Ask any Human Resources professional and they’ll tell you that two of their biggest challenges is attracting the right candidates and hiring them quickly. This is why companies often even pay their own employees for referrals to help solve this problem.
Recruiting is the lifeblood for any thriving organizations. Recruiting the right talent can infuse instant contributions while the wrong talent can not only stall the advancement of objectives for an organization today, but also put company behind in the future. Plus, the costs of turnover are significant. They include the cost of hiring for that position, training the new employee, any severance or unused paid time off, and managing the role when it is not filled.
While many human resource professionals try to keep a pulse on hiring, as an organization gets larger, it is impossible to keep track of the employees, but where they came from and how they’re performing. Using simple statistical analysis, human resource recruiters can employ a scientific approach to recruiting to help target the right candidates and bring them on board quickly.
This step can be done in different ways, in this example, we’ll a human resource professional in charge of recruiting is trying to assess the most effective recruiting grounds for her company. As a prestigious financial services firm in New York, recruiting efforts were focused on Ivy League Universities, local (New York) schools and the University of Michigan and Penn State University, the alma maters of the founders of the company.
First, as data is collected we graph a bar chart of the recruits to see the representation from the various schools. We do this by going to Graph à Bar Chart à Counts of Unique Values. We Click OK on Simple.
Under Categorical variables, we select Undergraduate.
[Screenshot 1]
We then get a graph that looks like this:
[Screenshot 2]
Based on the bar chart, we can see that despite similar recruiting efforts at all of the schools, the company ends up hiring the most people from University of Pennsylvania. The company also has a lot of success hiring from Columbia, Cornell, NYU and Penn State.
The company can also see it does not have a lot of success at Harvard and Princeton so perhaps it can save time and money by eliminating recruiting at these places or try to investigate further how to better attract these candidates.
While the bar chart helps demonstrate where the company is having success in terms of hiring people, it does not speak to the quality of those hires. What school is delivering the hires that perform the best?
The Human Resources department performs a box plot analysis to look at the performance scores and tenure of the individuals hired from each school.
To run this analysis they go to Graph à Boxplot à Select One Y with Two Groups
For Graph Variables they select “Average Performance Rating” and and for Categorical Variables they select “Undergraduate”
[Screenshot 3]
Then they get the following graph.
[Screenshot 4]
Based on the two box plot, the human resource department gains insight into the performance of the recruits. Interestingly, the best performing recruits come consistently from Harvard, Penn State and Michigan. That said, both Columbia, NYU and Princeton all produce solid performers, but there is much more variability of recruits. Clearly, Yale and Brown, on average have not been delivering good performers.
Without further data analysis, one might just simply focus on recruiting at Harvard, Penn State and Michigan. However, it is important to further analyze where the recruits are having success. To do so, we run an interaction plot.
[Screenshot 5]
Using this graph, we can determine which schools have delivered successful recruits in specific areas. As you can see, the recruits from University of Michigan performed well across most departments, but were particularly strong in marketing. Students from Penn State also performed consistently well, but excelled in sales. Princeton, which had significant variability, perform extremely well in Human Resources but not so much in other areas. Harvard students generally performed well, but were best when put in R&D. Columbia, which had a lot of variability, produced very strong engineers. Finally, NYU, which is a fertile recruiting ground for the company, produced generally solid results across all departments.
Armed with this knowledge and analysis, a recruiter is able to both cut recruiting activities and better target them.
By eliminating certain schools, like Brown and Yale, the company can save money and efforts. It could replace those activities at a school like Harvard, where there are consistently good performers, or simply save money.
As certain needs crop up, like additional sales, the recruiter could target efforts at Penn State where it has had success.
Rather than cutting all recruiting at Princeton, which doesn’t produce many hires, it could focus activities on recruiting Human Resources professionals.
Overall, by analyzing data in Minitab, Human Resources professionals can make their activities more targeted, more efficient and yield better results.
Try Companion by Minitab free for 30 days
Download your trial now