Just out: Recruiting analytics: the competitive advantage for enterprise talent acquisition

If enterprise companies aren’t using analytics to iterate on their talent acquisition strategies, they risk looking archaic beside their industry startups who are using data for recruiting best practices. Here's the data you need.

Any organization is only as good as the talent who make it tick—a truth that became clearer in the wake of last year, as leading employees proved their capacity for agility; for flexing and wearing new hats; and for humanity, compassion, and resilience as the ground shifted beneath all of our feet. And it’s true of all organizations that poor recruiting and hiring processes equals money wasted and business opportunities missed; but the impact is even greater for enterprise companies, for whom more is at stake when non-optimized (or poorly-attended-to, or biased) processes meet massive hiring volumes.

Research has shown that every dollar invested in data and analytics yields returns worth over $9.00. That’s a nearly-1,000% ROI, and a data point that explains why the majority of business executives say they're using analytics to gain a competitive edge. And as very few functions have the kind of bottom-line impact that talent acquisition does (a fact you know if you’re in TA), this is as true of recruiting as it is of any other business in an org.

At least, it ought to be—which is why we’ve written this ebook on Recruiting Analytics: The Competitive Advantage for Talent Acquisition. Finding and keeping talent in 2021 is the top internal stressor for CEOs—probably including yours—regardless of company size, location, or industry. 50% of CEOs globally cite recruitment of top talent as their most critical human capital focus, which indicates executives’ awareness that internal talent is the engine of their business—essential not only to their growth, but also to maintaining their competitive position. What’s more, nearly 80% of large companies (10,000+ FTEs) rate talent analytics as “important” or “urgent”... yet only 21% of talent leaders currently believe that their orgs are effective at using data to shape TA and recruiting strategies. 

It’s time to do better. If enterprise companies aren’t turning to analytics to continually iterate on their talent acquisition strategies and hiring processes, they risk looking archaic beside the startups turning up in their industries who are using data to derive recruiting best practices from the very beginning. Even the most well-established companies can’t rest on their laurels if they want to evolve and remain relevant alongside talent’s expectations. Enter enterprise talent analytics to help you maintain that competitive advantage you hold in terms of longevity and brand awareness. 

TA analytics refers to the systematic discovery of meaningful patterns in an organization’s data that support decisions related to recruitment activities, processes, and outcomes to positively impact business value. It can answer critical questions like:

• Where is our talent acquisition team spending their time, and are their efforts being spent in the right places?

• How successful is our candidate outreach? Which teams or individuals are performing above or below average? What best messaging practices can be derived from those who are above average?

• What sources are our top-performing candidates come from? Where should we optimize spend? 

• How long does it take to hire for a single role, and how long do candidates typically sit in each stage for that role?

• How many candidates will it take us to make a single hire (or ten hires, or 50 hires) for a specific role?

• How efficient is our hiring process? What do conversion rates look like and where are candidates dropping out of process? Are certain demographics falling out at certain stages?

• What does diversity look like throughout the entire hiring funnel? Are female-identified and underrepresented candidates passing through at the same rates majority candidates are? Is our process equitable?

• Where can we improve candidate experience—and, therefore, our talent brand?

• How do we know what overall recruiting strategies are working so we can justify budget for resources or headcount for strategies?

• How do we prove to leadership that talent acquisition is driving real business value and influencing business outcomes?

If your team isn’t able to answer these questions—perhaps especially that last one—it’ll be well worth your while to read this guide. More and more, talent acquisition is being asked to prove its impact and justify its decisions based on measurable outcomes (i.e. how are you impacting company revenue through accelerated time to hire?); and talent leaders simply can’t prove or justify without analytics. Traditional descriptive data like time-to-fill and cost-per-hire won’t stand on its own anymore. You need to know (and show) what your most successful talent attraction efforts are, how effective your pipeline is, where you’ve eliminated bias to diversify your hires, how long it’ll take—and what resources you’ll need—to make headcount for department X at location X. Without that data, you’ll never elevate the talent discussion—or recruitment’s profile—in the org, because you won’t have any meaningful, business-relevant insights to offer your managers and executives. 

Teams that are leveraging technology to track metrics and letting data guide their decisions are discovering where they’re underperforming and where strategic opportunities lie, implementing process improvements, making better-informed talent decisions, optimizing spend, and proving their ROI. They know ahead-of-time where to put their resources because they can forecast how their requisitions will act, and so they’ve become better partners to their hiring managers. They’re connecting more effectively with talent and offering better candidate experiences. They’re proving the value of talent acquisition to their C-levels through better-quality hires, increased corporate performance, and stronger profit margins. And then it’s a virtuous circle: they attract top talent not only because their respective companies are thriving, but because they’ve become known for the top-notch candidate experiences they provide.

Recruiting Analytics: The Competitive Advantage for Talent Acquisition covers:

• What a recruiting analytics maturity model looks like so you can determine where your org falls and what the next steps are for increasing maturity.

• The most critical TA analytics every enterprise team should be tracking (hint: they’re data points with much more business value than just time-to-fill and cost-per-hire).

• The data to report to each stakeholder—C-levels, sourcers and recruiters, and hiring managers—so they get the slice of the recruiting story that matters most to them.

So dive in—because with each new action a prospect, a candidate, or someone on your team is taking, they’re adding to the treasure trove of actionable data you should be accessing for insights.