Meet Peter Hetherington, the Recruitment Director at Link Asset Services and a self-proclaimed ‘dataholic’. Peter is known to say he’d choose good data over employer brand any day. Though he acknowledges both are ultimately necessary. “Data is foundational to success,” he remarks, “and no amount of tinkering with interesting things like employer brand will make up for missing or inaccurate management information.”

Link Asset service left Capita almost two years ago. This acquisition meant separating from a company of 70 thousand to operate as a three-thousand person entity within the new organization. Peter started from square one at his new employer. He was a team of one, with no tools but his email. His sole focus in those first weeks was to build out his team – people needed to be hired and fast.

Peter set to work hiring a stellar team, most of whom are with him to this day. His second order of business was to implement an applicant tracking system (ATS). He chose SmartRecruiters Talent Acquisition Suite (TAS), and – in just four weeks – the system was running and Peter was collecting data.

Data is, was, and will always be a must for Peter, and here’s why: Data transforms managers into leaders, improves the quality of conversations, enables him to question conventional wisdom, and allows his team to learn from the past to predict the future.

Overall, it helps him see what’s happening, form a plan, and sell that plan to internal stakeholders. Yet, even when the data is there, it can be a challenge to organize it in a way that speaks to your leadership. The term ‘the board’ makes this committee seem like a homogenous mass, when really it’s comprised of many parts, each with unique objectives, concerns, and insights.

The CEO has an eye for expansion and growth, the CFO is concerned with wise spend, and bottom-line targets… the list goes on. Peter takes us through the top five points your data should address, in order to align executives with hiring success.

Watch Peter’s presentation from Hiring Success 18 – Berlin below, and be sure to register for Hiring Success 19 – San Francisco for more great content like this live!

1)

Governance

Recruiting is critical to the development of an organization. So, the way your team manages the “floodgates” is all-important. Leadership needs to know your TA strategy promotes the desired organizational structure.

2)

Management Information

Who doesn’t love a good dashboard? Use your data to build dashboards so your leadership can easily view your department performance in real time.

3)

ROI

Return on investment is an obvious metric to include when presenting the board, though it can be hard to demonstrate in a palpable way. Remember to frame everything as an investment (because it is), not a cost. Use your past data to justify future investment. How many more hires were you able to make after expanding your team? Use that info to demonstrate why you want another recruiter on board.

4)

Process Excellence

Showcase the excellence of your team, including their ability to hit targets and communicate with other departments.

5)

Forecasting

Share your projections of who you need to hire and how you arrived at that conclusion – again, using your data. Then give some context as to whether the market can supply that need and the amount of resources your team will require to reach that goal.

Case Studies

Organizational  Structure

Link went from a large company to a much smaller and more agile organization. The leadership of this new Link iteration wanted to make sure that each new hire was strategic, thoughtful, and fed into the new management structure they had laid out for their company. One of their main targets was to ensure managers only oversaw 3-10 people directly – any less or more found to be ineffective for the business needs.

To support this management initiative, Peter and his team implemented conditional fields to alert when a hiring manager opened a new role in the SmartRecruiters system. The system would ask how many people the new role managed, and if the number was outside the ideal window the hiring manager would be asked to provide a business case to justify their decision.

Before these conditional fields, hiring teams would reach offer stage only to have the scope of the role called into question and, at times, would have to start from scratch with a modified version of the role. This small tweak of adding conditional fields ensured the board that proper governance was in place to make smart hires in line with business objectives.

Resource Allocation

Another aspect of their organizational restructuring was reallocating office resources. Leadership wanted to encourage collaboration through open offices, and move more workers to their suburban campus as opposed to their city campus, in response to Dublin’s skyrocketing rents.

Employing the same tactic of conditional fields, hiring managers were asked where new roles would be located. If the job was located in Dublin, hiring managers were then asked to present a business case for hiring an employee there. The hiring team could then immediately forward these requests to the right people to approve.

Now, candidates aren’t surprised by a sudden change in job location, and the leadership knows that the hiring team is helping the meet the company ’s fiscal goals.

Contractors

Contract workers are often the highest uncontrolled spend for businesses. Hiring managers often prefer using a contractor over hiring a full-time employee, as the latter takes much more time and effort to source and onboard.

