It’s not a secret to anyone that if you want to build a top class company, you need to hire top class employees. That’s probably the main reason why companies invest so heavily in their recruitment teams. The truth is: the best talent has the luxury to be selective about who they work for and depending on the industry most of them have impressive number of offers when they decide to look for a job.
It is your company’s job to persuade them to join your mission. If you manage to convince them and build a strong team right at the start, you will be able to convince investors and customers with the same success in the long run. That’s the power of recruiting and that is the main reason why it should not be underestimated.
In the past, the heavy burden was on individual recruiters, who had to rely on their intuition while hiring. But recently the evolution of the whole recruitment process is beginning to be shaped more and more by Big Data, also known as, data analytics. And the more it does the more accurate become the decisions made. The biggest advantage of recruiters nowadays is the luxury of relying on facts rather than plain intuition when it comes to issuing job offers, as vast amount of data aggregated from different sources (especially social media) is right at hand with limitless list of prospective candidates – it makes the job easier and more organized for them.
At this day and age, the power of data is used more to make “people decisions” and is contributing more and more to the hiring process, as well as, recruitment marketing, desirable candidate filtering, brainstorming interview questions and making important decisions such as who to hire or promote.
“People decisions” bear a tremendous impact on the performance of companies and that’s why it is only logical to treat your employees like your company’s most valuable assets. Those decisions have an ongoing character. Therefore, it makes a lot of sense to invest in such tools and systems (analytics-driven) for talent recruitment processes, just as many companies would at the product development stage. Probably the strongest analytical tool for recruitment is data scraping, capable to get everything done fast and on point.
The continuous success of companies that have come out with visible results of data analysis and its impact on their recruitment business, encourages the growth of the practice. Big Data already has its major impact on the recruitment process. For example recruiters in the IT space have access to online services leveraging Big Data and analytics to grade programmers based on their coding abilities and contribution to the online IT community. This is a huge advantage for a recruiter and provides them with deep insight into the skillset of the prospective future candidate which is later used, together with other information, to determine just how suitable the candidate is to the position.
Now, having this in mind, let’s zoom in and discuss how companies can benefit from web scraping as a valuable instrument for proactive hiring.
Manage your data
It is appropriate to mention large (international) companies which have multiple teams spread around the globe as the ones benefiting the most from the insight into talent base that Big Data can offer. For instance, HR departments of those companies can have a better idea whether to shore up resources or trim them down in specific areas using data from sales and billing together with data from the company’s staff database. Data available from a company’s internal systems and external sources such as demographic information, public transportation, compensation surveys, and social media can reveal patterns that will help a company determine where to hire from and at what cost. HR can use this information for ongoing talent management as well as for determining training/development necessities for individuals and teams.
Guesswork vs constructive decision making
If you embed necessary analytic insight into hiring process, the element of guesswork will be dramatically reduced with time. Predictive analytics is hardly ever an advantage and often ends up being nothing more than statements like “I think this guy can blend well with the team”, ”I think this is our person” instead of constructive decision making. As mentioned earlier, one of the biggest advantages the recruitment business has nowadays is the availability of online job listing sites that capture heaps of data and give perfect insight into what is likely to provoke qualitative and quantitative response.
What can recruiters do to use this huge advantage to their benefit?
They can scrape or crawl data off of those kind of job portals and run analytics through it. By doing so they are able to determine the likelihood of filling a particular position in a specified location based on historical data patterns. Everything is relevant and important here and can impact the results of the research. Every little nuance, like the day of the week, certain types of jobs should be posted or other kinds of factors that will influence the decision making of the prospective candidate. In this way web scraping can help greatly to make better use of recruitment marketing resources.
The power of data scraping
Finally, if the recruiters use the power of data and web scraping to make “people decisions” for their companies it is undeniable that recruitment marketing, desirable candidate filtering, important decision making can be done with more precision and lesser involvement of intuition. This is not a luxury anymore thanks to the availability of online job listing websites, as well as, the access to online assessment services.
Do you use web scraping as a method of proactive hiring in your company? If you do, feel free to share your success story with us in the comment section below!
