On this week’s episode of Taking the Hire Road, Leah Shaver sat down with Nathan J. Widener, chief data officer at Career Now Brands, to discuss the powerful ways data can be used in recruiting.
“Data is everywhere. We all generate a steady stream of data just by going about our daily lives. The challenge is harnessing the right data at the right time and turning it into something useful, or ‘activating the data,’” Widener said.
How that data is activated is highly situational, however, and that’s where expertise and experience come in. According to Widener, “Data has always been an integral part of everything we do at Career Now to deliver results for our clients, but data activation can take many forms, such as selecting audiences for an SMS class or mining statistics to determine why one recruitment market is performing better than another.”
Career Now is intentional about gathering data wherever possible in order to continually improve results. “All of our products and services are deeply integrated with our data assets, whether that’s finding matches for a hard-to-recruit diesel technician or historical hiring data and geofence studies to optimize the campaign,” Widener said.
Gathering the most relevant datasets is just one component of successful analysis. “We host our own candidate-facing products such as CDL Job Now and Career School Now, which have millions of sessions each year, so we see our fair share of data,” Widener said. “We continually invest in those technologies and skill sets that allow us to activate data in a variety of ways,” he added.
According to Widener, one of the primary benefits of proper data analysis is the cost savings from developing cohesive strategies before investing heavily in marketing budgets. “When we work with recruitment teams, we want to understand their goals, but we like to take it a step further and use their historical performance data to analyze where and how we go to market, what tactics to use for drivers versus techs, and any other variables that impact performance. We find that this data-driven planning before deploying dollars into the market really makes a difference in results,” he said.
As in any industry, there are carriers on both ends of the spectrum when it comes to data gathering and metric-driven goals. “In either case, we like to do a market analysis before we launch a campaign – map out historical hires, where terminals or orientation locations are, and figure out where they’re seeing success and where they’re having challenges,” Widener explained. “We can overlay our database of marketable drivers and performance results of various tactics and even bring in third-party data engagement results. All of this data we put together to paint a picture of what we might expect and help set client goals.”
The more information a client provides, the better results Career Now can typically achieve. The company’s strategy, according to Widener, is understanding each carrier’s specific recruiting process and what metrics it uses to monitor the steps in that process. “The marketing plan we design might be good at generating quality leads, but that’s no guarantee that will convert to more hires,” Widener said.
Every recruitment process involves multiple milestones, and each of these steps is a potentially important source of data analysis. Every prospective hire needs to at least fill out an application and speak with a recruiter in some capacity, and that alone accounts for two milestones.
“If a recruiter thinks about their whole recruiting funnel, there are several more milestones, including interview scheduling, position offers and so on, and often these are all slightly unique to each carrier,” Widener said.
Ideally, Career Now helps clients construct this funnel in a model where hires are at the bottom and marketing efforts and lead acquisition are at the top. “The more visibility you can glean into each milestone along the way, the better we’ll be at spotting issues. We visualize this data for clients who provide it, and it’s very telling. You can see where the funnel collapses down at a pinch point,” he said.
Sometimes, according to Widener, that pinch point isn’t solved by spending more money or shifting marketing funds, but by reexamining the process itself. “Sadly, in some cases where we don’t have that kind of data from the client, we will ramp up spending and increase marketing budget and actually exacerbate the problem,” he said. “We can help clients with these issues, but all of the solutions rely on timely, accurate data.”
Click here to learn more about Career Now Brands.
Sponsors: The National Transportation Institute, Career Now Brands, Carrier Intelligence, Infinit-I Workforce Solutions, WorkHound, Asurint, Arya by Leoforce, Transportation Marketing Group, Seiza, Drive My Way, F|Staff, Trucksafe Consulting, Seated Social, Repowr
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