Your tech stack needs to be intuitively data-driven (and data-heavy)

Your recruiting operations team can now be more data-driven than ever. To live in the numbers in real-time, look to your technology vendors to surface the right stats and help your team use them.

As LinkedIn pointed out in their 2017 recruiting trends report, 81% of talent leaders say that their team is the highest priority in their broader organization. But to make an impact on the executive team, it’s important to contextualize the data. Having data means nothing unless there is a way to present it to decision-makers in a way they understand.

Some of the impact is in choosing the right data, often achieved by working with software providers who make it easy for you to focus on the most important metrics. And some of the impact is in the telling: presenting cause and effect in a way that execs who aren’t in the recruiting trenches will be able to contextualize.

Here are a few categories of data you can use to assess the health and impact of your recruiting efforts:

Data that helps you expand your prospecting reach

There’s a growing ecosystem of tools and marketplaces with algorithmic match-making under the hood—all designed to help you target your top-funnel outreach and find candidates who are likely to be qualified and interested. When you’re looking at tools that use machine learning to help you target your outreach, they should offer some level of transparency that shows you why they’re prioritizing certain types of candidates.

The same signals the algorithms use can also help you think about how you’ve written the job description, how the hiring manager’s expectations may need to be reset, and how your assumptions about where to look may not be quite right.

The takeaway: when you’re evaluating prospecting software, make sure you can learn from the same signals the software learns from.

Data that helps you improve pipeline throughput

Time-to-hire is a near-universal performance indicator, but it blots out the specific steps in your candidate journey where things get stuck. Everyone knows to watch this stat, but it doesn’t always translate. Case and point: Dr. John Sullivan’s research tells us that top talent is only on the job market for 10 days before getting scooped up, but Jobvite’s latest research shows the 2017 average is 38 days!

Your software partners should be helping you measure the duration of every step of your candidate journey. Your ATS may be able to provide this granular detail, but likely the accuracy of those numbers relies on everyone on your team inputting progress in a uniform way, and in near-real-time.

So as you build out your tech stack, seek solutions that can automate and aggregate phase-specific data. How long does it take for your prospecting emails to get opened? To get a response? How long does it take for a phone screen to get scheduled? How swiftly does the hiring manager make time to meet with a candidate? How many days do you lose to reference checks?

The takeaway: get data for each step of the journey—that isn’t dependent on manual entry—so you can focus on the phases that can be tightened up.

Data that helps you engage stakeholders

When LinkedIn asked candidates what gets their attention from a potential employer, the most popular response was company culture and values. Recruiters are the ones who make the first impression in this influential (and let’s be honest…often amorphous) area of employer brand. So you have to deliver a great candidate experience—and prove the team is committed to respecting one another’s time and focus.

In other words, the interview process needs to be seamless.

But you’re not entirely in control of that interview process…because it’s full of interviewers. So to help your collaborators understand the impact they have on your ability to delight candidates, it’s helpful to have data you can share with them.

Show them how long it takes them to make time to talk with candidates. Show them how frequently they reschedule interviews at the last minute. And maybe guilt them a little into better behavior next time.

The takeaway: giving stakeholders their personal performance data can help them be better participants in the candidate journey.

At Clara Labs, we show recruiters detailed, real-time scheduling data at every step of the candidate funnel. Numbers are powerful—especially for teams who are building authentic relationships at scale.

Authors

Vanessa Hope Schneider leads marketing at Clara Labs. Previously, she's led marketing, communications, and content teams at One Medical, Airbnb, and Eventbrite.