Recruiting Analytics: Why Your ATS Prevents Quality Hires

“Bad” and “hire” are two words recruiters never want to hear said together. Not only can it undermine trust in the recruitment process, but it’s also a very costly problem. The average cost of a poor hiring decision can equal 30% of the individual’s first-year potential earnings -- not just from the turnover, but also lower productivity, a damaged employer brand, lower employee engagement, and higher manager time spent on mitigating underperformance.

It’s no wonder organizations are willing to go to great lengths to improve their quality of hire. For example, one of our customers paid a third-party assessment consultant to rate job candidates based on a “stay and perform” score. The consultant created a candidate scoring process that promised to identify which candidates would stay and perform well long-term. However, the opposite proved to be true: when the organization started using Visier’s workforce intelligence solution, the analytics revealed that the so-called “high scoring” candidates (who were hired) were actually the people leaving the company the fastest!

It turns out the third party assessment was not as predictive as promised. What led to real improvements was a proper workforce intelligence solution that showed the end-to-end results of the hiring process.

Without workforce analytics, it’s difficult to identify what makes a strong hire. Most recruiters rely on their Applicant Tracking System (ATS) to tell them about a candidate’s viability, but these systems have an inherent flaw: they lack a complete and accurate view of an employee’s history at the organization, making it difficult to analyze how well they actually do post-hire. 

Your ATS Prevents Consistent Quality Hires

Finding the perfect quality of hire metrics has long been the holy grail of recruiting. Yet current HR technologies are still not designed to focus on quality. Why?

Because none of them can link to all the data sets required to provide a full, fact-based picture of what makes a high performer.

Case in point: your ATS only gives you a view of someone before they become an employee. For example, what source the candidate came in from, who interviewed them, how long they were in the recruitment process, etc. Without the post-hire data on existing high performing employees (information such as performance, tenure, promotions, and engagement), it is impossible to connect the recruitment team’s actions to the shining stars in your organization -- and replicate the process each time you need a high performer in a critical role. 

When information on your employees is kept within multiple HR systems (as is typical today), data gathering is a time-consuming process of report generation and data cleanup by HR analysts. By the time Talent Acquisition gets their hands on much-needed metrics, it may be too late to put them to good use.

Positioning the Recruitment Team For Success

If you’re just starting your data-driven journey, you may be using spreadsheets and generating reports from various systems. As previously mentioned, this can be a long and tedious process. However, if you want to truly build a sophisticated analytics function for recruitment, consider investing in new technology that will make it faster and easier to get critical data from your ATS, HRIS, and other systems in seconds, not days.

Wherever you are in your journey, remember that analytics is not a “one-and-done” process. In order for recruitment to be successful, you must continuously look for ways to improve hiring. Recruiting analytics enables you to confidently double down on your strengths --  and eliminate the areas where you’re weakest -- so you can increase the number of quality people you bring in who will eventually become high performers at your organization.

Ian Cook is a recognized expert in the field of workforce analytics and planning. Ian heads up the workforce domain for Visier, which develops cloud-based applications that enable HR professionals to answer critical workforce strategy questions. For the last 10 years, Ian has been involved in driving forward the datafication of HR and is a frequent speaker and blogger on the subject. Prior to joining Visier, Ian built Canada’s leading source of HR benchmark data. His expertise has also been developed through years of international experience solving strategic HR problems for leading brands in the Fortune 500 and FTSE 100. In his role at Visier, Ian is committed to delivering workforce intelligence that impacts business results. For more information, visit the Visier website.