The colors in the palette and their relative hex codes are innumerable. Not every color appeals to you visually on its own. Yet when filled in the right white spaces of a seemingly vacant scenery, the hue adds vibrancy and brings life to the art.
Hiring people is an art quotes Howard Schulz, Chairman & CEO of Starbucks and I couldn’t agree more. When placed at the right job positions, people add so much vibrancy to their workplace, shine there and that’s a huge success to your recruiting strategy.
With unemployment rates down low, the market has gotten hotter than ever according to Josh Bersin, Founder and Principal at Bersin by Deloitte that concentrates on research-based human resources (HR), talent and learning. He refers to recruiters as finished carpenters who get better at hiring with the right set of tools and technology, especially those dealing with data.
Though enough and much has been said about the significance of data and analytics in the HR arena, only 35% of the respondents in a recent survey had access to it.
Here are five hiring processes of the recruitment cycle you can weave data into and see promising returns, right from identifying talent gaps to improving your retention strategy.
Spot those gaping skill holes
Recruitment sprees that happened just once a year and then saw a long lull before the next batch of talent fishing happened, is no longer seen in the talent acquisition scenario. With technological paradigm shifts being the only constant, different job roles and related set of skills keep surfacing now and then. Who would have thought of a digital prophet or a community blogging manager in the early 2000s??
An agile recruitment process begins with identifying which talent or specialist would boost the company‘s business performance. As an expert HR professional, before you just browse and see the trending job titles that you could take and shove into your work spot, it is important to understand the working of your company as a whole. Understand the core businesses, your organization‘s vision and mission, how important is that skill to your company, would that new hot job title disrupt, add or change nothing concerning your current way of working.
Rather than blindly making hires based on trending job positions, keeping all the above factors in mind, take a look at the employee data you have in hand. Can you provide training to existing employees and upskill them for the new title or is a fresh hire required? With proven data in hand, you can make critical decisions that can close your organization’s skills gap.
Map desired skills and right candidate profiles
Now that you realize the talent dearth in the company, sourcing the best fit would be the next step. Though a perfect or ideal candidate is like a cold day in hell, spotting the best of the lot would do the organization much good. The internet is stocked with data on a candidate’s skills and interests found scattered on job boards, LinkedIn accounts, and other social media handles.
Hiring teams scrape data from job boards, track online presence and thus can predict the outcome of the recruiting process ahead of the actual interview. Tech forums like StackOverflow and Kaggle are also popular hiring hangouts showcasing their success of landing Gilberto Titericz, an awesome job at Airbnb.
Piecing this information together paints an entire story of the person you are looking for to fill the vacant job slot. The data story helps especially while recruiting for leadership positions as you can play your cards wisely to bring them onboard.
Good recruits can also be made by looking into data pointers on how your current employees are faring, what skill set they were a match for, from where their profiles were unearthed etc.. Look into profiles of your star performers and observe what sets them apart; the most crucial trait that you need to look can all be gained by analyzing such data that works as a feedback loop, making your hiring strategy even better as pointed in this article.
Get your best candidate prospects interested in your offer
Once potential persons are identified, reaching out to them and keeping them engaged with relevant job posts, and company happenings help in gaining the attention of the candidate and boosts their perception of the company.
In an era when personalization is rapidly gaining traction, data on the candidate’s interests helps reach out to them on a warm and personal note, rather than mass cold mailing of prospective candidates.
Proving the success of such custom messages is the data experiment carried out by LinkedIn. Brendan Browne, LinkedIn’s VP of Global Talent Acquisition talks about the simple 2×2 grid developed by them to identify and engage the best candidates. The grip plots the affinity of the candidate against the quality of their skills which would aid in sending the messages to the people with the suitable skills and their affinity towards looking for a new position. With this data in hand, LinkedIn’s recruiting team achieved a success of 85% Inmail response.
No wonder I get apt, engaging content related to my marketing specialization straight to my LinkedIn Inbox.
I just couldn’t miss viewing the mail and the related details. Kudos Team!
This same type of personalization could be attained if only recruiting consultants can mine the hoards of data they can easily access.
Keep your new hires engaged with great employee experience
The best fits spotted, engaged, and strategic interviews done, now enters the much talked about people analytics. Nurturing an employee’s experience in the workplace is a growing trend in the HR world. People data mined at an organization through various survey and gamification tools lend a view into how satisfied or not an employee is with the organization’s policies. Richard Branson’s words to train people well enough so they can leave, treat them well enough, so they don’t beautifully voices employee engagement.
A Harvard Business Review Analytic Services report of more than 550 executives found 71% of respondents ranking employee engagement as very important to achieving overall organizational success. Flexible work schedules, continuous performance appraisal systems and recognition at work spots aid a lot to the well being of the employee.
The level of interest showed while the new employee steps into the organization has to be sustained so that the true value of your recruitment strategy can be fully realized. Giving a positive experience to employees through data analytics has been ranked as a disruptive focal area in HR technology for 2018 in Deloitte’s latest report.
Work on retaining your recruit while nurturing successors
Knowing employee experiences time and again also gives a clear heads up on employees who start finding the workplace restless. Rather than superficially looking for those who can be retained or fired, data gives you truths on why a particular department sees a higher attrition rate than the others.
Data shows the truth on common reasons for an employee to leave; is it the way a manager treated a team, or the work timing of that particular project, or the stunted growth seen in their team? Exit surveys and analytics of the reasons behind the job exits gives a clear path towards retention strategy.
Take for example the much-cited Xerox’s retention methods. Their insights from employee data showed that hiring training freshers rather than choosing experienced candidates helped retain them too. Combined with other insights on the effect of social media on employees and their level of creativity, they were able to cut the attrition rates at their call centers by 20%!
Also, plain analytics isn’t going to stop a person from leaving an organization and in those circumstances, data can point to the right successor – either within or outside the organization.
So will HR be governed by Data entirely?
No, not at all. Data and analytics are to be taken as guides for talent acquisition and people management rather than numbers dictating everything about recruitment.
All the information you find on job portals has a human face behind them that only people like you can truly understand. Hence, gear up with data to back your instincts and be the best you in hiring well-fitted, colorful, and vibrant people you believe in.
