In today’s complex and quick changes taking place in the world of work, owing to the accelerated advancement of technology, digital transformation, an increasingly dynamic and complex business environment and volatile global economic conditions, the skill gap and talent crunch have become pressing concerns for every organization. It has become necessary for HR teams to change their recruitment process to hire and retain the best talent that fits the values and culture of the organization for long term growth and success.
In such a context, traditional hiring practices become more and more irrelevant. Earlier, collecting data was an inordinately tough task but now it has become more easier with digital HR solutions. So, with the availability of voluminous data and a wealth of tech tools and software to analyze these data and gain invaluable insights, data driven hiring process come to the light to provide a seamless way for HR teams to identify and assess the best candidates.
Data-driven hiring is the process of optimizing the candidate’s journey from awareness to consideration by leveraging data on the candidates you want to recruit by using useful insights from data, tangible facts and stats.
Some benefits by using a data-driven process are:
1. Guesswork and forecasting
Enabling recruiters to analyze large volumes of data and draw insights, tangible facts and stats that can be used to improve the efficiency of the hiring process, eliminating gut-feeling decisions, inaccuracies and uncertainties in both hiring and forecasting. The gut-feeling decisions, CV likeability and other bottlenecks in traditional hiring are removed and decisions about the hires and hiring process are based on facts.
2. Quality of hire
By leveraging data, organizations can hire and retain candidates who are a perfect fit for the organization, thereby reducing turnovers and improving productivity. It also enables HR professionals to dig deep into key metrics like qualified application per requisition, turnover rate, hire source, etc. to revise/ redesign the hiring strategy and budgets.
3. Time and cost to fill
Using a data-driven approach, organizations can effectively understand and analyze the time required to fill certain roles/ vacancies including the time spent at each level of the process. Based on these insights, organizations can identify bottlenecks and weaknesses in the process, build credible timelines for hiring (reducing number of interviews per role) and expedite the hiring process. Similarly, organizations can leverage the right data to reduce the cost per hire.
4. Candidate experiences
By leveraging hiring data and analytics, organizations can understand the bottlenecks in the hiring process and analyze the challenges faced by candidates to fix inefficiencies in the process, make it more effective and provide seamless experiences to candidates. HR professionals can use insights from data to personalize the candidate experience.
5. Remove bias
It’s human to be biased, have certain biases and pre-conceived notions (generally due to mental filtering) which often gets manifested in the hiring process. Data-driven recruiting arms you with the knowledge you need to minimize bias and hire based on merit by using analytics, AI and ML.