how people analytics can improve recruitment outcomes.

What role do people analytics play in your current recruitment process? If data and analytical tools aren’t already a vital part of every stage of the hiring process, you could find it extremely challenging to fill job vacancies with the right candidates considering today’s tight labor market. At a time when 77% of global leaders link acquiring and retaining top talent to business growth, inefficient recruitment practices could hinder the success of your company.

What is people analytics? In short, it’s the process of collecting and analyzing data pertaining to your workforce to make informed business decisions. Why are people analytics so important? Studies show that 70% of organizations that invest in people analytics do so to improve business performance. If you’re looking for ways to improve your company’s performance, people analytics can help.

This type of analytical data provides the insights organizations need to make a wide range of business decisions. Our guide focuses on how people analytics can improve your company’s recruitment efforts.

how talent analytics can improve your recruitment outcomes

Talent analytics is a subdivision of people analytics that focuses on recruitment data and provides value in all stages of the hiring process, starting with sourcing. This analytical data can bring real value to your recruitment practices in a number of ways.

source high-quality applicants

Amidst the ongoing labor shortage, online job boards aren’t going to be enough to attract the skilled labor your company needs. Instead, you need to target both active and passive candidates. Unfortunately, passive candidates aren’t always scrolling through online job boards.

Talent analytics can help you reach these target candidates by understanding their online behaviors. For instance, do your ideal candidates spend time on social media platforms, such as Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn, or social news groups, such as Reddit or Hive? Understanding where your target candidates spend their time online can help you narrow sourcing efforts to attract your ideal applicants.

enhance candidate engagement

Knowing where to reach your ideal candidates is just the first step in sourcing. You must also entice these potential candidates to reach out and complete the application process. Talent analytics can help with this process by analyzing data to better understand what motivates target candidates to seek new employment opportunities. Improved candidate engagement throughout the recruitment process is also known to help improve job acceptance rates.

Existing employee engagement levels are also an important factor in attracting new talent. After all, the top candidates don’t want to work for companies with low employee engagement levels. You can use talent analytics to measure engagement rates in the workplace and identify obstacles that may be hindering workplace engagement.  These insights, in turn, can help you build a culture of engagement you can use to enhance your employer brand.

hire for job fit

According to a recent study, 88% of global leaders admit to having higher-than-normal turnover rates. With the cost to replace an employee averaging more than 20% of the employee’s annual salary, higher turnover rates can wreak havoc on a company’s budget. These factors make hiring for ‘job fit’ and ‘boss fit’ more important than ever.

Standard hiring practices, such as the interview process, are often riddled with bias. Studies show that interviewers make decisions about a candidate in less than 7 minutes. It can be difficult, if not impossible, to determine job fit in such a short period of time.

Fortunately, talent analytics can minimize the impact of bias in the hiring process. It does this by providing real-time facts and analytical data to help business leaders make sound hiring decisions. This doesn’t mean, however, that you should take the human element out of the recruitment process. In fact, it’s the combination of ‘tech and touch’ that allows you to hire for job and boss fit.

improve acceptance rates

The last thing you want is to guide a prospective candidate through the recruitment process only to have them reject the job offer. This wastes time and resources and prohibits you from obtaining the top talent your company wants.

Certainly, your company may attempt to counteroffer by offering a higher salary. However, today’s job seekers are looking for more than just better pay. They also want flexible scheduling, diverse workforces, training, career development, strong employer brands, companies that are socially responsible, more paid time off and other perks.

Since no two candidates are the same and they all have different needs and expectations when it comes to work, it can be difficult to create a compensation package to meet everyone’s preferences. You can, however, use talent analytics to build a competitive compensation package that resonates with target candidates. Using your own in-house analytical data combined with a complete competitor analysis can help you better understand the workplace expectations of employees in specific locations, roles and industries.

