Data-Driven Recruiting: How To Utilize Analytics In Your Recruiting Plan

Building a systematic talent acquisition plan is an essential part of a modern HR department’s work. And what better way to make your recruitment process more systematic than using data and analytics? Want to find out how you can make your recruitment planning truly data-driven? Keep reading and you’ll find out!

Looking for a step-by-step look at using data in each stage of the hiring process instead? Read The Ultimate Guide to Data-Driven Recruitment.

What metrics should you use? Basic metrics are a good starting point

Analytics can be a powerful tool in helping you optimize your recruiting and providing valuable insights in what works, why and when. But it can seem like a herculean task to pinpoint the KPIs that actually matter to your business. You can use data to measure and analyze different aspects and stages of your recruitment processes. It is often easiest to start from basic data and build from there. Widely used basic recruitment metrics include:

• Number of recruitments
• Number of filled positions
• Candidate volume

With the above data you can find out how often you had to reopen positions, which job advertisements attracted the most applicants, what was your hit rate and how sought after you were among job seekers in general. All valuable information to use when planning and developing your recruiting.

Time to hire might just be the key metric in achieving your recruitment goals.

Delve deeper, forecast and perform better

In most cases basic data isn’t enough to properly gauge your processes and forecast recruitment needs for the future. Using more advanced analytics can provide you valuable historical data and help you identify areas of improvement in both processes and your recruiting plan. Time to hire might just be the key metric in achieving your recruitment goals.

Having extensive data on the lead time of your recruitments provides a basis for a more realistic recruitment calendar. Analyzing the data further can lead you to find ways to reduce the time to hire altogether – more efficient recruitment benefits both the company and the candidates.

Cost of hire should be a no-brainer metric. Knowing how much resources it requires to secure a talent is integral in matching your budget with your recruitment needs. It also provides context to the efficiency of your recruitment processes: are you using the correct channels?

Are you attracting the right talent? Are your processes too complex or not extensive enough to deliver good results? Yet in 2019 only 41% of companies reported the cost per hire. Want to calculate your cost of hire? Add up your external and internal recruiting costs and divide the total by the number of hires.

Be sure not to forget the importance of talent retention: poor talent retention directly affects how difficult the job of your recruiting managers or talent attraction team is. Ratio of new hires to replacements should be a metric that every HR department looks into when planning their recruiting – it might be one of the reasons behind unfavorable recruitment metrics, such as hit rate and how often you need to open ad hoc recruitments.

It might also highlight problems with your other HR functions, such as onboarding. Using more advanced analytics is also a great way to differentiate from competition that might base their recruiting plans on less measurable and predictable goals.

How to calculate the key recruitment metrics

When you build next year’s recruiting plan, these are the metrics worth having at hand. Here’s what each one tells you and how to calculate it:

Quality of hire is the hardest one to measure, but it’s where more and more TA teams are heading: in LinkedIn’s Future of Recruiting 2025 report, 72% of recruiting professionals believed AI can improve how quality of hire is measured. And keep an eye on your offer acceptance rate. Gartner found that the share of candidates accepting job offers fell from 74% in 2023 to 51% in 2025.

Don’t forget the applicants – soft data can lead to tangible results

So, you have now utilized important KPIs, such as cost of hire, lead times and candidate volume to plan your recruiting better. But what could be the reasons behind your metrics – whether good, ok or bad? This is where it is important to look into data right from the source: the applicants. Ask yourself the following questions:

• How was the candidate experience?
• How many applicants completed their applications?
• What was the quality of candidates or number of relevant candidates?
• What was the channel/source that brought us the most candidates / most relevant candidates?
• What was the withdrawal rate and reasoning behind the withdrawals?
• How diverse was the applicant pool?
• How did your hiring managers feel they performed?

Finding ways to measure the questions above when planning your future recruitments can save you time, money and lots of frustration.

Measure your Employer Brand to see if you are doing the right things

A healthy and well-communicated “EB” is vital to secure a competitive edge in today’s recruitment environment. But how can you properly assess your employer brand, if not with data? Exactly. Some metrics we discussed before, such as candidate experience, ratio of new hires to replacements and the volume and quality of candidates surely contribute to your employer brand, but aren’t true indicators of it. But combine the data with data such as:

• Employer brand perception and awareness
• Employee satisfaction
• Satisfaction of former employees

…and you can correctly assess where you stand and what actions need to be taken in the future to further strengthen your employer brand. For tips on the matter, download our definitive guide to employer branding.

Set goals, analyze constantly and communicate with the C-level

At the heart of achieving true data-driven recruiting is setting concrete goals. After you have accumulated and analyzed historical data, you need to assess where you want the numbers to be, say, a year from now? Without goals your data becomes merely an observing tool instead of the complete tool for systematic recruitment it can be.

A practical way to turn your data into a plan:

1. Look back. Pull last year’s numbers for each metric, by role type if you can.
2. Look ahead. Ask the business how many people they’ll need, in which roles and when.
3. Set a target for each metric, for example cutting time to hire from 45 to 35 days.
4. Agree on the actions that move each number, such as a new channel, a shorter process or salary ranges in your job ads.
5. Follow up regularly – monthly with the recruitment team, quarterly with leadership.

Analytics are your friend if used correctly and analyzed regularly. Only then can you make the needed changes and optimizations and achieve the goals you have set. And all HR professionals know how much executives love numbers. Gathering valuable data and communicating it with C-level will make your life that much easier!

The most important thing is to actually start gathering data.

How can I gather the data? The right ATS solution is crucial

Great! Now we know the importance and value of relevant KPIs in planning your recruiting, but the most important thing is to actually start gathering data. Being data-driven requires the right tools. An extensive applicant tracking system provides you with just those tools in addition to a plethora of other benefits. TalentAdore Hire can help you gather, analyze, and visualize your recruitment data.

With our solution, you can measure your candidate experience in real-time and collect open feedback, monitor data of your job ads and applications and get insights on the effectiveness of your recruitment process. You can also ask our AI assistant Taika about your positions and candidates, or watch our Advanced Analytics 2.0 video to see the reports in action. Interested? Book a session with our experts right away.