Recruitment strategy: Forging a data-driven hiring process
The evolution of recruitment strategy is an interesting process. What started with newspaper ads and bulletin boards, later became online job boards and advertisements. However, more than two decades after the 1990s, the recruitment industry realized that there has been a lot of data archived from the recruitment procedure when done online.
This big data can be used to a company’s advantage with the help of new technologies that allow users to analyze big data and bring out useful information from it.
There are limitations to using data for recruitment needs. Data of candidates from CV and early experience is mostly very subjective as it is about a person’s character and them fitting into the company culture. Hence, using data to analyze this might not turn out to be as effective. You need to figure out a way to do both to optimize your results.
How do you switch to a data-driven recruitment strategy?
If your plan on recording and archiving all the data is by physically logging in all the data into the system, then that will probably take ages. Data is going to be in the form of CV, any formal emails, discussions and more. It will be very hard, time consuming and expensive to do this physically. Hence you need to find a way to automate the whole process.
For this, you require complete data. Incomplete data will not let you take proper recruitment decisions as the decisions will be made by only partially analyzing the candidate data. A recruitment platform where all interactions will be logged into the system automatically is your answer here. In the current world there are multiple technologies that allow you to do that. This will make sure all interactions are automatically logged in and no extra effort has to be put into it. After this is done, you can engage in data analytics which will ideally make your recruitment process far easier and optimum.
Implement Scorecards
It is very important to have score cards. Having vaguely jotted down points will not give you a proper data set at the end of the day. To retrieve data from notes is extra work. Create very specific features and skills the candidate will be tested on. Describe this feature and what character comes under it. Each of this feature should be rated either out of 5 or 10. Giving points to characteristic traits can be a very effective way to make intangible features tangible. Detailed description of what each feature entails will make sure that bias and subjective rating is least.
Measure hiring speed
Identify the time taken by each candidate in each of your interview stages. You can create a pattern out of it, showing you which stage takes the least time and what takes the most amount of time. This data can be of immense help as identifying the most time-consuming step allows you to work on that particular step to speed up the whole interview process.
Determine the value of each candidate sourcing channel
The quality of your sourced candidate can be found by using the same data provided by other channels. Measure the number and quality of candidates provided by each of the different channels to get the overall quality of the candidate you picked.
Structured Interviews
If you want to gather comparable data or any data for that matter, your interviews need to be structured. Without structuring of data, it is almost impossible to generate usable data. Here, the goal is to have comparable data so that every candidate can be compared and before the final stages of the interview, the recruiter will have an idea of who will perform the best. Here are a few steps that can be implemented to create structured interviews.
Define the traits you want in the candidate:
Identify 5 or 6 traits that describe an ideal candidate fit for the job you are looking to fill. This is more personality traits rather than technical skills needed to do the job. It can be characteristics like being a fast learner, good decision making, good team player, and more. Make sure these traits are independent from each other.
How to measure:
Create questions and answers for it to analyze these traits. Decide what answer gives 5 points, what gives a 3 and so on. Also decide what total score a candidate has to get in order to bag the job. Also implement a minimum threshold to clear for each trait.
Interviewer instructions:
Make sure the traits your mention is detailed. The order in which you ask the questions should be predefined and stick to it. Apart from this, make detailed notes for future references.
Getting feedback:
Feedback within 24 hours of the interview is ideal. This can be hard to achieve if there are a lot of people you have to get back to, but only so much can be remember after 24 hours of an interview. Hence, the sooner you write the feedback, the better detailed it will be including all aspects there is.
Move fast:
After you have figured out who gets through the required score of bagging the job, waste no time. Offer them the job immediately even if it is one of the first person you interview. The candidate you interview might have other interviews and other offers pending so the more you delay, the more the chance they will find someplace else.
The next step
To check if all these worked, you can simply compare your recruitment data with that of performance data to see if the characteristics of high performing ones do align with the ones you chose. Incorporate Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning into this same format and you will have a much easier time recruiting individuals and generally take your recruitment process to the next level.