Hiring Managers to HR: Improve Your Recruiting

Visier’s The Demand for Data-Driven Talent Acquisition report is a very quick read and gives some interesting data to consider as you plan your 2017 talent acquisition activities. The opening paragraph of this short white paper sets the stage for some interesting data points:

With countless recruiting-related technologies and assessment options on the market, business leaders might expect that measuring the long-term impact of talent acquisition is a practice that’s well-established and effective. A survey of hiring managers, however, suggests that the reality is just the opposite.

The bottom line is that, after massive investments in recruiting technology, it’s still tough to predict the long-term quality of hires. And measuring the impact of the recruiting process is becoming job #1 for many recruiting organizations because their clients, hiring managers, are expecting more.

200 hiring managers from across the U.S. – from a number of industries – took a survey in October 2016. All of the respondents were from organizations employing more than 8,000 people with over $1 billion in annual revenue. The size of the responding employers may well be irrelevant in the discussion of talent acquisition and what continues to challenge organizations of all sizes.

The report is fairly straightforward – just 8 questions are reported in this paper. Two that stuck out to me are pretty obvious, but also pretty revealing:

It’s no surprise that managers in larger organizations – remember the respondents were hiring managers not HR or recruiting professionals – want the recruiting process to be improved. Other questions and data in the report show why that would be the case. Hiring managers in larger organizations appear to be challenged by the effectiveness of their recruitment support teams. But beyond finding the right people who will stay in the job, hiring managers also want more data-driven processes when looking for new talent. Data-driven business processes abound in larger organizations and hiring managers are expressing deep interest (70% of them!) in employing data-driven processes for talent acquisition. Makes sense to me.

Visier publishes these bite sized reports fairly often and I enjoy reading them. They open windows of simple (and sometimes all too obvious) insight that can be quite useful.

This originally appeared on China Gorman’s blog at ChinaGorman.com.