How to Start Optimising Your Recruitment With Data

Data is incredibly valuable when it comes to improving your hiring practices, as it allows you to optimise processes, save money, and increase the quality of your hires. Once you gather your data, either from your own internal methods or from your recruitment partner, you must utilise it efficiently. 

In this article, we’re going to talk about how to start optimising your recruitment with internal data, as well as how you can keep your recruitment partners accountable to providing you with their data points, too.

Internal data

Access to recruitment data is valuable, but if you don’t know how to use it, you won’t see tangible improvements in your recruitment strategy. For example, let’s say that you’re currently tracking your interview to placement ratio; this involves tracking how many candidates it takes to successfully fill a role. 

It’s a valuable metric to track, as it gives you an indication of the quality of candidates that you’re interviewing, as well as how long the decision-making process takes. This data can be used to optimise your recruitment in two key ways:

1. See where your current screening process may need improvements 

Tracking interview to placement ratio gives you the opportunity to see if there are issues with the way that you are selecting candidates for both video and campus interviews. If you find that the total number of people you have to interview in order to make a hire is increasing, especially for the same types of roles, it might be time to change up your interview questions. Perhaps you’re not asking the right questions so your candidates aren’t getting a chance to wow you. You might also want to change your process if you find that you are frequently needing to invite additional candidates for campus interviews in order to make a hire. If you can reduce the number of candidates you interview by a small percentage, you will save time and resources in the process.

2. Track how long it takes to make a placement based on how many interviews are carried out 

This data gives you the opportunity to see how your interview to placement ratio affects your time to hire, as well as allowing you to see if you are frequently losing good candidates partway through your process because your time to hire is too long. 

Understanding how your time to hire differs between different types of positions can help when you have to recruit for multiple positions simultaneously. For example, if you need to hire both a PhD student and a postdoc for a project and you know your time to hire is longer for a postdoc, you can start the postdoc recruitment process first. 

You can see how one data point can positively impact your recruitment strategy, which is why we recommend introducing data tracking into your recruitment strategy. 

In our downloadable guide, we have created a tracker that enables you to track up to 7 data points, however, don’t feel obliged to start with all 7. If you’re new to data-driven recruitment, start off with tracking 1-2 points and phasein other data points as you become more comfortable. Try to start by identifying a weak point you currently have within your institution and use that as the first data point you track. 

Recruitment partners

For some roles, you may look to engage a recruitment partner to create more awareness and visibility of your vacancy. A good recruitment partner should be able to provide you with data about your performance on their platform and be able to advise you on how to use this data to improve your recruitment process. 

So, what kind of data can a recruitment partner provide you with?

Depending on the type of recruitment partner you work with, you will have access to different data points. Here are some you may be able to acquire and how you can use them: 

1. Candidate source: Knowing what countries your candidates are coming is an incredibly useful data point for you to be made aware of. It can give you insight into where there are strong talent pools and reveal potential new countries of interest that you can target in the future with outreach or advertising campaigns.
2. Traffic: Recruitment partners should act as a vehicle to drive traffic to your open roles and ensure that you are receiving substantial visibility. They can provide you with monthly traffic reports, so you can see how often your available positions are being viewed.
3. Top-performing jobs: Similar to traffic, your recruitment partner can also provide you with details on your highest performing jobs. This could be the number of people viewing the role, as well as the number of applicants. This will allow you to understand which types of roles are in high demand as well as the types of roles that perform best on each platform. 

Optimising your recruitment with data doesn’t have to be complicated. Instead, it can be a mixture of incorporating your internal and external data points and using them to tweak 1-2 things in your recruitment strategy over time.

Do you want the full guide on how to design a data-driven recruitment strategy? Download our comprehensive guide below.