Tazio Trends: Are Recruitment Teams Collecting Too Much Data and Learning Too Little?

As graduate recruitment campaign plans take shape for the next hiring season, many hiring teams are doing what they always do at this time of year: updating assessment questions, reviewing interview guides, tweaking attraction campaigns and adding another column to another spreadsheet.

There’s nothing wrong with that. But there’s a question which often gets overlooked that should inform these activities:

What did last year's recruitment process tell us?

It’s a particularly important question to ask in the current jobs market. As we’ve mentioned elsewhere it’s not collapsing but it’s not firing on all cylinders and evidence suggests finding a graduate level job is becoming more competitive.

Research organisation High Fliers reports that recruitment at the UK's leading graduate employers has fallen by almost a quarter over the past three years. This is one reason the ratio of applicants to graduate roles is so high (140 according to the ISE).

Combine those volumes with multiple datapoints from assessment scores, ATS platforms, interview ratings, source-of-hire, time-to-hire and so on, and recruiters are being buried under an information avalanche. The key in this landscape is understanding what data matters most.

Are we measuring the right things?

Clearly, the recruitment sector has become very good at collecting information. What many organisations aren’t so good at is going back a year later and asking which information truly helped identify the people who turned out to be successful.

Weighty research, such as papers published by the American Psychological Association looking at thousands of hiring decisions across different industries and roles, has concluded that some selection methods are better than others at predicting future job performance.

Structured interviews, where every candidate is asked the same job-related questions and scored consistently, tend to outperform unstructured interviews. Work sample exercises also perform well. And using a small number of good selection methods together usually works better than relying on just one.

In other words, not all hiring evidence is equally useful.

Testing which data tells you the most

Graduate programmes give employers a good opportunity to test which data is the best predictor of performance for them.

Graduates are often hired in cohorts, trained together and assessed over time. That means it’s possible to compare recruitment data with what happens later: who performs well, who stays, who progresses quickly and who struggles.

If you collect data and let it gather dust in a digital filing cabinet once hiring is completed, it’s a missed opportunity. By bringing it together with performance and promotion data you can build a clearer picture of your recruitment process and reveal insights that can shape your next campaign.

For example, did the highest-rated candidates become your strongest performers? Did the people who looked brilliant in interviews stay longer than everyone else? Which part of the process turned out to be the most insightful?

More effective, not more, data

This isn’t an argument for collecting more data. It’s an argument for collecting better data and getting more from it.

By constantly reviewing employee progress against recruitment data, you can adjust your recruitment process to make it as streamlined and efficient as possible. If a stage does not help predict who will be successful, why is it there?

The smartest hiring processes use a small number of well-designed, well-validated selection methods and then check, regularly, whether those methods are working. Assessment platforms can also become ongoing partners, enabling you to reassess employees as your workforce needs evolve and match people to new roles. Holding this information alongside ongoing performance data in a single platform makes this analysis more straightforward to carry out.

As our CEO, Tom Stroud, explains:

“Understanding someone’s ability to succeed in a role goes beyond degrees and experience, particularly at graduate level. Tailored assessments that explore situational judgement, aptitude, values and motivations, tell you much more about a person’s ability to perform in a role. By building them into your ongoing recruitment and development strategies you can constantly enhance how you identify potential.”

As you plan your next graduate recruitment campaign the best place to start is the graduates you hired two years ago – who has shone and how did they perform in the recruitment process.

That is where technology can genuinely help, not just by administering assessments, but by making it easier to use validated assessments consistently, keep candidates engaged throughout the process, and compare hiring decisions with what happens after people join.

Do that and your recruitment goes from being a series of one-off campaigns to a constantly improving strategic process.

As always, our mission is to empower you to make smarter, faster hiring decisions and create exceptional experiences for your candidates. Stay connected with us on LinkedIn for the latest news and resources.

If you have any thoughts on this edition of Tazio Trends or want to find out more about our platform, it would be great to hear from you.

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