1. What is your biggest recruitment challenge?
When you start gathering and analysing metrics it’s easy to drown in data. A useful first step is to ask yourself: “What are the main recruitment problems, and are they worth solving?” - are you finding it particularly difficult to recruit for a specific role, for example?
2. Define the outcome of your challenges
Once you’ve identified a handful of problems you can start to determine what the associated outcome of each is. For example, if your biggest challenge is recruiting top-performing sales people, then the outcome is likely to include an increase in the average time to hire for this particular role.
3. Ask Why?
By highlighting the issue and the outcome needed, you can then assess why they are important to the organisation. Taking our example above, we might consider that for every month that a sales role goes unfilled there is a potential loss in new business revenue. While this is a simple example, it demonstrates the impact a recruiting metric can have on another part of the business. Of course to get the data required, we will need to speak to the relevant heads within those other business areas. We’ll need to know things like average quota for a new salesperson and expected achievement within the first twelve months. This should then give us a benchmark for using analytics to determine a quantifiable return.
This three step approach can help you focus on the importance of specific recruitment analytics and metrics.
The next step is to gather the data for the identified metrics, and break it down, i.e. in this example the time to hire, into its constituent parts for analysis. As discussed last time, using an e-recruitment software platform like Eploy to gather source data on applicants and the job role level provides you with valuable insights for planning your future campaigns.
Finally, it’s important to recognise the journey that an analytics programme takes us on, rather than the destination – since business is always changing and so too is its challenges. Because of this, the legacy approach of reams of reports and charts is no longer helpful.
If a metric cannot be used to improve the performance of the business in some way, then it’s just a number in a table and will quickly be ignored and forgotten. On the other hand, if we can identify and analyse those metrics that are having an immediate impact on the business – and help us solve a challenge – it allows us to improve and move on to solving the next problem.