Traditionally, talent acquisition has always relied on 'gut feeling' and intuition. But that isn't the best measure in today's world. In the last few years, the industry has been changing working patterns, changing EVPs, and new-hire attrition increasing well over 15%.
So, talent acquisition, now, has no place for intuition. Talent leaders and hiring managers alike are moving to skills-first hiring, and talent acquisition analytics plays a crucial role there.
With in-depth insight and quick data processing, talent acquisition analytics can change the face of your company's hiring cycles. But what exactly should be the right approach to this? What would be the right tools to help with this? What are the benefits?
To answer all the above questions and beyond, we have compiled an extensive guide that will show you how to integrate talent acquisition analytics into your recruitment system effectively.
What is talent acquisition analytics
In simple terms, talent acquisition analytics refers to a data-driven approach to filling an open position that can deliver positive operational and business outcomes.
It delivers critical insights on what to look for in a candidate and how to improve the hiring process to build long-term associations with the right talent.
With appropriate talent acquisition analytics, it becomes much easier to find fitting candidates, optimize process and technology, and understand its expected impact on the business.
Benefits of talent acquisition analytics
The right talent acquisition analytics software has multifaceted benefits. From analyzing different salary packages to predicting employee retention rates, analytics algorithms can make hiring effective, save company expenditures, and help measure the engagement rate of employees.
Let us look at some of the advantages of implementing talent acquisition analytics in detail:
Target appropriate job candidates
With advanced talent acquisition analytics, companies can pinpoint suitable candidates based on the organization's vision, find them, and connect with them.
With detailed data-driven insights pinpointing the right skill-set and characteristics, you can narrow down the right platform to post job requirements and curate a job description that would appeal to the targeted candidates.
Predict your candidates' future performance
Analytics can help companies predict the future performance of job applicants. It portrays a comprehensive image of what a successful long-term employee looks like and makes the HR team's job easy to hire such individuals. Developing matching persona of candidates also lowers the chances of recruiting unsuitable candidates, saving the company's costs.
Track hiring metrics
HR professionals can track hiring metrics to make better hiring decisions using talent acquisition analytics. The algorithm of such software can provide a comprehensive idea of the recruitment costs per new hire, the average time needed for the recruitment drive, recruitment sources, etc.
A talent analytics platform allows HR managers to monitor and optimize important metrics throughout the recruitment process. It will enable them to direct their resources to the most critical areas, making the recruitment process more efficient. This will give the HR teams time to focus on the crucial objectives of the business instead of wasting resources through inefficient processes.
Gather feedback from existing employees
Talent acquisition analytics determines the skill gap in your workforce and allows you to plan your hiring process strategically. This way, you can run more targeted recruitment drives.
Moreover, the analytics algorithm helps you distinguish particular skills in your employees and decide whether they would be suited for a different job position.
Talent acquisition analytics can also help you identify employees who would fit in leadership or managerial roles. This way, your employees get the chance to climb up the corporate ladder. This will contribute to employee satisfaction and maintain a high retention rate.
With constant feedback about your employees, you can also determine which employees lack the required skills to do justice to their job and work on programs to better their skills and performance.
Eliminate bias
It is possible for recruiting managers to have reservations about race, gender, and other external factors. Such biased-driven recruitment makes it more likely to miss out on exceptionally talented candidates and choose incorrect fits for the job.
But when you incorporate data in your hiring process, it will not consider any external biases or stereotypes except the candidate's skills and alignment with the company's goals. Data-driven analytics will eliminate wrong first impressions and base your hiring process on accurate and impartial facts.
Customize employee benefits
An attractive salary and benefits package makes your company appealing to the best talent. Customizing a package that values highly-skilled candidates would attract the best talent to your organization.
Talent acquisition analytics scrutinizes a candidate's persona, previous job experience, and skill set, providing you with enough data to tailor an appropriate compensation and benefits for each candidate. This will help your business attract talented people and optimize spending on the same.
Saves time
Integrating talent acquisition analytics eliminates the need for you to identify the issues and problem areas manually. It examines every related factor and generates a comprehensive set of data-driven insights, pointing you toward the best course of action.
It shows you the best and most influential talent acquisition platform, predicts a candidate's future performance, and helps you quickly fill the gaps in your workforce.
You don't have to spend much time going through thousands of candidate profiles with quick analytics. That way, you can concentrate on the more strategic areas of your business while technology attracts and retains the best talent for you.
Promotes transparency
Talent acquisition analytics builds a transparent recruitment process by providing understandable and data-driven results. Candidates can be informed why the company chose them and what it expects of them.
Likewise, the unsuccessful candidates can know where they lacked or why the company did not find them fit for the job role.
Moreover, contextual and straightforward data also gives your existing employees an image of their performance and how it affects the company. Talent analytics provides reports that align with each employee's roles and targets. Such information allows the employees to adjust their performance and increase their investment in the company.
What type of talent acquisition data should you collect?
While there are several benefits of implementing talent acquisition analytics, HR departments collect vast data that remains unused. This is a widespread occurrence in bulk hirings.
Moreover, if you are a company just starting its data-driven recruitment journey, picking the vital pieces of data from a considerable bulk can be confusing and overwhelming. Using the wrong metrics can also completely derail your recruitment process.
