How to Add Talent Analytics To Your Recruitment Strategy

Adrian Dixon

September 4, 2018

Data-Driven Approach to Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Download

With U.S. unemployment rates below 4% according to the BLS, recruiters today are working harder than ever to find top talent. The last thing recruiters need is to waste their time pursuing the wrong recruitment sources for candidates.

talent analytics

This is just one area in which talent analytics plays a huge role in improving the speed and quality of a recruitment team.

While traditional applicant tracking systems (ATS) can provide some data that are used when analyzing recruitment teams’ effectiveness, they only tell a portion of the story such as time to fill and recruitment source used.

Talent analytics go beyond ATS data to look at the bigger picture by pulling in data from sourcing, hires, onboarding, retention, cost, and even CRM or project management tools you use to manage your hiring process. This is invaluable to a recruiting team as they can begin to craft a recruitment strategy that digs deeper into how, when, and where their efforts should be spent to fill roles with the best candidates possible.

Without talent analytics, recruiters lack that insight all together or are manually working to cobble together potentially unreliable data from spreadsheets and various software from several departments.

Here are 7 areas you can use talent analytics to improve your recruitment strategy.

1. Improve quality of hire

Ideally, every position should be filled with a high-quality candidate who will stick around and thrive. Talent analytics looks at how many candidates who applied were actually qualified, retention rates, and which sources produced the best hires.

Analytics can even go a step further, telling us which characteristics are shared by top performers so that recruiters and hiring managers know which qualifications they should continue to target.

2. Predict time to fill

Recruiters have enough pressure and it’s only made worse by hiring managers and senior leaders putting on extra pressure because critical roles are sitting vacant.

Talent analytics can provide an accurate time to fill estimate based on data such as recruiting conversion rates, historical hiring times, and the size of the potential talent pool. This makes it easier to identify which parts of the hiring process are potentially being slowed by the recruiting or interview teams.

3. Improve the candidate experience

Although candidates are the most critical part of a recruiter’s world, sometimes the candidate experience is less than satisfactory. This is largely due to overworked recruiters having too much volume and not enough time, and applicants beginning to feel like a number.

Talent analytics can help recruiting teams identify where they’re running in to trouble, such as how much time they’re spending in each area of the recruiting process and where candidates are dropping off.

It can present benchmarks and best practices to inform recruiters where and when a candidate touchpoint may be necessary (e.g., an automated email after receiving an application).

4. Make diversity a part of the process

Diversity recruiting is still proving to be a challenge for many companies. Without the right data, it’s difficult to know whether you’re hitting your diversity targets and ensuring equity during the recruiting process.

Analytics will assist you by continuously monitoring the hiring funnel to look at demographics (e.g., gender, veteran status) at each stage. This data helps you track your diversity initiatives and implement changes where needed.

5. Improve forecasting

Unfortunately, there are still organizations who put the brakes on hiring when they’re nearing the end of the fiscal year in order to lighten their cost-burden.

Making analytics a part of your recruitment strategy includes forecasting based upon hiring plans that use historical hiring data, turnover, internal job changes, and the current hiring rate. All of this data can be pulled from both finance and recruiting to provide a more accurate forecast on hiring and spend.

6. Identify talent gaps

Analytics can help predict a talent gap at your organization based upon current talent, the demographics of your geographical area, and the upcoming talent market.

This gives you time to proactively address the impending gap by investing in training, tapping in to new recruitment sources, or considering placing talent in alternate locations.

7. Analyze compensation

One of the toughest conversations a recruiter can have with a hiring manager is that they’re just not paying what the market bears.

Having talent analytics data to show what is competitive and more in line as early as possible in the recruiting process means a wider range of candidates and hopefully a shorter time to fill.

Jessica Barrett Halcom is a write for TechnologyAdvice.com, with specializations in human resources, healthcare, and transportation. She holds a bachelor’s degree from the University of Wisconsin, Green Bay and currently lives in Nashville.