What is Talent Analytics?
It refers to the process of leveraging technology and statistics to assess employee data, especially into the hiring pool and the internal workforce, to derive critical insights which can facilitate smarter workforce planning and enhanced business decisions. Talent analytics also goes by the following names – workforce analytics, human resource (HR) analytics as well as human capital analytics.
HR analytics tools derive insights into the strengths and weaknesses of an organization’s potential employees and workforce. These insights help talent acquisition and HR teams to understand the influencing and motivating indicators for potential hires and workforce drives. Furthermore, combining these powerful insights, organizations can craft and adopt powerful strategies that enable performance and productivity optimization.
So how did analytics gain such relevance today? Let’s take a more detailed look at the history of HR Analytics for enlightenment.
The Past and Present of Talent Analytics
Analytics got recognition with the 100-years study conducted by Google’s People Innovation Lab to analyze and understand work. Laszlo Bock, the former SVP of Google’s People Operation, said that the goal was to understand the KPIs of a productive and satisfactory work experience. He further stated that this was made possible by analyzing employees’ perceptions, attitudes, behavior, and personality traits over time.
Deloitte states, today talent analytics belongs amongst the top five priorities in different domains across the globe. Since talent analytics enables engagement doubling, revenue enhancement, as well as other aspects of business productivity, Deloitte states further. That’s why 60% of organizations have planned to invest in HR analytics tools this year.
But how do talent analytics metrics work? Let’s take a closer look at the basic components of talent analytics to understand the matter better.
What are the Fundamental Elements of Talent Analytics?
Each component of talent analytics software plays a unique role in defining the overall functionality. These combine to generate actionable insights and statistics that help organizations to make optimal decisions for business enhancement. Here is an overview of each component in detail.
Hiring analytics analyzes applicants and candidates throughout the recruitment process to provide real-time insights. This component of this checks candidates’ knowledge, skills, and experience as listed on CVs and applications to help recruiters shortlist the best candidates among the bulk.
Furthermore, due to automated candidate screening, HR analytics tools help in reducing bias and discrimination from the overall recruitment process. Since it is an ongoing process, HR analytics tools gather data over time to provide invaluable predictive talent analytics for enhanced hiring decisions.
-
Ongoing Feedback Analytics
On the other hand, Ongoing Feedback Analytics focuses on the existing workforce. This component of talent management analytics helps in team performance examination, skill positioning, and skill gap identification. Hence, continuous feedback analytics is a vital tool for business scalability and succession planning. Furthermore, continuous feedback analytics also helps recruiters in identifying candidates who:
- Need skill upgrading
- Have leadership ability
- Can perform better in various roles
- Degrade productivity and much more
Optimization analytics combines hiring and ongoing feedback analytics to generate predictive talent analytics insights into the key areas available for performance optimization. Using optimization analytics, HR teams can analyze current workforce scenarios and locate areas that need improvement. Hence, this component of talent management analytics provides a holistic overview of overall business performance to make data-driven decisions that meet the bulls’ eye.
Now you must wonder what will your organization derive by leveraging talent analytics? Well, the list is simply enormous. Continue reading to know about all the benefits of using Talent Analytics in HR processes!
What are the Benefits of Implementing Talent Analytics in HR?
We have already discussed how Talent Analytics in HR helps in understanding the workforce better by pinpointing the various factors which affect workforce productivity both positively and negatively. Furthermore, predictive talent analytics tools also provide better insights into the hiring pool for apt candidate selection.
However, Talent analytics in HR has more than one benefit. Some of the benefits of implementing talent analytics in HR include:
Talent analytics tools collect overall data and provide insights about your candidates. That is, HR analytics tools use intelligent algorithms to go through job applications and CVS to get a complete picture of the candidate. Based on the required skills and experience, the talent analytics software will unbiasedly shortlist candidates that meet the given criteria.
Furthermore, the talent analytics software also ranks the candidates who exactly match the given criteria, hence, enabling recruiters to derive a list of suitable candidates for an interview without manual workload.
-
Hiring Metrics Tracking
HR analytics tools provide complete independence to recruiters when it comes to hiring metrics tracking and analysis. These data provide impactful insights on recruitment costs, average hiring time, hiring source derivation, and much more. Not only so but talent analytics software also helps recruiters to enhance the recruitment process as well as implementing resources in the required places. Hence, recruiters can focus on crucial business goals rather than spending their time on cumbersome hiring administrative tasks.
-
Continuous Feedback Collection
Talent analytics software also allows you to analyze and determine whether your organization has an apt skill base. In addition to that, you can also identify skill gaps and assess your team’s performance. Hence, talent analytics metrics enable you to develop powerful workforce plans and align them with your organization’s long-term goals.
