Recruiting the right candidate for a job is a tedious, costly, and demanding task. The job market is becoming candidate-driven. There is competition among companies to hire top-skilled people for jobs, which has resulted in costly processes to fill open positions. If you move slowly, you will lose the best talent, and if you act fast, you might end up hiring the wrong person for the job.
Using big data in the recruitment process can rescue a company from these hurdles, especially when it comes to direct hire recruiting. They can use the monumental data to hire the right candidate. Let’s explore this in detail.
What Is Big Data Recruitment?
Big data is a collection of large volumes of data that grows exponentially and cannot be stored or processed efficiently by traditional data management tools. For example, the New York Stock Exchange generates about 1 TB of new trade daily.
Big data analysis can be used for anything, from financial services to tracking productivity and employee performance, to forecasting future trends. Big data recruitment is the huge amount of data that recruiters have access to, which helps them analyze and hire the ideal employee.
Benefits of Big Data In Recruitment
Here is why you should opt for big data in recruitment.
Improves Quality of Recruits
Data and analytics can help you make the best evidence-based decisions. When you hire the wrong employee, a significant amount of cost, effort, and other resources are lost. Big data allows you to hire employees from online information and publicly available databases.
Creates a Larger Pool of Candidates
It is important to interview a couple of candidates before making your final decision. Sometimes, companies cannot find enough people for the interview process. Big data eliminates this as well. It provides you with a bigger pool of talent, which can help you better analyze the mortgage recruitment process and address any skill gaps.
Improves Employee Retention
Recruitment starts with reviewing CVs, but does not end after the employee is hired. It also includes employee training and retention. Big data allows human resources to track and measure the effectiveness of training programs. It also helps in creating employee retention strategies, thus improving job satisfaction rates.
Lowers Recruitment Costs
By using big data analytics, companies get a complete view of overall performance vs budget. These studies help recruiters understand what job advertisements were effective and who brought the best quality hires. This also allows them to keep track of which platforms attract what type of employees.
Forecasts Future Hiring Needs
Your company can grow exponentially by combining the knowledge they have about the current workforce with big data, providing insights into the future. Human resource departments can analyze the economic demands and demographic trends that affect the business.
Optimizes Hiring
Both over-hiring and under-hiring can cause losses for a company. When you hire people who are wrong for the position or not needed, there are additional costs, and when you under-hire, there is lesser productivity, causing indirect losses.
Removes Bias In Hiring
Humans tend to make decisions based on unconscious bias, making the hiring process discriminatory. When analyzing big data, there is a huge amount of data available, and it reduces bias in the recruitment process.
Risks of Using Big Data In Recruitment
Big data, undoubtedly, provides several benefits. However, it comes with its inherent risks. Firstly, data is collected without the consent of the candidate. The algorithms that use the data could lead to potential bias. You must make sure that the algorithms take your countries diversity laws into account.
Secondly, data-driven hiring is not completely ethical. Moreover, if you are an untrained recruiter, you may not be able to interpret the results correctly every time, causing wrong hiring. For this, you should always reverse engineer the process. Think about what you want to achieve and then move backwards.
How Is Big Data Used In Recruiting?
Big data allows employers to find the ideal candidate for the job. It gives them a 360-degree picture of an employee before they even come for the interview. We live in a world where we can find the complete overview of any person online. A resume, in such a digital age, seems too one-dimensional. You may also want the same for your company.
You can use keywords to guide your research. However, look beyond that, and extract an employee’s information using semantic analytics. Then analyze, understand and interpret that data. The data is collected from sources such as social media profiles, performance reviews, resume databases, shopping behavior, political associations etc.
Conclusion
The hiring trends are gradually changing, and everyone wants to hire the perfect candidate. In order to meet the needs of today, companies need to adopt big data analysis in their recruitment strategies. This will help them reduce hiring costs, recruit the best candidates, and forecast future hiring needs.