When Google and Facebook joined the recruitment industry, the game changed. The rules guiding how talent acquisition professionals find talent have shifted, with big recruiting websites now realizing that they have serious competition.
These two tech titans brought with them a massive database of job-seekers and businesses. In fact, this year Facebook hit 2.3 billion users per month and Google for Jobs is listing on average 175.000 unique jobs every day in the US.
Even though this new data-driven reality led by Google and Facebook can seem like a big challenge for talent acquisition professionals, when it comes to matching candidates with businesses, it keeps the solution within easily definable metrics, allowing talent acquisition professionals to analyze and compare the effectiveness of various job postings. Focusing on data-driven talent acquisition will allow you to dive deep into the efficiency of your workforce and track hiring success.
More metrics
The first step is thinking strategically over tactically. This means that when you are building your recruiting strategy you need to think in the long term – not the immediate impact you intend to make.
When using talent acquisition metrics correctly, you can understand if your team is hiring the right people – so start considering things like how to accomplish your wider recruitment goals rather than simply how to get one person hired. Furthermore, you need to work more closely with other departments as a company-wide strategy. Maintaining a wider perspective will help you know exactly what data to get, measure, and analyze.
Once you have your goals set, you can start selecting your recruiting metrics. There are many variables that you can use, so you need to choose wisely. For example, you can analyze the time it takes to find and hire a new candidate in order to plan a replacement for a departed employee. Also, you can measure the time that a candidate takes to be fully productive in the company to estimate the cost of replacing an employee. When you have thorough data in your hands, the recruitment process will be taken more seriously at your company’s higher levels.
There is no standard way to build a data-driven talent acquisition strategy – it depends on each company. This is why it’s important to fully understand the business workforce and which recruitment processes have been utilized so far. As a talent acquisition professional, you need to keep in mind that you will have to make adjustments in accordance with your data.
For instance, if you track your hiring source and see that most of the recruits for a particular job are coming from Indeed, you need to separate the organic from the sponsored candidates before you can make a change to the strategy. Then you can invest more in Indeed since it is clearly a destination for people that might be already thinking of your company.
Separate your job prospects into levels
When you are building your recruitment strategy, it is key to separate the job prospects into three levels so you can determine how much time, effort, and investment you need to put into each hire. The three levels should be as follows: hourly, mid-level, and highly-skilled candidates.
Easy jobs that do not require specific experience or education fall into hourly jobs, which can range from custodial and security to retail and other entry-level positions. Technical vacancies where candidates are more difficult to find comprise the second tier while expert-level employees, who are much harder and more expensive to source, are classified in the third level of job prospects.
Separating job prospects into these three levels allows businesses to spend their money effectively. Today, there are still a lot of companies that will spend much of their recruitment budget on one-size-fits-all campaigns on job boards for results that could be sourced with free tools and organic platforms.
With these divisions in mind, smart talent acquisition professionals can focus their strategy for hourly and mid-level positions on platforms like Google and Facebook to save money. They can then take those savings and use them to improve recruitment efforts for much harder-to-hire, high-skilled employees like web developers, machinists, counselors, and other people who need specialized training.
The programmatic job advertisement will prevail
When it comes to promoting high-skilled job positions for your business, choosing the right channels manually becomes a daunting task. That is why, in the digital realm, programmatic advertising is an essential addition to your recruiting strategy.
This tool allows companies to optimize the job recruitment process by automating the buying and placing of job postings through multiple organic and sponsored channels. This not only saves you a lot of time but gives you access to 24/7 marketing analytics that will help you spend smarter and get more results from your budget. Moreover, you can use as many job advertising platforms as you wish, allowing you to reach more viable candidates. In other words: programmatic enables efficiency.
Today a successful recruitment strategy must be founded on data. Competition for great candidates is more alive than ever before. As a talent acquisition professional, you need to know the value of data for your specific business and how to apply that knowledge when building your recruitment strategy. If you take the time to work with your data and plan wisely, you can secure the best possible hires.
About the author: Othamar Gama Filho, is the CEO at Talentify, a recruitment marketing automation platform.