-
Predictive Talent Analytics Application
Predictive talent analytics or optimization analytics provides an unbiased about an organization’s:
- Current position
- Necessary changes required identification
- Scalability measures
- Improvement grounds
- Action required areas
Furthermore, using predictive talent analytics, you can forecast the necessary skills required in future candidates and employees to meet business goals. Apart from that, talent management analytics also helps you to make better decisions in areas such as productivity, employee retention, hiring needs, and much more.
-
Employee Retention Rate Increment
HR analytics tools also allow you to identify satisfying and cumbersome aspects of a company’s culture. To keep your workforce happy and motivated, managers need to conduct employee surveys to understand problematic areas. Here, talent analytics tools provide data-driven insights after analyzing every employee feedback accurately. Working on the said areas surely enhances employee engagement and experience, helping you to retain your potential employees better.
HR analytics tools provide a clear overview of your organization’s profitability rate. These talent analytics tools simply compare the per-hour workforce rate with the production levels. Moreover, talent analytics software allows you to analyze overtime patterns and payroll irregularities as well. In addition to that, you can track down fraud threats and stock anomalies in real-time with talent analytics tools to prevent major losses.
Talent analytics software also helps you to focus on important aspects of your business rather than spending your time identifying problematic areas and resolution ideas. HR analytics tools help provide access to data-driven reports which clearly and accurately state the areas that your workforce faces problems with. Furthermore, leveraging data also provides you with apt problem-solving ideas for the same.
On the other hand, talent analytics tools also help you to automate major hiring processes like candidate sourcing, shortlisting, and screening. Hence, you save your precious hours with talent analytics software.
Apart from deriving accurate data on employee performance, the HR team also needs to convey the same to employees such that they can improve on their productivity. However, employees may also be interested and misinterpret length spreadsheets and powerpoints. On the other hand, talent management analytics can provide access to those data-driven concrete insights to employees as well. This will provide complete transparency to employees and understand the areas where they need to improve.
Your brand is a deciding factor of your organization’s fate. According to statistics, 84% of candidates prefer to choose a company with a powerful brand image. Apart from that, a powerful brand infuses trust in the hearts of both internal and external stakeholders. Hence, marketing managers keep a constant eye on how employees and consumers engage and react to your brand image. However, this manual tracking can lead to several errors that can result critically for your organization.
Hence, leveraging talent analytics allows recruiters to track the minutest details of your brand awareness. HR analytics tools provide clear and strong insights on who researches your company, engages on your social media sites, the number of applicants, popularity, and much more. Identifying these can help your marketing team craft marketing strategies that align with your consumers’ preferences. Therefore, talent analytics software is a clear way out to enhance your brand awareness successfully.
So who uses talent management analytics in the present era? We have shortlisted some of the best analytic talent examples along with how they helped organizations to overcome severe challenges in the following section.
Real-Life Use Cases of Talent Analytics
Here is an overview of the leading companies that have utilized talent management analytics and the amazing benefits they have experienced.
Several companies have favored candidates with great academic records. However, Google and AT&T have leveraged talent management analytics to pinpoint candidates with the right skill set and experience irrespective of academic records. This has enabled these organizations to enjoy a great hike in performance and productivity.
IBM leveraged HR analytics tools to take holistic feedback about their newly proposed appraisal system. These talent analytics tools collected data from their internal social networking sites where they put on surveys. The talent analytics software figured out that IBM’s employees did not praise the idea of getting graded on a curve. This insight helped IBM to avoid investing in the idea to ensure that their employees’ notions were met.
Twitter made employee surveys twice a year with MCQ-based questionnaires. However, that did not give them a clear idea about their employees’ experience. Hence, Twitter started sending monthly open-ended comprehensive surveys to understand employee experience and engagement. They utilized metrics to derive actionable insights into employee info and patterns. Hence, in the end, thesemetrics helped them to boost morale as well as productivity.
Credit Suisse Bank leveraged talent management analytics to get a deeper understanding of the longevity of an employee’s stay and their reason behind leaving. With anonymous surveys, Credit Suisse Bank identified employees with high and low performance and development rates. Furthermore, they also came up with apt solutions like skill development training to resolve the challenges. Hence, with HR analytics tools they were able to reduce turnover rates and improve employee retention. In addition to that, talent analytics software helped the company to save $70,000,000!
Clarks started implementing this system to enhance their employee engagement. In a study, they found out that a 1% increase in employee engagement leads to a 0.4% increase in financial performance. Using talent management analytics, they were able to define the characteristic factors of their top 100 high-performing stores.
