As you prepare to implement a recruiting solution, an important consideration to think about is your reporting needs.  If we don’t build the data elements into the system, you won’t be able to report on them!

So what data are you reporting on?  What numbers are important to your organization?

There are really two types of data that I find valuable for a recruiting function:  predictive analytics and performance indicators.

Predictive analytics should help you improve your recruiting efforts.  These are the things that help you hire better candidates who will stay with the company and perform at a high level.  The best analytics will tie recruiting data in with other organizational data so you can see how your candidates do over the long term.  This is not the kind of information you can gather on a whim.  It takes time to develop enough data to be useful.

Examples of predictive analytics:

• Retention – What causes employees to become dissatisfied and leave your organization?  Can you evaluate this trait or target a segment of candidates to lead to lower turnover?
• Performance – Are you evaluating similar criteria in the interview process and the performance review process?  How can you create consistency between these processes to help predict the hiring of high performers?

These indicators can help you target the best candidates.  What is the source of hire for your best performing employees?  What educational background do employees have who tend to be most satisfied in their careers with you?  This can help you build your future recruiting strategy to replicate past successes.

As always in the recruiting world, you have to consider legality and compliance in making your decisions.  You may find that middle-aged white men with no children have the best retention and highest performance.  Rather than targeting this segment of the population, I would encourage you to figure out why this is true.  Is it because successful performers happen to have engineering degrees, and lots of middle-aged white men have engineering degrees?  If so, maybe you need to broaden your pool of engineering candidates.  Don’t just take the numbers at face value, figure out why they are the way they are and how you can make that information work for you.

Performance indicators can also be useful in assessing your recruiting talent and program success.  These numbers help you gauge how your recruiting department is doing.

Examples of performance indicators:

• Time to Fill – How are you measuring this?  If the clock starts ticking when the requisition is created, but the hiring manager is holding up the process, this is not a good assessment of a recruiter’s performance.  Everyone in the process should be accountable.  Instead of a start-to-finish metric, consider publishing numbers on each person involved or each step of the process.
• Cost of Hire – If you have several recruiters performing similar work, but one spends significantly more on advertising than the others, this may be a valid measure of success.  Again though, consider the reason behind the numbers.  Is one person posting ads that several recruiters benefit from?  If so, the cost should be distributed across all of the recruiters.  Does one recruiter target more difficult to fill positions than others?  In that case, it may simply cost more to find the right candidates, which means that recruiter’s costs can’t be compared line-for-line against those of other recruiters.

The moral of the story is that good planning can provide you with great information.  Analyzing that information can lead to excellent performance.  Just don’t accept the numbers at face value.  Consider the reasons behind them as part of your overall assessment, and plan ahead to make sure you know what you want to measure.

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