Sometimes it’s blindingly obvious that a candidate isn’t right for the job. For example, when a candidate shows up with his mother in tow. Or steals food from the restaurant he wants to work at. Or perhaps, the one who asked her interviewer to wait in a hotel lobby while she finished her game of solitaire.
But sometimes it isn’t so apparent that a candidate isn’t going to be a good fit, even for the most practised recruiters. According to Glassdoor, the average cost of hiring an employee in the UK is £3,000, with a time to hire of 27 days. So while hiring mistakes are costly for any organisation, in an SME, this impact can be felt particularly hard.
For this reason, many recruiters are now leveraging advances in technology to integrate HR analytics into their recruitment and talent acquisition processes.
What Gets Measured, Gets Managed
Recruiting metrics tend to be the preserve of larger organisations, but even SMEs can benefit from measuring their hiring processes. LinkedIn offers a tailored cheatsheet of 12 key metrics that can be used by any business to start figuring out how their recruitment processes are performing.
Traditionally, recruiting metrics have been highly quantitative, covering measures such as time to hire, first-year attrition rates, or cost per hire. However, organisations are increasingly turning to qualitative measures that take input from candidate performance ratings and feedback surveys to assess the effectiveness of the recruitment process.
Once you start putting these measurements in place, they can provide rich insights into where your recruiting processes could be improved. If particular positions take longer to fill, maybe better sourcing is needed. If employees in a given team are leaving within a year, maybe that manager needs help with screening candidates or onboarding new recruits.
By applying HR analytics to your recruiting processes in this way, you can make better-informed decisions that will ultimately help to reduce spend on recruitment, decrease the time to hire, and direct budgets into those areas that will yield the most results.
Choosing the Tools that Matter
LinkedIn’s “The Future of Recruiting” survey provides some intriguing perceptions regarding how technology is creating a shifting landscape for recruitment professionals. There are several key facets to this shift. Firstly, as companies become more reliant on technologies to stay ahead of the competition, recruiters are having to adapt to the pressure of hiring roles such as developers and data scientists amid a skills shortage.
Secondly, the increasing availability of technology is providing recruiters with new ways to meet these challenges. In particular, HR analytics tools to help find and engage candidates and assess soft skills are growing in use and having a positive impact on the recruitment process.
However, the most significant gap identified by the survey is in tools to analyse the talent market. Currently, less than a quarter of respondents said they used such tools, whereas more than half think they’ll have a significant impact on the recruitment process in the next five years.
This suggests that tools to analyse the talent markets are likely to see a spike in adoption over the coming years, meaning that HR professionals have an opportunity now to be among the first movers, and get ahead of the HR teams at the companies competing to attract the same talent pool.
One recruiter told of how they’d used these tools in a European expansion, identifying that Ukraine had an abundance of talent with a scarcity of openings. Garnering these kinds of insights could mean improved performance across almost every metric in the recruiting process.
Shifting the Hiring and Retention Mindset
Later in the process, intelligent screening software is perhaps one of the most powerful, enabling recruiters to identify candidate traits and assess their suitability for any given position. Deloitte’s 2019 Human Capital report cites Unilever as an example of a company using these tools to deliver a step-change in the way they recruit and retain talent.
Rather than seeking to attract graduates, Unilever now uses an AI assessment system to seek out candidates who display specific competences, regardless of their qualifications. The company also uses the GrowUperion platform to ensure that existing employees stay engaged and motivated, thereby curbing churn.
The Deloitte report concludes that recruiters using HR data tools can save as much as 50% of time spent on screening, enabling them to deploy their efforts into other, more valuable activities. Furthermore, they can take much of the legwork out of HR analytics, as they’re often integrated with dashboards that will provide insights into the types of candidates that have undergone screening, at the click of a button.
Tips and Warnings
Technology isn’t a panacea by itself, and talent professionals should be cautious in ensuring they’re choosing the systems and tools that can deliver value and work with the process, not against it. Too many tools, especially if they’re fragmented and don’t sync with one another, can make a recruiters life more difficult, demanding time-consuming manual workarounds. Even worse, a poor candidate experience will negatively impact on your employer branding.
Another pitfall to watch out for, as alluded to above, is that the shifting technology landscape means that recruiters have to adapt. The old, habit-driven methods of hiring candidates are rapidly being replaced by the work of machines, meaning recruiters have to up their game in soft skills. These include communication, problem-solving, and strategic planning capabilities.
According to Amy Schultz, LinkedIn’s Director of Talent Acquisition, “The best recruiters will be curious and adaptable, with a learning mindset.”
HR analytics offers great potential in the field of recruitment, and those working in the sector have their work cut out to stay abreast of all these changes. However, as technology and analytical capabilities become more sophisticated at identifying the best talent for any given role, perhaps the “worst interview” anecdotes will eventually become a thing of the past.
