Predictive Analytics in Recruitment

Most HR departments will be familiar with admin overload but when did it become the new normal? An ever-growing pile-up of paperwork is never a good sign and the backlog won’t just be affecting your team either. How can your HR team possibly be able to effectively manage recruitment processes, applications as well as internal HR matters?

Attracting and retaining talent is difficult enough. Without analysing data, predicting employee tenure and candidate compatibility becomes little more than a guessing game. Recruiters and hiring managers have data at their fingertips, yet Gartner reports that only 21% of HR leaders believe that their organisations are harnessing talent data effectively to make better business decisions.

This is where predictive analytics in recruitment can help. It can provide insight into the effectiveness of your recruitment and hiring efforts and in order to hire intelligently, managers must understand how data can help them make future hiring predictions and therefore more accurate business decisions.

Simply put, predictive analytics in recruitment is the process of using historical data to make predictions about future hiring activities and candidates. It's all about collecting and analysing data using statistics, machine learning, and modelling techniques to best predict what could happen under specific scenarios.

If you’re a bit hesitant about jumping into the scary world of recruitment analytics, then you may be interested in hearing from some of the companies who are actively embracing these tactics. Names like Google, Cisco, Sprint, and Deloitte all use recruitment analytics to drive their decision making and hiring processes, and do so with industry-leading success.

That’s because the benefits of analytics in recruitment over traditional hiring are endless. Here are just a few:

• It provides objective visibility into the effectiveness and value of your recruitment activities.

• It helps keep track of high-potential candidates, allowing you to actively nurture possible future hires.

• It lets you create a robust talent pool, or a permanent record of all candidates or hires that you can consistently come back to.

• It unlocks the potential to learn from and improve processes.

• It enables proactive recruitment (rather than reactive recruitment) to drive better and more timely hiring decisions.

• It lets you predict which candidates will be high performers, and which ones may be bad hires.

Recruitment analytics enables organisations to hire faster using a combination of data and predictive analysis. Analytics and the techniques behind it are as broad as the technologies available to the recruitment industry. This is made possible by the collection of large volumes of data from a variety of platforms. As well as thanks to the increasing use of workforce analytics solutions to measure variables like performance and engagement. The presence of these large data pools means that complex predictive algorithms can be applied to forecast future results.