Top Tips from Top Recruiters: XO Group recruiter uses ‘small data’ to land great engineers

Drew Koloski is an admitted data nerd. After getting his feet wet as an agency recruiter, he spent the early part of his career acquiring tech talent for a series of companies, including Experian Marketing Services, and start-ups Vente Privee, and Offerpop. “I spent a lot of time with engineers, learning what they do and what they care about,” he says. All that time spent with engineers helped him develop a knack for numbers, and for using metrics to track things like response rates, conversion rates, and return on investment (ROI) of different recruiting strategies. “Data explains things,” he says. “And it helps you make better decisions.” Today Koloski is applying his metrics’ based approach to recruiting at XO Group Inc., a consumer internet company that owns The Knot, The Nest, and The Bump. Koloski and I talked recently about how hard it is to recruit engineers in such a highly competitive marketplace, and how he uses metrics to hone his search and keep his team motivated. How Do You Use Analytics to be a Better Recruiter? Everyone today loves to talk about big data. But unless you have a vendor aggregating data for you, or you are a huge company with terabytes of data to analyze, it doesn’t make sense. I like to think of what we do as ‘little data.’ It’s about leveraging the metrics you have to identify trends. At XO Group, we’ve had a lot of success leveraging email for analytics, which helps us understand whether we are getting our message across to the engineers we are trying to recruit.  I grew up at Experian CheetahMail, which is a huge email service provider, and I learned that email is easy to measure and when leveraged properly, can provides great insight. How Do You Use Email for Analytics? We only send one message at a time to engineers, and they are always handcrafted to be contextually relevant to that engineer’s experience and projects, and matched up to problems we have that need solving. Then we measure things like how many people open our messages but don’t reply, people who read and reply to our messages, and what percentage of emails overall turn into conversions. When you look at those numbers over time you start to see trends.  Since January, for example, we've sent more than  2,000 contextually-relevant, hand-crafted engineering emails, and have about an 18 percent response rate. We are focused on improving that to 25 percent. We are also using analytics to improve things like our 'software engineer job description CTR rate,' ‘message to interview rate,’ ‘response to phone screen rate,’  and our ‘phone screen to offer’ rate.  If we improve a little bit in each area it could mean one or two more hires per month. What Do You Plan to Measure Next? Right now I only have six months of data, and I can’t wait until I have two years’ worth. At that point we are hoping to be able to understand when engineers open and respond to our emails so we can try to optimize for that. It will give us the ability to deploy messages at very specific times of day and drive higher conversion rates. What Else do the Metrics do for You? They help us communicate with the executive team and engineering leadership about why we are getting the results we are getting so we can make better decisions collaboratively. It is one thing to tell people that numbers are down because we are recruiting harder-to-find engineers, but when you show them the data it puts it in to context. Everyone in our company has key performance indicators (KPIs), including us. The data proves the challenges we are facing, and it shows the ROI of our efforts. It also helps my recruiters get perspective on their results. In January, our requirements started to change from primarily back-end engineers to full stack engineers, who are much harder to find.  Our team was sending out the same number of recruiting messages but their conversion rates were down, and that can be really frustrating. When I showed them the numbers they realized that they are still converting in the front of the funnel, and we have been working with engineering to change our messaging, our interview process and our targeting. We now have set new goals – and based on current results, we are starting to see immediate results. Having those numbers keeps us focused on what we can and cannot change, which gives us the confidence to try new things, and continue to be innovative.