Data and analytics continue to be key topics in Talent Acquisition. But what should employers be measuring, what value can the data give them and how widely is a data driven approach to recruiting actually being adopted?
To answer these questions as well as many others, I’m delighted to welcome Kyle Lagunas, Research Manager at IDC, as my guest for this week’s show. Kyle has been intensely studying the development of data driven recruiting for several years and has some very interesting insights to share.
In the interview we discuss:
• The gap between current technologies and adoption
• The evolution of measurement practices in recruiting
• Recruiting skills versus Recruitment Marketing skills
• How data can be used to optimize a recruiting operation
• What is possible with analytics and how to measure beyond the usual activity metrics
• An example strategic framework for developing data driving recruiting
Kyle also give us his view on the future of some other current trends in talent acquisition including AI, Recruitment Marketing Platform and Chatbots
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Transcript:
Matt Alder [00:00:00]:
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Matt Alder [00:01:10]:
Hi everyone, this is Matt Alder. Welcome to episode 95 of the Recruiting Future podcast. Data and analytics continue to be key topics in discussions about talent acquisition, but what should employers actually be measuring? What value can data give them? And how widely is this data driven approach to recruiting actually being adopted? To answer these questions and lots of others, I’m delighted to welcome Kyle Lagunas, research Manager at IDC, as this week’s guest. Kyle has been intensely studying the development of data driven recruiting for a number of years and has some fascinating insights to share. Hi Karl, and welcome to the podcast.
Kyle Lagunas [00:01:59]:
Hey Matt, thanks for having me.
Matt Alder [00:02:00]:
My absolute pleasure. Could you just introduce yourself and tell everyone what it is you do?
Kyle Lagunas [00:02:06]:
Absolutely. So my name is Kyle Lagunas. I am a research manager at a company called IDC, which is International Data Corporation. We advise IT organizations on technology trends. I work with a lot of software vendors on innovative best practices, the adoption of new technologies. The program that I run is called Emerging Trends and Technologies in Talent Acquisition. And so I cover services and software as it relates to the broad world of talent acquisition.
Matt Alder [00:02:38]:
So I’ve had a lot of guests on the show talking about technology and talent acquisition, everyone from employers to vendors and kind of other commentators. Tell me what you’re seeing in terms of your work. What are the key trends at the moment? What should everyone be on the lookout for?
Kyle Lagunas [00:02:57]:
Well, there’s nothing to fit this. Just right around the corner we’re in this really interesting phase in innovation where technology got a little too far out ahead of adoption and now we’re waiting for practitioners to catch up. There’s always been early adopters that have been the first to leverage social media for recruiting, the first to build employer brand as a cornerstone of the recruiting strategy. And there’s always been those that have been quick to take to this notion that candidate experience is a foundational element of recruiting performance. But now we’re still playing catch up. One of the areas that I focus on most, and anyone who’s familiar with my work has probably heard me talk about this in the last 18 months. I’m really focused on the adoption of analytics technology. I’m really focused on how measurement practices in recruiting are evolving, and that’s because there are so many new ways to attract and engage candidates. There are so many new technologies for finding those diamonds in the rough or those needles in the haystack. But we’re not really sure how to measure performance in a more modern recruiting world, especially around things like recruitment marketing, candidate experience. I’ve really been focused on how we’re leveraging these new tools that are available. I’m sure any tool you’ve seen lately, you know, has its own reporting and analytics module or whatever in the product. But the challenge isn’t the availability of analytics technology, it’s the actual utilization of that technology. So something I’ve really been focused on. You may or may not be surprised, but very few organizations are actually building out robust measurement practices that look beyond efficiency metrics in recruiting. Most folks are still just trying to do the best with the budget they’ve got and demonstrate where the budget has gone and maybe a high level of what came out of it. But very few organizations are actually getting down to the nitty gritty in recruitment marketing. For example, how does this one email campaign actually drive tangible business outcomes? How does it actually impact talent acquisition efforts as a whole? And we’re getting there. The challenge is the metrics that we need to measure these next practices are wholly new to us. And I find that we’re not getting as much support or learning as much from our counterparts in consumer marketing.
