This is a guest article by Giles Guest, explaining how harnessing data can supercharge recruitment campaigns.
Good data is the beating heart of talent attraction campaigns. Here are ten ways that high quality insights can bring your recruitment campaigns to life, and help you achieve astounding results.
1) Selecting Channels
Do you know which channels get the best results for hiring certain roles? Source-to-hire data is a vital reference, which you can use when selecting channels for new campaigns.
You could prioritise those channels which receive the most engagement or those that are proven to deliver high quality applications. This allows you to put your budget into the right areas, giving campaigns the best chance of success from the get-go.
2) Answering The Key Questions
What questions are candidates asking about the hiring organisation and the industry as a whole? Search data can provide an insight into the information candidates seek the most.
Providing an answer to these burning questions can form a key part of your campaigns and can drive extra traffic to key pages of your site.
3) Targeting The Right Audience
Receiving a flood of applications from unqualified candidates may cause extra admin work. However, it also provides a chance to understand why certain people were attracted to the role.
Analysing previous applications can help inform some valuable changes to your approach. You may decide to tweak anything from the wording of adverts to the title of the role, in order to bring the applicant-to-hire ratio down.
4) Staying Ahead of The Market
Does your vacancy reflect the latest expectations of candidates? Does the salary and benefits for the job match or exceed your competitors?
Benchmarking your offering against the latest market trends can make a huge difference to the performance of your campaigns. Investing in this information has great value in the planning phase.
5) Understanding Key Motivations
To capture the attention of your ideal candidate, you should first understand exactly what motivates them. This is likely to vary considerably, depending on the role and level you’re recruiting for.
Multiple data points can be used to build up this picture of the candidate. You could use findings from a large study, conduct your own survey or factor in feedback from previous interviews.
6) Getting The Timing Right
Never underestimate the difference good timing can make. Choosing when to send elements of your campaign can play a big part in its overall impact.
Engagement data from tools like Google Analytics can let you know exactly when your candidates are most active and therefore most likely to get in touch or apply.
7) Harnessing Insider Opinion
Running internal surveys can result in some powerful statistics to entice candidates to new roles. For example, you might be able to make a claim such as “98% of existing employees would recommend the business to their friends”.
Insights from existing employees can also help to highlight strengths and address the weaknesses of your employee value proposition. You can also use data acquired from exit interviews for this purpose.
This can be ideal for identifying any discrepancies there might be between initial expectations and the reality of the role.
8) Fixing Drop Off Points
At what point in the candidate’s online journey do you see the most drop offs? Insights from Google Analytics and your ATS can tell you exactly where they are most likely to abandon their application.
Meanwhile, data from heatmaps and A/B tests can help to refine the content of key pages such as your application form. This will allow you to minimise the number of candidates that fall at the final hurdle.
9) Spotting Inefficiencies
Can you improve the way you communicate with candidates? The correspondence sent by your team is vital in minimising the time to hire. So it’s well worth putting this under the microscope.
Look at everything from response rates to the time of emails sent and consider tweaking processes to boost efficiency.
10) Acquiring Investment
Can you demonstrate the effectiveness of a campaign or the value of a hiring channel with solid, unarguable statistics? Nothing persuades a senior board to invest more than cold, hard data.
That’s why, the more data you can collect on your recruitment activities, the more likely you will be to secure greater investment in future campaigns.
In Conclusion
You can achieve all of the things above and more when you harness the power of data. Using accurate data insights from a range of sources can help you plan, execute and track your campaigns more effectively.
It can be used to guide all of the finer details of your campaign. Everything from the content in your job adverts to the timing of your emails and the placement of your ads.
This can transform a costly trial and error approach into efficient talent attraction that delivers an impressive return on investment.
Giles is the Managing Director of Enhance Media, the UK’s leading agency for data-led online recruitment marketing.
All copyrights for this article are reserved to Warehouse News