In today’s hyper-connected world, almost everything you do contributes to an ever-expanding pool of data. Whether you’re confirming an appointment with a friend via a messaging app, transferring a monthly rent payment or swapping out a word in your marketing slogan – you’re creating insights that will eventually inform others’ behaviors.
All this data being generated is valuable fuel for marketing and recruitment – so much that many are calling data the new currency. When it comes to your company, the information gleaned from data is vital for success.
Running marketing or recruitment campaigns without data insights is like trying to land a plane in thick fog without dashboards or autopilot: nearly impossible, and probably disastrous.
Data not only helps to target your campaigns, but it allows you to manage incoming market curveballs or branding roadblocks with ease. In marketing, data analysis is a key component of audience targeting, campaign execution and optimization.
HR professionals are increasingly utilizing these strategies that have been a staple on marketing teams since the dawn of the digital age. Recruitment professionals can now continuously optimize their recruitment processes, study conversion rates at each position in the applicant funnel and better understand the candidates in their applicant pool.
The benefits of data are clear. But the question remains: How can you utilize data-driven insights to continuously optimize your recruitment strategy?
If you want to reap the benefits of data analytics, you must first allocate sufficient resources for building data-driven infrastructure. Poorly executed data collection and analysis can be just as bad as not having any at all. One way to remember this is the Garbage In = Garbage Out (GIGO) concept. Feeding poor data into a good model, or vice versa, will result in incorrect and unusable insights.
While this all may sound daunting at first, keep in mind: data will help, not hurt, if used correctly. Follow these tips to get started incorporating data into a successful HR and recruitment strategy.
Pool all relevant data that’s accessible to you.
Using a combination of internal and third-party data is most beneficial for effective recruitment optimization. Tools, such as Applicant Tracking Systems or recruitment platforms utilized in HR departments, automatically capture data in applicant funnels; it then becomes the job of your team to unlock the meaning behind it. This is considered first-party, internal data; couple it with market research and audience data, and you can round out your informed approach to recruitment.
Let’s say you are looking to tap further into the minority workforce. You can acquire data both from your own minority candidate journeys to discover where and why successes or drop-offs occurred. Supplement this data with demographic research to best optimize your funnel and achieve desired results.
Ensure that data can flow freely within your organization.
In addition to utilizing technology to gain insights into your audience and job candidates, you should promote the exchange of data insights across teams in your company. One team’s useless metrics could be another team’s holy grail of information. If the HR/management team discovers that retention for candidates with a certain profile is extremely low, they must be able to communicate this freely to the marketing team, which can then alter its strategies accordingly.
Tweak existing recruitment models according to your data.
It’s important to break down every step of the recruitment campaign process into manageable parts, so that you can best apply data every step of the way. Just as a marketer works with customer journeys, the HR representative works with candidate journeys. This journey includes recruitment marketing, the application funnel, the hiring process and onboarding/management.
Data can inform the process as early as building brand awareness for candidate acquisition. For example, you can refine your company branding and better target quality candidates by using A/B testing with messaging.
Track your success rates, iterate and redeploy.
This is where analytics and advertising software come into play in a major way. Funnel the quality data you’ve gathered back into analytics platforms to optimize your recruitment campaigns for the week, month and year ahead.
Don’t be afraid to acknowledge where you’ve fallen short – whether that’s using data to identify pitfalls in your hiring efforts, or discovering ways to improve the data insights process itself. Iterate accordingly, continue to test and redeploy your updated campaigns.
Here’s the bottom line: You need data to hire top talent and maintain competitive advantage. Don’t wait to start making data-informed decisions.
The most agile companies today rely heavily on data to guide their recruitment strategies. Most decision-makers don’t realize they’re already gathering data that contains transformative insights; the next step is to turn those insights into increasingly successful campaigns.
Instead of racing to keep up with the advancing competition, set yourself up to run on data-driven autopilot. Not only will you experience ROI in the form of more effective campaigns, but you’ll save time and resources in the process.
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- Radancy’s Programmatic Jobs – Part 3: Business Intelligence - March 18, 2020
- Radancy’s Programmatic Jobs – Part 2: Budgeting Intelligence - February 19, 2020
- Radancy’s Programmatic Jobs – Part 1: Campaign Automation - January 28, 2020
- Putting Candidates at the Center of Your Recruitment Strategy - December 17, 2019
- In Pursuit of Perfection: Using Testing for Conversion Rate Optimization - November 22, 2019
- Job Content 101: How to Optimize Job Ads for Results - November 5, 2019
- Recruitment Automation: How to Automate Applicant Sourcing - October 22, 2019
- Recruitment Analytics 101: How to Collect and Analyze Data for Recruitment Success - September 11, 2019
- Recruitment Funnel: How to Optimize the Job Applicant Experience - August 19, 2019
