Career showcases and the power of data

March 8th, 2018 | Industry News

Many employers are exploring the possibilities that career showcasing can offer recruitment. For example, over 700 people recently travelled to North Tyneside for a recruitment event hosted by a training organisation for a wind industry service provider.

Career showcasing offers recruiters the following benefits:

• Talent identification – both current and future
• Pipelining for planned projects
• Immediate need recruitment

There’s a further benefit too, which is that over time, sophisticated recruitment software can track attenders at such events, chart their career progress and recognise where top talent pools are likely to accumulate. Web based recruitment software can be used in real time to log the engagement of candidates at showcases, giving a 360 degree picture of their interests and preferences, allowing savvy recruiters to stockpile talent for future use and to identify likely career trajectories, giving them the ability to forecast when a particular candidate will be of maximum value to an organisation. Applicant tracking software also helps companies, and recruiters to assess the impact of their advertising and their appeal to potential talent. For all these reasons career showcasing, sensitively handled, can give businesses an insight into their performance as a potential employer, allowing them to fine-tune their approach to top talent.

Data and recruitment

The Federation of Small Businesses reports that one in five small businesses are actually unaware of the imminent arrival of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) on 25 May, which requires organisations to report data breaches, have a data protection officer in organisations with large amounts of stored data and to give consumers and citizens better access to data held about them. Fines for failures could be 4% of annual global turnover, capped at £17 million.

Since the arrival of online job boards such as Monster and then aggregators such as LinkedIn, data has been the bedrock of recruitment at all levels in the industry. Recruiters have mined data to create a recruitment database that, for example, identifies how long people in a specific industry have been in their role without advancement, giving them a pool of potentially dissatisfied individuals who can be approached when relevant positions become available. GDPR means that recruiters need to identify which data they hold that could be sensitive, to ensure all data held is secure and be ready to share data with individuals and companies who request the right to see information held about them. When companies compare recruitment software, it’s vital that they look at GDPR compliance as a key feature of their applicant tracking system.