Halving Your ‘Time to Hire’ with Data-Driven Recruitment, saving costs and improving diversity
According to SHRM it takes 42 days on average to fill an open position, with most of this time spent developing position descriptions and shortlisting from, in some cases, hundreds of applicants.
Despite dedicating so much time to these tasks we are still, too often, forced to use our intuition and gut feel when selecting the right person for the job due to a lack of other objective measures. According to Dr. John Sullivan over 75 percent of the decisions made during most corporate recruiting processes are made by humans relying on their own intuition, rather than data. So how can a Data-Driven Recruitment approach reduce the ‘Time to Hire’ and increase the efficiencies and fairness of the overall hiring process?
What is Data-Driven Recruitment?
Data-Driven recruitment focuses on using rich data to optimise recruitment processes, but this involves much more than just looking at statistics & reports around time to hire, the number of candidates, candidate drop out etc.
Data-Driven recruitment starts by implementing industry-standard datasets. Developed by industry peak bodies or standards associations, these data sets describe skills, competencies, behaviours, and tooling & equipment in industry-specific definitions and proficiency levels.
Implementing these standardised measures ensures your organisation provides an unbiased and fair process to all candidates, with each candidate assessing against the same skills and competency definitions, which also provides clarity to the candidate regarding the expectations of the role.
Position Descriptions in 5 Minutes
Typically organisation create new position description each time they go to market for a role, this can be extremely time-consuming as each component of the role needs to be authored from scratch.
Using a Data-Driven approach to position description creation involves leveraging the industry-standard datasets mentioned above as the building blocks for truly industry best practice PDs.
Better still, many of the same organisations who develop the data set also develop standardised position templates. These templates are designed to be used as a baseline for any given industry-specific role, whilst allowing your organisation to tweak and change the template to your own needs.
By using standardised position description templates organisations not only greatly reducing the time to create a position description but also aligning the skills and competency terminology used with the rest of the industry, ultimately improving the candidate experience and also attracting more candidates due to the consistency of language that is being used across the industry.
Improving the Shortlisting Processes & Removing Keyword Matching
Historically organisation have relied on cumbersome manual approaches to shortlisting. This typically involves things like keyword resume matching which in itself is a flawed approach, as great candidates can easily be overlooked should their skills/competencies not be exactly aligned with the naming conventions the organisation is using.
Using industry-standard datasets such as skills and competencies allows all candidates to be assessed and measured fairly and equally by the means of a simple self-assessment.
When using a Data-Driven approach self-assessment data can be aggregated and can be manipulated to show candidates that are a good fit based on their current skill set. The assistance of an online tool can greatly improve these efficiencies by automatically analysing the data and ranking candidates according to the best fit for the role, all within a few clicks regardless of the number of candidates.
Overall a Data-Driven recruitment model allows candidates to be assessed fairly, consistently and objectively, ultimately providing candidates with a great experience allowing your organisation to be set apart from the rest. Organisations and hiring managers can expect great reductions in the ‘time to hire’ with the many time savings around position description crafting and the shortlisting process. This in turn leads to cost savings, better fit staff to roles and increasing diversity of talent.
I hope you can see why I am so passionate about Data-Driven recruitment, the benefits for both the candidates and organisation almost seem endless. Should you want to discuss Data-Driven recruitment further please feel free to contact me directly.
Regards Anthony.
