Want More Accurate Hiring Reports? Ask Yourself These 4 Questions:

Hiring reports are critical to modern recruiting success, but they can do more harm than good if they are based on inaccurate or misleading data.

Here are several key considerations to help you create more accurate hiring reports that help, rather than hinder, your recruiting efforts:

1. Do Your Reports Contain Inaccurate Data?

This may seem obvious, but it bears mentioning nonetheless: If you want accurate hiring reports, you have to use accurate data. If your candidate database contains inaccurate data, whether due to manual errors or data decay, you’ll consistently struggle to find and hire top talent. Inaccurate hiring reports can result in misleading performance assessments, poor decision-making, and inaccurate forecasting.

Candidate database maintenance is the most paramount consideration for accurate hiring reports. Unfortunately, maintaining an accurate database is easier said than done. Here are some steps you can take to ensure optimal data hygiene:

1. Audit your existing database: Regularly audit your database of candidate and new hire information. Identify errors or missing information so you can make quick corrections and fill in the gaps. Depending on the size of your database, a manual audit could be time-consuming and error-prone. For this reason, you may want to partner with a company or adopt a tool that specializes in data upkeep.
2. Examine your existing data collection methods: To avoid further contamination of your database, take a close look at how you collect candidate data. Identify methods that leave room for human error or inaccuracy. Do you source from job boards or hiring sites that don’t collect certain valuable pieces of candidate information? Is your HR department manually collecting all candidate data? Try to consolidate data collection processes and eliminate all practices that can lead to low-quality or inaccurate data.
3. Implement automated data maintenance: A data audit helps you clean up errors in your database, but it won’t stop your data from decaying over time. Consider investing in ongoing data maintenance through an automated platform or service so you can be confident your database remains accurate.

2. Are You Tracking the Right Metrics?

Your hiring reports might appear to be accurate, but if you’re tracking the wrong metrics, they won’t paint a realistic picture of your recruitment strategy. Recruiters fall into this trap often, particularly when they prioritize vanity metrics  over more insightful data points.

Vanity metrics may make you look good, but they will only hurt your strategy in the long run. Here are some valuable recruiting metrics to track instead:

1. Rate of qualified candidates: Rather than reporting on total numbers of applicants, track the percentage of qualified candidates for a given position. Unqualified or low-quality candidates don’t ultimately contribute to the success of your company, but qualified candidates do. For this reason, tracking your number of qualified applicants per role tells you more about your recruitment strategy than simply tracking total applicants.
2. Quality of hire: A comprehensive hiring report should account for how your hires perform in their roles once they’ve joined the company. Incorporate performance reviews and manager feedback into your hiring reports to obtain an accurate illustration of your overall quality of hire.
3. Source of hire: This metric refers to the channels through which your applicants enter the hiring process. Source of hire is essential to your recruiting reports, as it shows you how effective each channel is and allows you to allocate your resources to the most useful ones.

These are just a few examples, and there are many other useful recruiting metrics  you may want to include in your reports. The overall message is to make sure you track metrics that accurately reflect your recruiting efforts, rather than metrics that offer no value beyond making you look good.

3. Are You Handpicking Your Results?

Even if you track all the right metrics, that doesn’t necessarily mean your reports are complete and accurate. When reporting recruitment results, it can be tempting to handpick favorable outcomes and omit ones that reflect poorly on your efforts.

Remember: Accuracy doesn’t simply mean your numbers are correct. An accurate report is one that provides a complete, realistic overview of your recruiting efforts over a given period of time.

For example, let’s say you cut your average time to fill in half between 2017 and 2018. You might use this figure to claim your hiring process has become more efficient. But what if you fail to mention your turnover rate increased over that same period of time? By leaving this out, you miss critical insight into potential quality of hire issues, employee dissatisfaction, and more.

4. What Tools and Platforms Are You Using to Generate Reports?

Reporting is a time-consuming process that can distract from the many day-to-day tasks of a modern recruiter. Furthermore, manually creating hiring reports leaves room for human error, especially when recruiters are rushing to get their reports done.

For the best possible reports, recruiters should trust modern recruiting technology to take the more difficult aspects of reporting off their hands. Most applicant tracking systems today allow you to automatically generate accurate hiring reports based on customizable lists of metrics. Not only will these reports be accurate, but they’ll also offer in-depth analysis and actionable insights.

The right technology can streamline your reporting process, but the wrong technology can do the exact opposite. If you use an overly complex system of recruiting tools, you’ll struggle to generate accessible and understandable reports. Be sure to prioritize ease of use when selecting recruiting software.

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As more companies embrace data-driven recruiting strategies, the reporting process becomes increasingly important to recruiting success. Hiring reports allow recruiters to analyze and act on their data to improve their future efforts. Recruiters must commit to consistent reporting processes, and they must take steps to ensure their hiring reports are complete and accurate.

Keep the above considerations in mind, and you’ll consistently generate accurate hiring reports.

Sam Holzman is a content marketing specialist at ZoomInfo.