According to the World Employment Confederation (WEC) Economic Report 2020, as of July 2021, the UK has the third largest Recruitment sector in the world with almost 40,000 registered agencies. In this crowded market, there is clearly a lot of competition between consultancies, and therefore a strong need to offer a differentiating factor to attract clients.

In addition to the threat of competition, another significant risk to Recruiters is the high churn of new hires. A shocking 20% of employee turnover occurs within the first 45 days of employment, not to mention 26% of employees will then leave or fail at a position within the first 18 months. This will not only impact a Recruiter’s fees for a placement but will have a lasting effect on their relationship with the client. It is therefore vital that once a Recruitment agency attracts a client, the candidates that they place with them are not just successful in the short-term but prove to be effective and lasting hires in the long term.

One approach available to help Recruitment agencies not only stand out from the crowd but also better match candidates with their clients, is to adopt a data-driven methodology for candidate selection.

What is data-driven recruitment?

Data-driven recruitment is the act of using data to optimise your hiring process. By using technologies and people data to analyse large talent pools, you can identify candidates who not only have the right skills and experience but who also align with an organisation’s values and culture.

This gives Recruiters scientific validation and support for their recommendations, reassures their clients that bias has been removed from the process, and guarantees the most suitable candidates have been put forward for the role. Two primary areas are suited for the scientific data-driven assessment of candidate fit: Personality and Culture. Each has historically proven difficult for Recruiters to tap into… up until now.

Personality Assessment

Personality data has long been used as a means of matching candidates to roles, and it is clear why; 78% of professionals across industries agreed that personality is the single most important factor when hiring. However, Recruiters must often be selective about when to use this approach, as assessing personality is typically conducted by third-party consultants, which is time-intensive, slow, and expensive. Furthermore, the consultants collect, manage, and process the data required on behalf of the Recruiter, and therefore own the rich collection of candidate information accrued over time.

Cultural Alignment

The environment, or culture, in which a candidate will be hired into is also regarded as a key factor in whether a placement will be successful. 67% of Recruiters consider cultural fit to be vital when hiring, but historically there has been no way of measuring it. Instead, an individual’s suitability for a particular team’s culture is determined based on the gutfeel of a Recruiter or the Hiring Manager.

Emerging technology

MyPeople offer a solution to these obstacles, using the latest predictive analytics and machine learning techniques. MyPeople Recruit is a cloud-based, self-service platform for Recruiters and Recruitment Agencies that allows them to gather personality and cultural preference information about their candidates, as well as build a team’s cultural profile with the Hiring Manager.

By assessing if a potential new hire aligns with a company’s culture, how different personalities fit together in the workplace, and a candidate’s compatibility with the role, the platform delivers tangible facts and results to help inform more objective hiring decisions.

How it works

When a job/project is created within the platform, a Personality and Culture Fit assessment is sent out to the candidates, and a Workplace Environment questionnaire is sent to the Hiring Manager.

The personality data gathered from the candidates is analysed in the MyPeople analytics engine, which provides key indicators of their job fit compatibility. Our candidate surveys are based on the Big 5 Personality Index, which is the most academically validated personality test, to compare candidates’ personality characteristics, in order to assess which roles suit them best.

This personality data is correlated against information generated by the US labour workforce database – a catalogue of c. 40,000 job roles that have been scientifically researched and matched, to determine the ideal personalities and attributes best suited for the specific job functions required.

Each candidate’s cultural preferences are then mapped against the Hiring Managers’ responses, which determines the culture of their team and their preferred working environment – This analysis provides additional key indicators that highlight optimum matches in relation to this specific team culture.

Once all the results have been submitted, the platform generates a report for each candidate identifying the overall levels of job and culture fit, as well as outlining potential misalignments that warrant investigation. The impact of these is described at a more granular level, with the automated generation of natural language explanations. The report also highlights specific areas to explore in more detail with the candidate, as part of the interview process. Suggested interview questions are provided to shape and inform these conversations.

There’s value in data

By using a data-driven approach, not only do Recruiters receive robust insights and actions tailored to individual candidates for specific roles and teams, but they are also able to build a repository of candidate data for matching to future roles.

The benefits don’t stop there, from a Hiring Manager/client perspective, they can make choices with confidence knowing that candidates have been through a scientifically validated process – eliminating gut-feel decision-making, removing bias, improving the quality of hires, decreasing the time to hire, and reducing recruiting costs. All of which improve a company’s performance both short-term and long-term.

Finally, optimising recruitment processes can also have the added benefit of improving a candidate’s overall hiring experience. Factoring in a person’s personality and cultural preferences; increases the number and diversity of suitable job role matches, identifies companies and teams that share the same values & sense of purpose, and unlocks additional feedback that can help shape future choices about what they’re looking for in a role and an employer.

To summarise

By using a platform which combines technology and psychology to interpret people’s diverse characteristics and attributes into easy-to-understand profiles, you’re able to simplify your decisions about recruitment and optimise your hiring process.