As I discussed in a previous article, all business processes have gaps. When it comes to recruiting reporting, there are lots of gaps. As an organization assembles its people, technology and processes to optimize their hiring capability, reporting is a key piece required to eliminate those gaps and increase hiring capabilities. The Catch 22 is, when there are gaps in your recruiting reports, how can you catch the gaps in your people, process, and technology?
In the last article we focused on recruiting feedback gaps and how they can compromise the integrity of the data you gather. Candidate, hiring manager and recruiter feedback is known as “experiential data.” The ability to combine experiential data (feedback) with the operational data contained within the ATS (what happened, when) is crucial to getting a full picture of what’s going on with the people, process and technology responsible for hiring the best talent.
So that brings us to…
Reporting Gap One: Lack of Integrated Experiential Data
You may be gathering feedback from candidates, hiring managers and recruiters, but if that data exists on an island, separate from your transaction reports (like time-to-hire, offer acceptance rate, etc), then you’re missing big pieces of the story.
(This article is part two of a four part series)
For example, if time-to-hire is a bedrock metric for your organization, you can see higher or lower numbers, but how does that affect your hiring success? And what is causing slower or faster times-to-hire?
With integrated experiential feedback data, you can now filter feedback data by number of days to hire. What are the satisfaction numbers associate with TTH and how do they affect to TTH? How do they relate to quality of hire? Is there a correlation between employer brand affinity and time-to-hire? This is just one example of where integrated experiential data can add perspective to your operational data.
What’s more, text feedback data, in the form of comments, can be filtered by number of days to hire and you can find a wealth of indicators as to what is happening that is affecting time to hire. Are interviews being rescheduled? Are offers causing candidates to spend too much time considering their options? Now you understand how your people and processes affect time to hire and you have a constant stream of intelligence guiding you to solutions.
Reporting Gap Two: Lack of Real-Time Data
So you’ve got your cobbled together candidate experience feedback program running, pulling data from your ATS periodically to send surveys to candidates in the different stages of the hiring process. Steph Curry would call it “janky” but it works! Until you finally realize that no one remembers what happened during your organization’s phone screen weeks or months ago (unless it was REALLY bad).
Recruiting reports don’t work when they hinge on experiential feedback and your surveys don’t go out immediately. The data is old. It’s unreliable and it can sometimes offend job seekers when they get a survey way after the fact. First, they’re no longer in the running for a job so they’re less motivated to help you out. Second, they most likely didn’t get the job and now you want something from them as an afterthought. Your response rates will be low and your data will likely get skewed negative.
Recruiting Reports Gap Three: Weak Analytics
Again, cobbling disparate systems together for reporting on candidate experience and gathering feedback works….until you want to get actionable insights from your data. Your survey program doesn’t tie back to your ATS fields like hiring manager, job req. number, region, recruiter, etc., so you can’t use those filters to zero in on the data you need. You can’t analyze sentiment and unstructured feedback by hiring manager, region, job req, etc.
So you are left with very broad data analytics that don’t allow you to 1) get granular metrics for key segments of your process and 2) your qualitative feedback (the free form text answers that provide a treasure trove of insights into what’s REALLY happening and how to fix it) floats on an island without the ability to tie it to a team, a candidate, a job or a region, etc. You’re coming up just short of transformational recruiting report data. Gaps.
So as we’ve explored the recruiting reports gaps associated with a typical candidate feedback program focused on job seekers at each stage of the hiring process, we’re looking at weak analytics, outdated data, disconnected experiential data and more.
And to be clear, if your recruiting organization has any kind of stage-based candidate feedback program you are WAAAYYY ahead of the game. The recruiting reports gap mentioned above represent how far this kind of cobbled together system needs to go to be truly effective. Of course the best option is a purpose-built system that integrates with your ATS and runs automatically in real-time.
Check out the rest of this series here.
