Good reporting is critical to achieving hiring success. Without a reporting strategy, how can you know if you are attracting, selecting, and hiring the best talent, within budget, and in the most efficient way? But often, reporting for talent acquisition is harder than it sounds. Gathering reports from disparate systems or business units can take up vast amounts of time, and sometimes a lack of data accuracy prevents the reports from being useful.

Why Implement a Reporting Strategy?

A solid reporting strategy can help you and your organization improve hiring outcomes in multiple ways:

• Evaluate real-time progress against goals
• Uncover hiring process roadblocks
• Measure the progress of DEI recruitment efforts
• Track the effectiveness of new strategies so that you can pivot when necessary
• Align TA with other business functions
• Inform stakeholders across the organization 
• Build credibility with executive stakeholders and the C-Suite
• Inform the next steps toward developing a more mature TA function
• Get support for future TA initiatives
• Build effective strategies to stay competitive in the talent marketplace
• Gather career-building win stories

How to Build a Talent Acquisition Reporting Strategy

Whether you’re still pulling reports manually or have some automation already built into your reporting strategy, you can start afresh and rethink your approach. The goal is to meet the needs of talent acquisition today, which may mean adjusting processes that worked in the past. Here’s how to get started:

1. Conduct an Audit

A reporting audit answers these questions.

• What reports are currently being run? At what time intervals?
• Who is responsible for running the reports and distributing them? How much time does it take?
• What reporting tools are available to us? Do we currently leverage our existing dashboards to the fullest?
• Who receives the reports? Are they the right people?
• Who makes decisions based on the reports? How is the success of those decisions being measured?
• Are the current reports effective at measuring what your company needs? Is there information missing that would help with decision-making? Identify the gaps.

2. Understand Business Goals

No reporting strategy can be effective without understanding the needs of the business. This may include differences across business units, locations, role types, etc. Then you need to look closely at your TA processes for each business concern. At SmartRecruiters, we encourage our customers to take the Hiring Success Business Assessment. The assessment helps them define their maturity status across people, processes, and technology in 21 compenents of talent acquisition. These components are grouped into three buckets: Talent Attraction & Engagement, Collaboration & Selection, and Management & Operating Model. 

By looking at the needs of the business against your current hiring practices, you can start to see where accurate reporting will have the most impact as you make improvements.

3. Ensure you Have Clean Data

Talent acquisition systems are designed to deliver good data, but only if they are used properly. Your reporting strategy will be ineffective if data is missing due to poor system adoption or missing links between tools. To ensure accurate data collection, you may need to identify where you need to improve processes or link systems.

4. Determine KPIs and Set Benchmarks

Every business needs KPIs that matter to the specific situation. While benchmarks may differ across different groups, it’s important to have goals in your sight. Then, individuals can be held accountable to reaching those goals. For example, if hiring velocity is a priority and hiring managers routinely slow down processes by taking too long to make decisions, they should be expected to make the necessary adjustments to hire on time. 

5. Establish a Reporting Cadence

Which reports get run weekly, monthly, quarterly, or annually? Determine who is responsible for creating and reviewing reports. To level-set teams and build the expectation of accountability, schedule meetings to review results well in advance.

Establishing a structured reporting plan may reveal knowledge gaps among stakeholders. It may be useful to enable data literacy through additional training from an expert. With greater data literacy, stakeholders can learn to ask better questions of the data and answer them on their own. Data literacy sets the stage for continuous improvement. 

6. Set Up Dashboards and Iterate

Developing a good reporting strategy is an iterative process. The first dashboards may not be as useful as you thought once the data starts coming in. It may take some time to start getting clean data, or some individuals may require education to understand all the data points on the dashboards. Over time, your team will become more fluent in reading the reports and discovering insights that can move the business forward.  

An Expert Can Help Guide the Way

Reporting for talent acquisition is a highly specialized function that other business analytics teams may lack the expertise (or bandwidth) to accomplish. Accurate, actionable reporting is essential in your path to hiring success and crucial to unlocking the full potential of your recruiting function.

SmartRecruiters SmartSuccess Talent Strategy & Insights consulting packages help you level up your reporting strategy. Working with an experienced consultant, you’ll dive deep into what’s working and what’s not. Together, you and the consultant will come up with action and success plans tailored specifically to your business needs. You’ll receive:

• Analytics and insights strategy sessions to identify what stories the data can tell you, giving you the ability to translate TA goals to measurable outcomes 
• Monthly insights maintenance and strategy alignment sessions to ensure you have the full picture of your talent organization to make informed business decisions
• Personalized Tableau dashboards that consolidate the most frequently needed data in one place

There’s no reason a sound reporting strategy should stand in the way of Hiring Success. Get in touch with us to learn more about SmartRecruiters and SmartSuccess. And for a deep dive into how you can lead more strategically with data, download our ebook, A Seat at the Table: A Guide to Leading a Strategic Talent Acquisition Function.

