Talent Analytics: The Key To Better Hiring & Retention
Nearly every industry is juggling significant challenges around talent – skills shortages, the diversity imperative, tight budgets, changing employee expectations, and more. For organizational leaders, that makes talent a strategic priority. If approached the right way, your talent has the potential to be a real competitive advantage.
The HR function has been brought into the spotlight, and Talent professionals are looking to hire faster, hire better, and keep their existing talent happy and engaged in a fast changing market – it’s a tall order.
One of the best ways to make sure you are making the right talent decisions – and are staying ahead of the curve – is to ensure that you base your hiring and workforce management decisions on robust and real-time talent data.
Why you need Talent Analytics for hiring ⭐️
Talent Analytics analyzes data across the talent lifecycle – looking at the skills and preferences of candidates, applicants, employees, alumni and even the wider job market. For Talent Acquisition, for example, you need a much deeper understanding of the wider talent market as well as in-house skills, in order to make the best possible decisions around hiring.
With the right AI-powered Talent Analytics, you can:
Forecast your business needs
Without deep and enriched talent insights, it’s impossible to have a true understanding of the skills your organization has, the skills gaps that need to be filled, and the gaps that will likely open in the future.
This is vital information for the Talent Acquisition function – if TA professionals don’t have the full picture of what skills are needed and when, it’s difficult to know if you’re making the right hiring decisions.
Traditionally, hiring is a reactive process. When a role opens up, a job ad is posted and you hope that your ideal candidate finds it and applies soon, so you can fill the role quickly. But in today’s tight talent market, where there’s lots of competition for in-demand skills, that’s not practical or efficient. Proactivity is essential to the modern TA team.
When you have AI-driven Talent Analytics, you should be able to view a holistic picture of your talent data, allowing you to better forecast your business needs, project how many hires you are on pace to make, and plan the resources you’ll need in the future to meet longer term TA goals.
Enhance your team’s performance
With the right data, HR teams can unlock new efficiencies in the TA process – allowing TA teams to improve their performance, while making better hires and saving the organization time and money in the process.
For instance, Talent Analytics gives recruiters the data they need to confidently make informed decisions, by recommending candidates for roles based on their skills, competencies, preferences, and career goals.
These actionable, real-time insights help speed up the hiring process and take the guesswork out of Talent Acquisition. With assistance from enriched data and AI, your recruiters can work more efficiently – ensuring that roles are filled with the right people at the right time.
Talent Analytics can help manage team performance outside of the TA function as well – managers across all departments can use Talent Analytics to get a better view of how their employees are performing against KPIs, for example. This can help inform decisions across the talent lifecycle, around things like promotions, development opportunities, and performance-based pay raises.
Hit diversity targets
Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DE&I) has become a strategic focus for many organizations, and for good reason. Research shows that diverse teams perform better than non-diverse teams, and diverse companies perform better than their less diverse competitors.
It’s much easier to track progress towards diversity targets, and identify areas for improvement with Talent Analytics. For example, with the right AI-powered Talent Analytics, you can see if there are certain teams that are lacking diversity, and could benefit from more diverse hires. You can also flag potential issues, such as specific people groups not making it to the final stages of the hiring process – as this could be an indicator of bias that needs to be addressed.
Improve the candidate experience
Another benefit of deploying Talent Analytics in the hiring process is gaining a greater understanding of your candidate journey and overall candidate experience. For example, do you know where applicants most commonly drop off in the application process? And do you know at which point candidates tend to drop off of the hiring process?
This data gives TA teams valuable insight into where candidates are experiencing pain points – a confusing or long application process, too many rounds of interviews, the lack of pay transparency – the list goes on.
When these problems are brought to light, you can begin to take action to correct them – vastly improving the overall candidate experience – and, hopefully, acquire more top talent as a result.
Boosting retention with Talent Analytics 🤝
As many HR leaders are aware, employee expectations have changed a lot over the last several years – they desire greater flexibility around where and when they work, higher pay, and opportunities to learn and grow within their organization.
The right AI-driven Talent Analytics can be a huge help to HR teams, as the rich insights can help identify ‘red flags’ that indicate if an employee is at risk of leaving the company. This ability to understand your workforce, what they want, and what they need to remain engaged in their jobs, is a crucial part of any good retention strategy.
If you are just finding out why employees want to leave after they’ve given their notice, it’s too late. Talent Analytics helps you identify which of your current staff are dissatisfied with their work or career path, long before they consider leaving.
With HR in the spotlight, it’s crucial that you are able to hire the right talent, with the right skills, for the right roles, and ensure that your talent stays engaged long term. With the pace of change ever increasing, it’s not feasible to make smart, high-quality talent decisions without real-time data.
Talent Analytics is here to help HR teams get quick answers to the questions that matter most, across every stage of the talent lifecycle – from sourcing and recruiting, to talent engagement and retention.