Have you been on Quora?  I’ve been on the site for a few years now but mainly as a lurker rather than actually offering some advice to people.  I get an email from them daily that updates me on a random assortment of topics that I ticked boxes for indicating that I find interesting.  The new Quora member interest page is an infinity scrolling page, and I have a wide range of interests so my email is eclectic to say the least.  In one email someone asked, “Who said "90% of data ever created was created in the last 2 years?" The answer,supplied by one Supreeth Srinivasamurthy, was, “Petter Bae Brandtzæg of SINTEF ICT, according to this Science Daily article: Big Data, for better or worse: 90% of world's data generated over l...”

I don’t think anyone is surprised that we are creating that much data.  We hear about big data in the nightly news, on the radio, in the blogs we read, even Netflix is leveraging big data to create shows it knows will be successful based on the preferences of its members. 

I think we all know we need to let the data help us with our decision making in recruitment as well.  But given that recruitment typically falls under the HR umbrella and HR is not exactly the fastest adopter when it comes to new technology, the recruiters out there who are already leveraging big data are few and far between.  Most of us are like the kid playing 8-bit Nintendo while the Johnson’s next door have a Playstation or an Xbox.  It’s been more than 2 years since Bersin by Deloitte's research said, “only 6% of HR departments believe they are "excellent" in analytics and more than 60% feel they are poor or behind.”  A lot of the recruiters that I talk to would agree that we haven’t made much progress yet.

So what’s holding us back?   For some it is not knowing how or where to start.  Some don’t have the budget.  A few are just afraid of change and think the old ways are best.  If you’ve been holding off on dipping your toe in the analytics pool, now is the time to take the plunge.  Join me next week for a special replay of one of our most popular webinars of the past year, How Talent Analytics Can Help You Develop a Recruitment Strategy along with a live Q&A with our guest presenters from Glassdoor.  Hope to see you there.