To ensure that hiring managers aren’t leaning on freelancers too much, Peter and his team use conditional fields once again to compare the merit of contractor versus full-time employee. Questions like, Where does this budget for this role come from? Does this position need to be interviewed? Is this a new role or an extension? and, what is the equivalent salary of a permanent person?, helped the TA team manage the company’s contingent workforce with greater efficiency and prudence.

Facility Management

What’s worse for candidate experience than arriving for the first day of the job only have no desk, no chair, and no laptop. Most people have seen this situation at least once in their company and aren’t keen to repeat it.

With larger organizations, these small details can fall through the cracks. That’s why the TA team at Link makes hiring managers think about supplies beforehand. As part of a new req the hiring manager must submit supply requests. The hiring team then sends facilities a weekly report with the needs of the new hires, instead of frantic managers calling daily.

Tech advancement is not slowing down, and as recruiters to struggle to find the best permutations for their HR needs, a bit of guidance of the latest trend is in order.

Speaking in jargonese, workforce analytics blend software and methodology that apply statistical models to worker-related data, allowing organizations to optimize their Human Resource Management. Sometimes referred to as descriptive analytics, this is helpful to understand, at an aggregate level, what is going on in your organization.

Tracking employee and candidate data to analyze in order to make better recruiting decisions, is a tried and tested strategy. What’s interesting now is the trend toward predictive and prescriptive analytics.

Recruiters are embracing rapid technological growth, not just because ATS systems continue to improve, but because the data they provide is changing their jobs for the better. Most notably, with a proper ATS in place, there’s a lot more recruiting and a lot less administration.

Workforce analytics gather data from enterprise resource planning (ERP), customer relationship management (CRM), and point of sale (POS) systems. The blending of data from these seemingly disparate sources makes for a more robust way to predict outcomes, and there are several software options to integrate with your current HR programs. Review and recommendation sites can help you narrow down your CRM, POS, or ERP software choices to those that connect the best.

Predictive and Prescriptive Analytics:

As we uncover predictive and prescriptive analytics, let’s take a look at how they’re different. When using predictive analytics, we’re beginning to move away from the traditional descriptive methodology, and beginning to ask, “what could happen”? It’s a use of statistical models and techniques that combine historical data pulled from a company’s tech stacks to forecast the future.

For example, when asking questions like “Which workers are most likely to leave”, or “which internal associates or external candidates are the best job fit”, you can use the data at hand to assist in knowing where your resources are best used.

Now, as we talk about prescriptive analytics, we’re taking things a step forward. Prescriptive analytics uses optimization and simulation algorithms to advise on possible outcomes, and answers the question of “What should we do”? Attempting to quantify the effect of a decision before it’s made, it’s not only an attempt to predict what will happen, but why it’ll happen.

So how does this new trend in workforce analytics affect recruiters?

One of the most notable ways recruiters use data is in succession planning, as well as internal recruiting. In the past, recruiters were limited to the short list of usual suspects based on gut feeling, two annual reviews, and senior management recommendations. Now, succession planning can be done using real-time data. What’s more is that the candidate pool is deeper, going beyond the top five people being nominated in secret to looking at another level of the organization based upon transparent, employee-driven career goals and performance metrics.

Another area where recruiters are using workforce analytics is in trying to understand what an ideal candidate profile should look like. Based on data gathered from the top performers in each role, it’s become simpler to identify the types of candidates who will also thrive in those positions. From there, recruiters will know from which pools to source, such as within specific geographic regions, professional organizations, or schools.

As the use of big data is disrupting just about every industry, consider how workforce analytics can change your recruiting strategy, as you consider how the face of recruiting is moving from what’s worked in the past to a predictive and prescriptive analysis and decision-making process giving you the best picture of where you’re going.

Data is being used to ever better understand company culture and employee profiles to find best-fit candidates for the enterprise overall. When it comes to assessing and analyzing culture fit, it’s essential we realize that regardless of which boxes you’ve checked – diversity, ability to work specific hours – at the end of the day, if people don’t feel included and accepted, you’ll never keep them.

The challenge when measuring ROI when it comes to recruiting and engagement in a talent community on social media channels normally surrounds one of the following:

• Guaranteed Success.  Social media is a relatively new medium in which to engage and recruit candidates through the process of erecruiting. While there are certainly best practices when it comes to LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter, like most things in business, there are no guarantees.   

