In the life sciences industry, making the right hire is critical to the proper allocation of your resources. The industry runs on brilliant talent, and it stands to reason that when you make a series of great hires (or even just one amazing hire), you can transform your organization from the inside out.
In this article, we’ll discuss how data-driven recruitment practices can help you get to—and stay at—a place where you are consistently making strong hiring decisions backed by facts and figures.
1. Define the variables that matter to you and start tracking them:
As you’re defining how you’ll best be able to recruit employees in the future, having a clear picture of your strengths and weaknesses can help you solidify a proven strategy. The more data you can gather on the success or failure of past practices, the better; however, your company doesn’t need twenty years of data to pull from to understand its strengths and weaknesses in the hiring cycle. The key is to collect the information that’s available and analyze the effect of your past practices on several key variables.
What are your long-term recruitment goals? Would you like to increase tenure length, lower the time to hire new employees, or increase the quality of candidates who apply for your open positions? As the data you collect starts to come together and tell a cohesive “story” of the recruitment strengths and weaknesses within your organization, you may add to or change these goals—that’s okay. Here are a few examples of data points to track as you define and implement your recruiting improvement initiatives:
- Total turnover rate for new hires (within a specified period, i.e., 6 months, 1 year, etc.)
- Cost per hire
- Job offer acceptance rate
- Hire rate (the rate at which open positions are filled versus tabled)
- Total cost of learning and development per employee
- Voluntary separation rate (regrettable turnover), including separate voluntary separation rates for racial, ethnic, and/or gender minorities in your industry
- Promotion rate (within a specified period, i.e., 18 months, 3 years, etc.)
- Diversity rankings (i.e., proportion of employees who are in racial or ethnic minorities or in a gender minority for your industry)
- Total time from job posting to hire
- Total time offer acceptance to start date
- Vacancy rate (proportion of open positions)
2. Analyze past and current data to understand your current strengths and weaknesses in the hiring cycle:
Survey current employees about their experiences in the recruitment and onboarding stages. A simple yet effective employee experience survey can help you gather deep insights. Seeing your recruitment strengths and weaknesses from the perspective of those who have been through the entire recruitment process will help to paint an accurate picture of your organization’s strengths and weaknesses, so you can more efficiently determine how to invest your improvement resources and efforts.
To the extent possible, compare your key recruiting metrics with competitors. Of course, not all competitor data will be available to you. Some information, however, like time to hire, is discernible with a bit of effort. By tracking when your competitor posts new roles and when the position is filled on LinkedIn, you can get a good idea of their average time to hire rates—and compare where you stack up.
Get clear on your offer acceptance rate for job offers. Offer acceptance rate isn’t a metric that is commonly tracked, especially when busy companies are focusing on their core business. But it’s worth beginning to track this data point so that you can see the impact of your recruitment initiatives on your overall hiring success. According to PwC’s Saratoga Workforce Index, the 2022 national average for accepted job offers stood at 84 percent.
3. Select a recruiter with advanced applicant screening abilities:
It’s critical to work with recruiters who have strong experience in searching for candidates in the life sciences industry. Life sciences companies are often looking for candidates with highly specialized experience and education, potentially with advanced knowledge in regulatory affairs, research and development, or clinical trials. But these days, it isn’t always enough to have had great experience finding employees for clients—recruiters should have tools to give their clients the edge over the competition in the battle for the industry’s top talent.
There is a new world of cutting-edge technology available to help employers analyze the data they have from past practices in order to obtain the results they’re looking for in the future. When you work with an experienced life sciences recruiting firm like Cornerstone Search Group, you can avail yourself of those technologies, like predictive analytics and enhanced candidate screening methods, which experienced recruiters often have in-house and can use to your benefit.
In general, predictive analytics works by using your past recruiting data to predict future outcomes and provide improvement suggestions. Data can be analyzed to determine which types of candidates will be successful at your firm given a host of variables, such as their experience, skills, performance, and more.
Enhanced candidate screening works by combining the power of predictive analytics with a top-of-the-line applicant tracking system (ATS). Using this combination, recruiters are able to give candidates holistic scores and rank them based on an educated predicted “fit” for the role. Because these models often learn from themselves, this data-driven recruitment process has been shown to produce the best hires time and time again.
Cornerstone Search Group Utilizes Advanced Data-Driven Recruitment Practices
The life sciences talent landscape is competitive. When you partner with Cornerstone Search Group, you gain an edge over your competitors. Cornerstone can help you tap into a deep network of specialized and senior talent, matching you with the team members who will help you take your organization to the next level.
We’ll also help you use advanced data-driven recruitment practices to turn your recruitment metrics around for good. In time, you’ll have built a stronger, more advanced company from the inside out.
Start a conversation with us today to learn more.
