I feel like this has been a very educational year for me. While I’m used to spending lots of time speaking to recruiters, this year I’ve done even more of that than before. And this is how I’ve come to this conclusion.
In recruitment, we’re still pretty bad at analysing what’s already happened. I’ve seen lots of companies that don’t track recruitment activity, recruiters that don’t keep track of sourcing activity, employer branding teams that have little if any understanding of what’s going on inside the company.
Can you honestly say you know what you’ve been up to in 2016? What sources of candidates worked best when advertising roles? What communication channels served you best when contacting the potential candidates you’ve sourced? What sort of impact your employer branding activities had on your recruitment team?
Why are we so interested in what anyone has to say about what’s to come in 2017 when we haven’t even processed 2016 yet?
If I’m to make one prediction for next year, it’s that some of us will keep being distracted by the new shiny sourcing and recruitment tools, best practices shared by companies that we look up to and anything to do with the future of work. Not enough of us will even attempt at analysing what they’ve already done and learning from their own mistakes and successes.
If you want to do better in 2017, stop blindly following others, and start tracking and measuring your own activity. Don’t be afraid too look at the past to learn more about what you can do in the future.
And if you’re disappointed I didn’t mention anything about the rising importance of marketing, how you can use drones for recruitment or why you need AI as part of your employer branding or recruitment strategy for next year, I’m sorry. But chances are, you’re better off working on the basics rather than getting more toys for the Talent Acquisition team.
So enjoy the holidays, get some much needed distance and remember nothing will change over night – you will have time to figure things out if you want to 🙂
1 Comment
The biggest problem with having access to sooo much data these days is deciding just how deep to dig and how much time / resources to invest in data.
I simple delve into Google Analytics can last hours and to start pulling out / then cross-referencing even simple data you could easily be looking at two days of work lost. And that’s before you’ve set up an email drip, checked your company’s keywords, dug into organic search figures, competition etc etc.
At what point do we accept this is as much a part of running a business as filling out tax returns, or scheduling our work rotas and just hire someone who knows this stuff?