Measuring HR Tech Effectiveness & Assessing New Tools

Spring is known as the season of renewal and rebirth, when everything comes alive after the cold of winter. It’s also an optimal time to analyze how your HR tech and recruiting tools performed through the first quarter and, in many cases, how they compare to the year prior. It is the perfect time to celebrate successes and identify trends to build upon and create a strategy to ensure your success is repeatable. Taking a look back enables you to be proactive going forward and make any changes you may need through training or updating tools. 

Your analysis can be done in a variety of different ways. This depends on the data points that matter to your organization and the way in which you measure success. This analysis will set the tone for building upon your success and how to make continued improvements to its current state; finding out what is working, what isn’t working, how to handle the upcoming changes, and knowing what you need to continue to monitor closely. The following four steps can help get you started measuring HR tech effectiveness and assessing new tools!

Manage and analyze existing data

Understanding ROI is critical to the recruitment team, to ensure they are focused on the right activity and using it as efficiently as possible. One variable that is important to look at is the time taken by a recruiter to complete a task using a new tool compared to time without the tool. 

Time is a luxury many recruiters will say they don’t have enough of, so measuring the time-saving performance of the tool for each user is vital. Then, dive further into the results to understand if there are any outliers, any opportunity to build on success through training, or other changes that may be impactful to your team or business.

Consider your current and upcoming business needs

There is a seemingly endless list of possibilities in the recruiting space when it comes to tools to find and engage candidates, with many niche tools allowing you to dig into a particular industry or vertical. However, if you get too drawn into the path of looking at what’s out there, you may spend a lot of time and money which doesn’t lead to increased productivity. It’s important to map out your current and anticipated business demands then review your current tools and their performance; do you have what you need to get the job done? If you are going to look at something new, making sure it’s the right fit for you at the time. This may include reviewing:

• Number and type of positions open overall
• Number and type of positions recruited by each individual
• New or challenging markets and the needs within each
• Industry or vertical of the positions, relative to the market; understanding supply and demand
• Historical recruiting data related to these types of roles and markets, and what was necessary to fill the jobs previously (i.e., throughput, time in the process, time to fill, among others)

Once you’ve reviewed the variables relevant to your business, you can better understand whether there are any existing areas of bottleneck or challenges you want to resolve. If you have identifiable critical data points to address, you can better determine what type of tools you want to investigate.

Evaluate new technology options

HR technology is ever evolving, with new and innovative ways to contact candidates; whether it’s finding their contact information through a people aggregator on a social site, or sending an email with a video embedded in it, texting  mass amounts of candidates at once, or any multitude of other mediums of contact. You need to go into the evaluation with a clear idea of what you want to get out of it. This will depend on the reason you are looking for something, and the type of technology it is. Personally, a type of scorecard is my preference as it creates a solid comparison from each demo completed to compare a static set of criteria.

Using the analysis already completed, what problems are you trying to solve? What success are you hoping to build upon? From here, draft out what you want this tool to do and what you expect to get out of it, then create a scorecard of the general categories you want to evaluate. This scorecard could include anything from system integrations, cost and languages, to ease of use. What matters most is that you define them upfront, then remain consistent in the evaluation of similar tools.

Continuous Improvement

Selecting a technology isn’t the end of the process. Just as you should have data points indicating the need for a tool, and criteria to evaluate the capabilities and limitations of the tool, you should also make clear and transparent expectations of what success will look like before you begin using it. These should parallel the data points you uncovered in your initial analysis, what improvement or change you expect to see, and in what timeframe. Without clearly defined metrics for success, you risk not being able to articulate its impact!

Embrace spring cleaning and declutter your recruitment and HR tech strategy by following these four steps. Streamline your ability to be successful by focusing your time and energy on the actions that bring results, and recalibrate your goals and expectations accordingly.