Making sure you are collecting the right data for your organization is integral to improving and optimizing your recruitment marketingstrategy.  But it’s not just capturing this data that’s most important (although you can’t get anywhere if you don’t capture it.)

Instead the most important aspect is how you can display / make available this data in a way where you can easily make meaningful insights into your recruitment & sourcing initiatives.

Making sure you are fulfilling your data needs

In order to make sure this is happening, you need to identify two main things:

What data?:  Basically you need to identify and decide on what data is crucial to your organization in terms of making better strategic recruiting decisions.  The key is understanding what data you need at your fingertips always and what data can be leveraged when you want to dig deeper.  This will help you determine what your data needs are and what you need to capture in your job distributioncampaigns.

Can you current process / technology support this?:  Once you determine the data you need, it’s important to take a look at your technology and if this data can be provided & presented in a way to easily make sense of it.  Because without the ability to present the right data in an efficient way, you are lost knowing what you need but being unable to provide it.

By answering these two questions you are well on your way to understanding your recruiting funnel better which can help you form a better overall recruitment strategy.

The Power of Collective Data

First and foremost, the first focus for any recruiting organization in terms of data is to make sure that they are fulfilling their needs in house.  They need to make sure they are getting the right data and are making it available in the right format.

One last important aspect of internal data is that you should make sure that all of your recruiting / sourcing data is in one place.  This will make it so you can make easier comparisons on what sources are working and what sources you should cut bait with while giving you a holistic view of all the activities you are doing to bring in qualified candidates.

Once you have your internal data processes in order, it’s time to look at what I call collective data.  Collective data is something many technology providers (including us) are working hard to provide.

Most technology providers in the recruiting space have access to a tremendous amount of data from a number of different organizations and industries.  From candidate drop-off rates to recruiting source data, there is a bevy of data out there that can be extremely valuable to companies looking for recruitment trends.

What would happen if this data was made available to every user in the aggregate (obviously, anonymously) so that you could see recruiting source data and recruitment metricsfor other industries and recruiting organizations.  And best of all, it would be great to sort this data based on different filters including job categories, experience levels, industries, etc.

With this data, you would be able to answer questions like:

• Are my candidate drop-off rates higher or lower than the industry?
• What recruiting source is best for Senior Marketing professionals?
• What job board / recruiting source should I use that I currently don’t?
• How does my social recruiting or Recruitment SEO strategy compare to other organizations in terms of results?

The sharing of collective data has huge potential to help recruiting organizations to greatly enhance the recruiting strategies they are using, benchmark their efforts against other organizations and most importantly improve the ROI they receive from these strategies.

This data is still a little ways off but is coming up quick in the rear view mirror.  However, when it comes organizations need to be ready to share their data in order to be able to leverage and draw insights from the collective.