Depending on the ATS you use, you most likely have a wealth of applicant data that you can use to make your recruiting strategy better.  The real questions, however, are what data is the most important and if this data is easily available and structured in a way for you to make quick and educated decisions on the state of your current recruiting initiatives.

The problem for most companies is that they have this data in several places and there's too much of it.  You have valuable ATS data here, recruitment marketing metrics there and social recruiting metrics in a totally different place.  Having to go to three different places for this data is not only a time suck but it prevents you from having a clear view of what's working and what's not working in your recruitment funnel.

A current client of ours was facing this problem and I wanted to share how we were able to work with them to resolve it.

The Problem:  Recently, we worked with a Fortune 1000 firm that wanted to fix their reporting structure and get all this data into one place.  They wanted to know if they were spending their time & money wisely on job boards / social network and wanted to easily identify what ones were the best at bringing in qualified candidates and hires.  Most importantly, they wanted all the right metrics / data in one dashboard.

What they Had in Place: We already provided them with a report for recruitment marketing and social media metrics on their job positions.  They also had multiple data points from their ATS that they wanted to track back to the recruiting source (job board, social networks, Google, etc.).

The Solution: In looking through their ATS data they realized that they wanted to keep their data simple.  While they had multiple statuses in their ATS, they knew that multiple of these statuses reflected one thing: that the candidates were qualified.  So they were able to filter their ATS applicants into three categories: unqualified, qualified and hires. And wanted the last two categories next to the recruitment marketing metrics we provided them.

We worked with them to get a data feed from their ATS to pull this info and put it in one easy to use dashboard for every job distribution they run.  See screenshot of the report below.

Results: Over the last 2 months, the company is collecting valuable data on the sources that are bringing in the most hires for their organization.  They will continue to look at this data and make strategic decisions on where they spend their recruiting budget going forward.

Do you have a clear view of what channels are performing the best for your recruiting organization?  If not, you should look at ways to consolidate and display the most important data you need to make the best recruitment marketing decisions.  Make sure this data is in one source so you can easily analyze and take action on the trends you see.