Talent analytics and data are rapidly becoming everything in the hiring world, despite it still being relatively new to human resources. A simple way to view this trend is that it’s old enough for HR leaders and experts to recognize it’s unprecedented importance, but young enough for companies to struggle and not understand. And while we know that there are countless benefits from talent analytics, there’s also plenty of ways that data can relieve your HR team from pain points that stretch from targeting and hiring talent to managing internal expectations.
Making Your Life Easier
It’s no secret that experts will tell you all the benefits you’ll gain from using data analytics in your hiring efforts, but what about the remedies to common pain points? It’s akin to buying a nice pair of shoes - you might hear how they’re comfortable and will last a long time, but most people don’t consider how they could be therapeutic to back and leg pains you might be experiencing. The same rules apply for data analytics.
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Below are four common pain points that HR professionals go through with the hiring process, and the ways that data analytics can provide remedies to those issues.
1. Unrealistically High Hiring Expectations
“Shoot for the moon! Reach for the stars!” These are nice words of encouragement, but how many times have these become the hiring expectations set by someone? Unfortunately, unrealistic hiring expectations happen and when they do it puts a strain on the talent acquisition efforts, the organization, and sometimes even the candidates themselves. With data analytics, however, this stress can be abated.
Quality data can demonstrate not only what defines a quality candidate, but how they can be properly targeted and hired as well.
2. Promising More Than What Can Be Offered
Enticing a candidate to select your organization over others is a multi-pronged effort. The more aspects you can make appealing about your organization, the more enticed the candidate will be. But this can lead to over-promising, and when the reality sinks in it can harm retention and reputation. Data analytics can help a company connect what a candidate is looking for in an organization with what that organization can offer them. That way the candidate isn’t being oversold or mislead, just promised the exciting realities of what your organization can offer them.
3. Not Having the Right Job Criteria
How many times have you reviewed a job description you’ve posted and realized that you’re not asking for too much or too little, just flat out wrong aspects? Skills that aren’t relevant, values that don’t matter, or personality qualities that don’t have any affect on performance? Job descriptions can be a tough creation because the idea might be to take a shotgun approach - ask for a lot, whittle down the candidate pool as you go. But this is time consuming and counterproductive. Instead, use talent analytics within your own organization to identify the skills, personality traits, and qualities that define your best candidates, measure how important each of those are, and design a job description around those specific aspects. Your candidate pool might be smaller, but it will be much more targeted and helpful to your organization in the long run.
4. Looking in All the Wrong Places
This problem is prevalent because, much like the previous problem, there tends to be a shotgun approach here. When you’re recruiting candidates the idea might be “they could be anywhere, so advertise everywhere!” Or it might be slightly more sophisticated, “we know that some channels are better than others, so target those.” Although many organizations might fall into the latter thought process, data analytics will take it one step further by telling you which outlets are giving you the most talent for your buck, where your best talent is coming from, and what sources produce some of the most retained talent. These extra insights will end up changing your organizations recruiting tactics for the better since you’ll now be taking more targeted, informed, and sophisticated approaches to how you find your candidates; thereby improving talent, retention, and ROI.
What do you think? Leave a comment, and make sure you check out the rest of our series on Analytics in Talent Assessment!
Topics: Talent Selection Ideas, Analytics