Because of today’s competitive recruitment market, small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) need to be high performers when it comes to attracting and nurturing top talent.

Leveraging the power of acquisition analytics and adopting a data led recruitment strategy is one of the best ways to do this.

Software like Candidly, for example, has talent analytics embedded within the platform, helping you better streamline your recruitment process, understand your potential candidates and improve your overall quality of hire –while also helping your company reach its full potential.

Making recruitment decisions based on data rather than intuition has several key benefits:

1)   Improved quality of hire: Analytics provide objective insights that can harnessed to help you make better hiring decisions. You can more easily highlight candidates who best align with your company’s culture and ensure you hire for strong employ-fit for crucial positions within your company.

2)   Enhanced candidate experience: You can incrementally improve the candidate journey for each applicant you engage with and increase your conversion rates by understanding the key recruiting metrics tied to your talent sourcing. By tracking what roadblocks might hinder the talent acquisition process (lengthy interview process, untimely feedback), you can adjust the process for both the applicant and the hiring manager.

3)    Optimised hiring funnel: Following on from point 2, access to real-time data tied to your hiring process can identify bottlenecks and opportunities tied to your everyday work. For example, if your talent analytics reveals your average time to hire is slipping from one month to the next, you can see what facets of your end-to-end recruitment cycle are slowing down your hiring approach and optimise them accordingly.

4)   Integrate all your data systems: If you’re a smaller business, your recruitment tech stack probably isn’t as complex as those of mid-sized or enterprise business. You might be running your recruitment from a spreadsheet or perhaps you leverage a variety of tools to collect recruitment data. The trick to learning more from these disparate datasets is to unify them into a centralised source. Platforms like Candidly offer you all the data in one location, giving you easily digestible insights that save you time and money.

Creating your data-driven acquisition strategy

To build a successful data-driven hiring strategy, your business needs to track, analyse, and execute on relevant data points throughout the recruitment process.

Here’s a step-by-step guide to help you get started:

Decide on your most important recruitment metrics

Define your recruiting objectives and the metrics tied to them which must be tracked over time to gauge your performance. Start by identifying the most important hiring KPIs for your business. These can include conventional metrics like time to cost per hire, time to hire, applicant source, and candidate experience. That said, tools like Candidly can offer you further recruitment analytics such as:

Pipeline speed

Jobs over time

Diversity Recruiting

Track and interpret highly relevant data

To make smart, data-driven recruiting decisions, you first need access to the right data. Start by collecting data throughout your recruitment funnel, from job postings and applications to interviews and contract offers.

Pay special attention to your applicant sourcing (i.e.,where you acquire the most candidates and the most candidates that go onto being actual hires) and candidate qualifications, education and skills.

Candidly can help you find leads in your system who alignwith the specifications outlined in the job posting/description quickly andefficiently by automatically sourcing from your database and using best matchranking to create candidate shortlists.

Analyse your data often to incrementally improve

Good data helps you start pinpointing trends and correlations associated with your recruitment strategy. Look at the trends across different variables to determine which factors lead to successful hires.

Ask yourself: What patterns do you see in your hiring pipelines?

Are there specific stages or channels that tend to produce the most highly qualified candidates?

Asking questions like these will help you and your hiring team assess where your current strategy is succeeding and where improvements are necessary.

One example could be if you find that the candidates sourced from a particular jobsite, like CV Library —are consistently high-performing.If so, you can focus more resources on that souring avenue.

Executing on your recruiting insights

Use your data analyse to make gradual improvements to your hiring process. This may involve optimising your candidate sourcing strategies, modifying your interview process, or investing in additional training for your hiring team to better interact with and advance top talent.

For example, if you find that job postings for recent roles haven’t led to as many applicants as you would’ve liked, you may decide to it’s time perfect your job adverts to better attract qualified candidates.

A continual process that requires detailed attention

Good recruitment is an ever-evolving process. Continuously assess your hiring metrics and make adjustments when necessary to ensure your data-driven strategy remains effective and aligned with your business goals.

To fully reap the rewards of a data-driven acquisition strategy, it’s vital to invest in the right recruitment tools. Candidly, an all-in-one in hiring software, offers a comprehensive range of comprehensive candidate management capabilities.

Book a demo today to learn how we can help you reach your hiring goals.

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