Recruiting Has a Data Hygiene
Problem
Hiring teams have historically operated mostly
on gut and intuition rather than data, contributing
to decision fatigue. That’s despite other teams
such as finance and sales having powerful
platforms for data collection and analysis that
help them do their jobs better. The reason is
data hygiene.
Data hygiene is the steps necessary to ensure
that data is complete, up-to-date, and not
duplicative. In recruiting, data hygiene can
include standardizing naming conventions for
sources, closing job requisitions after a hire, and
updating candidate status (e.g., ‘rejected’),
among other things.
Conventional wisdom, according to
Datapeople, says that recruiting
analytics is a visualization problem.
Companies have a lot of information in
an applicant tracking system (ATS),
and the trick is presenting it in a
usable way.
That is a problem, says Datapeople, but
recruiting analytics is, first and foremost, a data
hygiene problem. Bad or incomplete data yield
reports that are misleading at best and
valueless at worst. Also, data hygiene is
generally more difficult in recruiting because
there’s no industry standard.
According to Datapeople, many
companies use ATSs to keep records
of their recruiting efforts, but they don’t
practice good data hygiene. Some
hiring teams treat their ATS as a
repository of candidates (i.e., a talent
funnel).
They manage job requisitions in the ATS, but
they don’t manage candidates. They collect
resumes under one requisition and then move
qualified candidates to another. This severs the
connection between candidates and the job
post, making it impossible to measure the
effectiveness of the post.
Also, Datapeople says that while ATSs do a
great job of recording data, they don’t
analyze the data. In that way, they’re similar
to an accounting ledger, which doesn’t
replace an accountant. ATSs store a lot of
recruiting information, but companies still
need to translate it.
Another wrinkle with ATSs, according to
Datapeople, is that they’re great at recording
process, but they’re also flexible. Flexibility
enables hiring teams to design their own
bespoke processes for candidates. But
flexibility also makes measuring and
understanding performance difficult.
Hiring teams can control data hygiene with
how they manage requisitions and candidate
pools. One of the fastest ways to dirty
recruiting data, according to Datapeople, is to
leave requisitions open. But it’s impossible to
judge how a job performed (past tense) if it
never actually closes.
Data hygiene depends on solid data
cleaning practices from all members of the
hiring team at all times. It means team
members need basic database
management skills, and they need to stay
vigilant. And everyone, even long-time
recruiters, may have to adopt new
processes.
Contact Us At:
https://datapeople.io/