Turning Data into Action with Talent Analytics

While many aspects of the job market are currently in flux, one thing is certain—now is a great time to grow your talent community and improve important recruitment reporting metrics like quality of hire. Bringing the right people onboard will be more important than ever, and effective decision-making depends on strong data analytics. Ashley Burns, Senior Manager of Talent Acquisition at Newell Brands, shared her own experience on the subject at IAMPHENOM 2020.

Burns was part of a larger brand transformation project which entailed bringing control of their career site in-house and being able to market to job seekers through highly targeted campaigns. At the heart of the project was the ability to utilize powerful analytics to improve recruiting strategies and track their progress.

In just one year, Burns and her team saw dramatic results:

Talent community grew from 300+ to 14,000+ members
Number of campaigns increased 72%
Apply clicks increased 69%
Job seekers increased 31%
More than 96% of job seekers viewing opportunities through the chatbot clicked apply

Here’s a look at how they did it, with tips to help talent recruitment managers make the most of their data.

Related: For the full story, read the case study!

Turning a Career Site into a Marketing Tool

From a marketing perspective, Burns knew they needed a fresh start. Applicant numbers were decreasing, the career site didn’t adequately convey the employer brand, and the team wanted to be able to target job candidates by division.

Burns and her team chose Phenom’s Talent Experience Management (TXM) platform for its creative control, the flexibility to launch highly targeted campaigns, and key reporting metrics including career site page views, visits by new and returning job seekers, apply clicks, and time spent on pages.

Newell’s upgraded career site now functions like a marketing tool, providing a consumer-oriented user experience. “We’re making it more like a shopping experience,” Burns revealed. To ensure your career site engages and converts candidates, Burns recommends the following four tips:

1. Incorporate strong, strategically placed calls to action (CTAs) so candidates can easily engage with your brand. For example, Newell invites job seekers to search careers or join their talent community from prominent positions on their homepage.

2. Include features that enhance the candidate experience and provide important data measures for the recruitment team, such as FAQs, a user rating tool to calculate net promoter score, and a chatbot.

3. Populate career sites with content that conveys company culture and showcases how the organization is engaging in the market and the community. This helps candidates get a feel for whether they’d be a good fit.

4. Develop highly targeted campaigns that match relevant content to job seekers, driving them to landing pages that engage and convert.

Reporting Metrics that Matter

Analytics drive decision making on content, campaigns, tactics, and website changes. “We try to live in it every day,” Burns said, and pointed to two valuable metrics in particular:

New & returning users. The number of new and returning users is a metric Burns relies on heavily. This helps the team assess whether content is relevant and refreshed enough to keep engaging users.
Page views. Pages that get the most traffic provide a window to what works best (and is worth replicating) in terms of content, CTAs and other elements.

Burns noted that it’s important to dig deep to interpret data and uncover the true story. For example, time spent on a certain page may decrease, and the quick assumption could be that there’s a problem. But conversely, it could mean that users are moving through the site more quickly, getting where they need to go faster for a more streamlined user experience.

How to Measure ROI: Attracting & Retaining Best-Fit Employees

Rather than looking at ROI in dollars (such as cost per hire), Burns and her CHRO examine detailed metrics and analytics generated by the platform, including:

How many jobs have been filled and how many have opened in the last 14 days
Traffic increases
Applicant increases

Meanwhile, Burns has seen metrics related to quality of hire trend upward since implementing the TXM platform. “When you have consistent talent marketing to attract what fits your organization, you can increase your quality of hire by combining AI, analytics, campaigns, fresh content [and other elements],” Burns said.

Because they’re able to spotlight fresh, authentic content that communicates the company’s environment and values in a targeted, consistent way, her team can deliver a slate of candidates who already fit Newell’s culture. And when managers see the process through with good mentoring, new hires turn into long-term engaged workers. “We get good employees who stay,” Burns said.

The Right Tools Make the Difference

Many recruitment professionals say they lack the right tools and resources to effectively measure performance. As Burns found at Newell, a TXM platform with powerful AI and analytics proved to be the transformative solution they needed for maximum measurable impact.