Go with your gut. Trust your instinct. Use your intuition.

These are tried and tired axioms in the world of recruiting. No offense to your gut, but with the resources and tools available today, instinct alone is not the smartest or most strategic way to go about recruiting. We all know the people a company hires are its greatest resource, so why engage in a hiring strategy comprised of guesswork and intuition?

Well, you don’t have to anymore. Today, Jibe is officially rolling out its Recruiting Analytics solution. A first of its kind in the recruiting world, Recruiting Analytics from Jibe enables recruiters to back up their guts with real-time data, analytics and actionable information. The solution is the first to capture data throughout the full hiring funnel, from the moment a potential candidate visits your career site through to the hiring stage. With Recruiting Analytics, talent acquisition professionals can identify which marketing channels are getting the best return, pinpoint where in the process candidates drop off most frequently, and ultimately optimize their entire recruiting strategy.

Big Data < Meaningful Data

Ahhhhh, Big Data. It’s all the rage, isn’t it? We’ve all been hearing for years now that Big Data is going to change everything. Heck, if it can turn the small market Oakland A’s into winners, it can do anything, right?

For some time now, Big Data in HR has been the trendy thing, the next thing, the new thing. It’s been talked about, written about and discussed to death as the revolutionary game-changer we’ve all been waiting for. But Big Data in HR isn’t new because the data has always been there. Turning all this data into something meaningful has always been the challenge.

Our recent Talent Acquisition Survey confirmed many assumptions about data and analytics in recruiting. On the whole, surveyed recruiters made it clear that getting a handle on data, or even access to it, is one of their biggest challenges. A clear majority of respondents (68%) reported that it’s very difficult to even extract data from their current systems, let alone make sense of it. When recruiters do gain access to the data, they spend an average of 22 hours a month – nearly three working days – sifting through and turning that data into something useful, a gigantic productivity killer.

The root causes for recruiter’s data frustrations are manifold. For one, the multiple systems used by talent acquisition teams aren’t integrated, thereby providing only partial data sets. Also, today’s data is rarely, if ever, presented in real-time, meaning recruiters are only getting information on a monthly, quarterly or even annual basis, preventing them from using the data in a truly meaningful way.

Recruiters are also frustrated with the format they receive data in, which is typically a jumbled, unformatted Excel spreadsheet they then have to spend hours (or days) transforming into something presentable. That’s time that could be better spent sourcing and hiring quality candidates.

So yes, up until now, dealing with recruiting data has been, for lack of a more artful term, a gigantic pain in the gut for recruiters. But Jibe is determined to change all that, starting with today’s launch of Recruiting Analytics.

With Recruiting Analytics, it doesn’t matter that your ATS isn’t integrated with your other systems because the solution pulls the data from all of them and integrates it for you. Not only that, but it’s done in real-time and presented in clear, easy-to-understand, configurable dashboards which can be instantly exported into clean, presentation-ready reports. For the first time, you’ve got data at your fingertips to demonstrate your strategic value. You can finally let the numbers tell your story, not your gut.

Originally posted at The Jibe Blog