With this real-time analytical data, you can revamp compensation packages to ensure you’re offering a competitive salary as well as the right benefits. This step can help you improve your company’s job acceptance rates despite today’s tight job market.

identify target candidates

Every company has a handful of hardworking employees they wish they could clone. While cloning isn’t possible, you can use talent analytics to determine what traits, attributes and capabilities these prime workers have in common. With this analytical data in hand, you can tailor job postings, job descriptions and hiring practices to target applicants with similar qualities.

For example, analytical data might show that the best performers in shift management jobs have been promoted from specific entry-level roles within the company. This data can provide insights as to what traits and qualities to look for when hiring for these entry-level roles.

reduce unconscious bias

Studies show that many workers around the world want to work for companies with diverse workforces. In fact, one study shows that nearly half of all millennials are actively seeking jobs at companies with diverse workforces. Diversity in the workplace can help to attract these job seekers and result in improved performance and increased innovation within the company. After all, if too many employees think and react similarly, this lack of creativity and innovation can hinder performance and productivity.

Building a diverse workforce, however, is not as easy as you might think. Unconscious bias too often impacts hiring decisions in companies that lack a strategy to combat this issue. You have to develop a sourcing strategy that targets candidates from different locations, genders and backgrounds while also engaging with them in a way that entices them to apply for the job and accept the job offer. Ultimately, this means you must remove bias from the hiring process and integrate talent analytics.

Talent analytics can help in a variety of ways. First, you can use analytical data to secure a company's buy-in by explaining the vast benefits of building a diverse workforce. Secondly, you can identify areas where your company may be struggling to build a diverse workforce. For example, is your company struggling to source diverse applicants, are unstructured interviews preventing diverse hiring decisions or are diverse candidates failing to accept your job offers?

Finally, you can use talent analytics to develop and implement recruitment strategies to address these issues. For instance, do you need to create strategies for sourcing talent or does your company need to revamp its compensation package to target a more diverse workforce? Then, you can analyze a snapshot of data over several periods to see if improvements have been made over time.

The good news is that by integrating data analytics into your recruitment process, you allow hiring managers to make data-driven decisions rather than relying solely on their gut instincts.

streamline the hiring process

In today’s highly competitive job market, it’s never been more important to have an efficient hiring process in place. Otherwise, you risk losing your first choice of candidate because you waited too long to extend a job offer. Talent analytics can help you identify factors that may be slowing down your recruitment process. For instance, is the application process too long, is something preventing you from filtering through applications quickly and efficiently or is an ineffective reference-checking process reducing your time-to-hire rates?

Once you’ve identified potential problem areas within the recruitment process, look for ways to make these processes more efficient. For example, can you bring more automation to your recruitment process to speed things up?

Using talent analytics to identify and fix problem areas can help your company avoid losing prime candidates in the middle of the recruitment process. Instead, you can make a job offer before your competitors do and acquire your first choice rather than settle for your second or third choice.

forecast future talent needs

Thanks to the advancements in artificial intelligence and machine learning technology, you can use people analytics to improve your workforce planning strategies. By collecting, measuring and analyzing workforce data, organizations can better predict the future needs of the company. This allows for predictive workforce planning rather than reactive planning and can improve recruitment outcomes.

People analytics can help you identify skills gaps within the workforce, predict skills needed for the future and stay ahead of future labor shifts. For example, if your company, like 80% of those around the world, plans to invest in more automation in the workplace, this transition will certainly bring changes to the structure of your workforce. This may mean that some jobs will be replaced with automation, new skills need to be acquired and upskilling may be a priority. People analytics can help you identify everything from future skills gaps to which employees are ideal for training opportunities.

Using workforce data analytics to predict your company’s future needs can put you a step ahead of the competition and allow you to acquire and retain the skills your company needs.

people analytics best practices

When it comes to people analytics, security and compliance are a must. As with all data your company manages, you must set clear parameters regarding what type of workforce data is being collected, how it’s stored and managed and who has access to it. After all, the last thing you want is to have a data breach of the workers' data. Additionally, make sure all your data collection, storage and analysis methods are in compliance with relevant employment laws and GDPR regulations.

Download our list of ‘7 things you should know about people analytics’ to learn more about the value this methodology can bring to your company.