By Tim Orrange, September 2020
Big data, analytics, metrics and reporting are all popular HR Bingo buzzwords over the past decade. Unfortunately, most organizations haven’t fully realized the potential of leveraging Business Intelligence tools to help identify candidates, improve processes and ensure an optimized candidate experience.
While focused primarily on the Oracle OBI toolset with Taleo, these concepts apply to any staffing function and can be implemented in part or rolled out as a full suite of process improvements. Through OBI, a recruiting team can glean a myriad of information on adherence to the recruiting process, EEO, compliance, proper usage of requisitions, age of requisitions, and overall candidate experience indicates.
Candidate Centric
Historic and current analysis of job types and markets can help determine the time and marketing mixes needed to collect candidates and ultimately fill positions that have been historically hard to hire. Proper reporting, standardized metrics, and benchmarks provide a common language within an organization and lead to more efficient and effective discussions. A blend of all these points rounds out the recruiting process and allows for a better experience at all levels of the organization.
Process Centric
By enabling automation and adhering to a recruiting process, helps ensure all candidates receive a predictable and consistent experience. Focused Step and Status reporting can show:
- The movement of candidates through the process
- Time in each step and status
- Proper offer usage
- Background screening times and adherence
- Proper hiring and on-boarding disposition
For urgent jobs, an analysis of background check times can help determine time to start as focused as job or geographic location.
Common sense and
common courtesy
should prevail, as in
many industries, your
candidates are also
your customers
Requisition Centric
Reporting on the age and status of requisitions can also be a valuable tool. How long does it take to approve a requisition? Once approved, how long does it take to post the requisition? Many organizations will post a job internally for a specific time; were those requisitions forgotten and never posted externally? Once posted externally, how long has that requisition been open? A manager or recruiter can look at all the requisition metrics and make appropriate modifications to the process or requisition itself. Requisition reporting can surface both successes and opportunities.
Diversity and Compliance
Ensuring you have an effective approach to attracting and hiring a diverse workforce can only be seen
through reporting. Mandatory diversity reporting is usually a look back over a period. Going beyond the
required reporting to truly understand the effectiveness of your diversity efforts creates a competitive
advantage toward a more balanced workforce.
Funnels and Drilldowns
Most organizations utilize Candidate Funnel metrics as a part of their annual wrap up, but the best use it
on a regular basis by drilling into individual locations, job codes or businesses to focus efforts. Perhaps
the most underutilized source of information lives in the funnel drill down to allow recruiters to focus
and define.
A candidate funnel can be created to show flow through the steps and statuses to help determine how many candidates/applications are needed to get to a specific number of hires,this can also be applied to single historic requisitions to determine the applications needed to get to that one hire.
Weighted Score Cards
A big challenge for complex organizations is defining metrics across all entities. Your ability to obtain an accurate global view requires a common language to compare. A recent project tackled this exact business case to define, weigh and display critical selection data to highlight who does it well and who can benefit from extra attention. Correlating business performance to selection effectiveness was eye-opening for the executive team. Furthermore, the impact of training was immediately reflected in the scorecard performance.
We applied weighting to all the measures and created calculations where a perfect score would equal 100. The scoring was applied to each of the operating companies in the organization. The report is distributed to recruiting managers and recruiters on a weekly basis. The report was not used for performance reviews but rather as a gauge to selection effectiveness. As the stakeholder met with the different operating companies in the organization, we saw relatively quick improvements in the scoring. The calculations scored on an individual scale rather than big averages so that operating companies did not have to wait to see the impacts and successes of proper adherence to the recruiting process. The report was built into a dashboard with a summary followed by detail tabs showing the calculations and scores. This was done so senior managers could see the summary and recruiters and managers could dig into the details and make corrections. Finally, an organic result of the report was friendly competition and peer-to-peer support.
Score Cards
A standardized set of metrics to report on weekly, creating measures to identify:
- Requisition days aging
- Number of requisitions in the pending status
- Number of requisitions on hold
- Variance of open to posted requisitions
- Offer tab usage
- Time to fill
- Executive time to fill
- Hired-to-start date difference
- Internal hires
Reporting and analytics are vital to an organization’s success in recruiting and hiring of candidates. Reports can reveal opportunities and celebrate success while ensuring selection is reaching its fullest potential.