Recruitment Process Intelligence is how we conduct every one of our hires at Solutions Driven, from meeting with our clients, to ensuring candidates are happy and successful, long term in their positions.
While the ‘Recruitment Process’ part is easy to understand, we wanted to dig a bit more into what we mean by the “Intelligence” part when we talk about Recruitment Process Intelligence (RPI).
So we sat down with Solutions Driven’s CEO, Gavin Spiers, to discuss how recruiters can use recruitment intelligence to get the right people in the right roles (every time), and how intelligence and insights can help businesses recruitment strategies longer term.
How Recruitment Intelligence Currently Works
Right now, recruitment and HR isn’t all that intelligence-driven. Sure, it’s tech-driven, and data is often used at the top level. However, when it comes to working from and providing real insights, that doesn’t happen enough. A 2019 Statista figure showed that only 28% of Talent Acquisition professionals mentioned that data is useful to improve outreach when recruiting.
Think about contingent recruiting. Rather than search down the perfect candidate, in the perfect market for a role, recruiters simply do a quick search and send over as many CVs as they think will fit.
Because real research isn’t being done during each process, intelligence isn’t being gathered for future projects. And the business doesn’t get insights into their process.
That’s why we use RPI throughout our process, to both help us fill our roles correctly and to help our clients gain insights that are valuable to their business.
According to Gavin, there are three main areas where intelligence is used:
Before the Process Starts
At Solutions Driven, before we begin working on a role, we sit down with the stakeholders hiring for the position and have a scoping call. At this point we find out exactly what “success” looks like for them.
As Gavin puts it, “it’s not good enough to give those insights at the end of the process.”
So, for example, imagine we’re looking at a role in the US. And we look into the diversity of the pool in that area. And then, if the diversity of that pool doesn’t match the client’s requirements, we can be upfront and say “Rather than looking for X years of experience, if you drop that slightly, the talent pool becomes more diverse.”
According to Gavin, “this gives our clients the insights and intelligence they need to allow them to assess what they’re really looking for.”
Rather than our team just going along with what the client wants and perhaps failing to get the right candidate within a reasonable time, we listen to what they want, input our recruitment intelligence into the discussion, and come away with a working brief that’s achievable and desirable for both sides.
During the Process
While the hiring process is ongoing, there’s even more intelligence to be shared. Many of our clients work in unique spaces and every role is different.
So we’ll look at areas like benchmarking. Figuring out what other organisations are paying for the same role and letting our clients know. Perhaps they’re not offering enough and that could be tweaked to generate more interest. Or it could be they’re paying too much for that market and they should bring it down.
We’ll also look at what candidates are feeding back to us, in terms of what’s important to them. Perhaps it’s freedom in their role, perhaps it’s clear advancement opportunities. This allows the business to tweak their job description or amend their EVP if those things aren’t in place.
After the Process
When the recruitment process ends, that’s when we have gathered the most intelligence, not only on how the hire went, but also on the job market and how candidates reacted to the role.
One of the points Gavin made on the podcast was about brand engagement. How many candidates knew of the brand? What was their feedback? This is useful for the hiring company as if very few knew of the company, they can use that to inform a brand awareness or engagement strategy.
“We’re building this data for two reasons. One to give insights to our customers about the particular role we’re working on, and two, to leave them with intelligence that allows them to think wider and say “ok that’s interesting, we’ve got an issue with our brand engagement.”
Also, at 3,6,9, and 12 month junctures post hire, we also check in with the chosen candidate to make sure everything is running smoothly, and gather feedback on their success. We can then bring all the recruitment intelligence we’ve gathered together to give real insights.
For example, a company could have hired 10 candidates from a competitor. So hiring from competitors might be a great idea. But we then note that four of those candidates left within six months. The business can dig into whether there’s a culture disconnect, whether the role is different across the board etc. depending on the intelligence we gather.
As you can see, intelligence in this case doesn’t just mean data on diversity or hiring trends. It means properly delving into each talent market, mapping out the talent, collecting the data, and providing insights, based on our experience, to our clients.
In RPI, it means taking that intelligence and turning it into insights that can not only help us perform better in future roles, but also helps the company think more strategically about their roles.
By blending art (human-powered processes) with science (intelligence and insights), you get much more than a dashboard of numbers that doesn’t mean anything to the hiring manager.
In order to keep ahead of the competition and hire the best people at any given time, businesses must embrace both the hard data and what can be gleaned from it.
