Mastering Hiring Success Through Pipeline Analytics

Your candidates are not data points. They’re people with unique stories, hopes and the potential to change your company for the better. However, the only way to give them the experience they deserve is to treat your candidate pipeline like a set of data points that can be analyzed.

This analysis helps you understand and eliminate the bottlenecks that drag out time-to-hire and drag down your employment brand by negatively impacting candidate experience.

Introducing Pipeline Analytics: Actionable reports of your hiring process

The good news is that now you can get deep and insightful information about your candidate pipeline. No spreadsheets needed! Starting this month, you can access easy-to-use Pipeline Analytics right from within the SmartRecruiters TA Platform. These include an intuitive and robust set of graphical insights grouped in two essential reports: Current Pipeline and Historical Pipeline.

Forget the enormous spreadsheets and number crunching! Whether it’s a weekly management meeting to review open requisitions or a quarterly offsite to refine your talent acquisition strategy, these interactive reports have your needs covered.

Current Pipeline Analytics: Optimize your hiring in real-time

The Current Pipeline report analyzes what’s going on now for all the jobs in your system. It helps you answer important tactical questions about the current health of your hiring process. Are we getting new candidates? Do we need more recruiting resources to manage inbound candidate traffic faster? How many good candidates are in advanced interview rounds? How many offers are outstanding, and which candidates are we hoping to close soon?

These questions routinely come up when Talent Acquisition leaders, hiring managers and executives discuss the current state of open requisitions and act fast on strategies that are not working. Communicating the status of hiring progress on a weekly basis empowers TA leaders to be proactive by identifying which jobs are “on track” and spotting obstacles before they become problems. Current Pipeline Analytics gives TA leaders a single portal to answer those questions, and more!

Historical Pipeline Analytics: Understand pipeline trends

The Historical Pipeline report analyzes your hiring process over time. These analytics help you understand hiring velocity, historical trends and bottlenecks. They are valuable for TA strategy reviews, especially discussions about hiring KPIs and projected performance.

For example, you can’t really set an offer acceptance goal without a comprehensive data review first. The ratio between offers extended and accepted is not enough to build a solid goal: First you need to analyze the outliers across your organization to see if data is skewed for certain departments, locations or even hiring managers. Analyzing outlier data for various subsets of your organization will help you understand the best practices from your hiring champions, identify teams struggling to close candidates, and as a result, adjust hiring methods and set better performance goals for the entire organization.

Likewise, your hiring velocity – the time candidates spend in the pipeline – may surprise you when you drill down to specific recruiters or hiring managers. Long wait-time to hear back from a recruiter or hiring manager is a top candidate complaint that severely impacts employer brand perception. However, every hiring process is unique: different roles and companies need different time to properly evaluate a candidate. Optimizing your hiring process so it takes just enough time – but not more – is a science-based art. You can achieve greatness only by establishing what good hiring velocity looks like for your organization (based on the data, of course), and then helping your hiring managers and recruiters get there.

Our Historical Pipeline report has even more details to accelerate your hiring velocity. By looking at different time periods, you can see whether you’ve got enough candidates to hit your goals and how quickly candidates move through the process for those periods. Comparing your recent performance to previous periods will establish whether your hiring velocity and offer acceptance are getting better or worse, including the factors driving those trends.

Win the war for talent with data-driven strategies

Great companies strive to deliver a great candidate experience and to optimize the hiring process internally. Few succeed because they don’t make fact-based decisions or track the progress of process improvements. The new SmartRecruiters Pipeline Analytics are designed to empower TA champions to achieve their hiring success goals through deep and data-informed decisions. In a world that is more and more data-driven, the choice is pretty straightforward: either turn your candidate pipeline data into a valuable asset or lose the war for talent to competitors who do.