Leveraging Talent Intelligence for Employee Retention

Adrian Dixon

June 30, 2021

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In the turbulent war on talent, enterprise organizations are leveraging talent intelligence to ramp up their talent acquisition and retention efforts. 

Turnover is at a record high, with The New York Times reporting nearly 4 million people left their jobs this past April, the highest quit rate since the year 2000. As the economy reopens with vaccination programs ramping up, many workers who have been sheltering in place during the pandemic are ready for a change.

The big ask for those changing careers? Employees are voicing that they want to continue remote work, creating a major retention risk for any employers enforcing back to the office. Gartner found over half of employees say work flexibility impacts whether they will stay at their organizations, valuing remote work over a pay raise.

What is talent intelligence?

Talent intelligence uses data to reinvent and optimize every part of the recruitment process, incorporating data from a number of sources to help HR professionals make better talent decisions. 

These sources include existing talent pools of potential candidates and existing employees, as well as competitor and industry information. 

AI and machine learning provide the heavy lift of connecting data points to evaluate talent more objectively and create an actionable workforce strategy at scale. 

Talent Intelligence for Employee Retention

Workforce planning with purpose

Make more strategic decisions about hiring and workforce management. HR teams may have had access to this data within existing systems for years, but lacked the capability to drill down and extract meaningful insights. 

Actionable insights for your talent strategy

There’s a wealth of data within existing HR systems that can generate insights for a range of areas, from migration reports of where talent is sourced from and departs to, as well as the specific talent gaps your organization has. 

Manage your existing employee pool better with talent intelligence. Technology now allows companies to become more people-oriented, collecting relevant information to create procedures that meaningfully affect your employees. 

Improve your quality of hire and find great candidates who stay. AI can compare past successful hires to better predict which candidates will be a good fit for your organization. That talent shortlist is the perfect handover point to HR for interviews and determining the perfect fit from the recruiter’s perspective. 

From a retention perspective, remember that your organization’s data holds a wealth of information, including insights into what makes your people stay and leave. 

Analyzing your competitors 

When considering your industry competitors, remember they are also competitors for talent. Talent intelligence provides analysis into your larger market space, as well as insights into talent within your own workforce.

Did the employee not feel they had space to grow? Was salary a factor? Josh Bersin described an example where a tech company in Silicon Valley found the most predictive factor in attrition turned out to be commute time. Using talent intelligence to analyze their turnover, they were able to start changing work hours to accommodate employee commutes and offering satellite offices to retain their talent. 

Companies can attract and retain the best talent by comparing benefits and compensation for similar roles at competitors. Don’t underestimate the importance of understanding these small differences for specific roles, and not just experience levels.

Track and evaluate your diversity goals

This sentiment applies to your overall workforce planning, in addition to your recruitment metrics. Recruitment teams track their success on metrics such as time to hire, cost per hire, attrition after the first year, and more, but this mindset is even more effective with your diversity efforts. 

More than a call for action, employees are now looking for results from your DEI efforts. With AI-based tools, global organizations are measuring their workforce demographics, identifying gaps, and developing DEI goals off these benchmarks. 

  • Identify leaders to keep your new initiatives alive. 
  • Structure your workplace with diversity and inclusion as core values in everyday office life.
  • Develop career mapping and succession planning for employees at every level of your organization. 

People want to stay at diverse companies. By promoting your commitment to diversity and inclusion in everything you do, your employees will feel a sense of belonging and greater commitment to your organization for the long term.


Are you ready to take your talent strategy to the next level with a layer of talent intelligence? Leadership teams can better leverage their existing data for more effective and strategic decision-making, making their people the powerhouse behind their organization.