Matt Alder [00:05:42]:
That’s really interesting. And I want to talk a bit more about analytics in a second. Before we do, though, just kind of going back to what you said at the beginning about the gap between the early adopters when it comes to recruitment technologies and then the kind of mass adoption so that, you know that that sort of adoption. Adoption cycle is that. I mean, can we quantify how long that gap is? Is it getting smaller? Is it just impossible to say? What does it look like from your perspective?
Kyle Lagunas [00:06:15]:
You know, that’s a really interesting question, Matt. I hadn’t really ever thought about that. And you know, honestly, now that I do, though, I mean, it’s. That timeline is going to vary by application. To be honest, social media is a perfect example. Social media the barrier to entry was non existent because it’s free. Anybody can tweet, anybody can use Facebook, and depending on what you want to do, anybody can use LinkedIn for free. And so whenever we first started talking about using social media for recruitment, everybody was like, oh heck yeah, that sounds awesome. I’m getting on board with this. I’m going to start actively networking on social media while also networking within my own backyard. And so adoption of social media for recruiting was almost instantaneous now. Yeah, you still heard about some of those old school HR functions that really wanted to police usage of social media. They were still very hesitant to open the floodgates and let people use social media for work. But look at it now. It’s inevitable that it was going to happen and the floodgates opened and everyone made it out relatively okay. Now we have websites like Glassdoor that are completely powered by social media user generated content to share how things are going and what their experience was with one employer versus another. But then you look at something like CRM Candidate Relationship Management systems. Matt I firmly believe that CRM is the next big system in recruiting. I think it’ll become the yin to the ATS yang that it’ll be something that we’ll all need to use because we’re getting better at attracting candidates, but we’re not getting better at engaging with them over time and at scale. And adoption of CRMs is still relatively. If you look at big picture of all recruiting organizations, adoption is still pretty low. Even among those organizations that have adopted CRMs, the recruiters don’t know what to do with it. It’s not a recruiting tool, it’s a recruitment marketing tool. And most recruiters aren’t recruitment marketers. So you see, it’s like I can look at one application, I can look at one technology and see where things move quickly and I can without having an advanced sciences degree. I can guesstimate why it’s moved so quickly. But then with something else that seems like, well, it’s a given that it’s going to be something that’s vital to the recruiting operation. But adoption is still relatively so. There’s a number of factors at play. So I can’t quantify the timeline, especially around analytics. I don’t know, I’m shocked that we’re still so slow to adopt there, but I think we’re starting to get better. I know I’ve been working hard to try and get the word out about it.
Matt Alder [00:09:13]:
Yeah, I mean, I think that makes perfect sense and I completely agree with you around recruitment, marketing and CRMs and, you know, perhaps some of the new skills that will need to be learned or brought into teams for those to work properly. So coming back to analytics, I think what would be interesting is to get a sense from you of, you know, what’s the potential in analytics. You talked about recruitment teams measuring some basic stuff, but what could they measure? What’s the potential in this space?
Kyle Lagunas [00:09:45]:
Yeah, again, you’re asking questions that I just love you for asking. It’s like you’re teeing me up perfectly. So what is the potential with talent analytics, especially as it relates to recruiting? Well, I defined data driven recruitment. We talk about this at conferences all the time. I’m sure that you do too, Matt, but we don’t really know what data driven recruiting is. I talk about it as the measurement and analysis of talent data, which is structured and unstructured data, and then the application of data based insights to optimize recruiting performance. That’s what data driven recruiting is, going beyond gut to optimize a recruiting operation. Essentially, that’s really what we’re trying to get at with better measurement practices. Understand what’s working, understand what’s not and why not, and then doing better. It’s as simple as that. But then you can go beyond just that lens of what is it, what’s the value for recruiting? And then look at what’s the value for the business. I did a survey around measurement practices last year and one of the questions I asked was, how are you reporting your talent acquisition performance data to the organization? Although I was glad to see that the vast majority were reporting performance data to the executive level. I think it’s something like 91% or something was pointing to executive level. Only 23% were reporting to hiring managers, which meant that 77% of hiring managers had absolutely no idea how things were going on in recruiting, except for when the recruiter tell them, I’m working on it. I’m trying to get you better candidates, I’m trying to find people for you. And hiring managers are just left to take us at our word. Now, you and I both know recruiting is getting really, really hard. It’s always