Detailed reporting is being phased out by dashboards, bringing new focus on key recruiting metrics and how to leverage them in the C-suite.

Modern organizations realize that data should lie at the heart of an organization’s decision making. As such, today’s talent acquisition leaders are expected to measure their hiring teams’ recruiting performance, compare against benchmarks, and make quantitative improvements. This means CHROs not only need strategies and tools for capturing and analyzing data, but they also need to understand what recruiting metrics and key performance indicators actually mean.

Building benchmarks can be a daunting task without prior experience working with data sets. The data doctors at Namely are experts at building benchmarks that generate useful, company-specific insights into company talent health. Find out the details of how they build benchmarking packages that give TA the ammunition they need in the boardroom.

Traditionally, human resource (HR) and talent acquisition (TA) leaders relied on admin-generated reporting for insights into metrics like time to hire, time to fill, and cost per hire. According to a recent webinar presented by The Association of Talent Acquisition Professionals (ATAP), practitioners are now moving away from text-heavy reporting in favor of visual KPI dashboards, with a renewed focus on summarizing important data and effectively communicating it to the right people so they can make better decisions. ATAP polled webinar attendees and discovered that 50 percent of TA practitioners already have a dedicated dashboard at their organization. For organizations that currently do not have a dashboard, 38 percent are actively planning and/or building one.

When using KPI dashboards, ATAP argues that TA leaders should shift their attention towards metrics that truly matter to their businesses. For most organizations, important metrics to consider fit within the framework of cost (Hiring Budget), speed (Hiring Velocity) and quality (Net Hiring Score)—what we at SmartRecruiters call Hiring Success.

Identifying these metrics is an important first step, but how can TA leaders create Hiring Success at their organizations? ATAP stresses the importance of reinforcing cultural practices surrounding data interpretation and integrity to maximize the impact of KPI dashboards. In turn, these efforts will strengthen TA’s presence in C-suite conversations and critical business decisions.

Data Interpretation

Traditional reporting offers a high degree of detail but also requires substantial analysis for interpretation. As a result, even though everyone may have access to the same report, their understanding of the data can differ greatly. Providing context to help stakeholders understand the data is necessary, and KPI dashboards offer a more digestible summary of important metrics in a way that our brains can easily understand (50 percent of the human brain is devoted directly or indirectly to vision).

More important than the numbers, however, is education and communication. Every TA team needs to establish benchmark performance metrics and educate stakeholders on normal variations in the data. TA leaders are responsible for helping recruiters and HRBP understand the dashboard mechanics, how it works and why it matters in order to foster a data-driven culture at work. Put another way: TA leaders should focus on behavioral training rather than the dashboard itself.

Data Integrity

“If it’s not in the ATS, it didn’t happen,” says webinar host Kristy Nittskoff, Founder of Talent-Savvy, a recruitment strategy optimization consultancy. Implementing a single system of record is useless if employees work outside of it. Encouraging employees to log all hiring actions in the ATS in order to track and measure accurate data is critical. Moreover, KPI dashboards use data from the ATS to build out metrics, and incomplete data can skew the results, leading to inaccurate interpretations, poor business decisions— or, worse, violate compliance laws, which currently cost US companies an average of $222 million annually.

Recruiters, admins, and other ATS users are ultimately responsible for logging complete and correct information, thus mitigating problems associated with dirty data. How important is clean data? According to one study, a strong organization that uses clean data can generate up to 70 percent more revenue than its average counterparts. Otherwise, it’s garbage in and garbage out.

Impact of Data

The primary purpose of collecting data is to inform business decisions. More high-quality data translates into insights around whether or not a current talent acquisition strategy is working. TA leaders can then iterate, update, or revise processes according to what the data suggests.

SmartRecruiters sent customers a recruiting ROI survey last year and gained key insights into critical metrics surrounding candidate experience, hiring manager engagement, recruiter productivity, budget, hiring velocity, and quality of hire. These metrics demonstrate the measurable impact TA has on an organization and reiterate the importance of data as a powerful negotiation tool.

Given the right leverage, data can support requests for more resources or headcount for talent acquisition. Alternatively, data can protect TA teams, pinpointing problems with the hiring process that exist outside of TA’s control. For example, if data shows hiring managers are unresponsive, thus hurting the organization’s hiring velocity, it’s likely not TA’s fault.

Data Culture is Key

LinkedIn’s Global Recruiting Trends 2018 found that 50 percent of hiring professionals rank big data as a major part of their strategy, but TA leaders have long struggled with finding simple and effective methods of communicating performance metrics to executive leadership. Recruiting KPI dashboards signal a change in how TA can prioritize the data that truly matters to their organization, and how to present the information to important stakeholders in an impactful way. These tools, combined with a strong data culture in the workplace, best prepare TA leaders to enter the C-suite with data-driven confidence.