Competitive analysis is about taking a deep dive into how other companies are recruiting and assessing strengths and weaknesses. If you do not analyze your competition, you may lose top talents when they accept competitors’ offers. The competitive analysis may sound complex, and many companies may outsource this task to a specialized firm, but you can conduct your analysis on your recruitment competition.

Understanding peer digital initiatives

Whom you hire and how you hire makes a difference. Every recruiter must understand their peers and from where they hire. The knowledge increases the ability to target a subset of peers or the precision with which one can target.

This sample Digital Initiatives table shows collecting and maintaining a library of digital intentions and mapping similar talent across enterprises. Mapping helps in understanding the niche and traditional skills. 

For example, if you are hiring a fraud management team, you should have a library of companies to target who is excelling in that work and lead in that digital initiative. In 2021, job descriptions will be a sum of digital intentions and initiatives. 

The graphic below shows Apple’s mapping of their designer talent. Apple has three versions of design talent. One’s focus is on traditional design skills, one around human factor design and one focuses on integrating different systems as in Apple Pay. 

So, there are three distinct types of designers within Apple product designers. Understanding this dynamic can make recruiters successful.

Analyzing competitors to fuel recruitment success 

Here is what you can do to outshine your competitors. 

Identify your competition 

Putting your focus on the companies you consistently lose out on hiring top candidates makes the analysis more accessible. Jump into the hiring trenches by conducting “opponent research.” 

Think outside of the box because your competitor may not be in the same industry. For instance, if you are hiring customer service representatives with specific skillsets for an outsourcing company, those same candidates may have the ideal skillsets for a position in retail. 

Put the names of your local competitors on the list. If they have positions in accounts, the industry may not matter as much as the candidate’s commute. Check with other departments in your organization, like Sales and Marketing, to see if there are any competitors or check for data on current competitors that could help you with your analysis. 

Scan their career page 

Each page on your competitor’s career page gives you insights into what they might be doing differently. Answer the following questions while going through the website. 

• What types of content do they have, and which ones are engaging? 

• Are they saying something different that we are not? 
• Are they using stock or their own images? 
• How easy is it to look for jobs using the job search feature? 
• What information is their job descriptions providing? 
• Is their website communicating their Employee Value Proposition (EVP)? 

Experience the application process 

The application process can appeal to or repel candidates away from the company. Go to your competitor’s career page and complete the job application process to analyze what’s missing or learn the areas of improvement. 

• Can candidates apply via smartphones or tablets? 
• Is the process streamlined, or is it disorganized? 
• Is there any personalization even when candidates return to the page after leaving the career site? 

• Does the page have contact information for candidates to get back with questions? 
• Does the page have any additional information or next steps that talent can check out while waiting to hear back? 

Evaluate their digital footprint 

These days hiring does not happen only on the career page. Evaluate where else your competitors are reaching out to potential candidates? 

• Do they have a solid and robust social media presence? 

• What SEO keywords and search terms are they using to rank high? Can you use any of them to rank higher than them? 
• What are their employees and ex-employees saying about them on review sites? What is their company rating, and are they recognized with employer awards? 

Leverage AI-based online platform 

There is plenty of help online. Every HR professional committed to hiring qualified applicants tries to get quality hiring software, for example, to get key job boards and job ad optimization experts to push quality content to the audience. The database software helps maintain contacts, manage CV volumes, manage your online reputation, and meet recruiting deadlines. 

Because of technological advances, there is an increase in AI, ML, and NLP, which has given rise to talent intelligence. Talent intelligence allows hiring managers to make data-driven decisions. They can alert enterprises and small companies to competitive hiring threats, future trends in talent and hiring, or identify urgent hiring needs in advance. 

Additionally, the talent management systems include data on recruiting, onboarding, learning, performance, compensation, succession, and collaboration. It can give workplaces insights on demographic, activity/mobility, internal and external talent behavioral data. 

Where talent intelligence plays a crucial role? 

Let us look at some use cases where data and analytics play a role. 

Tracking hiring metrics – The data HR receives on their average costs per hire, the average time to hire, and successful hiring sources help recruiters focus on business objectives than spend insurmountable time on ineffective hiring processes. 

Predictive analytics – With predictive analytics, hiring managers can create a performance management model, target and address training needs, make future forecasts, and predicts much-needed skills for the future. 

Employee retention – Hiring managers can use the data from predictive analytics to fix existing enterprise culture gaps, plugging talent leaks. It can give data helping the management to implement a comprehensive reskilling strategy. Now, the management can train and move employees from one role to another. 

Diversity nurturing – The robust data can help the management identify diversity gaps, whether ethnic or gender and rotate their hiring process to fix it. Robust talent intelligence platforms like Draup provides location-level intelligence, enabling companies to hire low-cost, highly skilled talent from tier-2 and tier-3 locations. 

Draup draws in data from 4,000+ sources and provides hiring teams with actionable insights on location, hiring costs, and reskilling support for target roles. While its Reskilling Navigator tool crafts reskilling journeys for its employees, its Diversity Navigator can help managers fix any leaks due to lack of diversity in the workforce.