been a hard job. It’s getting, I think, even more difficult because there’s so much more noise out there and it’s impossible to cut through that noise if you’re just taking shots in the dark. With better analytics, not only can you improve your performance in this crowded space, heavily competitive space, but you can demonstrate to the business what you’re working on and what outcomes you’re getting and what you can expect over the next three months or what’s going on with your candidate pipeline, you can actually show the business tangible effort instead of most of what we do happens outside of any system of record. We’re filing through our Rolodex, figuratively speaking, and calling up everyone we can find. But if we don’t actually have anything to show for all that effort, if we’re still struggling to get candidates in the pipeline or we’re struggling to find folks that meet all the 25 requirements that hire managers set out for us, it doesn’t look good to the business when we just say, I’m doing my best, I’m doing what I can. Even though we are doing our best, even though we are doing what we can, no other business function in the organization is actually going to just expect the business to take them at their word. Everyone else can actually demonstrate exactly what they are doing and what kind of outcomes it’s having. Especially if you look at consumer marketing, which has a huge budget, bigger budget than recruiting does, they can demonstrate what every one of those little clicks does, what every layer of engagement does for building up brand and for building up reputation in the market. And I think that we need to get better at that so that we can have a more open dialogue with the business around what’s working and what’s not, so we can get more buy in from the business.
Matt Alder [00:13:40]:
What do you think is sort of possible in this space? Or maybe what have you seen other people doing? Because what kind of strikes me is a lot of the reporting analytics we see in recruiting is very much activity based. So, you know, these are the, you know, this is what we’re doing. This is, this is where people are in the process, this is how many people we’ve hired, et cetera, et cetera. You know, what do you think is possible in terms of actually sort of tying that to, you know, outcomes, to business outcomes, to performance, to, you know, what does that look like?
Kyle Lagunas [00:14:13]:
Yeah, I think that’s a good question too. So in order to answer your question, I would probably reference some of the services organizations. This is where we’re seeing the most innovation around measurement practices and adopt the most adoption of analytics. And it makes sense at services organizations. They’re selling best in class recruiting and companies are paying top dollar for it. They better be better than in house. They better be able to demonstrate what that investment is delivering, not just for the recruiting department, but for the business. For example, you just talked about some pipeline metrics. This is how many New applicants we got. This is how many people we have in process. This is how many hires we’ve made. This is where we’ve made those hires from. Well, then we take it one step further of just that pipeline stuff and say, this is the average NPS for all the candidates in this super tight market over here. This where we’re struggling constantly to get good candidates in the door. We’re seeing a marginal increase in candidate experience. I believe, as your recruiting expert, that we should be focused heavily on improving candidate experience in this very tight market or for this very difficult job group so that we get a better reputation for being an employer of choice. And then all of this other stuff that we’ve always been doing will suddenly get easier because we’ll have a better reputation. Right now, we’re doing all the things that we’re supposed that we’ve always done, but people don’t really like us. We don’t have a very good reputation in the market. Look at our glassdoor reviews for all of these nursing jobs that we’re trying to fill. Nurses don’t like it here, or nurses love it here, Our nurses love it here. But the nursing candidates are not liking the experience. So we need to do something there. You know what I mean? We’re looking just one more metric to inform all of the rest and then helping to make that relevant to the business, helping them understand how something like candidate experience actually impacts all of the rest of the things that we’ve always talked to them about. And if we say looking at our talent competitors, looking at this hospital group over here, they are consistently getting the candidates that we’re trying to recruit, and it’s because they’ve invested it in candidate experience. Look at their glassdoor page and look at all their reviews from nursing candidates. They’re great. And look at ours. They’re not bad, but they’re mediocre. And so we’re losing because everyone else is mediocre. So just kind of helping them to understand is getting them more involved in the process instead of making us look like we can’t do the job. It’s helping them understand what we’re doing and what outcome it’s having and how we can do better.
Matt Alder [00:17:13]:
Now, you’ve already answered this question implicitly, but I just wanted to kind of maybe pull out as a summary. What would be your advice to an organization that wants to sort of take this next step with their analytics? What should they be doing first? What should they be thinking about in the medium to long term?
