Ways managers can use data analytics for hiring smarter

Authored by Deloitte and Visier leaders

Executives know that you can’t run a company without people, and companies in many industries are facing increased competition for the top-quality talent necessary to sales, product innovation, customer satisfaction and retention, and more. With the competition for talent happening on a much more global scale thanks to more remote work opportunities, the effectiveness of the recruiting funnel is now a major focus for the entire business.

Taking a more analytical path to hiring without slowing down the process is tricky, but it’s something every business leader needs to think about these days. People have been quitting their jobs at unprecedented rates, and the ratio of job openings to hires has also reached historic highs in the U.S. The pressure is on to fill those roles.

Let’s imagine you need to fill a crucial role. After weeks of searching, you finally extend your top candidate an offer and they never return your calls or emails. Why did they ghost you? To answer this question, you need information such as how long the recruiting process takes and whether your compensation package is competitive

A recent survey from Visier uncovered that ghosting during the hiring process is increasingly common. But knowing there’s a problem is different than knowing the reason behind it. More than half of surveyed employees (55%) cited “more available job opportunities” as the top reason they were more likely to ghost a current or potential employer now than before the pandemic began, pointing to just how competitive the labor market has become over the past 18 months.

Does your talent acquisition staff need training? A less personal recruiting process was cited as another common reason (46%) candidates gave for ghosting. Are you offering too little? A salary below expectations was another motivation employees gave for ghosting a prospective employer, underscoring the importance of competitive pay packages to hiring top talent in the US. Is there some other reason? Perhaps it’s an inaccurate job description, a bad reputation, or a poor workplace culture.

It’s easy to blame ghosting solely on talent acquisition, but the report shows that many factors influence whether quality job candidates stay in your hiring pipeline. While data helps the Talent Acquisition team see where improvements could be made, there are many ways hiring managers can also use people data and analytics to build out their hiring strategy.

3 ways managers hire better with people analytics

1. Understand where your top performers come from

No matter what department you’re in, hiring more individuals who will become top performers is valuable to success. Traditionally, hiring is a subjective process. We all have biases and naturally, we gravitate towards people who are like us. Gut-based hiring decisions can also lead to more bad hires and productivity can significantly drop as you rush to fill an opening.

When you tell your recruiting partner the profile of who you want to hire, show them data on what makes your top teams and individuals perform well and stay long-term, where they were hired from, and how talent develops and flows through your organization. This can help increase the chances that you’ll get the right candidates into your funnel early on, while revealing the talent management, compensation, learning and development plan, and other factors you can optimize to create an attractive hiring package.

2. Forecast hiring needs

Get ahead of hiring needs by using people analytics to bring together your risk of exit data with sales revenue data. This helps you understand the financial impact of staying the course on your current turnover trajectory. You can put hiring and training plans in place, reforecast regional targets to have others pick up the slack, or have conversations with individuals to keep them at your organization.

3. Let data insights inform your decisions

Hiring good candidates needs to be a team effort. Data shows where candidates are dropping off or where biases may be creeping in. This can continue well into the late stages of hiring too. Visier’s research indicates that job candidates are just as willing to ghost an employer during the late stages of the hiring funnel than in the early stages. In fact, 31% said they would ghost an employer after their first day on the job. To solve this problem, managers need to start looking at data to make hiring decisions based on tangible data, such as bottlenecks in the hiring process or focusing too much on less-optimal recruiting pools—and be open to correcting actions or behaviors that are hindering progress.

Strengthen your people insight muscles

Making good decisions is more than just having good data. You need insights that come from having true people analytics capabilities. Mark Smith, Vice President Workforce Strategy & Analytics at Providence Health & Services is a specialist in people analytics who presented some of his experience at the Deloitte webinar Success Stories: Building the Foundation of a People-Powered Organization.

Mark is trying hard to remove ‘data’ from his vocabulary, because data starts to denote reports and being reactive. He’s focusing more on insights:

“We want to be able to go from data to really making the data begin to teach us, creating those insights, moving into predictions, moving into forecasting,” he said. “That's what I think is going to be critical.”

Beyond HR: Leveraging people analytics to address critical business issues

Are you interested in building your expertise in people analytics, taking your insights from the spreadsheet to the people cloud? Deloitte and Visier collaborated at Visier’s Outsmart conference in May to help bring some of the core use cases to life by leveraging people analytics in areas with key people and business implications.

Want even more insights? Register today for the next webinar on May 19, Beyond HR: Leveraging People Analytics to Address Critical Business Issues. Join Visier’s Yustina Saleh along with Deloitte’s Pete DeBellis and Eric Lesser as they explore real-world examples of how people data can be leveraged outside of core HR applications.