Using Data to Drive Better Hiring Decisions

Recruitment marketing and sourcing have absorbed most of talent acquisition's attention and budget for years, while hiring itself — the interviewing, screening, and assessment work that determines who actually gets an offer — has been left to fend for itself on outdated systems and inconsistent data. New research pulls that gap into focus, drawing on a survey of talent acquisition leaders alongside interviews with recruiters and TA leaders about where their hiring process breaks down.

Companies report using as many as four separate solutions to cover interviewing, screening, and assessment, which produces exactly the fragmented experience and unreliable data that make good hiring decisions hard to defend. Interviewing has overtaken recruitment marketing and employer branding as the top process organizations plan to rework this year, a shift that hasn't shown up in prior years of this research.

Findings covered include:

• One in two companies is actively reevaluating its hiring process, and one in four expects to miss its hiring goals this year without changes.
• One in four candidates drops off at the interview stage, a bigger leak than most organizations' conversion-rate dashboards capture.
• ATS platforms, built for workflow rather than decision-making, are used for screening by only about half of companies and for assessments by a quarter, pushing organizations toward extra point solutions that rarely integrate.
• Most companies are not satisfied with the quality of their hiring data, and a majority don't use assessment data consistently across the organization.
• Interview processes commonly stretch two to six weeks, and many companies rely on two or more assessment providers, compounding inconsistency in candidate insights.

The remedy proposed is treating hiring — talent measurement — as a core layer of the tech stack alongside the CRM, ATS, and onboarding system, rather than a patchwork bolted on afterward. That means consistent, integrated candidate data that goes beyond a resume, faster and more standardized interview practices, and assessment tools that produce usable insight instead of another two-to-six-week wait. The argument throughout is straightforward: no amount of investment in sourcing and branding compensates for a hiring process that loses candidates, defies measurement, or leaves recruiters guessing at quality of hire.