How data can help to improve the entire recruitment process

The days of recruitment methods based on educated guesswork, a bit of luck and/or requiring a hefty advertising budget are long gone.

Although a recruiter’s intuition will always be valuable, data-driven recruiting is quicker, more efficient and more cost-effective than traditional recruitment methods. Most importantly, it is more likely to attract the talented candidates you need for your jobs. Utilising data can improve every aspect of the recruitment process, from job ad copy, to where and when to post those jobs, to tracking performance and evaluating strategies. Used effectively, data can help you to streamline your processes and shorten your placement times.      

Optimising job ad content to reach the right candidates

Do you know the ideal length for a job ad in your industry? How about the keywords that candidates are actively inputting into their search? What job titles candidates searching for jobs like yours are looking for? Data can supply all of this information and more, helping you to ensure your job ads are reaching the candidates you need. Top tip: WaveTrackR recommends an average word length of between 150-350 words.

Utilising analytical data on your recruitment website

Do you know how many visits your recruitment website receives? How long visitors stay for? How many convert by registering/subscribing to a newsletter/applying for a job? Without tracking the performance of your website via a tool such as Google Analytics, it’s hard to know whether your recruitment strategies are working. Without analysing web metrics, the marketing strategy for your website is pure guesswork. With solid data into user behaviour and website performance, you can determine what is working and what needs attention, ensuring that the ROI for your recruitment website is as high as possible. There are several web analytics stats that you should be monitoring on your recruitment website to ensure you are fully utilising it to attract candidates and convert them into applicants, including website visits, goal conversion, visit duration, most visited pages, website load speed, and more.   

Posting jobs to the right platforms

Data has meant that the age of spray and pray is well and truly over. No longer do recruiters have to spread their advertising budget over dozens of job boards in the hope that they might get lucky – a method that was never cost or time effective. Based on information provided for a job advert, recruitment tech can now utilise gathered and live data to recommend which job boards are likely to generate the largest number of quality applications.

Scheduling your jobs to post at the right times

Posting your jobs at times when jobseekers are actively searching is critical, and even more so in such a competitive market. Post at times of low candidate activity and, with the rate at which fresh jobs are added to job boards, your job will be old news by the time those candidates are looking. How do you know the best time to post your jobs? In short, data. A data-powered multi-poster such as WaveTrackR can analyse data taken from thousands of job posts and applications and calculate the day of the week (and even the time of day) that the majority of candidates are applying for jobs. WaveTrackR has found that most applications are received on a Monday or Tuesday (18% each). How does that affect job posting decisions? WaveTrackR data has also revealed that 50% of candidates apply within one day of a job being posted. The best time to post a job – for maximum exposure to quality candidates – is therefore at the very beginning of the week, first thing on a Monday, or even on a Sunday evening.

Budgeting and negotiating

Knowing which job boards are likely to supply the most applications and hires allows you to allocate your budget intelligently, buying the right number of credits from the right job boards for your industry and your jobs. You can use this data to make solid budgetary decisions and negotiate both internally and externally.

Evaluating job board performance

Data that tells you which job boards bring you the most applications, the most hires, and which therefore are the most profitable for you, will help you to figure out which job boards are working for you and which aren’t. And with revenue per job board data you can literally see how much money job boards are bringing you in.

Tracking hiring efficiency

Efficiency analytics, showing you the rate of hires among all applications received, can be vital information, allowing you to evaluate the success or otherwise of your recruitment processes. If, for example, you have a high rate of applications but a relatively low rate of hires, you know something is going wrong somewhere else. That could be pace of communication, length of the process, or possibly an issue at the interview stage.

Improving the overall process

Here’s the boring but important bit: data captured by your recruitment tech can help you keep track of burn dates, burn rates, and credits remaining. This sort of data helps to ensure an efficient process, with everything in one place so you can keep on top of the admin side and spend more time focusing on your clients and your candidates.

Utilising data helps to streamline the entire recruitment process, saving you time and money, allowing you to make informed media decisions, and freeing you up to spend more time with candidates and clients, building and fostering those all-important relationships. Harnessing the power of data as much as possible means you get to focus on the human side of recruitment. The combination of streamlining, data-driven tech with the compassionate, relationship-building power of a human recruiter makes for a winning formula.

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