Talent: Data to the Rescue for Strategic Talent Management

“Candidate A met all our requirements on paper, but I got a really great vibe from candidate B in the interview. So, let’s go with B.”

In an era where workers at every level of an organization are expected to justify decisions with facts and figures, it’s peculiar to note that the talent acquisition (TA) realm seems to be lagging in this area.

You won’t find a CPO making a major procurement decision based on a “gut feel” or a CEO shifting a company’s strategic direction due to a personal preference. But hiring authorities regularly make off-the-cuff decisions without using the most important tool of 21st-century business: data.

Data can enhance four key steps of talent management: identifying needs, hiring, skills development and retention.

Identifying Talent Needs

One of the differences between tactical and strategic recruitment is talent managers’ ability to proactively anticipate hiring needs. Shifting from reactive to proactive hiring starts with access to historical data. Say, for example, your organization’s procurement team has a 10 percent annual turnover, and that typically, employees tender their notices in first quarter of the fiscal year, after annual bonuses are paid out. Armed with this information, there’s no reason managers should scramble to replace staff when people leave.

A proactive talent manager would begin engaging the pool of active and passive candidates well in advance of first-quarter departures to ensure a viable short list of interested candidates. Tracking yield ratios will provide an understanding of how many applicants are typically needed to make one hire.

One of the differences between tactical and strategic recruitment is talent managers’ ability to proactively anticipate hiring needs.

Leveraging “people data” will also enable organizations to allocate their hiring budgets more intelligently, track the sources of hire — as in, where the best candidates are recruited from — and unearth hiring issues that cause them to miss out on quality candidates.

Hiring

Managers can move from subjective to objective hiring by selecting candidates based on assessment scores (including from sample work tests) and sticking to a structured interview to ensure candidates are asked the same questions. While it may be more interesting to freestyle with interview questions — especially when you’re talking to dozens of candidates — this makes it much harder to make an objective decision during the selection process.   

Think about other data points that you could potentially capture during the hiring process that will ultimately help improve the quality of hire while decreasing time and cost per hire. For example:

• Track the hiring team’s productivity and efficiency. Where are bottlenecks in the hiring process?
• If you have an online-application process, find out how many prospective candidates complete it. If there’s a conversion issue, discover exactly where the process is abandoned. Use this data to improve the candidate experience.
• If top candidates decline your offer, ask why and, if possible, find out where they end up working.
• Track retention and hiring satisfaction.

Skills Development

An integral part of talent management, skills development helps businesses optimize talent, increase performance levels and improve retention. But skills development is also where budgets are wasted with training programs that are one-size-fits-all or teach workers skills they already have. 

Data-driven learning is about making your training effective, tailored and relevant to the learner. It involves:

• Understanding each learner
• Personalizing skills development through tailored courses
• Identifying why training doesn’t “stick”
• Improving engagement
• Measuring training programs’ success.

Retention

Put people data to work to (1) identify employees who are most likely to leave your organization, (2) understand why, and (3) take steps to re-engage them. While an exit interview is a time-honored way to learn why an employee leaves, that’s when it’s too late to do anything about it. Instead, regular employee surveys can identify pain points and rectify them where possible. CIO.com provides an example of an employee-polling tool that asks: “What is one process that, if eliminated, could make you more productive?”

Survey your employees to understand the value they place on the typical tools companies use to drive retention: better leadership, training programs, career paths, financial bonuses and other perks, and endeavors that promote work-life balance.

Finally, think about how you can use applicant data to hire people that are more likely to stay at your organization for longer than the average tenure. While the stigma associated with job-hopping has reduced with the rise of the millennial workforce, the data in an applicant’s employment history can be used to predict how long he or she might stay at a company.   

If your organization has a significant retention problem, the human resources (HR) department can use its gathered data to make a business case for implementing hiring-process improvements. Again, it’s about eliminating guesswork and making evidence-based, high-quality decisions that are more likely to pay off.

Other Considerations

Two final points:

• Whose job is talent management, anyway? Is it up to the HR team, external recruiters or hiring managers? Current wisdom is that talent management is a shared responsibility, which is why everyone must be on board with the concept. Recruiters and HR representatives can set the agenda and unearth relevant data, but their most critical task is equipping business managers with the information necessary to make better decisions around hiring, training, engagement and retention.
• The amount of data can feel overwhelming, but technology is here to help. Research talent management systems on the market — especially the data they capture, how it is captured, and how it is used to guide fact-backed decision-making.

Without data, getting strategic about talent management will be an uphill battle for businesses. There are deep pools of people-data insights for any organization to tap, but it’s up to talent managers to capitalize on it.   

Naseem Malik, CPSM, is managing partner at MRA Global Sourcing in Chicago and a member of Institute for Supply Management^®’s Talent Management Committee.