Talent analytics: the 'crystal ball' for recruiters

During the course of the past decade, big data has revolutionised the way businesses operate. Access to analytics has allowed organisations to design more targeted marketing campaigns, fine-tune customer service, predict trends, and cut business costs.

In other words, all that data has helped organisations streamline their everyday operations, and, ultimately, boost productivity and revenue. Now, companies are taking a closer look at how big data analytics can improve their recruiting practices as well.

With unemployment at an all-time low, skilled labour shortages, and shorter job tenures, attracting and retaining high-quality talent in today’s economy isn’t the easiest feat.

Talent analytics — commonly known as people analytics — can provide recruiters with the information and insights needed to generate high quality leads no matter how tight the labour market is.

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Find the right talent for the right role

One of the biggest challenges organisations face today is keeping employee turnover at bay. High employee churn can be extremely costly to your business — in some cases, it can cost up to twice an employee’s salary to source and train a replacement.

In general, the key to keeping employees around boils down to hiring the right people, to begin with. Predictive analytics can help companies efficiently source, assess, and hire job applicants who are not only well-suited for a role but very likely to fit in with the workplace’s culture as well.

They work by analysing the skills and competencies of current high performers in the company, and, using that data, build success profiles that can predict the type of person who is most likely to succeed in the future. The tools then scan each candidate’s background, education, career highlights, length of their previous job tenures, and skillsets to determine if they match the characteristics of the success profiles.

Several analytics platforms also offer tailored assessments — which measure candidates’ cognitive ability, behaviours, traits, and learning agility — to help employers further determine whether or not an applicant is a good fit, and, therefore, likely to stick around.

Understand local labour markets

Employers looking to expand, relocate, or recruit in new areas should leverage analytics tools to analyse various regions and understand local labour markets. Companies can learn everything from what skills local talent already has, what skills are in demand, who is currently employing them, along with the companies that are hiring them.

For example, say you’re looking to hire a data supply analyst in the retail sector. Advanced analytics can break down exactly how many professionals have the necessary experiences and skills for the role within a certain radius.

Furthermore, if you’re looking to open an office in a new location, these tools let you see which cities have the largest supply of relevant professionals so you can plan accordingly and avoid making any expensive mistakes.

Beat the competition

Many talent analytics tools also offer insights regarding your competitors’ attrition levels, skills inventory, and compensation models.

By scanning pay databases, these tools can help employers identify the right salary range for each position and potentially price out the competition. It’s important, however, that companies are analysing the best data. For example, pay information reported by compensation professionals is much more accurate than employee self-reported pay. This type of data is extremely important, because in many states and regions, it is now illegal to ask candidates about their pay history, so determining the correct pay based on data for a role, similar company, industry and region is critical to determining appropriate pay guidelines.

Businesses can also see the companies and regions competitors are pulling fresh talent from and go after that ripe labour market.

On the flip side, if talent flow analytics reveal that your organisation is quickly losing employees to competitors, your team can revisit and revamp your organisation’s retention initiatives and incentives.

The trick to making analytics work is to find the best way to let data within your organisation “talk” to each other. Data systems, such as pay and rewards, development and succession should be available via one platform: a “hire to retire” model if you will.

Experts have described talent analytics to be the closest thing hiring managers and talent acquisition professionals have to a crystal ball. In order to accurately predict which candidates have the greatest chance of success and get a leg up on the competition, recruiters need to rethink how they hire and take a more data-driven approach to talent acquisition.