The Role of Recruitment Analytics in Your SMB Hiring

Even amid robust labor market conditions (something we in the U.S. have not really seen since the official end of the pandemic), many small businesses have traditionally not perceived recruitment analytics as valuable or necessary to the success of their talent acquisition strategy.

• The truth is every SMB — including yours — needs analytics to make strides with their recruiting and hiring efforts in both the short and long run. (Read: Employ the right individuals.)

Without complete, historical data tied to your recruitment process that’s easy to parse and accessible to everyone involved in TA at your company, you can’t enhance your hiring process, better liaise with hiring managers, and — at the end of the day — make smarter hiring decisions.

How to leverage recruitment analytics to drive your SMB recruiting and hiring strategies

The best businesses — at every organization: from SMBs to enterprises — use hard data tied to their sourcing channels, nurture campaigns, interview cycles, job descriptions, and diversity recruiting (among other facets of TA) to guide their decision-making regarding candidates in their pipeline.

Some talent specialists may argue there’s an art element to hiring today, not just science. However, that’s just no longer a feasible way to identify, engage, evaluate, advance, and extend offers to prospects in your recruiting funnel.

• “When recruiting operates as a data-driven scientific approach, you get consistently superior results and business impacts that can’t be achieved when it’s managed like an intuitive art,” HR thought leader Dr. John Sullivan wrote for ERE.

Let’s assume you embrace recruitment analytics and either have used it to guide your talent strategy to date or want to start doing so in the near future. (Good choice, by the way.)

Now, you and your TA team need to know specific ways you can leverage your data to assess applicants, source passive prospects, engage both for open roles, and move them through the recruiting and hiring life cycle in an effective, efficient, and intelligent manner.

Here are a few of the most common ways you can take advantage of your wealth of recruiting data to hire smarter.

Regularly analyze and take action on your recruitment metrics

With the right recruitment analytics solution, you get real-time insights into critical components of your talent acquisition efforts, including (but certainly not limited to):

• Source of hire
• Time to hire
• Time to fill
• Cost per hire
• Nurture engagement
• Offer acceptance rate

You’ll see larger companies implement systems that offer predictive analytics in recruitment to attempt to forecast which kinds of candidates are likely to be strong fits for and want to learn more about their job openings. For your SMB, though, simply sticking to these metrics (and other “standard” data points tied to your pipeline management) is more than enough.

Factor in recruitment data in short- and long-term planning

Recruitment analytics can inform changes to your daily and weekly recruiting activities as well as your bigger-picture TA strategy (i.e., for the next few or several months). A couple examples:

• Short-term: Data that shows which passive sourcing channels generate the lowest- and highest-quality candidates (essentially calculated by how many and how far prospects from said channels advance in your pipeline) can help you adjust your recruitment marketing spend and focus your energy on proven job boards and other sourcing avenues.
• Long-term: Let’s say you drill down into your quality-of-hire data. Looking at insights tied to existing employees (i.e., their tenure, performance reviews, and contributions to the business), you can spot “root problems” in your talent acquisition approach and commonalities among top-performing hires. This, in turn, can inform changes to the way you source, screen, interview, and evaluate candidates.

Transform your SMB into a truly data-driven organization

You and other recruiting and hiring stakeholders may be the ones who “handle” your recruitment analytics in your day-to-day.

But, your leadership team should be aware of — and have access to (more on this shortly) — data tied to your TA activities and metrics so they can easily discern how well you’re doing in terms of meeting hiring goals that roll into larger business goals.

The more employees and execs at your org outside of talent acquisition who can see your team’s weekly, monthly, and quarterly progress with filling key roles over time, the more they’ll consider TA a strategic pillar (as opposed to a cost center).

The people, processes, and technology you need to make the most of recruitment analytics

More and more SMBs want to utilize recruiting analytics to guide their decision-making in both their day-to-day and in the long run. But, without the right personnel, approach, and tools, it becomes pretty difficult to make the most of one’s data.

People: Train recruiters and hiring managers to utilize data

Let’s start with your hiring team. It’s not just your recruiters who need to know how to take full advantage of analytics. All hiring stakeholders and decision-makers must be trained on the ins and outs of analytics.

This means you must all learn how to scrutinize pipeline reports (i.e., ones that show how recent “opportunities” progressed in your funnel) and unearth insights tied to everything from diversity recruiting to the offer approval process.

Processes: Develop a reporting cadence to track performance

Speaking of reporting, having a concrete process in place to have custom reports created.

This could mean having your recruiting ops manager (if you have one) own the entire process of creating reports and dashboards for various hiring team members and business leaders

Or, if you want to democratize this task, you can work with your analytics provider to ensure everyone in TA knows how to develop reports tied to their individual recruitment efforts so that everyone is well-versed on how to pull and present data quickly and efficiently.

Technology: Secure an SMB-centric ATS with built-in analytics

None of the processes you put in place to capitalize on recruitment analytics will matter if you don’t have an applicant tracking system that’s purpose-built for small businesses like yours — like JazzHR

Talent teams with our SMB-focused ATS use our native Customer Report Builder tool to build bespoke reports tied to recruiting speed, interview efficiency, application submissions, and even individual candidates in their pipeline.

Looking for a new applicant tracking system with out-of-the-box analytics (and other effective candidate management capabilities? Look no further than our powerful yet intuitive ATS built specifically for small businesses.