Are you Prepared for Predictive Recruitment?

Talent attraction has changed in recent years. The availability of advanced recruitment software, coupled with easily accessible talent pools on social media, means that companies no longer have to rely solely on recruitment agencies to source candidates.
Bringing recruitment in-house also affords brands the opportunity to capture, record and analyse valuable candidate data, which helps to optimise recruiting campaign effectiveness, reduce costs and improve talent quality.

With the average cost of replacing an employee in the UK exceeding £30,000, making sure that you hire the right person, and retain them, should be a top priority.

With the rise in the use of social media by active and passive applicants to source roles, and also brands to find talent, this medium is no longer a fad or an irregular way to recruit.

• 37% of recruiting professionals cited social media as their primary tool for attracting talent; the most popular networks were LinkedIn and Twitter – socialtalent
• According to a survey in 2015 by Jobvite, 92% of employers now use social media in the recruitment process
• 50% of workers believe that social media influences their view of a brand and whether they want to work for them – EWS
• 71% of 16-20 year olds believe employers are not working hard enough to attract them – ONREC

The amount of data available for applicants, and the recruitment process as a whole, is more abundant and deeper than ever before. As well as being able to interrogate data collected during the applicant process, it’s now possible to extract and analyse data from various different sources, covering everything a brand needs to highly target future campaigns.

However, according to the “Deloitte Global Human Capital Trends 2014” report, only 14% of HR departments use analytics and only 4% of those in order to predict. As a result, adapt future efforts.

The ability to use data to spot and take advantage of trends is a critical success factor and one that will set you apart from the competition, enabling you to attract top talent. Trends include:

Strategy performance – how are current recruitment efforts performing? Is the number of engaged applicants starting to wane?
Proactively adjusting your recruitment campaign strategy and adapting to trending/popular topics will help maximise ROI and reduce the need to react at the last minute or miss out on opportunities altogether.

Talent source – where do the most successful applicants originate? Are there different sources for different types of vacancy? How does LinkedIn compare to Twitter at certain times of year or for particular job types?

Using your data to determine the target social network, industry site or publication, can save both money and time.

Candidate interaction – what type of content encourages the most interaction, not simply in terms of an application, but also sharing your vacancy advert and helping your brand to increase your reach? Understanding these metrics helps to target your content and reduce marketing costs.

Recruitment process performance – are there stages during the recruitment process that could be improved? Are you using your recruitment budget in the right places? By recording and analysing the associated data, you’ll quickly gain an insight into what works and, more importantly, what doesn’t.

Improving the candidate experience – one of the most important factors to maintaining and improving your brand, both as a recruiter and employer, is ensuring that your candidate experience is as good as it can be. From the initial advert and first engagement to the onboarding process and training, you need to use data to study and improve the candidate experience in order to ensure that you retain talent and avoid turnover expenditure.

Psychology of applicants – are there certain colours that attract more applicants, when included in a job advert? Does certain language in a job description encourage more engagement? Regardless of how small the change is, the ability to analyse, test and make even the smallest of adjustments, can have profound effects on your recruiting efforts and success.

Recruiter performance – It’s not just the candidate experience and metrics that you should be measuring and acting upon, your recruiters are also an integral part of the process and just as important to manage. For instance, are there certain members of the recruitment team who perform well on certain networks or when sourcing candidates for a particular type of vacancy?

The ability to track the performance of your recruiters also enables targeted training and development, allows for the introduction of incentives based on data and, if granted, the option of self assessment within the talent attraction team.

Credit: Martin Varsavsky

Google analyse data to attract top talent

Google, the worlds second most valuable company has long been an advocate and leader in talent attraction. Reportedly, each employee, on average, generates nearly $1 million in revenue and $200,000 in profits each year. This is surely a testament to the efforts Google puts into attracting the very best talent and making sure that the candidate experience is one that encourages their employees to stay for the long-term.

Google relies on staffing analytics to introduce more data and science into the hiring process.

Google has four key goals:

• Using analytics to expand the candidate pipeline and bring more talented people into that pipeline
• Using analytics to improve decision making and identification of the best candidates
• Making the candidate experience remarkable. Every candidate should have a “magical” interview experience and a “magical” hiring process
• Making the hiring process fast and efficient

Source: Korn Ferry Institute

Google probably receives more applications than any other company in the world and so are able to collect data on a massive scale, but this doesn’t mean that smaller businesses can’t take advantage of the same principles.

Speak to us today to find out how we can help you to capture important recruitment data and improve your recruiting efforts.