How to Conduct a Talent Analytics Assessment

Data-driven decisions have become a cornerstone for any recruitment team to be successful. A big part of that is people analytics, which is collected over time throughout the span of an employee's career at a certain company.

With the right tools to store, study, analyze and predict data, talent analytics assessments can optimize several facets of your hiring approach.. 

The importance of conducting a talent analytics assessment

A good first step to conducting a talent analytics assessment is to understand the importance of talent analytics assessment. According to a study from Bain, 70% of the Fortune 1000 companies had invested in people analytics and this number is expected to hit 100% in the coming years. 

It’s clear that advanced analytics in this space is going to be adopted by the top organizations that want to be at the cutting edge of optimizing their human resources.

What should your talent analytics measure?

Recruiting

Finding qualified candidates quickly with as few bottlenecks as possible is key to having a great recruiting process. There are many metrics in the recruitment process that tell you the story from a candidate's perspective. For larger organizations, these should be divided into different departments:

• Application time
• Source of application 
• Completion rate, completion to interview rate, interview to hire rate, turnover rates
• Attributes of hires: Demographic data
• Cost of hiring a candidate

The analytics above will give you a good picture of what is being observed, but an improvement to this process would be to have predictive analysis capabilities involved. Predictive data can give you time to adapt to the needs of the future of recruitment and plug gaps wherever required. For example, predictive analysis can give an estimation of how the application completion rate might change given the time taken to complete the application. 

Candidate experience

Even if a candidate is not selected to be part of your organization or be in the interview process, providing them with a prompt and transparent hiring process is key to maintaining a good reputation within the candidate pool. Some metrics that can be measured from their experiences can be grouped around:

• Candidate Interview Experience
• Was the communication provided by the company clear? 
• Was the job description in line with your application process?
• Scaled Rating for what they liked/disliked about the interview process
• How many candidates exited the interview process?
• How likely are you to recommend others to apply with us?

• Candidate Working Experience
• Regular survey for workers, asking about their working experience.
• Anonymous feedback on the work environment.

It is important to note that the feedback from candidates who quit the interview process, were not able to attain the role, or received job offers from you are going to be significantly different. You want to keep in mind not to compare apples to oranges when reviewing candidate feedback. 

New hire experience

With the advent of remote/hybrid working, the experience of new hires has been novel to say the least. It is imperative to collect data from new hires as it keeps them involved and gives them a platform to voice their opinions/concerns. This could be the difference between keeping or losing top talent. 

• Training feedback
• Training and workshop suggestions
• What work settings best suits their professional needs? (remote/hybrid/office)
• Career Mapping questionnaire

Candid new hire opinions and subsequent process improvements will vastly improve company turnover rates and retain healthy morale.  

Benchmarking is the most important step in your talent analytics assessment

Benchmark comparisons are often used to put a mirror in front of one’s performance. Although it is only effective if it is performed correctly. For example, companies can compare costs to hire, interview length, and turnover rates between very similar organizations within an established time period. These organizations can be within or outside the same company. 

How to benchmark your talent analytics

By not benchmarking in isolation. Benchmarking talent analytics should be preceded by vetted business strategies that have the buy-in from different stakeholders. These defined business strategies will shape the KPIs which will define your benchmarks down the lane. 

What do your talent analytics say about your recruiting and talent experience?

Your set benchmarks will give added meaning to your measured metrics. You will come across some common metrics that have a deep impact on your organization:

• Cost to hire: A low cost to hire compared to the established benchmark might mean you are managing costs effectively. A higher cost might mean you need to improve your hiring channels.
• Time to hire: A lower time to hire could indicate an efficient process. A higher time to hire might mean you are losing out on good candidates as they accept offers elsewhere. 
• Training Expenses: The nature of your business will influence this tremendously. A higher training expense than the benchmark might indicate wasted resources. On the other hand, increased training efforts might produce better-skilled professionals in the long run.
• Revenue per employee: A lagging number could indicate less effective hiring decisions or a lack of productivity. Increased efficiency in the hiring process and regular engagement with the employees can improve this metric.
• Turnover Rate: A high turnover rate might indicate management within the organization needs to do a better job in keeping employees engaged, aligning their values, and rewarding them fairly. Better visibility and information dissemination for management will help in this regard. 

When conducting your analysis, the deviations in comparisons between your data and the benchmark data might mean many things. The quality of data and the homogeneity of the institutions is imperative for the analysis to be effective. 

Final thoughts: Talent analytics assessment

Talent analytics assessment is a continuous, involved, and nuanced process that institutions cannot afford to lag behind on. Staying update on key metrics and tracking important aspects of your hiring pipelines will give you the best chances to improve your process and find the best talent out there.

Thankfully, Crosschq is prepared to ease the responsibility for you. Our advanced hiring tools, like the Crosschq TalentWall, will prepare you with ready-to-use analytic insights and vivid visualizations. 

Click here to learn more about how Crosschq can help with data-driven hiring filters, month-over-month analytics to stay on top of your hiring insights, and more.