On the most fundamental level, recruiting is a triad. All recruiting comes down to three basic decisions: 1) time, 2) cost, and 3) quality. These are the three recruiting pillars when it comes to effective recruiting and hiring. In most cases you cases, two of these may come easily – but the third one can be a real challenge for talent acquisition and recruiting teams.

Three Recruitment Principles for Every Hiring Situation

These foundational recruitment principles are the most important truth every recruiter who is hiring should be thinking about right now. In a near-zero unemployment economy, we must move quickly in order to compete in this talent market. Candidates have more choices now than ever before, and sacrificing time is no longer an option. Hold out for cost or quality, and you may end up settling on a candidate who has been on the job market longer and may not be the employee you could have had if you’d moved faster. In fact, dragging out hiring decisions doesn’t actually improve hiring quality; it reduces it.

Streamline and Prioritize Recruiting with Data

Data is at the heart of many of the decisions we make, but it’s also the key to improving metrics in the three key areas of time, cost, and quality. It’s nearly impossible to separate time from quality from cost, as the crossover effect is inherent in these recruiting pillars when it comes to analytics.

In order to hit all three components of the recruiting triad effectively, metrics and predictive analytics will allow you and your recruiting team to make the best-informed decisions about what to automate, where to spend time on high-touch tasks, how to reach candidates more quickly and in a targeted way, as well as manage costs.

Using analytics beginning at the sourcing stage can help you quickly identify top prospects for your hiring funnel. This is one function you can streamline via automation. Using assessment programs and hiring algorithms not only allow you to quantify the skills you’ve identified in top talent, but also identify candidates who are not a good cultural fit or may pose a turnover risk.

Recruiting Metrics and Analytics Dramatically Improve Results

According to Randstad Sourceright, recruiting metrics and analytics can dramatically improve sourcing by helping identify the best recruitment resources for the talent you need. This could include everything from mining social media platforms to identifying the top job search aggregators with the best candidates, reaching unique candidate audiences, and optimizing your job advertising investment using technology like Talroo, to knowing which job titles are the most appealing to potential employees.

Streamlining your sourcing means positive returns in the form of better, more efficient hires that will improve quality, time-to-hire, and ultimately save money.

When developing a budget for a hiring campaign, targeting is key to reaching top-level candidates quickly. A performance-based advertising model gives you the tools to hyper-target your job ad based on many factors. For example, for the real estate industry consider what your top candidates might search for not just when considering a job change, but also what they might search for related to career development. By creating your targeted campaign around these keywords, you’ve instantly broadened your job ad reach from active job seekers to passive candidates.

Because your candidate funnels are built on strategy, efficient advertising helps recruiters drive qualified and highly targeted traffic to job postings more efficiently than traditional job postings on job boards. In the talent marketplace, performance-based advertising has one significant difference from standard CPC ad buys. While job ads can be created and scaled, unlike traditional digital advertising, job ads have an end date. Once a position is filled, it should and can be immediately pulled from an ad buy. The biggest benefit to this type of advertising is that you can set specific rules that are directly related to your ad budget, to reach a specific audience, for example, or to target a specific conversion rate.

Using SEO and Google’s Algorithm to Your Advantage

And a nice side effect: Google for Jobs is pulling traffic from traditional job boards at a level we haven’t seen in the history of online job sites. Google’s algorithm rewards certain features of job postings, like salary ranges and keyword matching, which in turn allows you to optimize your ads without putting the budget into CPC ad buys.

We all want to be able to move faster, spend less, find better candidates. Performance-based models are changing our approach to all three recruiting fundamentals. By using metrics combined with the right tools and strategy, you can monitor your costs, allowing you to focus on targeted quality candidates that meet specific criteria faster than traditional models.