Hence it is vital to know which metrics you should consider for the best results. Here are a few:
Source data
Tracking multiple data sources is an excellent way to volume quality hiring. This includes data from job boards, ATS, social media, etc. The job board and social media data will tell you how your job postings perform. On the other hand, a sound applicant tracking system will instantly draw data from the existing talent pool and match suitable candidates to open roles.
Time to fill
This one is an internal metric that measures a time range from approving the budget for additional headcount to hiring every budgeted headcount. Time to fill includes activities like:
- Curating job posting
- Circulating it to various job boards and agencies
- Generating candidate pipeline
- Conducting screens and onsite interviews
- Creating the offer
- Compensation negotiations
- Background checks.
This particular metric reflects the speed of your end-to-end hiring process, which helps provide an estimated time for a new opening to be filled.
Days in stage
This metric quantifies the number of times candidates typically stay in each stage of your interview process. Usually, 'days in the stage' are reported in average terms. However, if your company has a lower volume of candidates, results in median or percentile can also work.
'Days in the stage' is a handy metric for identifying your company's recruitment process bottlenecks. This specific data helps talent acquisition managers discuss the areas with their teams and make the process faster and more efficient.
Offers sent & acceptance rate
As evident from the term, these metrics count the number of offers sent in a period and the rate at which they were accepted, resulting in the new hire starting the job.
The volume of sent offer letters shows how successful the talent acquisition team was in finding suitable candidates. On the other hand, the acceptance rate reflects how attractive a job offer in your company is to the talent pool. A change in acceptance rate will also indicate how competitive the market is. Studying this can also help you understand how to build more effective packages.
Cost of a bad hire
Finding the right talent for your company is difficult in a competitive market and expensive. According to a survey, 74% of companies have stated that they hired the wrong talent, and every lousy hire costs their companies up to $14,900.
Apart from high financial costs, a bad hire can also be detrimental to team dynamics and progress, causing wastage of company resources and time.
Replacing a bad hire comes with a hefty price tag regarding money and effort. From job postings on various platforms to HR expenditure on interviews and onboarding, several factors determine an inadequate hire replacement expenditure depending on the industry and the business size. Some of these are –
- Job advertising fees and HR resources
- Relocation and training for new hires
- Disruption in workflow
- Lower productivity rate
- Negative effect on team performance
- Weakened brand as an employer
Considering all the abovementioned costs, going through all necessary and time-consuming formalities to hire talents only to let them go leads to significantly draining company resources. To prevent this, companies need to prioritize talent acquisition analytics.
Also Read: Here is top 17 Talent Acquisition Tools to hire best candidates in 2023.
How to use talent acquisition analytics
As we know the importance of talent acquisition analytics, let's get into the best practices to use this stellar software to your company's benefit.
Prioritize automation
Working in human resources involves a lot of overwhelming elements, and HR professionals barely have time to review the intricacies of every candidate's profile thoroughly. Manually organizing all information is not only time-consuming but also prone to error.
But with automation, tasks like tracking candidates, pre-screening, collecting necessary information, and scheduling interviews will be done without any mistakes, saving the precious time and energy of HR. This way, they can focus more on the strategic parts of the recruitment process.
Tracking crucial KPIs
Monitoring and examining various KPIs like hiring finances, market trends, demographics of the workforce, etc., help improve your organization's human capital analysis.
Use dashboards in talent acquisition software to quickly and efficiently find trends, correlations, and insights to make more informed and better-hiring decisions. It also helps you track and gauge the impact of your recruitment drives.
Identify areas of improvement
Implementing technology is just the initial step for better talent acquisition, but constantly improving the strategy makes it last longer. Always look out for gaps and flaws in the various sets of data.
With every insight, your understanding of whether or not your current talent acquisition strategy is working will improve. Such a data-driven approach will allow you to revise and update your recruitment process and job offers.
Common mistakes to avoid while using Talent Acquisition Analytics
With newly implemented technology comes the risk of making mistakes. Here we have compiled for you a quick list of prevalent mistakes to look out for:
- You must understand how analytics work and why exactly you need it before you start gathering data. Without a clear vision or objective, your recruitment strategy will fall apart.
- Avoid implementing data visualization that solely suits your recruiter. Remember that your recruitment process and its results have an impact beyond the HR department.
- Not conveying your insight comprehensively or accurately is another common mistake companies make. Filter the data and see which are helpful and how you can convey them to the decision-makers.
- Data visualization shouldn't just be laden with facts. When a set of data addresses a specific business need, make sure it represents the data through a compelling narrative.
- Ignoring legal risk is one of the gravest mistakes you can make in implementing such technology. Remember the rules around personal data are rigid, and comply with all the regulations before you start your analytics journey.
Implementing technology is necessary for today's competitive market for a fast, unbiased, and effective recruitment process. And scaling your business is only possible with the right set of employees.
Talent acquisitions analytics' data-driven algorithm will increase retention, save cost and empower you to create a diverse, skilled, and dedicated workforce. So to keep up with the latest trends in attracting the best talent, companies should implement talent acquisition analytics without delay.
To get started, contact our experts at iMocha today!
