Big data: buzzword or big business?

Jo Faragher

There’s been a lot of talk about how ‘big data’ can give agencies the competitive edge. But how many are really making the best use of data and what value can it bring? Jo Faragher reports. 

Think about the volume of data going through your agency every day: the details stored in your candidate database, your interactions on Facebook and Twitter, your investment in CV databases and advertising on job boards. Now consider whether you’re really getting the best out of that data, and what you’re doing with the insights it provides you.

Dan Martin, managing director of job-posting technology company Broadbean, believes that many recruiters are not extracting the full value of all the data that’s available to them. “If you go back 15 years, recruiters were valued on the size of their database, it was a key asset,” he says. “But now job boards have moved on so much, and there’s an assumption you can constantly refresh the people you’re looking at for each role. Agencies spend a fortune on CV databases and advertising, but are not making the best use of this data.”

Many industry experts believe that ‘big data’ – a buzz-term that is gaining prominence across a number of industries – will be the next big revolution in recruitment. The term refers to large volumes of data, and how that data is stored, searched, sorted and analysed to provide useful business insights.

What is big data?

Peter Linas, Bullhorn

In some large commercial organisations, huge data centres house billions of nuggets of information, and teams of technical and statistical experts come together to find ways to extract useful information. Managers then use that information to make informed decisions on where to take their business.

Perhaps the most striking illustration of how effective this approach can be is in the retail world. There is a high-profile example of US supermarket chain Target, which thanks to all the data available on her purchasing habits, concluded that one teenage customer was most likely pregnant, and began sending her coupons for baby food and clothing. Her father found the coupons and was understandably shocked.

In recruitment, the insights might not be as controversial or the volume of data on anything like the same scale, but the principle is the same – to generate intelligent insights on how you can run your business more effectively.  “It allows a level of discussion and intelligence into the business that you can only get if you really dig into those numbers. It enables you to make good business decisions,” explains Peter Linas, managing director for Europe, the Middle East and Africa for Bullhorn, a recruitment software company.

Many agencies will already be extracting simple metrics from their CRM systems – from how many calls consultants make to how many offers have been made by a certain client – but it is often a combination of metrics that can provide the best intelligence. As Martin explains: “Facebook might be delivering you high volume of applicants, but are they good candidates who are getting interviews and offers? The companies that look at this data use these reports to refine their strategy and become better at what they do.”

Dig deeper

Martin believes there are four key areas where recruiters could be exploiting data in a more effective way. First is their own candidate database. “Candidates could be useful for future roles but often, consultants start their search from scratch each time,” he says. Secondly, he adds, too few recruiters use data to look critically at the platforms they’re using to advertise roles – so if they’re looking for an accountant, is there one job board that suits their brand better?

Another useful source of intelligence is external market data. Salary surveys and job indices published by job boards such as Reed and Monster, used in tandem with information extracted from your own database, could provide some useful insights, as could regional employment statistics. This information is particularly relevant if an agency is opening a desk in a new market, or opening a new regional office.

Finally, one of the most valuable seams of data to mine is your own agency’s sales performance data. Martin explains: “In the past, agencies have tended to measure consultants on fairly basic key performance indicators (KPIs), such as how many calls they make. Now they have data they can use from a number of systems (CRM, email, social media) that can help them to tell what makes a particular individual successful.”

To help with this, there are a number of products now on the market that can help agencies to see more clearly how effective individual consultants or teams are. Companies such as Cube19 and US-based InsightSquared offer data intelligence tools that can sit on top of CRM systems and show (as a news feed or league table, for example) how sales people are performing and what they need to do to achieve their targets.

“In the not-so-distant past, data intelligence tools were a luxury for only the largest businesses. Every day staffing and recruiting firms record valuable information in their applicant tracking systems that traditionally has not been decipherable. Our mission is to unlock the potential of that data for all small and medium businesses, turning their data into a tool to run their businesses more successfully and more intelligently,” says Fred Shilmover, InsightSquared’s CEO.

In terms of developing staff to achieve their best performance, there is a clear return on investment with these tools, according to Martin. “You might discover that the person who’s making the numbers is not the person meeting all their KPIs. That person might prefer to meet people face to face and be more successful that way – forcing them to make a certain number of calls might be a counterproductive target for them.”

Looking at your data in this way could also identify sources of untapped revenue, believes Linas at Bullhorn. “It’s also important to see what information you’re not getting. Who’s not entering everything into the CRM system and what insights are they missing out on as a result? If this person engages at 95/100%, how much more profitable could we be?”

Early days

It’s still early days in terms of recruitment’s relationship with big data. According to analyst company Forrester, only 21% of small and medium sized businesses have deployed the sort of business intelligence technology that can provide this level of insight.

Over time, however, agencies will be able to tap into an ever-growing mountain of useful data and have access to more and more sophisticated analysis tools – even predict candidate behaviour.

Richard Haycock, HCM sales director for software giant Oracle, thinks that recruiters and HR professionals will have to apply a “combination of statistics and philosophy” to make sense of the insights coming through.  “Software can now help you analyse huge volumes of unstructured data – for example billions of Twitter posts – for attitudes and trends. The challenge will be in how those insights should be applied.”

This final point is crucial to big data becoming more than a buzz-term and something of real value to agencies. Knowledge is power, so use it well.