Recruitment analytics are increasingly indispensable as advanced, practical tools for recruitment. In a highly competitive hunt for talent, you need something that will give you an edge.

Data & analysis can provide you with this competitive advantage, helping improve your recruitment strategy. This applies to HR analytics in recruitment and recruitment agency metrics.

In this blog, we’ll look at what analytic recruitment involves and how it can help with your hiring process. The benefits of hiring analytics include improving hiring quality and saving recruitment costs. Plus, you can track your performance to keep you on track with your recruitment KPIs.

What Are Recruitment Analytics?

When you apply big data to recruitment processes, this creates recruitment analytics. By collecting this data, you can measure your recruitment strategy and, where necessary, adjust and fine-tune it. These analytics are quantitative and qualitative.

Quantitative analytics come from measuring amounts of data. For example, the number of new hires in a set period. This can tell you the time it takes to fill a vacant position, helping you plan and monitor the effectiveness of your recruitment strategy.

Qualitative analytics comes from the analysis of data. For example, what similarities do these new hires share? Here, qualitative analysis is especially useful for keeping track of diversity recruitment and helping you draw from a broad talent pool.

The key recruitment metrics you can examine from hiring analytics are:

• The time it takes to hire
• The time it takes to fill a role
• Source of the hire
• Quality of the hire
• Number of applicants per opening
• Diversity of candidates
• Experience of candidates
• Offer acceptance rate
• Attrition rate
• Cost per hire.

Analytic recruitment works by first gathering and then analysing information. By using a dedicated recruitment and analytics platform, you can gain valuable insights from measurable recruitment data.

These insights enable you to make informed, strategic recruitment decisions. Now let’s look at how recruitment analytics help the recruitment process in greater detail.

How Can Recruitment Analytics Help the Hiring Process?

The more you know, the better equipped you’ll be to make sound, strategic recruitment decisions. Depth of knowledge provides the insights that will support your strategy.

This isn’t simply about collecting more information (the “big” in big data) but breaking this information down into different, detailed metrics.

1. Improve Quality of Hire

Recruitment analytics apply beyond the initial hiring stage.

It’s not just about candidate selection but also looking at their first-year performance. This allows you to see if the candidates you’ve recruited fulfil your expectations.

Also, by looking at attrition rates, you can see the percentage of new hires who leave within a specified period. This helps measure your hiring success and whether advertised job descriptions match the reality of the role.

Basically, the proof of the pudding is in the eating. The metrics tell you what happens after you’ve recruited someone to help you improve the process for the future.

This isn’t notional or theoretical. The data shows you how people are performing in their roles, or if they’ve left the company after a relatively brief period following their recruitment.

2. Saved Costs

Hiring is costly. This applies to the process of advertising roles and to interviewing candidates.

The average cost of recruiting an individual in the UK is around £3,000.

Cost-per-hire metrics will tell you what you need to invest in the entire recruitment process, from sourcing to interviewing, hiring and onboarding.

You get this figure by dividing your hiring costs by the number of new recruits you take on within a specified period.

Metrics throw other aspects of recruitment costs into sharp relief. If you end up with an unsuitable hire resulting from your recruitment strategy, you’ve then got costs associated with re-filling that role.

And you may have issues with ending the contract, generating further cost implications.

Again, it’s about gaining as much information as you can to help you make informed decisions. If you attract candidates that are well-suited to roles, and who will remain with you for longer, you save in the long term too.

3. Track Performance

Analytics are measurable. They keep telling you things.

You’ll have recruitment KPIs, so key recruitment metrics will let you know whether you’re meeting them.

They’ll tell you the effectiveness of your recruitment team’s efforts and your recruitment strategy in real-time.

You’ll see conversion rates, the time it takes to fill and hire, the number of applicants and the cost of hiring.

4. Increased Efficiency

Hiring takes time. Hiring processes will vary from organisation to organisation, but lengthiness tends to be a common factor.

It takes 27.5 days to complete the average interview process in the UK.

There are various reasons for this, including organisational structures, decision-making bottlenecks and the caution that underpins much recruitment – companies want assurance that they’re getting the best possible candidate for a role.

One of the major risks here is that the longer it takes to recruit your ideal candidate, the greater the chance that a rival offer will divert them before you can complete the process.

Recruitment analytics are drivers of efficiency. By offering greater visibility and up-to-the-minute metrics, they streamline hiring processes and highlight areas for change and improvement.

They point the way to streamlining processes without sacrificing diligence.

5. Improving Diversity

Improving diversity in your recruitment strategy isn’t simply a box-ticking exercise.

Not only does improved diversity send out positive signals about your organisational culture, but it also broadens the talent pool you can draw from.

The recruiting metrics can tell you about the demographic and other makeup of your candidates.

Data is the bedrock for recruiting strategies for fulfilling organisational and HR commitments to improve diversity. It offers detailed diversity reporting at every stage of the recruitment funnel.

Many employers are still struggling to address diversity issues in their recruitment. An analytic, data-driven approach can help them make necessary and critical adjustments to their processes and policies.

Greater diversity in recruitment supports innovation, attraction, retention, financial performance and a positive workplace culture.

Conclusion

Analytic recruitment, based on data-driven decisions, offers you excellent ways of improving your overall recruitment strategy.

Recruitment analytics help you:

• Improve the quality of hire
• Save on recruitment costs
• Track your performance
• Increase efficiency, and
• Improve diversity.

Make recruitment metrics your priority to take your hiring to the next level. Contact the Broadbean team today to find out more about our dedicated, data-driven support.