Hire Using Data-Driven Recruiting

Intuition can be helpful in business, especially when hiring new employees. That said, decisions based only on feelings or emotions are prone to human error. Relying on gut instinct alone can prevent you from making the right hires. That’s where the value of objective, data-driven recruiting becomes evident.

Optimizing your hiring process with data from pre-employment tests lets you compare candidates objectively, speeds up the recruiting process, and ultimately helps you make the best decisions to create a strong workforce. You don’t have to be a data scientist to hire the right people using data—all you need are the tools. Here, we’ll show how to optimize your hiring process, the benefits of doing so, and how you can acquire the right data from pre-employment assessments.

What is data-driven hiring?

Traditionally speaking, interviewing and hiring are strictly subjective processes. Hiring managers and interviewers are forced to rely on their impressions and gut feelings to determine an applicant’s potential fit for a role and within a company culture. In the scientific world, we’d refer to this as a qualitative process, meaning it doesn’t involve direct comparisons of applicants, which leaves room for bias and can make it difficult to justify your reasons for making a hiring decision.

Data-driven hiring is a quantitative process. A pre-employment assessment and structured interview process can be used in tandem. Every applicant has as close to an identical experience as possible; their responses to specific questions and situations are assigned a numerical score. With data-driven hiring processes, the candidate experience is standardized, and every candidate is held to those same standards. This makes it easier to determine job aptitude and candidate fit, directly compare candidates side-by-side, and make objective hiring decisions.

Advantages of optimizing hiring with data

Data-driven hiring makes the recruitment process easier for the interviewer and hiring manager by creating a structure for measuring candidate success. Providing clear benchmarks for specific values and performance indicators removes the grey area from the interview process and makes the decision process go more quickly. Here are a few other core benefits you’ll also see when using data-driven hiring.

Improve the candidate experience

Not only does the interviewer’s experience improve with data-driven hiring, but the candidate’s experience improves as well. Interviewing is as much an opportunity for the job seeker to assess whether the position is a good fit for their career goals. If you’re able to standardize the interview and hiring process for candidates, you’ll be able to tell them exactly what to expect as they move through the evaluation process and alleviate any stress and uncertainty. In turn, candidates will be able to see that your company offers a degree of organization, objectivity, and focus on their employees.

Hire more productive talent

Data-driven hiring lets you ensure that you’re making higher-quality hires. You’ll always know that the candidates you choose have rated highly for company fit, job aptitude, and overall performance ability. Hiring high performers helps your company maximize the work you’re able to accomplish. When compared to the average employee, high performers were 400% more productive and able to tackle more tasks (and more complex tasks) in the same amount of time. The more specialized the role, the more important this performance aptitude becomes—in specialized positions, top talent is up to 800% more effective than an average employee in the same role.

Reduce employee turnover

High-performing employees also tend to be more fulfilled at work, easier to train, more promotable, and more likely to align with your company values—all of which are critical factors in decreasing employee turnover. Because employee turnover is so costly, this is a critical measure of success not only for your hiring and HR processes, but also for your company’s overall bottom line.

What recruiting metrics do I need to know?

If you want to select top talent, it helps to understand the competencies needed to be successful in a specific role and at your company. When you look to evolve your hiring methods to take a data-focused approach, begin by studying and documenting your overall HR processes.

When conducting your initial audit of the pre-employment process, you should look at the following metrics:

• Percentage of good hires: This measurement looks at performance of new hires in any given department to determine when newer team members become top performers.
• Turnover rate: Do new hires quit after a few months? At what point in the employee lifecycle are your team members most likely to leave?
• Time to hire: How long are job postings sitting open? How long does it take for a single job to go from the application stage to extending an offer?
• Time to productivity: How long do training and onboarding take before a new hire is able to perform all job functions as promised?
• Hire source: Where are your top-performing new hires finding your job postings?

Once you have the full picture of your workforce health and productivity, you can begin to assign value to the most critical competencies for job success and company culture fit. You can then work with a talent assessment provider to link these competencies to assessments and structured interview questions. You can assign importance values to different personality qualities and company values, then include those metrics within your overall scorecard for data-driven hiring.

Get the hiring data you need

The best way to get the data you need is to involve pre-employment testing in your hiring process. Because talent assessments give you an objective point of view about your organization’s talent, these tools can guide you toward the right decisions for your hiring and employee development procedures.

At InVista, we believe in hiring the right person for the right role the first time you fill a position. Our talent assessments let you develop structured interviews for specific roles and provide clear candidate profiles that centralize results from both pre-employment assessments and structured in-person interviews to create a fully data-driven hiring process. Ready to get started? Get in touch to see how InVista can help take your team to the next level.