The attainment of a new commodity can spawn a lucrative, fast-growing industry. Two centuries ago, the resource in question was gold, with thousands of prospectors traveling to California to make their fortune. A few decades later, gold was displaced by oil as the most valuable and important resource. For over a century, oil has fuelled the modern economy and been the source of much political conflict. Now oil has found itself supplanted by data as the world’s dominant resource.
What is data and why is it important?
Data has become something of a nebulous term, that many people have heard of but would not know how to describe it if asked. At its most basic, data is simply a collection of different facts, including numbers, measurements, and observations, that have been translated into a form that computers can process.
Data is especially useful for those in business, as the more data that you have at your disposal, the better position you will be in to make sensible decisions and take advantage of new opportunities. The data will also give you the evidence you need to support these decisions should you need to justify your reasoning. Access to data can also help an organization identify problems and inefficiencies, giving you time to take appropriate action and resolve the issue.
Data played a critical role in the COVID-19 response. Over the past two years, the world has endured one of the worst pandemics in human memory, affecting over 385 million people. Digital developments have been essential to the global response to the pandemic. The pandemic has caused a significant impact on recent markets, including the recruitment sector.
How the pandemic has affected the recruitment sector.
The number of online job postings decreased immensely since the start of the pandemic, as many businesses had either had to furloughed employees or let people go due to the uncertainty at the time.
In March 2020, job vacancies advertised online in countries such as Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the United States fell sharply. And by early May 2020, the volume of online job vacancies had fallen by over 50% in all five countries.
However, with restrictions slowly easing and offices opening their doors once again and many startups are slowly arising, many employers are now searching for the right people to fill in positions that are now available. But how do you find the right person for the job? This is where the power of data comes in.
How data-driven recruiting is improving the hiring process
With the traditional methods coming to an end, data-driven recruiting is now the modern way of recruiting. Data-driven recruiting can improve the quality of the hire efficiently.
Now, what is data-driven recruitment exactly?
Data-driven recruitment is a data-driven approach to hiring. Using technologies and data to analyze a large talent pool to identify potential candidates that will fit the company's requirements, looking at skills, experience, and mindsets.
As this process is repeated frequently more data becomes available to recruiters, and over time the system analyzes the data, new insights into new metrics such as efficiency, quality, and cost will become available.
This new type of intelligence has multiple benefits, including;
Efficiency and productivity: For instance, keep track of how many emails associates of your hiring team exchange with potential candidates.
Help assign budgets: identifying which outlets you spend a lot of time and money advertising on. Highlighting which platform offers little to no substantial results, makes it much easier to cut this program altogether.
Uncover hiring issues: For instance, review the application forms for conversion rates to uncover if you need to adjust your evaluation questions.
Benchmark and forecast hiring: it is important to identify your recruiting ratio, as it indicates how many applications you need typically for a role. If you have few applications, consider re-advertising the job role.
These 4 benefits can effectively improve your hiring process, by selecting the candidates for the right positions. Even if your hiring teams are used to making judgments based on intuition, they will find a better powerful ally in data. Data will help recruiters see what worked and what didn’t in hiring processes and enhance their future hiring decisions.
Data has never been more important.
We are living through the new digital age, meaning data is more valuable than ever before. Various industry experts have begun using the phrase “data economy” to describe the influence and prominence of big data in today’s society, for, without it, society would grind to a halt.
