Putting Together Your Talent Analytics Strategy

One of the biggest hurdles for HR teams is integrating proven data-driven strategies to improve their hiring capabilities and business performance. You may have the tools to collect data, but translating those insights into relevant metrics and actionable business strategies presents a new set of challenges.

That’s where a talent analytics strategy, also known as people analytics, can help transform your business and hiring practices. Below we’ll cover everything you need to know about putting together a competent talent analytics strategy. 

What is a talent analytics strategy?

A talent analytics strategy is about developing a process that allows you to maximize your talent analytics insights and data into actionable business decisions. If people analytics is about leveraging data to improve hiring and business outcomes, then a talent analytics strategy is about how you plan on leveraging data to achieve those outcomes.

The importance of a talent analytics strategy

According to a Deloitte survey, only four percent of companies feel they predicted talent capabilities today, but 60 percent of those companies want to build a talent analytic plan this year. Why? Because of what talent analytics can do for your business. 

With a robust talent analytics strategy, you can expect your hiring practices and business performance to improve in the following ways:

• You’ll have greater capabilities to identify skills gaps. 
• You’ll have a clearer understanding of your headcount, turnover rate, and employee satisfaction. 
• You’ll be able to segment analytics to the departments that need it the most. 
• You can leverage predictive analytics to either increase your staff or cut back on hiring. 
• You’ll be able to adapt your hiring strategy to business changes. 

Putting the right infrastructure in place for a talent analytics strategy

Developing the right talent analytics structures starts with identifying which parts of your business you want to improve and tracking the relevant metrics for your needs. To do that, you need the right tools to measure your talent analytics.

With the right tools, you can integrate your analytics tracking with your overall software ecosystem. Some of the most common talent analytic tools include:

• An advanced ATS
• A CRM
• Talent sourcing tools
• 360 digital reference checking
• Quality-of-hire analytics platforms
• Employee survey data capabilities

Below we’ll take a closer look at how to test your tracking and determine which metrics to follow.

Test your talent analytics tracking

Adequate data tracking is a real problem for hiring teams. 39 percent of Linkedin respondents said they didn’t have the right strategies to gain meaningful insights from data, and your analytics structure can actually be a detriment to your business if you’re not tracking your metrics properly.

This comes down to narrowing down your goal and limiting your strategy to a few key metrics to start. It also helps to have a talent management platform that can streamline a lot of these processes for you. 

Trusted talent management platforms, like Crosschq, simplify this process, making it easy for you to segment data, rely on supporting visualizations, and identify concrete metrics you can focus on.

Determine the talent metrics that will be included in your reports

You want the right systems and analytic platforms that align with your desired metrics. Determining how you’ll calculate these metrics, whether or not those tools are available in your current system, and what kind of cadence reporting your platforms to provide are all important things to consider. 

At the end of the day, you have stakeholders and team leaders to report to, and the right talent analytics platform will give you everything you need to provide those numbers in a cogent, easy-to-understand manner.

Some key metrics to consider for your talent strategy include:

• Quality of hire
• Pipeline efficacy in finding the right hires
• Predictive measurements for future hires
• Month-over-month performance metrics
• Time-to-hire
• Retention rate
• Employee satisfaction
• Training and onboarding spend
• Absenteeism rate
• Automated reference checking reports

Driving action from your talent analytics strategy

After you’ve determined what kind of reporting to draw on and what metrics to track, how will you drive action for your company to improve?

You need to establish benchmarks and KPIs for your talent analytics strategy and make actionable decisions to reach those benchmarks. For example, if your concern is performance, you may want to look at your onboarding/ practices, quality of hire metrics, and reference checking process. 

An SHRM study found that businesses with a standardized onboarding process experience 50 percent greater new-hire productivity, and 69 percent of employees who had a great onboarding experience stayed with their company for at least three years. 

Improving your onboarding and training processes is just one way to help performance and retention, but you can’t improve your onboarding strategy if you don’t know it’s an issue in the first place.

Final thoughts: Talent analytics strategy

Crosschq offers 80 on-demand quality-of-hire reports that can give you insights on performance, retention, and your hiring channels. All of these come with easy-to-read visualizations, charts, and dashboards that give you an at-a-glance view of your key metrics and pipelines.

Try the demo to learn more about why Crosschq is the best talent analytics platform in the market today.