The Role of Talent Intelligence in Optimizing Recruitment

Recruiting is competitive, fast-paced, and challenging, where the best talent intelligence wins.

It requires staying on top of the latest recruitment trends and being more creative with your recruiting strategies to secure top talent.

Sixty-nine percent of US employers struggle to find a skilled workforce. Post-pandemic, recruiters are under greater pressure to think outside the box and fill vacancies at a near-impossible pace amid a massive global talent shortage. Recruiters need more than just resumes and job descriptions to find and hire talent and step up their game with talent intelligence.

In this blog post, you’ll learn the key benefits of using talent intelligence in your hiring strategy, how your company can leverage it throughout the hiring process, and explore the future of talent intelligence in a hybrid world.

What is talent intelligence? 

Talent intelligence is fast becoming a recruiter's trusted tool to increase recruiting efficiency. It helps fill in the gaps, so you spend less time finding quality candidates and more time attracting them.

Recruiters rely heavily on data and insights to identify patterns and what is and isn't working in their hiring strategy. For example, identifying skill gaps helps them determine the type of candidates they need to target. Managing employee churn determines why people leave the company. Recruiters need this data to make better hiring decisions.

But how do you use this data without hours of manual effort?

This is where talent intelligence comes in. Put simply, it's a scientific method for collecting, analyzing, and compiling a wealth of candidate data at every stage of the employee lifecycle into comprehensive reports to drive informed hiring decisions throughout the hiring process.

You can use this data to personalize and optimize candidate engagement, employee career development, talent acquisition and retention, and hiring of diverse employees – in short, all aspects of the employee lifecycle can become more efficient with talent intelligence.

Why you should bake talent intelligence into your recruiting strategy 

You're not the only company looking for high-caliber talent. You may be competing with big tech companies and high-growth startups. So how do you stand out from the crowd?

Opt for data-driven rather than instinct-driven recruitment and consciously engage with your employees. Prospective or existing employees alike will want to work for your company if they know you’re willing to invest in them. Talent intelligence allows you to do this.

Suppose you have the bandwidth to collect talent data in-house. You can use your existing candidate search tools, CRMs, Google Analytics, and salary comparison tools to collect relevant talent data, including:

• Skills gaps and talent shortage analysis 
• Talent acquisition metrics 
• Candidate experience metrics
• Diversity and inclusion metrics

How to use talent intelligence to drive value

Talent intelligence can shed light on difficult questions, such as why your company is prone to employee turnover and how to get your employees to stay. The deeper you dive into talent data, the better prospects you get.

Source: HackerEarth

It helps you analyze which parts of your hiring process need improvement and is working successfully. You can then start addressing talent shortages, internal policy changes, new employee retention activities, manager reviews, and more.

Here’s how to get started. 

Predict your hiring needs

Finding skilled candidates in a planned hiring environment is challenging enough but almost impossible when a vacancy unexpectedly opens up. Your entire recruiting team has to work hard to fill this position. Rash decisions can make you end up hiring candidates without the needed skillset. 

You need to be proactive to gain an edge over your competitors. Have a detailed plan ready that addresses urgent hiring needs, future skills needed, and long-term hiring needs.

Talent intelligence supports you every step of the way. It enables you to understand the strengths of your entire talent pool and identify underlying skill gaps. It helps you gain insight into individual teams to predict your hiring needs going forward. You get actionable insights on:

• Which team members are planning a job change?
• Who would retire soon?
• Which teams are struggling and may need more team members?
• What skill gaps do you need to hire for quickly?

This data feeds into your strategy so you can proactively hire to fill skill gaps and job openings. You can also anticipate when an employee will lose engagement and find ways to make them stay by focusing more on their individual needs.

By allowing talent intelligence tools to streamline your entire recruiting process, you can make more data-driven decisions around talent hiring and retention – less chance of making costly mistakes like a bad hire.

Stay abreast of future trends

Anticipating your company's short- and long-term hiring needs should form the basis of any recruiting strategy. But what happens when something completely unprecedented happens? When the only way we know how to function becomes impractical.

The pandemic led to one such unforeseen trend, the remote work trend. Offices worldwide were shut down overnight, and people were compelled to work from home. Nobody could know the consequences or how things will work after the pandemic.

In such situations, the light at the end of the tunnel is data. By analyzing the data provided by talent intelligence, you can get an idea of ​​what to expect next. You can spot patterns, trends, and insights from this data to develop better strategies and optimize your hiring. This prepares you for new market trends and adapts your processes in good time.