They found out that their high financial performance resulted due to two reasons. Firstly, their ideal team size. Secondly, the stay length of their store manager. Furthermore, they also figured out that with the increase in their turnover rates, their performance level dropped.
These insights helped Clarks to devise a performance management plan along with an engagement toolkit to maintain the same performance for their wide range of stores.
-
Harrah’s Entertainment
After getting success in identifying and attracting profitable customers, the Atlantic City and Las Vegas-based entertainment company was determined to use analytics for their employees. Using talent management analytics, Harrah’s Entertainment was able to:
- Identify ideal candidates requirements for goal fulfillment
- Improve work conditions and engagement for employees
- Evaluate health and wellness programs’ effect on employee engagement
Not only has Harrah’s Entertainment improved employee engagement but also reduced urgent medical costs in millions of US dollars in just a year!
Best Buy has been utilizing talent management analytics for many years. Recently, they pinpointed some KPIs that helped them to enhance their employee engagement by 0.01% in one of their stores. This resulted in a $100,000 hike in their store’s yearly operating earnings!
Experian faced a 4% hike in attrition rates and thereby was facing some severe challenges to retain their employees. However, they were able to predict the longevity of each employee in their organization by leveraging a predictive talent analytics model that included 200 attributes. The predictive model generated data-driven insights, which when implemented, resulted in a 1% reduction in their attrition rates. Henceforth, they were able to save $10,000,000!
How AI and Talent Analytics is helping to develop leaders of the future?
In this competitive era, managing both workforces and choosing the right candidates means estimating the productivity and profitability of your organization. Keeping employees happy and motivated towards work results in enhanced productivity outcomes. While identifying the candidates whose skill-sets align with your organizational objectives will ensure a great future for your organization. However, just by relying on the gut, you cannot achieve the above-stated above-stated realities.
Forbes states that AI and Talent Analytics can help organizations propose better strategies to achieve high-potential candidate selection and improve employee engagement and experience. This combination can help organizations in the following five ways to ensure that your employees and hires become tomorrow’s leaders.
-
Identify potential candidates with leadership capabilities
Forbes states that AI’s powerful algorithms can easily screen high-potential candidates from a huge base of talents. Moreover, with talent analytics, you can identify their strengths and weaknesses from various AI-based self-assessment surveys. Hence, not only can you mold candidates’ skills to meet your requirements but AI and talent management analytics also help candidates to add value to their career orientation.
-
Right coaching competency determination
With changing times, situations, markets, and demographics have become volatile. AI and talent analytics metrics can help organizations to analyze real-time situations and demographics to come up with coaching programs. Not only so, but AI and talent analytics also assess skill gaps across your organization. This identification helps recruiters to develop personalized skill development programs in an organized and consistent manner at a great scale.
-
Top-notch quality conversations support
With data-driven insights into each employee’s strengths and weaknesses, coaches can derive attention-grabbing topics using AI. Both these factors can help employees and coaches to underline pain points and talk about ways of improvement. Hence, AI and Talent Analytics Metrics can help both employees and trainers to converse qualitatively which leads to better outcomes.
-
Defining strong behavioral skills development programs
Great leaders have advanced behavioral skills. Organizations can leverage AI and talent management analytics to help potential candidates develop the best behavioral skills to become the leaders of tomorrow. AI and talent management analytics can help you to map key skills and competencies of employees that can help their growth and improve your productivity. Furthermore, this technological combination also provides development program suggestions for proactive development and continuous improvement.
-
Productivity drive intensification
Low engagement leads to poor performance and productivity. Hence, you can leverage AI and talent analytics to assess employees’ present and future development requirements. This can directly affect employees’ engagement levels and result in greater productivity.
Conclusion
In 2019 itself, the role of HR analytics was in high demand compared to other roles as stated by Statista.
However, with the rising demand for innovation, talent analytics tools have also risen considerately. Overtaking traditional video conferencing platforms like Zoom, 90% of respondents to a survey conducted by Deloitte say that talent analytics will become necessary for their organization in the next three years.
Simply because talent analytics not only helps in filling a vacant space with an average skill-bearing candidate but it also helps to find the best talent amongst the lot irrespective of bias. Furthermore, keeping aside the external hunt, talent analytics metrics also looks for measures that help in developing existing workforce engagement and experience to increase their performance levels.
Infuse Data to Empower your Operations Today
Empower data and talent analytics into your organization today by leveraging Birbal. Birbal is your one-stop destination to manage all Human Resource Management (HRM) challenges. Backed by AI and Talent Analytics, Birbal is a powerful tool to manage compelling challenges like workforce planning and business decision-making. Get a glimpse of Birbal’s efficiency with a free trial right from here!
