The recruitment industry has seen a number of new trends recently. The marketplace has become more candidate-centric. Sites like LinkedIn have made it easier for candidates and recruiters to contact each other directly. Even large companies have started posting job openings on third-party sites in an effort to attract more diverse applicants.
Despite this, recruiters are finding it increasingly difficult to identify positions they can recruit for in time to offer candidates. The same job information is available to both applicants and recruiters on job aggregator sites.
This means that the value of a recruiter's offer to a candidate becomes more questionable. And as companies use more and more ways to get offers from candidates, the ability to quickly find and offer quality talent declines. To stay competitive, recruiters must stay one step ahead of candidates based on data.
Data Collection for Data-driven Recruitment
44% of recruiters use publicly available data like social media profiles to speed up their recruitment. What if we told you that it's now much easier and faster to gather all this information and make smart decisions with automated data collection?
Data-driven recruitment allows HR managers to make informed hiring decisions based on the data they receive, in addition to reviewing resumes, conducting tests, and interviewing.
Recruiters typically use certain metrics to track the success of the process and use the data collected to improve the effectiveness of their search for a position. Plus, collecting and analyzing the information eliminates the possibility of guesswork and bias.
By treating ads as data, recruiters can begin to build a better and more effective system for finding potential candidates. If structured, data has the potential to change the recruiting industry radically.
The data is contained in a regular, consistent format that includes:
- job descriptions;
- types of employment;
- job requirements;
- company description;
- publication dates;
- minimum/maximum salaries.
This information is useful because it allows HR managers to create a relational database. Such databases can be easily filtered, analyzed, and searched to identify trends and find vacancies within specified parameters.
Using web scraping API technology, HRs can access high-quality job postings directly from the source of the career pages of the companies themselves. Thus, if a job ad is posted on a career page, you can assume that it was meant to be, that it is current, and that the position is still open. Other helpful data sources include Google Analytics, social media analytics, and more.
By embracing job scraping and data-driven recruitment strategies, HR teams can streamline their processes, make more informed decisions, and ultimately find the best talent for their organizations.
Benefits of Data Collection for Recruiters
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By leveraging data collection and analysis, recruiters can unlock many benefits. These include:
Improving the Quality of Hired Employees
Recruiting with the right data can help you identify untapped talent pools and improve candidate quality. By tracking where your top talent is coming from - whether from Indeed, LinkedIn, or staffing agencies - you can identify and filter candidates with specific skills, make improvements to your recruiters' candidate outreach, and do a better job of attracting high-quality talent.
Reduced Time for Hiring
A lengthy hiring process can reflect on the company, as candidates will drop out one by one or be hired by a competitor. There is a way to speed up the data-driven hiring process if you have an understanding of the numbers that will allow you to determine the length of the recruiting process - from the time candidates submit their resumes to the time they sign a contract.
Understanding how to optimize the recruitment process can reduce the hiring cycle by 60% with an increase in quality. A data-driven approach will help you to understand the selection process, and which stages of the hiring process take a long time. Perhaps these stages can be automated or eliminated altogether.
Reduced Costs
By speeding up the hiring process, you'll save money. And data-driven recruiting will save you even more. Given the necessary KPIs, you can optimize the most effective hiring channels.
Data-driven recruiting allows you to track the process and analyze which parts of the process are spending a bunch of resources and whether they're being spent correctly. For example, you can eliminate the use of expensive staffing agencies and use advertising. You can also work with the hiring process itself along with the hiring sources.
Improved Candidate Experience
You have to fight for the attention of the best candidates. By using data to improve your hiring process, you'll increase the number of qualified leads that make it to your job offer mailing list.
Also, understanding what your candidates think of you and your recruiting process can be very beneficial. You'll be able to make improvements to the hiring process, the department, and individual professionals based on the information you get directly from the candidates themselves.
Improved Forecasting
For a company, forecasting things related to hiring is important. If you can use the data to predict how much capital you will have to spend on hiring new personnel, what department you need an employee in, and how many resources it will take to train them.
Providing more detailed forecasting, it's worth tracking employee turnover rates, shifts between departments, etc. That way, you can draw more detailed conclusions. Plus, forecasting allows you to reduce the hiring time we talked about earlier.
Data-Driven Decision-Making in Recruitment
To make data-driven decisions, you need a strategy for analyzing that data to understand what information is really needed. Based on this information, you can optimize talent recruitment and increase engagement. Given the rate of self-initiated departures, employee retention becomes key for HR teams.
Using data for HR is one of the most effective ways to hire qualified employees quickly and combat staff turnover. It helps to research, draw conclusions and make decisions regarding the recruitment of new employees. Here are some of the ways recruiters can improve data-driven decision-making:
- Researching prospective candidates, finding facts about them online, on social media, or on sites like LinkedIn.
- Researching hiring trends and analyzing the workforce.
- Finding successful hiring practices and developing strategies to build the recruiting process.
Don't forget about KPIs, which are critical for evaluating the effectiveness of the hiring process. Recruitment metrics can be based on speed, quality, cost, and so on. The right mix of recruiting metrics can show the HR team which hiring strategies are working and which are not. The most relevant metrics provide actionable information on what the HR team should spend time and budget on.
Building Data-driven Recruiting Tactics
The first thing you should do is establish consistent processes for collecting data. Conduct an audit to understand what systems and processes your recruiting team members are using. Choose a concrete method of data aggregation that everyone will follow to ensure a single record.