You also provide potential candidates with a positive first interaction with your company and take better care of your existing employees. Engagement and productivity don't dip in the face of new workplace changes when you’re mindful and careful of the people around you.

Manage talent acquisition costs

A large part of recruitment boils down to this question. Are you getting the best possible return on investment (ROI) for your time as a recruiter filling a vacancy? The most reliable answer comes in the form of data. You can use talent intelligence insights to understand which stages of the recruitment lifecycle cost the most.

Every recruiter should keep some key recruitment metrics in mind:

• Cost-per-hire is a metric that every HR team has eyes on. It focuses on reducing the cost of onboarding a single candidate. To do this, you need to analyze internal and external recruitment costs and formulate a budget-friendly strategy.
• Time-to-fill is the time it takes to fill a position from when it was advertised until a candidate accepts the job offer. If filling this position takes time, reconsider your job posting strategy. Look for new avenues like social media and recruitment platforms, and be proactive about what works and doesn’t in your strategy.
• Time-to-hire estimates the time from the first step in the hiring cycle, such as the first phone call or meeting, to accepting the job offer. If this is on the higher side, consider whether your interview process is taking longer than necessary. Are you spending too much time on the appraisal phase, or are there other phases of the hiring process that you can shorten?
• Quality of hire can vary from candidate to candidate, but it's an important metric to track. Look at the value the new employee brings to the company, say, the new employee's performance compared to pre-employment expectations. Set and track the expectations within the first year of a new employee joining the organization. This allows you to better understand how effective your current recruiting practices are.

You can go a step further to identify existing employees' pain points and challenges. This will help you improve employee engagement and satisfaction. Remember, talent Intelligence primarily supports your HR team and saves you the cost of replacing your existing employees.

Reduce employee churn

To say that employee churn is a major problem for companies is putting it lightly. And the icing on the cake? According to a recent study by TeamStage, 80% of employee turnover is due to poor hiring decisions. To top it off, replacing a single employee comes at a high cost to the recruitment budget. If you haven't already felt the pressure, you certainly would now!

To combat employee attrition, you need to get back to basics and understand why an employee might want to change jobs. You can spot patterns to better analyze why some employees leave, and others stay.

Conduct exit interviews to gain deeper insight into why employees decided to leave. You might even encounter a not-so-obvious disconnect between your HR teams and workforce that can reduce employee engagement and increase turnover. Armed with this data, you’re one step closer to hiring better employees and reducing your employee churn rate.

Emphasize diversity and inclusion

Your job descriptions may contain biased language that'll turn off potential candidates. Use a talent intelligence platform to identify potentially discriminatory language and more inclusive alternatives to attract a diverse talent pool.

In the initial screening phase, recruiters and hiring managers interact with multiple candidates. Despite your best intentions, an unconscious bias can creep in and influence your hiring decisions. Be it the person's gender, a fancy family tree on a resume, or a diverse ethnic culture, you may make decisions based on first impressions.

With talent intelligence systems, it’s easy to implement a blind screening and evaluation process that removes contact, personal details, and other subjective filters about candidates. They help you assess each candidate fairly and objectively.

You can further use talent intelligence to comprehensively view your workforce's talent patterns, employee demographics, payroll, and more. Identify where inclusivity lacks, pay disparities exist, or unequal promotion opportunities take place to implement actionable policy changes.

These combined efforts, coupled with data analytics, eliminate inequalities in the workplace and increase the diversity of your talent pool, existing workforce, and the organization as a whole.

Leverage salary benchmarking

One of the top reasons that make candidates happy is a financial reward (60%). To hire a talented candidate, you need to rethink your hiring budget, especially in today's candidate-centric market. Benchmark your company's salaries for a specific location below or above the market price.

Have more informed conversations with employees about salary decisions and how compensation is structured based on salary benchmarking data. Transparency regarding pay goes a long way toward increasing employee satisfaction and building trust, which leads to better employee retention.

Stay ahead of the curve with talent intelligence

Making data-driven decisions allows you to stay ahead of the competition. Talent intelligence helps you better understand your workforce’s needs and expectations. The various ways in which you drive value through talent data contribute directly to your bottom line.

Talent intelligence lets you finetune your hiring processes, stay abreast of future trends in the recruiting world, and take better care of your people.  

Before anything, learn how to build an authentic and strong company culture that fosters the right environment and instills the right mindset within your organization.