Can Data Analytics Help You Hire Better Candidates?

Can Data Analytics Help You Hire Better Candidates?

Data analytics have been growing in popularity in recent years and have become invaluable for many aspects of organizational management. Data analytics help to identify strengths and weaknesses of an organization, while assisting in solving complex business problems. As many executives have learned, poor hiring choices can be extremely costly, making high turnover an expensive challenge for HR departments today. Not only is it expensive, high turnover can also damage an organization’s culture and reputation. Luckily for HR departments, data analytics can be made useful for hiring the proper candidates.

The Recruitment Success Rate
The success rate of recruiting is based on a process that starts when the candidate first applies for a position and ends with the acceptance or declination of a job offer. Most frequently, the analytics used to measure this effectiveness are cost-per-hire, time-to-fill, turnover ratio, and quality-of-hire. Additionally, HR departments can track where people fall off in the process, whether it is during the screening interview or some other part. By identifying these gaps, an organization can improve their hiring processes. Another tool HR departments can use is HR software. HR software can prescreen candidates based on the criteria required for a specific job, which reduces time-to-fill by eliminating manual processes and certain biases. Harvard Business Review has found that these algorithms outperform human decisions by at least 25%.

Identify Job Requirements
A thorough job analysis can be utilized to identify the position requirements. These competencies can be degrees, licenses, personality traits, and more. Once these competencies have been identified, the hiring process can be built around them.

Utilizing Assessments
Depending on the job requirements, assessments can be a great tool to identify the perfect candidate. These assessments can be personality tests, cognitive exams, or interviews structured to extract answers to certain questions. Some positions may be best performed by someone with certain personality traits, which can be identified through a myriad of personality tests, the most commonly used being the Myer-Briggs Type Indicator. Cognitive exams can be administered if certain abilities are necessary to perform a job, similar to a doctoral candidate taking the boards to ensure they have the knowledge to perform their job. When choosing an assessment, be sure to pick one based off of research and theory that has the statistics to back up its predictive ability for a candidate’s success. Additionally, it is important to give all of the candidates for that position the same assessment in order to eliminate bias.

Recruiting can be a complicated task with potentially high expenses if done incorrectly. However, when used properly, data analytics can mitigate the biases and reduce expenses to ensure you hire the best candidate to suit the unique needs of your organization.

This DATIS Blog was written by Carley Donovan, DATIS, on February 10th, 2016 and may not be re-posted without permission.

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