The Analytical Recruiter

I've noticed more and more companies are storing candidates' LinkedIn profiles in their applicant tracking systems before people ever express interest in their jobs or even respond. Apparently, it's legal in Europe if they're following GDPR procedures, but is it ethical? What do you think?

If you're wondering why companies do this, usually it's so they have data like InMail response rates and conversion or so they can set reminders more easily to reach out again in 3-6 months.

Usually when companies include a link to a privacy notice in the InMail, they do this because they are storing your profile. I'm also curious how many people were aware of this. Let me know!

#gdpr #privacy #dataprotection #ethics

LinkedIn Poll: Is it ok for a company to store data about you as a potential candidate if you've never expressed interest in that company or job?

no 60%

yes 6%

depends what's stored 23%

if following GDPR laws 11%

Do you know what the cost of NOT hiring someone is (aka the "cost of vacancy")? At most of the companies where I've worked, we've at least attempted to measure the cost of hiring someone but I've never looked at the cost of not hiring someone until now.

What's the verdict? Well, if your company's average time to fill is 90 days, your revenue is $20 million annually, you have 150 employees and a senior engineer's salary would be 170k, the cost of vacancy for a high priority role like a senior software engineer is estimated to be $60,930.0. This is according to Built In's formula for measuring cost of vacancy. If it takes 6 months to fill this role, your cost of vacancy is up to $121,860.

Let's say your company's a bit earlier stage, taking in $10 mil per year and you have 100 employees. Using the same (very optimistic) 90 day time to fill and same 170k salary, the cost of vacancy is $26,370, or $52,740 for a more average 6 month time to fill.

The takeaway for founders and executives wondering when to invest more in the best recruiting platforms and tools should be - if you can significantly reduce your time to fill by using an "expensive" recruiting platform or even an agency, just bite the bullet and pay the fees. Marketplace platforms like Hired or talent.io are well worth the one-time hiring fee for a high-priority hire. In my experience, with these platforms, top of funnel conversion is 10x higher than using Linked Recruiter. What does that mean? If I contact 100 people on LinkedIn, I might get 10 recruiter screens out of it, whereas if I contact 100 on a marketplace platform like Hired or Talent.io, I expect to get 50 recruiter screens. That means, using better recruiting tools can drastically speed up time to fill, more than offsetting any hiring fees attributed to them.

If you'd like to try the python script I used to model the cost of vacancy calculations, check it out on my github here.

The cost of vacancy calculations are explained in more detail here.

yes, always 39%

usually, but not always 18%

sometimes 21%

rarely 23%

LinkedIn Poll: How important is it that your superiors at work are emotionally intelligent?

Very important 88%

Somewhat important 6%

Not important 3%

What's emotional intelligence? 3%

LinkedIn Poll: What is the best way to evaluate a software engineering candidate's coding ability?

live coding interview 20%

take-home coding challenge 28%

technical discussion 50%

other 3%