Recruiting Metrics: An Evolving Hiring Process

Let’s face it, the hiring process is and always will be a competition.  From the perspective of the applicant, they are in a competition to beat out other applicants and get a job offer.  On the other hand, companies are in a competition with other companies to secure top talent and maximize the goodness of fit for each new employee.  In a race, a status quo approach will only get you in the middle of the pack, if you are lucky.  To achieve greatness in hiring requires constantly improving the recruiting process to maximize efficiencies and minimize bottlenecks.

Improving the Recruiting Process

All recruiting programs have some degree of redundancy or inefficiency.  Your attention to detail dictates the success of your recruiting program.  Most corporate recruiters will agree that there are certain scheduling conflicts, redundant interviews or bottlenecks that crop up on a regular basis.  These elements may vary dramatically from company to company.  For one organization, it may be a hiring manager that is just too swamped with other tasks to dutifully handle their responsibilities to the recruiting program.  For other organizations, it may be a result of an overly extended review process that results in missed opportunities and applicant dropouts.  

Feedback, Feedback, Feedback

In any process, feedback is required to improve results.  When you stub your toe, you decrease the chances that you will make the same mistake twice.  Unfortunately, the hiring process covers more variables and a recruiting program’s responsibilities tend to be spread out over multiple people.  With so many potential cracks to fall into, how do you ensure that the successes and failures of your corporate recruiting program make it into a feedback process?  In the past, corporate recruiters would be responsible for taking notes and managing email strings to try and pinpoint errors and issues.  This process tended to be fragmented and highly personal.  When a recruiter tells a hiring manager that they are causing a bottleneck due to lack of availability, the situation can appear personal.  How do you get around an antiquated feedback system?  Capture data in a central location so all stakeholders have access.  Modern applicant tracking systems are capable of storing a wealth of data on the “whos” and “whens” of your hiring process.  This data can be incredibly granular and comprehensive.  Half of structuring feedback is capturing the data required to extrapolate trends and pinpoint issues.

Presenting the Data

Structuring and mining your recruiting data is critical to finding areas for improvement.  Information by itself is like a cluttered desk full of random papers.  Each paper has some information, but there is no way to make heads or tails of the entire data set.  Recently, some recruiting software companies have perfected the art of surfacing data and presenting usable formats to help quantify your corporate recruiting system.  These Recruiting Metrics are providing tremendous insight into the hiring process.  Imagine being able to view your bottlenecks in real-time with an easy to understand graph.  These analytics packages offer a wide range of capabilities, from pinpointing which hiring manager’s cause the most holdups to a full-spectrum review of your corporate recruiters screening tasks.  The basic goal of recruiting metrics is simple; make your data as usable and actionable as possible.

In the inherently competitive process of hiring, continuous improvement in key to achieving success.  Improving your recruiting program is dependent on feedback.  With modern applicant tracking software you can capture a wealth of information.  New recruiting metrics features are taking aim at providing you corporate recruiters and HR managers with the data they require.  These new recruiting analytics features are driving a new approach to hiring, the evolving recruiting process.