Talent Analytics – It’s Time to Make Informed Decisions

Back in the 90’s when frontline recruitment at a commercial recruitment company was all about meeting performance KPI’s and never about analysing the reason around the useful KPR’s these KPI’s produced. Much of what recruiters did then, was a far cry from the day to day activities and experiences of both internal and commercial recruiters of today.

HR teams did not have specialist internal recruiters then, recruitment was just part of the general HR function and HR Business Partners were still a shiny developing strategy from David Ulrich's HR model.

Fax was the technology of choice, Offline press held the majority of job adverts. The ATS system was a filing cabinet and your desk based indexing system or rolodex. Oh - and the only mobile device spoken about in 90’s was this new technology from a leading tech company called ‘Psion’ and it’s new PDA.

Back then the rule for many recruitment companies was to have its staff hit numbered targets as many thought historical evidence of successful performance aligned directly to creating a minimum activity target across key process actions, such as Jobs On, Candidates Interviewed, Interviews Arranged ....and so on. What many did not grasp at the time; it was never about the numbers reached but it was all about the ratio between the actions measured that informed them about the recruiters’ delivery performance.

Move on to the present, and looking at all that’s changed since I started in the talent sector, there have been unbelievable (from me as a first year recruiter) advancements in business process understanding, the technology and skills to analyse it. Yet is seems we are as slow to take advantage of this great new age as we were slow back then to see the greater value in ratio understanding of the KPI. If we visit performance measurement again today and look at Talent Management; granted we are now analysing more on the side of outcome ratios than singular number target achievement.

Unfortunately this is no longer the only and most important data area that needs to be collected and understood. We now need to capture more data specific the wider needs of talent engagement and talent experience that will allow us to gain the insight we need to make successful decisions.

As your company looks to achieve its business goals it must understand and close the loop of business strategy – EVP – Employer Brand – Talent Management -– Talent Attraction/Acquisition. This will be successful or not; by how well you are able to conduct and understand your organization's Talent Analytics. Knowing what this data is telling you will then provide critical actions plans or action changes that go on to deliver successful outcomes to each segment of these interconnected strategies.

Talent Analytics will provide the data to make management decisions across workforce and succession planning, promotion, compensation and talent acquisition, retention or placement strategies

In Talent Analytics, recruiter performance efficiency is only a part of what needs to be understood, ratios like time to new employee proficiency can be far more useful to the company.

Back in July I tweeted a link to a great article in Forbes (#TalentAnalytics: A Crystal Ball For You) from Meghan Biro who explains the usefulness of Talent Analytics. I only had time to run a quick tweet then but thought the subject needed more comment from me. Do read her take on the subject.

Conclusion

In any form analytics, it’s not the data that is important but the insights it provides once it has been analysed! The data determines, priorities, relevancy, level of impact that leads your organisation to better decision making and ultimately better performance across workforce and succession planning, promotion, compensation and talent acquisition, retention or placement strategies

As in the 90’s KPI’s were not the most valuable measurement of Recruiter performance so today Recruiter or Talent Acquisition Specialist performance is not the sole area of insight needed for your Talent Management strategies. Making informed decisions using talent analytics will prove this.

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