Have you ever been at a conference and heard a stat so wild you just couldn’t believe it? We talked about it at my webinar with my friends at Pin.com. We did some recruiting metric trivia. I shared some of the stats I do (and don’t) trust, why they matter, and offered some practical advice for your recruiting roadmap. But today’s post isn’t all about trivia – it’s about knowing which stats you can trust.
Every recruiting tool has a dashboard. In fact, it’s usually the first thing the sales engineer or whoever is running the demo will display when you join the pitch meeting. They’re trying to show you they can help you “get results” and “hire faster.” Usually, this is exactly when I start to get a little skeptical. Data without context is just marketing and I’m not interested in being marketed to when I’m making a purchasing decision.
I’ve been around the demo block and seen these false data points first hand. Job boards that claim they have 1 billion active candidates then when I ask them to search, all I see are outdated profiles. Email outreach tools that claim a 99% response rate when the stat is based on one person that emailed 10 people.
As AI becomes a bigger part of recruiting workflows, we’re going to see more exaggerated dashboards, downloads, and data points. Knowing how to evaluate a data point for trustworthiness will help you in a few ways. First, it makes you a more savvy buyer. Second, you know what data is worth sharing to the executives. Finally, you know what next steps are worth prioritizing in your recruiting strategy based on market sentiment.
What I Look For Before I Trust a Recruiting Metric
So, how do you separate the marketing hype from legitimate market intelligence? You need a reliable vetting process. To protect your budget and your credibility with executive leadership, you need a system to stress-test the numbers. Here are the four critical questions I ask about any data point before I trust it:
Before I share any data point, I look for four things:
- Clear Definitions. A metric is only useful if everyone agrees on what it means. What qualifies as a sourced candidate? What counts as engagement? How is the response rate calculated? If the definition is vague, the number becomes meaningless.
- Scale. If you didn’t survey more than 1,000 people, that’s not a trend I trust. Hiring is just too varied across regions, levels, and industries. Analyzing 100 people from the same region is not going to provide insight into trends you should trust.
- Outcomes. This one is specific for technology teams who are trying to tout results. Trustworthy metrics connect directly to measured recruiting outcomes. A sourcing tool can generate thousands of prospects, but if those prospects don’t convert into conversations, interviews, and hires, the activity metrics like “3 million emails sent” don’t matter much.
- Who Does This Serve? This one is a little nuanced, but will change the way you read surveys. Before accepting any survey at face value, ask yourself: Does the creator benefit from the results being true? Companies leverage self-serving surveys with tiny data pools to manufacture a problem that aligns with their solution. For example, does it benefit a national credentialing organization to produce survey data that shows you’re behind the AI trends? Of course it does. Does it benefit an AI interview company to produce a survey that says candidates love AI interviews? Sure.
Recruiting Trivia!
It seems like every week my inbox is filling up with recruiting reports, benchmark studies, and “must-know” statistics. Now, I have the time to read what looks interesting because it helps me write this blog and provide data to back up my POV at events. You and your team on the other hand… Well, I know how busy you are, so I hosted this trivia session to catch you up.
At my recruiting trivia session, we had an interactive, one-hour webinar where we put some of the most talked-about recruiting stats to the test.
Together, we explored which metrics deserve your attention, which ones might be misleading, and how to evaluate the trustworthiness of surveys before using them to guide hiring decisions. Folks made their best guesses, compared answers with other attendees, and left with new friends who love digging into the data as much as you do.
Thanks to my sponsor, Pin.com, for making it possible.