How to effectively communicate data in an impactful way?

How is my company performing on its recruitment processes? Who are my top recruiters? Which are the main reasons why some candidates are not hired? 

Have you ever asked this kind of questions when trying to assess your IT recruitment processes? If so, how did you try to find the answers to those questions? If your answer was with data, then we're aligned! ‘Data is the new oil’ (Clive Humby), we all know that already, as data is playing a very crucial role in every business nowadays. 

But then the question is: How to generate insights from that data and how to communicate them in an impactful way such that it helps driving business decision making? 

1. Understand your data & your business 

If you want to retrieve insights from your company’s data and communicate them  in an efficient and impactful way, it’s crucial that you understand the data you’re analyzing and that you connect the insights with your company’s business, making sure you’re analysis is aligned with the defined business goals. 

How to better succeed in this first and important step? 

• Make sure you spend enough time looking into your data in detail, communicating with stakeholders and clarifying everything that might be confusing 
• Align with business stakeholders to understand which are the expected business outcomes and how they could be measured with the available data 
• Document everything that can be helpful for your further analysis, writing down the business goals, concepts’ definitions, calculus formulas, etc. 

In IT recruitment, data insights are only impactful when they are aligned with business goals. For example, demonstrating how improving candidate screening reduces hiring costs or how boosting candidate engagement impacts time-to-hire is crucial for connecting data to the broader objectives of the organization. By consistently linking data insights to measurable business outcomes, we ensure that our data communications aren’t just informative—they’re transformative. 

2. Understand your audience 

Knowing who you are presenting your data to is essential so you can adapt the way you communicate your insights tailored to your target audience. For instance, if you are presenting IT Recruitment data to business stakeholders, your speech will be different than when presenting data to a technical team. Make sure to evaluate your audience and how they react to your presentation and gather feedback to continuously improve your communication. Most of the times, prioritizing simplicity and clarity over technical knowledge is a good way of ensuring that everyone in the room will understand your findings and that the data has a real impact on the team. 

3. Tell a story with data 

Who doesn’t love to listen to a good story? With data, it’s the same: if you can tell a story with the insights you’re presenting, connecting the different metrics that are under analysis, and building a logical link between the data and your business outcomes, it will be easier to catch your audience attention and to make them better understand your findings. 

As every good story, you should divide your presentation in 3 main parts – beginning, middle & end: 

• For the beginning, start by introducing new concepts’ definition or remembering old ones, telling your audience the purpose of the presentation and perhaps doing an overview of the data you’ll be showing 
• The middle part is where you present your data in more detail and communicate your analysis and the most valuable insights that one could take from the data 
• End with a wrap-up including the main conclusions to take from what you have just presented, and if it suits the purpose of the meeting, suggest some action steps to take for future improvements 

4. Choose the right Visualization 

When thinking about how to better communicate your data, choosing the right visualization for each case is an important step that deserves great attention. The way your audience will see the data is determinant in how they will understand both the data and the insights taken from it. If you manage to succeed in your visual presentation, you don’t even need to explain the data in too much detail – highlight the most important insights and let your audience investigate the detail if they want to. 

Some tips for choosing the best visualization (although it is always important to evaluate each case and what chart type suits better your data): 

• Bar charts work well for comparing quantities across categories (e.g., the number of hires by hiring manager). 
• Line charts are ideal for displaying trends over time (e.g., the evolution of your company’s headcount over the last year). 
• Pie charts can be used for displaying relative values or percentages, but should be used carefully to ensure that the data remains clear and uncluttered. 
• Heatmaps or scatter plots may be useful when dealing with multiple variables and patterns, such as when assessing the correlations between the number of interviewed candidates and successful hires. 

5. Make your presentation interactive / dynamic 

Sometimes it is not easy to gather your audience attention, especially in periodical presentations where you’re showing the same metrics every month / quarter. So, try to get your audience by making your presentations dynamic– using PowerBI online you can directly change data in real time, or if you’re making a more static presentation in PowerPoint, use animations that allow you to highlight the most important points and to give a little bit of ‘life’ to your presentation. Try to interact with your audience, allowing them to ask questions about what you’re showing or even discuss the data together and share their own inputs. 

Final Thoughts 

Data communication in IT recruitment is not only about showing numbers – it’s about delivering valuable insights that make a real impact on your company and help drive business decisions. By understanding your data and your business, tailoring your presentation to your audience, focusing on key takeaways while telling them a story with the right visualizations, and using dynamic strategies of showcasing your data, you can definitely impact the way your team looks to the data and understands the relevant insights. 

At HumanIT, we always work with these principles in mind when looking at our data, developing tailored dashboards and actionable insights that help to make informed decisions and improve our hiring outcomes. 

‘We are surrounded by data, but starved for insights’ (Jay Baer)