Why Candidate Segmentation is the Ultimate Recruiting Hack

Not all candidates are created equal.

Your sales candidates aren’t like your engineering candidates, who aren’t like your marketing candidates. They have different skills, personalities, and work habits, and what makes them good candidates for each position is a unique blend of those qualities.

Hiring teams would never use the same hiring criteria for different roles, yet why do many organizations structure their hiring process as a one size fits all solution? It’s a problem because it ignores the specific characteristics that help people succeed in different roles.

Knowing exactly what abilities and aptitudes are most valuable for certain roles is a crucial aspect of efficiently hiring the right people.

Implementing candidate segmentation is your chance to do that.

First things first. What’s candidate segmentation?

It’s a method of dividing your job candidates by specific criteria and developing talent acquisition strategies to source, recruit and hire candidates based on the specific skills, experience, and traits particular to each role. This, in turn, allows you to establish predictability and scalability into your hiring framework.

Candidate segmentation is particularly effective because it allows you to identify points of failure, refine conversion metrics for each hiring stage, measure overall recruiting efforts, and individually gauge pipeline health for each segment. It’s also highly customizable, and can be tweaked for your particular organization’s talent requirements.

Here’s how to implement it.

Group Your Candidates

The first thing to do when you’re getting started is to figure out how to divide candidates. For instance, one direct way is to group candidates by department (Sales, Marketing, Engineering, Finance, IT). Other criteria could include seniority (entry level, experienced, manager), industry (experience in your org’s space or elsewhere), source (referrals, internal, job boards or recruiting agencies), location or even skillset. Different segments can overlap, but don’t have to. The value of multiple, overlapping segments is that you can quickly and easily sort your candidate pool by different criteria.

The easiest way to figure out candidate segments is to base segmentation on your organization’s existing structure. Each department, location or business unit can be a separate grouping. This is particularly useful if you have project-based teams with uncommon skill groupings since you can segment candidates by those specific criteria. The more detailed and consistent your candidate database, the easier it is, since your ability to manipulate candidate data relies on how well you can track it to begin with.

The upshot is that these different groupings allow you to better track deliverables, trends, and outcomes with detail. This gives you more insight into how your hiring process is performing for each position and open requirement.

Identify Hiring Stages

Knowing your organization’s distinct hiring stages is a big part of optimizing your talent acquisition strategies. Each hiring stage should correspond to one distinct activity on the part of your and your candidates. For example, stage 1 could be email outreach/response. Stage 2 is the phone screen, stage 3 is the first interview round, stage 4 is the second interview round, and the final stage is the offer. Keeping your hiring stages lined up with actual instances of progress keeps your data useful.

The value of tracking outcomes from each hiring stage allows recruiters to identify and diagnose points of failure or inefficiencies at each juncture. It also makes it possible to track your funnel’s performance from top to bottom, which lets you see where and when candidates are dropping off. This lets your talent acquisition team see exactly where performance can be improved and shows you where and when your efforts are most (and least) effective.

Refine Your Metrics

Once you’ve mapped out your hiring stages, you’ll be able to track metrics for each step in the process. Some good metrics to keep an eye on are the ratios between applicants and interviews, interviews to offers, applicants to hires, offer acceptance rates and time-to-hire.

Good metrics tell you about the health of your pipeline and where you may need to optimize or troubleshoot. They also tell you if your team is doing a good enough job tracking your internal hiring data. When it comes to metrics, remember to focus less on how much work your team is doing and more on the results.

Prime Your Pipeline

In recruiting, your pipeline is your lifeline. Segmentation lets you separate out aspects of your pipeline to see better, more detailed data for each open position, department, recruiter or hiring manager. It also allows you to isolate funnels so you can see where candidates are coming from, how far they’re progressing, and which candidate source results in the most hires. You’ll also be able to optimize your process to focus on the most productive recruiting avenues for each department or type of hire.

From the start, candidate segmentation will offer priceless insights about your talent pools, candidate engagement levels, and overall recruiting program. From there you can calibrate your way to recruiting greatness.