Your Weekly Checklist for “The Summer to Evolve” — August 31-September 4
The final week of The Summer to Evolve was all about using data and analytics to drive business strategy and improve outcomes. If you need to catch up, start by watching our Recruiter Skills Session to learn which metrics and KPIs are most important for talent professionals — and how to measure them.
Once you’ve got the basics nailed down, you can get started on these action items for the next week and the next month. Before you know it, you’ll be a data and analytics whiz!
Hot Takes from Week 12 of “The Summer to Evolve” 
- Data and analytics are related concepts, but they aren’t the same. Analytics is all about the answers, insights, and knowledge that can be extracted from raw data.
- KPI stands for “key performance indicator,” which is a quantifiable measurement that can be used to gauge strategic, financial, and operational effectiveness.
- As you think about applying data and analytics to the talent acquisition world, take time to talk to the marketing team. They use data and analytics all the time, and the process of converting talent isn’t all that different from converting leads.
Top Ways to Get Started with Data and Analytics THIS WEEK
First, determine which areas are the most important to focus on, the questions you need to answer, and the problems you want to solve. Start by analyzing your hiring process and your current job openings. Gather feedback from stakeholders, including hiring managers, upper management, and others who might have a vested interest in TA effectiveness and efficiency.
Choose the key KPIs you want to measure. Start simple, with no more than four or five key metrics. These might include:
- Time to hire
- Time to fill
- Cost to hire
- Applicants per hire
- Effectiveness by channel
- Effectiveness by individual recruiter
- Conversion rate at various funnel stages (application to interview, interview to offer, offers accepted, etc.)
Think about how you’ll track what you learn and how you’ll report your findings to leadership. Your recruitment marketing platform should make it easy to build and customize dashboards, build actionable reports, and share those reports across your organization.
Top Ways to Incorporate Data and Analytics THIS MONTH
Use your analytics and reporting capabilities to enhance diversity and inclusion efforts. For example, you can set up a dashboard to measure how diverse candidates are progressing through the hiring process and analyze hiring statistics.
Look for opportunities to evolve your insights. The simplest analytics involve simply looking at what happened in the past. The next step is figuring out how and why things happened the way they did. The final and most sophisticated level is predictive analytics or forecasting, where you learn to anticipate what will happen in the future. This isn’t a short-term process, but it’s never too early to start.
Don’t get overwhelmed by details. Remember — applying data and analytics isn’t an all-or-nothing proposition, so you don’t need to have a comprehensive plan from Day 1. Just start with your most important problems and see what you can learn. As you become more analytics-focused over time, you’ll learn to extract more valuable insights and apply them to improve business results.
Thanks for joining us for The Summer to Evolve!
We hope you’ve enjoyed the last 12 weeks of amazing content, and that you’re finding plenty of ways to incorporate what you’ve learned. Join our mailing list, and you’ll be the first to know about upcoming events, new thought leadership content, and so much more. The Summer to Evolve may be over, but that doesn’t mean we have to say goodbye!