Recruitment campaigns are an essential aspect of creating the workforce your organization needs. Every job posting, application, and declined offer represents multiple data points that you can potentially use to inform future recruitment drives — or even tweak ongoing ones.
Talent analytics is a recruitment-specific niche of business analytics focused on using those data points to improve hiring processes. With the right tools in place like predictive modeling and performance tracking platforms, recruiters can accurately identify areas for improvement and create a better experience for candidates.
Benefits of Talent Analytics
Investing in new technologies means gaining the buy-in of finance leaders and other organizational stakeholders. The best way to achieve this is by clearly highlighting the many benefits of talent analytics, including the potential for:
- Reduced time to hire
- Reduced cost-per-hire
- Enhanced candidate screening
- Increased engagement with passive candidates
- Increased employee retention
- A more diverse workforce
Talent analytics don’t just matter during the recruiting process. They also help recruiters understand the long-term impact of their recruitment decisions, by constantly monitoring numerous metrics and assessing highly granular data attached to them.
Types of Recruitment Metrics
One of the first steps toward building a great analytics strategy is to understand which recruiting metrics are the most important to your organization. If you’re looking to cut costs, then monitoring and assessing the impact on cost-per-hire might be a priority. However, if you’ve had problems with employee churn, gaining feedback on the applicant experience and quality of hire could address these.
Common recruiting metrics assessed by talent analytics include:
- Offer acceptance rate
- New hire turnover rate
- Applicants per hire — how many applicants you gained for a single role
- Candidate callback rate — how many candidates responded to direct communication
- Applicant experience scores
You might use employee surveys to gain feedback on this last point, to understand what candidates enjoyed about the recruitment process and what could be better.
Implementing Data-Driven Decision-Making
Of course, gathering data is just the first step. Transforming raw data into actionable insights is the whole point of talent analytics.
If data shows that candidates are unhappy with how long it takes to get a hiring decision, implement that as a process transformation. Work with hiring managers to set applicant expectations better or to speed up the internal processes causing this challenge.
Analytics platforms could also indicate that your most productive employees were sourced via social media. That insight can lead to a discussion with your finance team about increasing your recruitment marketing budgets for social platforms.
Predictive Analytics for Workforce Planning
Analytics can even help know when to recruit. AI-powered business intelligence (BI) platforms have the ability to constantly sift through huge volumes of candidate and employee data for patterns, comparing business needs with market fluctuations and other external factors to suggest the best times to seek talent.
The right analytics tools can predict future workforce trends. For example, if you recruit for the manufacturing industry, you might start to recruit more electrical engineers with a flair for machine learning and automation to help future-proof your organization.
Analytics platforms also take into account peak business periods and the predicted workforce needs. The right software could prompt you to do a recruitment drive before a busy season, providing details about the type of employees to seek and even what channels to use.
Continuous Optimization of Recruitment Processes
With the right data, recruiters can continuously improve and update recruitment processes. With cost management a top priority for most organizations during economic uncertainties, reducing the cost of hiring is an essential component of organizational growth. Talent analytics help recruiters drive process improvements that culminate in holistic, organization-wide benefits.
For example, research shows that organizations that invest in talent analytics could be up to 40% more productive than those that don’t. That’s because when recruiters have the right data to hand, they can quickly hire the best people for the job and keep those employees engaged. Productive, happy employees are more likely to talk about the great experiences they have, potentially increasing the available talent pool for future recruitment drives.
Talent Analytics is the Future of Recruiting
Utilizing data-driven insights informs strategic recruitment decisions to optimize hiring outcomes. Analytics platforms also help manage budgets, streamline processes, and make the whole process more appealing for both candidates and hiring managers. The more effective talent analytics platforms are, the more likely companies are to invest in them as the benefits become clearer and more wide-ranging.
For more insights into data-driven recruitment, connect with MRINetwork to find out how we can optimize your recruitment processes.