You can set up a scoring system to identify candidates who are more engaged with your site and social media.
And it's worth paying attention to creating consistent, structured interviews. This will help you evaluate each candidate against the same criteria and allow you to make more accurate correct decisions.
Data Collection Tips for Recruitments
Data collection is critical for recruiters in order to make confident hiring decisions. To ensure accuracy, following essential tips can help streamline the process.
Choose the Right Platform
A recruiter typically looks at a lot of resumes and interacts with a large number of candidates daily. And even now, professionals are divided into groups and communities, so choosing an employee can be easier.
There are hundreds of job websites and platforms where you can find the right candidate for a particular position. For example, with LinkedIn, Facebook, and Indeed you can get data on all types of jobs, and on GitHub and Stack Overflow, a recruiter can learn more about technical positions.
In-depth Job Market Analysis
Researching the offered salaries. Recruiting sites like Glassdoor or Salary.com have data on salary ranges by specific criteria, such as position or experience. This makes things easier for recruiters to understand candidates' expectations for desired salaries.
Candidate requirements analysis. By automatically gathering information, education and skill requirements for a position can be identified so that more accurate job descriptions can be created.
Exploring competitors' offers. Web scrapers can gather additional information from job postings that describe training opportunities, work schedules, vacation days, benefits, relocation, insurance, parking spots, etc. This is how recruiters can optimize their jobs and review the benefits provided to attract candidates.
Gather Information on Candidates in Specific Geographic Regions
There are web scrapers that integrate IP proxies to provide access to data of potential candidates in a specific region, country, etc. This gives recruiters the ability to target specialists in a particular location if the role requires employees to work from the office or in certain places.
Collect Emails for Mailing Lists
More than 50% of recruiters contact candidates by email. So why not create your own lists of potential candidates? So that when a position opens up, the most suitable people will get an offer first.
Web scraping helps you gather a base, make a mailing list, and warm up candidates to have people in reserve. It makes a cold base into a warm one. The easiest way is to use the email extractor tool. It will quickly copy all the mail on the page to the clipboard and then paste it into a table. Such a tool can be used, for example, on Github, Linkedin, or TurboHiring.
And if you need more information besides email names, you can use more advanced data collection instruments.
Data Visualization
It's not enough to just collect data. If you want to have a more accurate understanding of your business, it pays to not only collect and process information but also analyze and visualize the results in a workable way.
Data visualization for recruitment allows you to display an overall picture of the situation on a particular vacancy, track key recruitment metrics, compare and track the best candidates' performance, weed out unsuitable candidates at the initial stage, etc. In addition, you can integrate different data sources to monitor more information.
Methods to Scrape Job Postings
Up to this point, we've only talked about the benefits of data extraction for the work of recruiting teams. By the way, 2 out of 3 recruiters do not have the tools necessary to understand the market and the talent pool. Therefore, it would be worthwhile for the company to use the following information-gathering methods:
Web Scraping Services
The easiest possible option to get data is to use the services of professional experts by outsourcing the needs. Such services will help you achieve your goals with minimal cost, guaranteed efficiency, and up-to-date information.
Professionals will take your requests and install everything you need to get the job done, such as scripts, servers, IP proxies, etc. and directly provide the data in the format and frequency you need.
In-house Web Scraping
You can create an in-house data extraction team and hire specialists. Creating your own solution here can be costly, as hiring and training employees can be time-consuming and expensive.
Web scraping requires a high level of technical skill, especially if you're collecting information from popular sites or if you need to extract a large volume of data regularly. It makes sense to build your team when you already have the necessary resources to develop and maintain systems.
Web Scraping Tools
You can also use web scraping tools that collect data based on your specific criteria. There are many do-it-yourself tools on the market, the choice of which depends on the size of the company and hiring needs. Tools can be a good option for small-scale data collection but will not be very effective for large-scale scraping. It is better to use them for small and mid-size tasks.
What to Look For When Choosing a Web Scraping Software?
When finding, hiring, and retaining highly skilled professionals depends on data, choosing the perfect data collection tool or software plays an important role. So if you decide to use web scraping tools and services, finding the right one for your needs can be a challenge. Therefore, you need to know what benefits your software should have.
Scalability
The amount of data you will need to collect will only increase over time. Thus, the tool you will be using should not slow down when there is a significant increase in data demand.
Data Quality
Data quality is important, especially when it comes to making critical recruitment decisions. So the data you collect must be relevant and organized in a convenient format.
Geolocation Selection
In the case of recruiting solutions, it is essential to have access to content defined by geography. If you need to hire from a specific region, a proxy can do the job. The tool should have the ability to select any location you want.
Overcoming Scraping Difficulties
To get the information you need in time, you should choose a scraping tool that can bypass the blocking of sites. Of course, not all websites put protection against scraping. For example, LinkedIn scraping has gained enormous popularity in recent years because you can safely collect publicly available data about potential applicants and employees from the site.
Data Collection as a Game-Changer for Talent Acquisition
The future of the HR field is rapidly changing. To summarize, if recruiters use web scraping data to make decisions, they can facilitate the entire process of finding, hiring, and managing staff. And for that, they would need a database of job openings in the market and open candidates to understand the situation, better inform their clients and attract outstanding talent.
