5 Best Practices for Using Recruitment Analytics in 2023

We are witnessing the rise of recruitment analytics and data-driven strategies in modern hiring – a trend that’s expected to accelerate.  

Amidst an overheated and competitive job market, organizations are increasingly relying on new HR technologies that allow them to tap into crucial bits of historical hiring data that can reveal insightful information about their previous job candidates and sourcing channels.  

These metrics can be analyzed, and the findings strategically applied to help organizations make better hires and fine-tune their talent acquisition strategies to be more effective in attracting the best job candidates.

Below we explore why recruitment analytics have become so important in modern hiring, and we’ll look at 5 of the best practices for applying them at your company.

What are Recruitment Analytics?

Recruitment analytics is a process that collates historical hiring data into easy-to-interpret statistical information that helps HR professionals make more accurate forecasts and data-driven decisions about their talent acquisition strategies.  

In the absence of recruitment analytics, it’s almost impossible to obtain the crucial information required to understand, for example, what might be causing excessive employee turnover or why your hiring process seems to take so long.

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Why will Recruitment Analytics be a Priority in 2023?

For many small and medium-sized businesses, recruiting is a process that can take months and cost thousands of dollars.  Therefore, it’s understandable when organizational leaders become frustrated when recruiters hire candidates that turn out to be unsuitable for the role to which they were appointed. 

Consider a recent report that said companies are expected to place greater emphasis on employee retention in 2023.  This would suggest that predictive recruitment analytics will become significantly more important in the year to come because of how these analytics can significantly reduce the chances of hiring the wrong candidates.  

In fact, a large majority of today’s professional recruiters see analytics as a priority in ensuring recruitment success in the future.

With the right HR technology, there is a wide array of recruitment analytics and metrics that organizations can tap into to answer very important HR-related questions as we head into 2023, including:

• What’s the total cost of hiring for a new position?
• What sourcing channel seems to be producing the best candidates?
• What similarities do the best candidates share?

Of course, technology plays a huge role in recruitment analytics, and none of the HR technologies in your HR tech stack are more important than an Applicant Tracking System (ATS).

The Increasing Importance of an ATS System for Recruitment Analytics

Talent acquisition strategies have never relied so heavily on recruitment analytics as they do now.  That trend is driving the adoption of powerful HR technologies and platforms that are giving recruiters the tools they need to extract and present the results of their recruitment analysis using customizable reports and intuitive “dashboards.”  

Consider for a moment that your average corporate job posting will attract 250 applications.  An applicant tracking system (ATS) is a powerful component of the HR tech stack that functions as a robust database to collect, organize, and parse every detail about what’s included in those applications – think of an ATS as an “electronic warehouse” that stores all the data on your job candidates.

The beauty of having an ATS is that they not only store swaths of useful metrics and bits of data about your candidates, but the data in your ATS can also be extracted and calibrated with useful dashboards to reveal key metrics about your entire hiring process.   

A recent survey revealed that approximately 75 percent of recruiters rely on recruiting or Applicant Tracking System (ATS).

Over time, an ATS can become a virtual “gold mine” that’s loaded with useful bits of hiring and job candidate data.  

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What Recruitment Analytics to Measure? 

It’s important to remember that we’re likely to learn more from our data when we have more data to analyze.  In other words, the greater the volume of data a company has stored in their ATS system or recruitment database, the greater the statistical accuracy and significance of the metrics they’re interested in analyzing.  A common benchmark is to gather at least 6 months to a year’s worth of recruitment data before relying on it to make strategic talent acquisition decisions.  

Depending on the adopted HR technology at a company, there are likely to be many metrics that can be tapped into, but the following are the most common metrics that are assessed:  

Time to Hire: the number of days between when a candidate applies and when an offer is accepted.  Useful for identifying bottlenecks in the hiring process.  

Source of Hire: identifies what percentage of all hires entered the pipeline from a given recruitment channel or source.  Useful in identifying the sources that tend to yield the best candidates…and otherwise. 

Offer Acceptance Rate: reveals the difference between the number of candidates that are offered a job versus those who are offered a job and accept it.  A low acceptance rate may be an indication that your employee value proposition (EVP) needs revamping in 2023.  

Best Practice 1: Choose the Proper HR Tech Stack

With HR costs making up almost 30% of an organization’s total operating expenses, it’s easy to understand why more companies are insisting that HR professionals research and adopt technologies that increase their process efficiencies.  

