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Data-Driven Recruiting: How to Hire Smarter with Analytics

JazzHR

Adopting a data-driven recruiting strategy is one of the best ways to future-proof your small business hiring. By leveraging the power of talent analytics and insights, your human resources team can:

  • Better understand which recruiting channels help you find the best potential candidates
  • Develop a long-term hiring plan that is based on historical data tied to past recruiting cycles
  • Improve key metrics, like your candidate engagement and job offer acceptance rates
  • Use your workforce data, such as your employee turnover rate and quality of hire, to make informed changes to your recruitment marketing and talent sourcing approaches
  • Ensure your small business continually hires top performers and reaches its full potential

The key to building a highly effective data-driven recruiting program is to first invest in a centralized solution where you can store all data tied to your hiring cycles and ensure all hiring team members can easily access and take action on your analytics in each stage of the hiring process.

data driven recruiting

The benefits of data-driven recruiting today

There are four pros of using analytics in your data-driven approach to recruiting and hiring and ensuring all SMB hiring stakeholders make decisions based on your real-time, unified insights.

1) Improve the quality of hire

Analytics provides objective insights that can elevate your hiring decisions. Analytics enables you to ID candidates who best align with your small business’s role- and team-based needs and ensures you only employ strong-fit individuals for critical positions across your company.

Measuring the quality of hires is critical to understanding the effectiveness of your recruiting process and proving its strategic value to internal stakeholders,” HR expert Corey Berkey told Spiceworks.

2) Enhance candidate experience

By tracking key recruiting metrics tied to your SMB’s sourcing, nurturing, and interviewing, you can gradually improve the candidate journey for each person you engage and boost your hiring conversion rates.

Regularly analyzing and acting on your recruitment data can also help you can address any roadblocks that hinder the hiring process (e.g., overly lengthy interview stages, delayed prospect feedback). In turn, this review can improve the candidate and hiring manager experience.

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3) Optimize your hiring funnel

Access to real-time insights tied to each part of your hiring process can also help you identify bottlenecks and opportunities tied to your day-to-day and long-term data-driven recruiting.

For instance, if your talent analytics reveals your average time to hire is slipping from one month to the next, you can see what recruiting activities slow down your hiring approach and fix them.

4) Integrate all your data systems

To make the most of disconnected recruiting and workforce data sets, your SMB must unify them into a centralized source. A small business applicant tracking system like JazzHR allows our customers to integrate popular recruitment tools and HR systems directly with our ATS.

Consider JazzHR customer Novoscale.

“We use Hacker Rank, CareerBuilder, Outlook Calendar, BambooHR, Monster,” said Novoscale Head of Talent Francisco Herrera. “All of these connect JazzHR so we were easily able to unify our data sources.”

Francisco added Novoscale’s hiring team can now “benchmark our success and provide reports that defend our recruiting KPIs from upper management,” helping them show off their progress.

recruitment metrics

Building your data-driven recruiting strategy

To create a successful data-driven recruiting strategy, your SMB needs to collect, analyze, and act on relevant data points across the hiring process. Here’s a step-by-step guide to help you get started:

Identify your most important recruiting metrics

Define your hiring goals and the metrics tied to them you must track over time to gauge your performance.

Determine the most important recruitment analytics for your business. These can include “standard” metrics like time to hire/fill, cost per hire, source of hire, quality of hire, and candidate experience. That said, with the right SMB talent analytics, you can also tracking your:

  • Pipeline speed: How quickly recruiters advance candidates from one funnel stage to the next
  • Candidate engagement: How often prospects open and reply to your nurture emails and texts
  • Diversity recruiting: How many diverse leads are in your talent pool and engaged for roles

Collect and take advantage of highly relevant data

To make savvy, data-driven recruiting decisions, you first need access to the right data. Start by collecting data related to job posting engagement, application completion rates, interview feedback speed, and other elements and stages of your hiring cycle.

Pay special attention to your sourcing avenues. Knowing where you source the most and best candidates can help you adjust your job-posting and recruitment marketing efforts on the fly.

Regarding this latter data point, your ideal ATS should be able to help you find leads in your system who align with the specs outlined in a job posting/description quickly and efficiently. If it doesn’t, it’s time to upgrade your recruiting software to one that’s more advanced yet intuitive.

recruiting metrics to track

Analyze your data (and often) to gradually improve

With accessible data, you can pinpoint trends and correlations tied to your hiring strategy.

What patterns do you see in your hiring funnel? Are there specific steps or channels that tend to produce the most qualified candidates? Asking questions like these will help your hiring team know where your current strategy is succeeding and where improvements are needed.

For example, if you find that the candidates sourced from a particular job board, like LinkedIn or Indeed, are consistently high-performing, you can focus more resources on that platform.

Take action on your recruiting insights

Use your analyses to make data-driven improvements to your hiring process. This may involve refining your candidate sourcing approach, tweaking your interview process, or investing in additional training and development for your recruiting team to better interact with and advance top talent.

For instance, you may decide to modify your job descriptions to better attract qualified candidates, if you find ones for recent roles haven’t led to as many applicants as you would’ve liked to have.

Improving your data-driven recruiting over time

Hiring is an ever-evolving process. That means you must continuously track your key recruiting metrics and make changes as needed to meet the needs of your small but growing business.

To fully reap the benefits of a data-driven recruiting strategy, it’s vital to invest in the right tools and resources. JazzHR’s ATS offers a range of comprehensive candidate management capabilities.

Want to use data and insights to improve your hiring strategy? Learn how JazzHR’s powerful, user-friendly ATS built specifically for small businesses can help your SMB recruiting efforts.

jazzhr recruitment software ats demo