As a Senior Recruiter, I am often asked what have to base my decisions on during the recruitment process. Especially when I have a problem closing the recruitment process successfully.

I have considered that topic many times. I must admit the best way is to show it through an example. Let’s start from a wider perspective and define the answer when a problem occurs.

Suppose you as a recruiter are responsible for the recruitment of an Automation Tester. You create an advertisement, publish it on job portals, create a post on Linkedin as well as on Facebook expert groups. Time goes by and you find yourself in a situation where you have dozens of HR conversations and screening done, no fewer Managers meetings and in the end, your organization employs two experts. Do you think those numbers tell you something or do you think that this case is typical? Will you base your conclusion and decisions on intuition and experience or you will use both and look into hard data?

What kind of data we should analyze

In my opinion, it is worth looking at those figures a little bit closer and analyze hard data. It will help us draw conclusions. At first, let’s look at the number of final meetings with Managers. How many meetings I must have held to finally employ one person? In this particular case around half of a dozen

. What does it show us? We can do something to improve the process, speed up the recruitment, and reduce workload. It seems that in this process it is for you a matter of too high expectations identified by the Manager or a problem with HR verification. I’m sure you are familiar with both. Gathered figures are the best base to start a dialogue.

Let’s focus for a moment on the second and rather opposite example. Now you are trying to recruit the same Automation Tester and you conduct a similar posting process. This time as a result you get only a few applications. Where to seek the cause? In this case, you must verify the number of publications versus the number of conducted interviews. This will prove if we reject too many potential employees due to high expectations in the advertisement. Or we post it in the wrong places and don’t get to the experts we really need.

How ATS can support recruiter

The real deal in recruitment analytics in the support of an ATS system. That enables you to get useful information from all sources, data, and figures gathered in the organization along with the quality of evidence. There you have to make a decision or verify your methodology. Here we get to the Evidence. Based HR refers to evaluating data, experience, opinions, and all available information to achieve the likelihood and certainty that the outcome decision is the one that you desired.

The answer to the main question is that managing the recruitment process is the moment where not only do I believe but also refer to hard data. It helps me to improve the hiring process, get to top talents and candidates on the basis of all organizational experience as well as get supported by analytics when necessary. The hard date gives us a common denominator to which we can all refer to in discussion without emotion and relying on intuition.