Why would you want to see a map with the candidates locations?
There are several benefits to visualizing candidates locations – on a map – of people applying for your jobs. If you ask yourself the following questions, you will quickly discover the advantages of mapping candidates:
1. Where do people who apply live? 2. Where do my current employees live? 3. (Not a question, but an insight!) If you convert questions 1 & 2 into layers of data, you can easily calculate what percentage of your new hires will relocate when they get a job. 
4. What countries are people applying from? 5. How do skills differ from location to location? 6. What skills are you actually getting from what country, city or region? 7. How is your recruitment marketing budget working for you in the different countries, cities or regions? How much did you spend, what did you get back? 8. What locations do your hires come from? 9. Can you assign a quality score per region as: Number of applicants / Number of hires – per city, country or a custom region you define?
Half of the above will not be relevant to you, but I bet you are already getting ideas about what YOU can do with the map of YOUR candidates!
The business decisions that the answers to the above questions can influence is practically endless. These include:
1. Where do we set up our subsidiary office when expanding to the new country? – Of course it will be far more cost effective if you set up where the candidates are already based. Especially if you are building a call center, or a manufacturing plant that requires a lot of staff. Avoiding the staff relocation costs is crucial in that case. Your ordinary recruitment database o r- any application tracing system – will not help you, in this case. You need to use mapping software. which will let you quickly plot your candidates locations on a map. The software will define the “ideal” location.
2. Should we open a subsidiary in the country or a city that a lot of applicants are coming from? – Visualizing the locations the candidates are coming from, it is easy to pinpoint potential locations for new offices. Do you migrate the candidates or do you “go to them” and open an office where most of the new staff is coming from?
3. What’s the best way to manage the global team? – Global companies often migrate their staff from one country to another. For them, mapping software for staff management can prove crucial. Understanding your staff migration patterns, enables you to predict the future migrations and manage them proactively, as opposed to reacting (in a panic!) to the moves as they happen.
Regardless of what area of HR you work in, having candidate location data is priceless if you use it correctly.
All modern recruitment software takes addresses from CVs or resumes and stores them in its database. You can easily export these to a spreadsheet and plot the addresses on a map. Visualization of location data is crucial in making any decision based on the location, e.g, knowing that your employees commute to work too much is a problem. Are you doing anything about it?
“Plotting the locations and routes your employees commute from is the first step in managing that problem.”
Mapping software was always something that was absolutely cost prohibitive to HR departments. That all changed rapidly with the Software as a Service (SaaS) model, where you pay only for your use of the product – as opposed to buying it.
You will be amazed at what your candidates locations and even the locations of current staff, plotted on a map, can tell you!
To find out what mapping software can do for your recruitment business, contact Ivan.