful, and you’d like to find out more about how data can improve your hiring processes, check out inploi’s community page, where articles are uploaded weekly.