| STRATEGY & GROWTH

ORIGINAL CONCEPT / Advanced Recruiting Analytics

How to Know if Your Hiring is Actually Effective

Every good talent acquisition team wants to be more effective in their hiring process. However, most industry standard metrics don’t paint the full picture when it comes to accurately diagnosing where in the process things could be made more effective.

One large global organization fell into this trap. While surface level metrics appeared healthy, they couldn’t understand why their recruiting pipelines were suffering.

I created Advanced Recruiting Analytics (ARA) to find out.

ARA is the means in which you can accurately determine the effectiveness of the two sides of the recruiting coin: recruiting inputs and business inputs. In the creation of this model which weighs these two sides differently, leaders could now get a full picture of who was doing what—and how well they were doing it—in turn, allowing them to allocate company time and money in the right places.

+ Forecasting, Data & Analytics, Strategy

OBSERVED CHALLENGE

There are many different ways to assess whether or not your recruiting process is working. We’d all be thrilled to have an efficient process where each team is running perfectly and uniformly. Unfortunately, that is impossible.

Factors such as different roles, interview panels, compensation and hiring manager biases have a big impact on how well your recruiting process is working.

There are many different metrics that you can track to see how effective your hiring process is.

The most common are:

If you are aware, tracking and optimizing for these three – you’re already ahead of the game. However, as your talent acquisition needs grow in volume or complexity, these metrics don’t paint the full picture of how to make your teams more efficient and effective.

This is because these metrics alone don’t give enough insight into what stage of the hiring process is or isn’t working — or why.

It’s possible to have a team which has the best overall passthrough rate to be completely inefficient and in need of a total overhaul. In other words, the statistics are lying to you.

THE ARA MODEL

ARA is composed of three individual metrics:

True Recruiting Value: How effectively the recruiting inputs are functioning in the interviewing process
True Business Value: How effectively the business inputs are functioning in the interviewing process
Recruiting/Business Ratio: How aligned the recruiting inputs and business inputs are performing in comparison to one another.

In Advanced Recruiting Analytics, the models revolves around the understanding that in order to truly assess both sides of the coin, you have to weigh the business inputs and recruiting inputs differently.

For True Recruiting Value to be calculated, initial outreach to screen & offer extend to offer accept are more heavily weighted. This is because those are the stages where recruiting has much more ability to influence success.

For True Business Value to be calculated, Screen to Offer Extend is king. This is because that is the part of the process where the business truly makes the most impact along the way.

The Recruiting/Business Ratio is the means in which we can quickly assess how aligned or unaligned TRV and TBV are relative to one another.

At the end of the day, these core metrics, along with others which comprise the totality of ARA, give you the understanding to know exactly where improvements need to be made.

Advanced Recruiting Analytics gives you the ability to go to the business and accurately diagnose what the true bottlenecks are—and have data that makes your position ironclad.

When it comes to an organization, time and money are the most valuable assets. Advanced Recruiting Analytics ensures you’re allocating them both in the right place.

To understand how well a hiring pipeline is really performing, I created Advanced Recruiting Analytics (ARA) — a weighted series of measures that review the business inputs, the recruiting inputs and their performance relative to one another in various fashions.

To see how ARA works, it’s important to revisit the various stages of the interviewing process and how they land between business and recruiting inputs:

In Smartwork, the goal is always to understand where you are and how you can be better. Better in this instance can be either getting the same output with less effort or getting a better output with the same effort.

There are many different levers you can pull to manipulate the hiring process and impact the overall passthrough rate. What we are after is to actually see what is going well or not going well and how to make sure we’re fixing the right things.

Without first discovering where the actual issue is, you risk wasting time, effort and goodwill and you also risk not being able to actually improve your position at all.

The important thing to realize with these metrics is that there are two sides to the recruiting process.

First, there is the business input, which can be defined as all of the things that the business is responsible. These include assessing during interviews and making a decision on which candidate to hire. Second, there is the recruiting input – which can be defined by things such as finding candidates, screening them and negotiating with them.

You need to understand how each of these inputs is performing and how they are performing relative to each other.

Imagine a team which has an overall hiring passthrough rate of 3% for a specific role. Depending on the size of the team, this could be considered a very good passthrough rate. However, if too much effort is being spent from the recruiting end by needlessly pre-screening candidates at a disproportionate rate and then declining candidates at the screening stage from the business end at a disproportionate rate, the extra effort from both inputs creates waste.

Without the ability to understand how well the business inputs and recruiting inputs are performing and how they are performing relative to each other, you’re unable to optimize your hiring workflow.

SOLUTION