A strong company starts with the right employees. If the people carrying out your strategies aren't talented and capable, it won't matter how worthwhile your vision is. Thus, being able to hire well should be a priority for any business. By identifying and retaining the best possible candidates, you can put your company into a position to thrive. 

It's a process that could benefit from FileMaker help. 

Hiring is by its nature an inexact science. Not only do you need to evaluate a person's skills in a short period of time, usually on the basis of nothing more than a resume and a handful of brief interviews, you also need to envision how they fit in with your corporate culture. Somebody who is perfectly suited for the role might not fit in with the rest of the staff. If this is the case, you've wasted your time and prevented yourself from having the best possible team.

This is where analytics come in. Parsing data on your current employees, as well as on the candidates you are looking for, can help you decide what metrics are actually important for a particular job. The answers could very well be surprising. Building the right database can even give you a way to incorporate information that would otherwise be tricky to mesh. In a recent article on Wired, author Michael Morrell discussed these sorts of criteria.

"Remember that personal interaction and communication provide perhaps more important data than massive amounts of publicly available data. Did a candidate respond to an email? Show up for an interview? And of course there are the personal referrals and references, which should carry a lot of weight in a matching algorithm," writes Morrell.

In addition, a stronger adherence to big data processes in hiring will benefit job seekers. Potentially talented people who have had issues showing it will be evaluated more holistically, which can take some of the pressure off of resumes and cover letters, both inexact proxies for actual talent. If hired, they will also be much more likely to fit in well with the company, since they would have been selected for traits that make that a likelihood. 

It's a win-win: businesses get the best possible staff, and candidates find the best possible working situation.