Long considered the ‘holy grail’ of talent acquisition metrics, quality of hire is top of mind for talent acquisitions professionals everywhere. In today’s rollercoaster job market, many organizations continue to face the dilemma of recruiting top talent efficiently and cost-effectively. And truthfully, a combination of efficiency and cost-effectiveness sounds like a no-brainer in theory. But it doesn’t always stack up in practice, especially when you’re juggling the need to fill empty seats fast, against a backdrop of underwhelming interest levels amongst potentially suitable candidates.
It’s in situations like these, faced with ‘the lesser of two evils’, that recruitment professionals can feel like it’s one thing or the other – low spend or quality of hire. And when your back is up against the wall, both may suffer.
Talent acquisition analytics have emerged as a game-changing resource for businesses. And especially recruitment teams. Armed with insightful analytics, including the highly valuable KPI quality of hire, you can achieve that highly desirable balance between low-cost and high-quality hires.
So, let’s take a closer look at how talent acquisition analytics are revolutionizing the hiring process and becoming a ‘secret weapon’ for combatting today’s recruitment challenges.
Understanding Talent Acquisition Analytics
Talent acquisition analytics leverage data and insights to equip you to make better-informed recruitment decisions. This is because analytics go beyond the basic metrics you might currently be measuring, e.g. the number of resumés received or interviews conducted per open role.
Many organizations are accustomed to gathering this sort of data. But it can add up to little more than vanity metrics. And despite good intentions, it can be ridiculously challenging to squeeze anything of value out one-dimensional data of this nature.
Comparatively, talent acquisition analytics dive deep into your business and people data to identify trends, patterns, and opportunities for improvement. For example, it analyzes various data points, such as:
- Sourcing channels
- Candidate profiles
- Hiring outcomes
By combining and processing these components into a whole picture, you’re no longer confined to manipulating unaligned pieces of information. On the contrary, you can access fresh and valuable insights to put an unprecedented blast on your recruitment strategies.
It starts with skyrocketing efficiency across your recruitment process, in turn optimising cost-effectiveness. And this is just the beginning of what’s possible!
Enhanced Efficiency and Cost-Effectiveness
Recruiting nimbly in a volatile job market can be a daunting task, even for the most seasoned professionals. Talent acquisition analytics empower you to level up your recruitment efforts in the following ways:
- Identifying the most effective sourcing channels
- Eliminating bottlenecks in the hiring process
- Streamlining candidate screening
As a result, you can prioritize the channels that yield the most awe-inspiring candidates. All while simultaneously reducing time-to-hire and keeping recruitment costs down.
In addition, analytics-driven recruitment also enables you to allocate your resources wisely, via a process of:
- Analyzing historical data
- Identifying successful hires
- Understanding the factors that contribute to their success
In short, it’s the ways and means for making data-backed decisions about where to invest your time, effort, and budget. And off the back of this approach, you can expect to see significant improvement in the ROI of recruitment activities, by ensuring resources are laser targeted at the most impactful areas and / or causes for concern.
A Real-world Example using the Quality of Hire KPI
Take a HireRoad client we’ll refer to as ABC Company. They were under pressure to reduce costs. A greater understanding of the quality of their new hires was needed to help them economize intelligently. It also required them to determine which sources produced the highest quality candidates for the lowest cost.
How did analytics steer a solution for ABC Company?
Cutting costs and focusing on smarter investments called for a deep dive into retention, performance, and termination data by hire cohort. For these purposes, analytics enabled ABC Company to really drill down into highly specific metrics, such as:
- % of hires terminated per cohort by four months, six months, etc
- Turnover by source
- Turnover in the first year
- Retention rates by source
- Candidate funnel by source
- Performance rating by source
- Best first year outcomes by source
You see, recruiting cost-effectively shouldn’t mean making poor quality hires. Even when facing candidate and skills shortages. Or even a flawed candidate journey that doesn’t keep the best talent as sticky as you’d ideally hope.
Besides efficiency gains, talent acquisition analytics play a pivotal role in improving quality of hire. How? By analyzing candidate data, such as:
- Skills
- Experience
- Qualifications
ABC Company
Let’s revisit Company ABC. With analytics at their fingertips, they prioritized recruitment sources that originated higher quality candidates. Ones who stay with the business and make a positive contribution. Crucially, this highlighted where they could spend the least to get the best results, by focusing on the best performing channels.
In a nutshell, when you’ve got to the tools to dig into this sort of data, you can identify patterns that correlate with high-performing employees – including the most likely stayers. It’s an inspired way to help you:
- Refine job descriptions
- Fine-tune screening criteria
- Identify the most promising candidates
And in the absence of a crystal ball, analytics helps you to forecast future hiring outcomes. After all, there’s a greater likelihood of predicting a candidate’s potential for success within your organization when you can analyze historical data on successful hires and identify common traits and patterns. Consequently, this gears you up for making informed decisions, identifying the best fits, and minimizing the risk of costly hiring mistakes.
It all comes down to this…
Unleashing the Power of Data Integration
The true power of talent acquisition analytics lies in its ability to integrate with other HR systems and data sources. In short, you can enjoy a 360-degree holistic view of the entire talent lifecycle. How? By combining data from multiple platforms, such as an ATS, HRIS, L&D system, and even external sources in different formats, such as any traditional number crunching you’ve done on spreadsheets.
This unprecedented integration provides comprehensive insights into the entire employee journey, from recruitment to retention.
For example, talent acquisition analytics can help identify areas where employee turnover is highest, enabling you to take proactive measures to address the underlying causes. By understanding the reasons behind attrition, you can plan and implement strategic activations, such as:
- Refining your sourcing strategies
- Improve candidate screening processes
- Deploying targeted retention initiatives
Crucially, the integration of talent acquisition analytics with other HR systems and data sources unlocks the full potential of data-driven decision-making. This includes but isn’t limited to:
- Adopting a holistic view of your talent lifecycle
- Identifying opportunities for improvement and risks that might be threatening to hold you back
- Predicting future outcomes
- Implementing strategic measures to enhance recruitment and retention
A Partner to Help
At HireRoad, we understand that in a recruitment marketplace characterized by ongoing turbulence and competition for talent, you need a competitive edge in your recruitment efforts. And you need to understand KPIs such as quality of hire. Our leading-edge PeopleInsight by HireRoad solution enables recruitment teams worldwide to strike a balance between low-cost and high-quality hires. Now, you too can leverage data and insights, optimize your recruitment strategies, enhance efficiency, reduce costs, and improve the overall quality of new hires.
Need a better balance between making low-cost and high-quality hires? Get in touch for a free demo of PeopleInsight by HireRoad. Because NOW is the time to stop getting the same results by doing things in the same old ways.