Kyle Lagunas [00:17:32]:
Yeah, so I actually have built a really, really high level framework for moving the needle, as I call it. And honestly, it’s not rooted in deep science. This is just general recommendations I have after having studied this for the last two years. The first is really simple. Measure what you can measure what you can. Find out what your existing capabilities are with your existing technologies, with your existing service providers, with your existing vendors. Get a baseline understanding of the measurement of your existing measurement capabilities and start there. Run just your standard report on an ATS and get a feeling for what you can easily with minimal heavy lifting. Start tracking regularly from there. Have conversations with the business about what measures matter most. Do they really only care about hires or quality of hire? Is that ultimately what they care about is quality of hire? Well, okay, then we need to have a discussion around what we can measure now and what we would need to measure to get to quality of hire and what it would take for us to be able to measure it. Like what kind of investment or change do we need to make? So those are just general high level about like measurement strategy. Measure what you can, measure what matters most, but then go a step further to the actual measurement practices and measure frequently, measure consistently. What I find is that most organizations, their measurement practices are limited to running a quarterly report to get your director off your back and no real analysis, which, you know, it’s just like once a quarter or maybe like sporadically. And you really can’t get a good sense of how things are going if you’re just taking a glance at your reporting module every other week or something, or every six weeks. But then beyond consistently and frequency in measurement, you also have to actually analyze this stuff. You have to actually report on it to the business and to your colleagues. That’s because the ultimate goal here again is to optimize your recruiting efforts. So measure what you can, measure what matters most, measure frequently and consistently and analyze, report and then optimize. That’s my highest level advice for organizations.
Matt Alder [00:19:52]:
Final question. Obviously you see a lot of what’s going on in this space and a lot of new technologies that are coming onto the market. Where do you think we’re going next? What have you got your eye on in terms of future tech trends in this space?
Kyle Lagunas [00:20:07]:
I see a lot of buzz in activity around AI and machine learning. These seem to the two big concepts for enterprise technology in general these days. AI does some really interesting things around matching candidates to jobs and helping recruiters to prioritize candidates or prioritize applicants that are applying for jobs. Just seeing who’s the best fit based on keyword analysis from the resume and the job description. So that’s kind of an AI. And chatbots are another thing that a lot of people are excited about and think it’s going to be really cool. But I don’t know. I’m reminded of my customer experience or customer service experiences with some of my cell phone operator or with honestly any service provider these days. You call in, you get the robo answer and then you have to navigate through the robo call until you can get to a real life human beings. It’s like, well, chatbots will probably do a favor in getting some of the more annoying candidate questions answered, but does it deliver a positive candidate experience? I’m not sure. I think that we’re still kind of holding our breath to see what happens with recruitment marketing. We know that this is standard practice now. We know that this new model attract and engage breaking us out of reactionary recruiting. But we’re really not sure where we’re going to need the most help. Like I had said earlier in this conversation, I think that CRM is the next big system, but adoption has been really, really slow and that’s because organizations don’t have new budget for these systems and they’re not free. Right? So I don’t know. It’s kind of difficult. I think that we’ll start to see CRM becoming more foundational in recruiting tech stack. I think that we’ll see our recruiting practices evolve around the CRM. We’ll be rescaling our recruiting teams to where we have dedicated recruitment marketers, we’ll have dedicated analysts, we’ll have dedicated community managers. All of that restructuring is going to bring to light some new needs and they’ll probably mimic consumer marketing. Maybe we’ll start to see some more marketing tools come coming out and we’ll start to see some more advanced use cases for email marketing or for talent communities. Maybe we’ll finally see talent communities really thrive under the helm of a community manager. Who knows? For now, I would really just like to see us do a better job of measuring what we’re actually doing.
Matt Alder [00:22:56]:
Carl, thank you very much for talking to me.
Kyle Lagunas [00:22:58]:
Hey, anytime. I appreciate your time.
Matt Alder [00:23:01]:
My thanks to Carl Lagunis. You can subscribe to this podcast in itunes on Stitcher or download the show app on your smartphone. Just search for recruiting future in your App Store. You can find all the past episodes@www.rfpodcast.com on that site. You can also subscribe to the mailing list and find out more about Working with me thanks very much for listening. I’ll be back next week and I hope you’ll join me.
