What is Data-Driven Recruiting?

Data-driven recruiting is a way of leveraging the data you have on candidates and employees to make smarter, more strategic hiring decisions. It can help you hire faster, more efficiently, and get candidates who are a better fit for what your organization needs.

Common Objections to Data-Driven Recruiting

1. Recruiting is about people, not data

Talent acquisition and management are people-driven fields, to be sure. This makes leaders hesitant to rely on data and AI to make hiring decisions — how can data give you a well-rounded picture of a person with all their strengths, weaknesses, soft skills, and cultural fit?

Well, humans are actually not so flawless when it comes to making hiring choices either. Affinity bias, or the tendency to hire people who look, sound, and live like us, is typically unconscious but very strong. And it can influence hiring decisions.

Data, on the other hand, can offer unbiased insights that make your hiring choices more accurate. Of course, AI isn’t going to replace recruiters because the human element is still essential. But data can help your people make more informed hiring judgments.

2. Artificial Intelligence isn’t advanced enough to help make better decisions

Other senior leaders may be reluctant to embrace analytics and Artificial Intelligence (AI) for making hiring choices because of poor experiences with previous systems. For example, applicant tracking systems (ATS) are sometimes used to filter out qualified candidates because they didn’t exactly match a keyword for the role in their resume or application.

But AI and analytics have come a very long way since then. Growth in data-driven recruiting reflects how sophisticated hiring software has become. With today’s technology, you can focus on pre-hire assessments that measure candidates once and recommend their suitability for any of your open roles, like Cangrade’s solutions for example.

3. Changing recruitment processes and systems is too hard

There’s no doubt about it — switching from your current system for evaluating and tracking applicants to move to a data-driven recruiting model is challenging.

To take full advantage of data-based recruiting, you must find the right hiring software and integrate it with the systems that provide data on current employee performance and any other employee or candidate data you have.  

Breaking down these silos by implementing integrations isn’t easy, but it’s the only way to get a full picture of how your hiring process is working and what needs to be fixed. Just imagine, how much better would your hiring process be if you could look at what skills current employees in a certain role have that make them successful and evaluate a new crop of candidates against that information, all in one system?

4. The recruiting team is already drowning in data

Senior leaders might argue that the last thing your overworked recruiters need is even more data — they’re already swamped with information on applicants, and the overload makes decisions even harder. But data-based recruiting isn’t about simply giving hiring managers and HR teams more information: it’s about giving them the right insights from that data.

For instance, do you currently know how long your average time-to-hire is, or how many new hires quit within thirty days, or how many top candidates turn down your offers? Data-based recruiting can help you answer all of these questions so you can make your hiring process as efficient as possible. This way you can further evaluate your strengths and weaknesses to build a stronger recruitment process.

5. Finding the right hiring software is hard

With so many kinds of hiring software on the market, choosing the one that can help you throughout the entire hiring process and into the talent management and retention phase can be difficult. You need a complete solution, otherwise, you’re simply creating more siloed systems that keep your data from your recruiting team.

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