1 - What is meant by recruitment data?
2 - What is Management Information?
3 - Why is Management Information useful?
4 - What skills do I need to make the most of recruitment data?
5 - What information is useful?
Recruitment Data is information gathered during the hiring process. It covers where candidates come from, demographic information, your average cost per hire, and more. Most applicant tracking systems should have a reporting dashboard, and if you have an advanced system, they should provide Management Information.
A basic dashboard will likely include:
Management Information is recruitment data that goes beyond your standard candidate information. Where recruitment data would give you a quick report on the number of live vacancies you have or your average time to hire, Management Information would give you deeper, more customized reporting.
For example:
This deeper level of insight should give an indication of the type of action required. It may inform tactical and strategic action, over the short, medium and longer-term.
The simple nature means dashboards are often produced automatically or appear live or on-demand within the platform where the data is stored. For example, your ATS should have fixed or slightly configurable dashboards. available to some or all users on demand.
Management information blends information from multiple sources and deeper insights may more likely produce manually, on a regular schedule to a defined audience.
There are certainly some obvious skills that would help!
But as is so often the case, the devil is in the detail, and there are some less obvious skills or qualities you’ll need.
Of course, these skills and qualities can be spread across the team, with each bringing different strengths! HR teams do not have a data specialist. For the few that do, we often find that the data specialist is great with your Management Information tool, but they don’t understand enough about the recruitment process. This is where we come in!
As with all recruitment data, it will vary. A good starting point can be "what do I want to solve?" or "what do I want to achieve?" or redirecting those questions at your customers and stakeholders.
Be wary of a common pitfall with this! Many things will be requested, but what is their purpose and value. Be prepared to challenge, and ask:
Data can be used as part of this diagnostic process, the forecasting and projections for the planning, and the ongoing measuring to assess progress and success.
At Jobtrain we came up with a simple approach that can work operationally or strategically, called the 3 Ps.
Approach – the 3 As
Operationally, this is ideal for helping to achieve SLAs or targets, by prompting the need to perform a task, often linked to a deadline or piece of compliance; for example a daily report of candidates who are due to attend interviews. Or a list of candidates who have documentation missing that will delay their start date.
At a strategic level, this might be more qualitative than quantitative, for example preparing for a legislation change, or anticipating a future demand for skills (perhaps identified through a report on how many workers are due to retire and when).
This allows you to measure what has taken place, why and what it means; for example: this can be used to monitor compliance or standards, simply to manage resources and expenditure, understand timings. These will inform projections.
Using your analysis of what has happened, and any other known or potential factors you can create projections that predict outcomes or potential against a target. These may update regularly for periodic monitoring and review.