Recruitment Analytics: A Comprehensive Guide to Optimizing Recruiting Processes

It’s true of all organizations that poor recruiting and hiring processes mean money wasted and business opportunities missed. However, the impact is even greater for enterprise companies, for whom more is at stake when non-optimized processes meet massive hiring volumes.

Recruiters, hiring managers, and business leaders face unique challenges in finding quality talent. Many are turning to recruitment analytics as the result of these hurdles. 

What is recruitment analytics? 

It’s the process of obtaining, managing, and analyzing key metrics related to your recruiting, hiring, and onboarding process. This type of data analytics is a game-changer for talent sourcing, as it provides a tool for better decision-making and hiring practices. 

When paired with technology, such as Gem’s pipeline analytics tool, you can manage candidates, evaluate pipeline performance, and make adjustments to attract the best candidates possible. 

The Power of Recruitment Analytics

Recruiting is a different ball game from just a couple of years ago, but when examining the entire process, it’s a night-and-day transformation in just 20 short years. Even before the pandemic, in 2017, Glassdoor found that 76% of hiring managers said attracting quality candidates was the number one challenge. 

Finding quality candidates is more challenging because access to job board websites like LinkedIn and Indeed, make it easier for candidates to submit applications, inundating recruiters with thousands of resumes for a single role. Additionally, there is a skills gap issue that creates difficulties for hiring managers to try and fill roles. 

Talent acquisition professionals constantly grapple with DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) challenges, striving to ensure that their hiring processes are unbiased and that they cultivate diverse teams. Factors such as unconscious bias, homogenous referral networks, and non-inclusive job descriptions can inadvertently deter a broad range of candidates.

Recruitment analytics offers a solution by providing data-driven insights into hiring patterns and outcomes. By analyzing data on the candidate pipeline, sources of hires, and interview-to-offer ratios, organizations can identify where biases might exist and take corrective action. This empowers hiring teams to make more informed, equitable decisions and enhance their DEI initiatives.

As with other business data, recruitment metrics allow companies to make informed decisions, streamline hiring processes, reduce workloads, and attract high-quality candidates. Using big data, hiring models, statistical analysis, and hiring tools, you can reduce bottlenecks and enhance your hiring results. 

Understanding recruitment metrics, such as time to hire, cost per hire, time to fill, and offer acceptance rates, can provide insight into what is working in your recruiting strategy and what needs an overhaul.   

Benefits of Using Recruitment Analytics

As you can see, the talent acquisition landscape requires a unique approach to provide the business edge to stay competitive. Although many tenured TA leaders may feel they have everything under control, there are many benefits to using recruitment data and analytics to make hiring decisions. 

These benefits can be everything from higher-quality new hires to fewer wasted funds on parts of the recruitment funnel that underperform. Additionally, you can see some of these other benefits, including: 

• Improved candidate management – Recruitment analytics can help segment and filter applicants, especially when paired with an applicant tracking system (ATS) or a CRM platform. Keep track of where qualified candidates are in the recruitment funnel, preventing the best applicants from slipping through the cracks. 

• Enhanced collaboration – Discussions between recruiting teams and hiring managers are more effective, as detailed KPIs can help lead to data-driven hiring. 

• Faster application review – With machine learning and artificial intelligence, hiring managers can make sense of recruitment analytics, filter unqualified applicants, and help identify the best candidates in less time. 

• Data-driven decision-making – A gut feeling can only take you so far. Make informed decisions backed by historical data to help justify hiring actions. Recruitment data can help you identify trends to eliminate being blind-sided with poor retention rates. 

Tangible benefits like these can give you confidence that your hiring strategy is on the right course. Plus, if your recruitment funnel is falling short of expectations, recruitment analytics can help you generate actionable insights to make adjustments. 

Different Types of Recruitment Analytics

Recruitment analytics, like other HR analytics, takes many forms and involves various levels of analysis to obtain a complete picture of the effectiveness of your hiring funnel. These levels include operational analysis, advanced reporting, and predictive analytics or predictive analysis. 

Each of these levels also has various types of analytics and metrics that comprise the entire analysis process. Let’s explore a few facets of recruiting analytics that can aid talent-sourcing teams, such as:

• Performance analytics – Performance analysis involves measuring how effective your hiring efforts are. Quality of hire is just one example of a KPI you can measure to determine the success of your hiring teams.  

• Candidate experience – People analytics gives you insight into the applicant's journey and how they view the overall candidate experience. Candidates who undergo lengthy onboarding processes or who experience challenges may feel your company is a poor fit for them. Use candidate surveys to help you understand their perspective. 

• Sourcing analytics – Candidate sourcing analytics can tell you which sourcing channels produce the best employees and which channels are underperforming. These details help you allocate funding and recruiting efforts. 

• Pipeline analytics – Key metrics, like time to hire and number of applicants, can tell you how healthy your pipeline is. Pipelines with few applicants and lengthy processes can spell disaster for your recruiting efforts.   

• Diversity Analytics – Millennials make up the largest portion of the labor force, and they are demanding more inclusive and diverse workplace environments. Analyzing diversity metrics, like demographics, can show you how diverse your hiring funnel is and how inclusive candidates view your organization. 

The best way to view all this information is by using an analytics solution that includes a data visualization dashboard for quick analysis. Additionally, your analytics software should be capable of producing in-depth reports and leveraging new technology like ML and AI to uncover hidden trends. 

Embrace Data-Driven Recruitment with Gem

The recruitment process constantly changes as external forces guide the workforce to new places. Businesses can adapt to these changes successfully by embracing recruitment analytics and the power it brings. 

Recruitment analytics can help you evaluate your hiring process, optimize job descriptions, uncover hidden trends, source the best talent, and save you money on recruiting expenses. Plus, create a more effective team by making data-backed decisions on hiring talent. 

Of course, staying organized with your recruitment analytics happens by investing in high-quality solutions like Gem. Gem helps you simplify candidate management by bringing you features that include: 

• Real-time sync with ATS platforms

• AI-driven suggestions to find skilled and experienced talent

• Advanced filter and sort options that give you total control

Plus, Gem offers a centralized platform for efficient collaboration between recruiters and hiring managers. Improved collaboration leads to faster follow-ups, communications, and decisions. Don’t let quality candidates slip through the cracks because of outdated hiring methods. 

Gem uses visualization aids to help with real-time decision-making. View keywords, KPIs, and strategy overviews in visual formats that highlight data points, allowing managers to make adjustments on the fly. 

Take charge of your hiring funnel with Gem’s advanced filters and Boolean search functions that help prioritize candidates based on skills and experience. Utilize Gem’s automation features to eliminate manual entry, allowing recruiters to filter, contact, and move candidates through the hiring funnel in less time. 

These automations include moving candidates through the steps of the hiring process, sending templated emails, and updating candidate profiles. Set expectations immediately with all parties using Gem’s SLA status feature that ensures timely follow-up. 

Don’t waste any more time and money on antiquated hiring practices and leverage Gem to maximize your hiring potential. Request a demo today to see Gem in action and start improving your recruitment analytics efforts in the process.