• Effort/Time.  Unless you are a well-known brand, building your presence and reputation on social media requires a great deal of time and effort before you reap the benefits. It takes time to build a foundation.  A social media recruiting strategy is much like purchasing a home. You don’t generally make money right away.  Flipping homes requires time, capital, and sometimes blood, sweat, and tears without a 100% guarantee.  

• Everyone is an Expert.  Or at least everyone claims to be.  Social media provides an easy entrance to experts many who have no experience in the field of recruiting, HR, or beyond a few SEO tricks.  Because social media strategies are as varied as the number of blogs throughout the internet, it’s important to research, plan, and prepare before diving into social media and recruiting.

As you begin dipping your toe into the internet recruiting waters of social media, it’s important to establish clear measurables and metrics that can support your efforts beyond the standard metrics tools and measurements like Tweet Reach and Facebook Impressions.

• Bit.ly Links.  Using a tool like bit.ly provides you data regarding the number of clicks to a particular url.  From here you can determine candidate conversion ratios using number of clicks/applications.  If the link is viewable on email newsletter, blogs, or other websites, a custom shortened link provides a consistent and subtle branding message that’s guaranteed to impress.

• Surveys/Focus Groups.  As you are beginning your online recruiting efforts, spend time talking with your candidate pool.  Where are they spending their time online and what made them apply for you position versus others online?  Go beyond the standard online survey, pull up a chair, and get to know your job seekers.

• Turnover Metrics.  While a candidate source might fill positions, the real key when developing any type of recruiting strategy is determining if the source provides quality candidates beyond time and cost to fill.  This means evaluating turnover by source metrics.  Video recruiting campaigns in my experience have always produced lower turnover than more traditional efforts because candidates are provide consistent and more information about job responsibilities and company culture.  Data from turnover metrics can help guide you where to spend your time and effort on future social media recruiting campaigns.

Internet recruiting strategies can support your already established recruiting efforts.  Like any business plan or strategy, it’s important to spend time establishing measure-ables and metrics to guide you, whether it’s by retooling your social media efforts, expanding them, or abandoning them altogether.

Photo Credit Soshable

Jessica Miller-Merrell, SPHR is a HR consultant, new media strategist, and author who writes at Blogging4Jobs. Jessica is the host of Job Search Secrets, an internet television show for job seekers.

Ask any human resources or recruiting professional and they will tell you that their job is more than hiring and firing. Human resources touches every inch of an organization sometimes in very indirect ways, which is why it’s important for HR teams to build a strong HR metrics and scorecard system.
 
When selecting which HR analysis processes and equations to use to support how your department is impacting the organization, it’s important to start first with your senior leaders.  An HR leader must ask either directly or indirectly of their senior leader, “What keeps you and your executive team up at night?”
 

Using this method instead of the traditional score card system allows for your HR team to remain in touch with corporate objectives and the hot buttons of the business.  And once you have determined how these goals align with your own department’s missions and objectives, you can begin to develop a system in which to evaluate the effectiveness of your HR department.
 
But before you do that, here are some human resource and recruiting formula equations to get you started.
 
1. Monthly Turnover Rate = (number of separations during month / average number of employees during month) x 100). 
 
2. Revenue per Employee = total revenue / total number of employees.
 
3. Yield Ratio = percentage of applicants for a recruitment source that make it to a determined stage of the application process.
 
4. Human Capital Cost = Pay + Benefits + Contingent Labor Cost / Full Time Equivalents.
 
5. HR to Staff Ratio = Employees / Human Resources Team Members.
 
6. Cost to Hire = Training + Advertising + Lost Productivity + Time / employee salary (ranges from 50-250%).

In addition to working directly with your senior executives to determine their HR Pain Points within the organization and how they align with company goals, it is equally important to talk to the employees themselves.  A combined approach is best using employee surveys to develop a baseline for performance as well as holding regular meetings with staff at locations.  Monthly “town halls” can help uncover not only what is important to your employee population, what isn’t, and their perceptions of the organization.

Jessica Miller-Merrell, SPHR is a HR consultant, new media strategist, and author who writes at Blogging4Jobs. Jessica is the host of Job Search Secrets, an internet television show for job seekers.
 
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