A huge step in achieving those efficiencies is first by eliminating the inefficiencies that exist in the hiring process.  An HR tech stack that features an ATS system achieves two things.  

First, it can be remarkably effective at increasing efficiencies via automation and artificial intelligence.  

Second, the dashboards and report-generating capabilities of an ATS system help recruiters tap into those crucial hiring metrics that can reveal where the inefficiencies are in their talent acquisition processes.

Market data indicates that nearly every Fortune 500 company relies on an ATS to warehouse and process all their incoming applicant data, even before their HR professionals get involved.  Small and mid-sized businesses are taking notice as they begin to see the benefits of investing in an ATS system for the first time.  

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Best Practice 2:Using Recruitment Analytics for Workforce Planning

Organizations are increasingly relying on historical recruitment metrics to develop strategies for building their future workforce.  Certain recruitment analytics, often referred to as predictive analytics, can reveal very important historical information.  

For example, predictive recruitment analytics can help an organization prepare for the expenses that may be associated with future hiring campaigns, or they can be used to identify in advance which key positions are particularly difficult to recruit for and, therefore, may require more effort and resources.

With access to these powerful recruitment analytics, organizations are gaining a competitive edge with their ability to plan more successfully for the future.  

Without the appropriate HR tech stack to access these recruitment analytics, organizations can often find themselves at a disadvantage; stuck in a position where they’re reacting to what’s happening within their company instead of taking proactive steps to strengthen their workforce. 

Best Practice 3: Use Analytics to Accelerate the Recruitment Process

Employee recruitment strategies are expected to continue evolving at the torrid pace of technical innovation.  That means those who tend to attract the best talent are often the ones who have been aggressive in the adoption of the market’s latest HR technologies because it offers the advantage of speed.  

Today, the best candidates are on and off the job market in as little as 10 days and to compete for such premium talent, one of the best practices of recruitment analytics being adopted is using historical metrics to accelerate an organization’s Time to Hire (or Time to Fill) metric without negatively affecting candidate quality.  

In today’s competitive job market, the faster an organization is at hiring new talent, the better the organization looks to prospective candidates.  

The logic goes that an expedient and fluid hiring process tends to make job candidates feel desired, which will boost your candidate experience dynamic – a crucial element in modern talent acquisition strategy.  

By tapping into historical recruitment analytics, organizations can identify and eliminate “roadblocks” that may be occurring but are presently unidentified.  

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Best Practice 4: Apply Recruitment Analytics to Improve Diversity

Diversity is an organizational dynamic that forward-thinking organizations will continue to focus on in 2023.  To achieve this, these organizations are turning to diversity metrics that provide crucial insights to help determine if their current diversity initiatives are proving effective and if their hiring strategies are properly accounting for inclusivity.  

As it stands, nearly 80% of all companies are focusing on diversity to improve the culture at their organization, and recruitment analytics are leading the way.  

Best Practice 4: Prioritize Data Visualization

The ATS systems on the market today have the technical capacity to store an extensive array of applicant data and hiring metrics, so much so that an HR professional may balk at the idea at first because it can seem overwhelming.  

Fortunately, technology has an answer for this too.  When companies adopt the right HR tech stack, there is very likely to be an assortment of software tools that are customizable and easy to use, allowing HR professionals to quickly extract and visualize important metrics that give them a clear picture of what resources and strategies are working (and what’s not working). 

Modern ATS systems offer innovative recruitment dashboards that HR professionals can access to build a comprehensive visual representation of their most important recruitment analytics.  

These recruiting dashboards allow companies to identify crucial trends and pull information that can be easily interpreted and shared with others at the organization in a minimal amount of time. 

Conclusion

A renowned statistician once said, “…if the statistics are boring, you’ve got the wrong numbers.”   A large part of applying recruitment analytics successfully is first having the right technology to make accessing and interpreting the data an interesting and engaging process.  

For organizations that are serious about adopting recruitment analytics as a strategic solution to enhance the quality of their hiring, Manatal is a category leader in the development of HR software that is making recruitment analytics a competitive advantage for more thousands of customers across the globe.

With Manatal’s innovative, cloud-based ATS system, HR professionals will enjoy access to customizable options for whatever metrics they want to analyze as well as how they would like their reports to be formatted, be it graphs, pie charts, lists, and so on.  

Headhunter agencies and organizations can discover just how well Manatal’s ATS platform can take advantage of their historical hiring metrics by inquiring about the 14-Day free trial that Manatal is now offering.