Los Angeles County’s Department of Human Resources (DHR) is responsible for attracting a diverse workforce for the 37 departments it supports. Each year, DHR processes upwards of 400,000 applications for job opportunities making it one of the largest employers in the nation. Managing a hiring process of this scale is complex with many complicated factors such as background checks and skills examination. These processes, if not managed properly, can create bottlenecks and a poor experience for both candidates and hiring managers.

In order to identify areas for improvement, DHR set out to build detailed operational metrics across each stage of the hiring process. DHR used to conduct high level analysis manually using excel and other disparate tools. The data itself was limited, difficult to obtain, and analyze. In addition, it was taking analysts weeks to manually pull data from half a dozen siloed systems into excel for cleansing and analysis. This process was labor-intensive, inefficient, and prone to human error.

To overcome these challenges, DHR in partnership with Internal Services Department (ISD) adopted a modern data architecture in the cloud. Powered by the Azure Databricks Lakehouse, DHR was able to bring together their diverse volumes of data into a single platform for data analytics. Manual ETL processes that took weeks could now be automated in 10 minutes or less. With this new architecture, DHR has built Business Intelligence dashboards to unpack the hiring process to get a clear picture of where the bottlenecks are and track the speed with which candidates move through the process The dashboards allow the County departments innovate and make changes to enhance and improve the experience of potential job seekers and improve the timeliness of securing highly qualified and diverse County personnel at all employment levels.

In this talk, we’ll discuss DHR’s journey towards building a data-driven hiring process, the architecture decisions that enabled this transformation and the types of analytics that we’ve deployed to improve hiring efforts.

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