Data can help us refine and redesign talent pathways in a rapidly changing marketplace.
The guiding principle of a people-first business is to cultivate great relationships. It’s personality-driven but underpinning everything is data.
Our data-driven methodology enables organisations to measure the metrics that matter, making the process more cost-effective and efficient. It also allows you to assess and compare agencies’ performance, ensuring you make an informed choice of partner.
Matching individuals and organisations
Traditional skills-matching approaches to recruitment are unsuitable to the challenges organisations face today, a subject we’ve explored before in previous articles.
Instead of looking to the past, organisations must recruit for the future. Our 16-point appraisal process, for example, is informed by the latest developments in recruitment and psychology. We developed it to give employers a more holistic view of an individual. Alongside skills, we look at suitability, cultural fit and, crucially, development potential.
Recruiting skills for the future provide “a competitive edge for banks having skilled employees and reduces recruitment cost”, say academics in a fascinating new paper.
This sounds great on paper, but how do we know it works?
Because we measure and report on everything we do – and we provide everything to our clients.
The power of a data dashboard
Data on its own is meaningless without context, so we combine several critical indicators into an easy-to-read client dashboard.
The dashboard provides detailed reporting on our candidates’ quality, suitability, and how successful clients are at hiring.
Some of the critical candidate-focused indicators we include cover:
CVs sent that are requested for an interview
Interviews that took place
Candidates that moved to the second stage
Offers accepted
Days from vacancy opening to appointment
This data demonstrates how successful our screening process is at identifying suitable candidates and supporting them to apply. The numbers don’t lie; they provide a truthful and transparent performance breakdown.
Our customers are understandably interested in our performance, so we report on data that demonstrates our impact. Some of the milestones we report on include:
Time from initial briefing to delivery of first CVs
CV sent to initial feedback timeline
CV sent to interview ratio
By focusing on the core indicators that matter, we develop a culture of continual development. We can identify areas of improvement and tackle them together.
The dashboard provides a simple snapshot of our services and our successes. We’ve developed a series of operational and screening processes that give us confidence –and we know they work because data doesn’t lie.
Why data drives relationships
Some agencies who work in our space can often be opaque, providing customers with little information and insight into the process. Unfortunately, this can leave partners on both sides with an incomplete picture of the situation.
Every consultancy measures its performance, but too many are guilty of what the Open Data Institute describes as “data hoarding”. Concerned about negative data’s impact on their reputation and relationship, they keep it stored inside silos.
Instead, agencies and clients must work together, sharing data to create value, recommends the ODI. “A more trustworthy data ecosystem, therefore, enables data openness, which in turn enables uses of data which create value for our societies and economies.” We can add companies to this list.
The data created throughout the recruitment process helps build trust, transparency and loyalty. Over time, sharing data on recruitment practices, success rates and ongoing performance can help refine the process. Academics describe such data ecosystems as “characterised by multiple autonomous organisations that engage in data sharing to leverage data-driven innovation.” The more open we are, the better we are.
Data can help us refine and redesign talent pathways in a rapidly changing marketplace. Both sides can quantify success and identify challenges and areas for improvement that can be tackled together. Sharing data means that we both improve and benefit.