Picture this: you have a candidate’s name, phone number, and some of their previous work experience, but not their complete work history. You have enough information to reach out about a position, but there are still a lot of unknowns: like their email address, where they’ve worked most recently, and which of their skills would be relevant to the role you’re trying to fill.
Now imagine reaching out to that same candidate, but you have all of their information loaded into your ATS or CRM: name, address, email, phone, skills, and up-to-date work experience. Reaching out with the perfect role becomes a lot easier.
In the competitive world of recruiting, the quality of your candidate data can make or break your hiring success. High-quality data gives you a distinct advantage, enabling you to identify and engage the best talent quickly. Likewise, relying on poor or incomplete data can lead to missed opportunities, inefficient processes, and ultimately, a weaker recruitment strategy. To stay ahead, it’s crucial to leverage high-quality, accurate data to inform your recruiting decisions.
What is rich candidate data?
In recruiting, “rich data” refers to high-quality candidate data that goes beyond basic details like names and job titles. It encompasses deeper information, like a candidate’s skills, experiences, preferences, and behaviors—which could be gathered from candidate engagement or big data.
Why Rich Candidate Data Matters
According to Gartner, poor data quality costs organizations an average of $12.9 million each year. And according to Forbes, without high-quality data, your decision-making, productivity and compliance are all at risk.
In recruiting, having more available information means you can better identify the best and most appropriate roles for your candidates. It’s easier to customize your outreach, and easier for you to find candidates in your database when you’re looking to fill a specific role.
Meanwhile, incomplete, outdated, or inconsistent candidate data is a common issue that can significantly complicate the hiring process.
When recruiters are working with poor-quality data, it takes longer to find the best candidates, which can lead to missed opportunities and longer time-to-fill. Consider the negative impact those challenges can have on your organization’s brand:
“If you have an old profile or two conflicting profiles, your automation and messaging to engage can come across as spammy and wreak havoc on the trust someone has in your brand.” - Chris Wirt, Daxtra
Challenges in Gathering and Managing Rich Candidate Data
Effectively gathering and maintaining rich candidate data isn’t an easy feat, and it’s something that recruiters deal with often in their day-to-day work.
Common challenges in gathering data might include:
- Data Collection: sourcing candidate data can be a challenge, whether you’re finding that data in resumes, on social media sites or other online sources.
- Data Accuracy: ensuring accuracy for collected data is another challenge, especially for online candidate data sources, as they may display information that is out of date or inconsistent with a candidate’s resume.
- Privacy and Compliance: recruiters are no strangers to data privacy regulations like GDPR, which provides legal requirements and guidelines for obtaining and storing candidate data.
Managing data is also a core component of leveraging rich data. Effectively managing data requires the intentional collection of candidate data, as well as established protocols and tech solutions to store it properly, like creating an optimized and frictionless data entry process for your ATS or CRM, or implementing regular data cleanups to identify and correct data inaccuracies before your database becomes cluttered with out-of-date information.
Solutions for Maintaining Rich Candidate Data
Maintaining rich candidate data starts with intentional data collection: take stock of what specific data you need to make informed decisions about candidates and roles. From there, regular data cleaning, simplifying data entry processes, and implementing effective data management systems can further enhance data quality, making it easier for recruiters to access and utilize comprehensive candidate information.
You can also consider tech solutions. There are tools (like Daxtra Capture) that are specifically designed to extract candidate data and load it into your ATS or CRM, while also checking each candidate for existing duplicates in your database and tracking sources for each candidate.
Pairing best practices for data hygiene and data entry with automation can be a winning combination that revolutionizes the way recruiters manage their candidate data and leverage it for successful recruiting.
Leveraging Rich Data in Recruiting
The quality of your candidate data isn't just a detail—it's a decisive factor in your success. Rich, accurate, and up-to-date data empowers recruiters to make informed decisions, streamline their processes, and engage the best talent efficiently.
Investing in the quality of your data is important, and Daxtra can help. Read our five tips to build a healthy database, discover the automated admin power of Daxtra Capture or read how Allen Recruitment leveraged Daxtra Capture with Daxtra Search Nexus to make the most of their candidate data.
