Most organizations we speak with are "data-rich and insights poor." Companies have tons of hiring data but lack the tools and resources to make sense of it. To help you gain insights into your customer data strategy, let's split it into three categories – branding and candidate sourcing, assessment and selection, and post-hire surveys.
1) Branding and candidate sourcing
You should track and measure your sourcing data under two core data sets: data on the job seeker and how job seekers interact with your careers site, job advertisements, and email campaigns. All activities on the careers site can be measured using Google Analytics, and Online ads and emails campaigns can provide their performance metrics.
The key data points that you should monitor are:
- Conversion rates – a visitor to the applicant
- Unique and total visitors
- Percent of mobile job seekers
- Time a candidate spends on the career site
- Traffic sources
- Conversion rates per source
- Ad performance - web and social ad campaigns
- Email campaign results
This data allows you to evaluate what is driving your brand's interest. Optimized career site content supports better website views, search engine visibility, and candidate experience.
2) Assessment and selection
Assessments help you determine whether an applicant is a cultural and behavioural fit for your company and roles. Through consistent tweaks and improvements to these assessments, you will be able to decrease the average drop-off rate that you might experience in the beginning. These assessments can help generate tremendous insights on whether the candidate is a good fit, their strengths and weaknesses and the likelihood of being a cultural fit with your organization.
Incorporating assessments into your hiring strategy will provide you with data on which applicants are the best fit, what behaviours are most associated with performance, which source (job boards / social networks) these individuals came from and if they were first-time or repeated visitors your career site.
Assessment data can provide deep insights into a company's ideal candidate profile and set a benchmark for your candidate quality. It helps remove any doubt on what an ideal candidate should look like.
3) Post-hire surveys
There are three key surveys that reveal critical pieces of information in completing your data-driven hiring process.
- New-hire Performance: Gain insights from the managers on how well the new hires perform and why their performance is unacceptable. This is the first step in understanding your post-hire data.
- New-hire Feedback: It's critical to understand how the new hire is coping with your work environment and what you can do as a responsible employer to make things better if they are unhappy in their new role.
- Exit Surveys: If you don't know why quality people are leaving your organization, focusing on things such as EVP(Employee Value Proposition) or selection tools can be a waste of time. What's critical is to understand the top 3-5 drivers of why individuals are leaving your organization voluntarily. These drivers can equip you with more information than any other survey as it relates to improving your workforce with data. Many services firms and web applications can easily capture, analyze, and report on the key drivers for the voluntary exit.
Conclusion
Categorize your data into these three sections when developing a data-driven hiring strategy. Here's a simple checklist to get you started:
- Ensuring Google Analytics is set up on your careers site.
- Conversion goal tracking is set up on the last page of the application process.
- An electronic assessment tool is in place that measures behaviours.
- An ATS that can pull ad hoc reports.
- A system to administer electronic surveys to key stakeholders.
When every department in your company leverages data to improve decision-making and results, why shouldn’t HR?
To learn more about how Mindfield can improve the quality of your workforce with data-driven hiring strategies, please click here.