Talentech blog

[Checklist] How to get started with recruitment analyses

Written by Anders Jørgensen | May 30, 2023 5:00:00 AM

A good recruitment analysis can develop and improve your recruitment process, so you find candidates with better qualifications as well as keep them for a longer time period and cut costs along the way.

Download the checklist as a PDF here

A recruitment analysis can be a magnifying glass, so you can look more closely at your entire recruitment process. It provides you with an overview of how candidates perceive your company, and what makes them apply for an available job. It makes you more knowledgeable about your onboarding process and subsequent employee retention, and in this way, you can see where you can reduce costs by making your process more efficient. It is valuable knowledge in a market that caters to the candidates, where companies compete savagely for the qualified working force – and it is also valuable knowledge in case the market development goes in the opposite direction.

But where do you start?


You can gain more knowledge about this very topic here, where we have put together the most essential pieces of information, so that you can get off to a good start making recruitment analyses in your company.

The process for data gathering

There is no analysis without data. You therefore need to have gathered the data that influences your recruitment and have it integrated into a platform that can provide you with reliable insight and give you an overview of your process. In this case, there are several things to take into consideration.

  • Find out what you want to look into

First and foremost, it is important that you find out what you want to look into specifically. What do you want to know? Which data does it require? And how is that data best acquired? Limit yourself and only start in one place, so you are not biting off more than you can chew. In the second and third points you find inspiration for your first inquiry.

  • Set up a data structure and be consistent

After the first step, you then need to find out how the data structure should be. Is it possible to make a relevant analysis based on the data points you have specified? How do you register the data and put the data set together? Especially the registering is important when handling large data sets. If you do not register the data sets in the same way, you won’t be able to compare them, and then the work will be wasted.

  • Know that not everything needs to be established initially

It is relevant to consider the data quality critically, but it is also important to underline the fact that you don’t need to have established all structures before you can perform a data analysis. The data gathering cannot only be a way to gain knowledge about your company, because it can also reveal flaws in your method. The most important thing is that the processes are the same, so that you can compare your results.

Measuring the candidate attraction process

Employer branding is important to any company that wants to attract candidates to their open positions. Based on a recruitment analysis, you have the opportunity to measure how well your company performs at this. There are many relevant pieces of data when you dive deep into the statistics for your website, channels, and job ads.

  • Look over your website with a fine-toothed comb

Are people looking at your website or career page, and if so, what kind of content are they looking for? Is your information up-to-date, and does your company appear relevant? These are all important questions to answer.

  • Evaluate your use of channels

It is also important to look into who and how many people engage with your content and on which channels, and how many who click to view your job ads at job sites, and whether there are people who sign up via marketing channels or career fairs. The answers to these questions can be indicative of what works and what could be better.

  • Examine your applicant-to-hire ratio

You can also get wiser by examining how many people look at your job ads on average, how many apply, and how many of those applicants who get a job interview. This will provide you with useable knowledge that you can rely on going forward. It can decide whether you need 25, 50 or 100 applications in order to get a qualified hire.

  • Do you need to do other things?

Depending on the above, you can consider if you need to do other things in order to attract qualified candidates. These past ten years, for example, the number of companies that use LinkedIn as part of their recruitment process has increased from 10 % to an impressive 59 %. It is also relevant to look at the cost per hire and then assess whether some channels work better and are more cost-effective than others.

How is the procedure after the new hire has started their work?

The recruitment effort doesn’t stop even though the contract has been signed, and the new hire has started working at your company. The effort continues until the new hire is comfortable in their new job and can handle it on their own. Therefore, the onboarding process and the continued development of the employees at your company are also relevant aspects of the recruitment analysis.

  • Evaluate your employment process

Which KPIs do you have? What is your time to productivity rate, i.e. when does the new employee start to create value at your company? How has the candidate experienced the onboarding process, and could some things be improved?

  • Look into your response time

It can also be relevant to look into what the response time has been for rejections and invitations for job interviews. If you take too long to get back to the applicants, it can lead to impatience, and it can potentially result in drop offs. Likewise, it can also make candidates hesitate to apply for a job at your company, if they have applied before and know that the waiting time is long.

  • Assess the development over a longer period of time

A recruitment analysis can also be utilised to increase employee retention. This can be done by continually gathering data about all employees’ job position and development within the organisation. This can, however, be an unmanageable and time-consuming process if everything needs to be done manually. Therefore, digitising and automating this process can be very valuable.

Recruitment analyses are something that we put great emphasis on, as they can easily show us which points can be improved upon, and we can thereby focus on these in the recruitment process. For this very reason, Ontame became a part of our product portfolio a few years ago. A manual recruitment analysis can be de-prioritised on a busy working day, so if you are looking for a system that can give you an overview of all of the above, then Ontame might be right for you. It is an HR tool that helps you make data-driven decisions. You can extract useful numbers, statistics, and reports, and you can even see it in a comprehensible way in the form of graphs and data visualisation. You can measure your employer branding, identify shortcomings in your recruitment processes, and get an overview of the entire candidate journey from attraction to employment start. You can have it made clear where the efficiency can be increased, and where costs can be reduced. And then you can easily compare all of these numbers and statistics to your KPIs, your company’s goals, and your business strategy.