What Is Talent Analytics? Why Do You Need It for Talent Management

“Without big data analytics, companies are blind and deaf wandering out onto the web like deer on a freeway” – Geoffrey Moore. 

In today’s data-driven world, more than ever, analytics has become a fast-growing aspect of HR that many businesses are still lagging. 

Talent analytics is a crucial area where both qualitative and quantitative data continue to matter in the workplace; it provides essential metrics and takes the guesswork out of recruiting talent, especially with the increasing talent shortage challenge that businesses have to deal with. 

Talent analytics is currently rated as one of the top five priorities of the 21st-century HR trend. Yet, many people still rely on their gut and bias to make a hiring decision. Talent analytics enables talent acquisition managers and recruiters to function more intelligently and work smarter. It provides a groundbreaking opportunity for the HR department. 

As an HR professional, you must implement true business-oriented talent analytics to enhance efficiency and engagement, improve the bottom line and make informed decisions. 

How can you address this ever-changing world of HR, make more intelligent workforce planning and decisions and transform your HR department with talent analytics? To help you get started, in this article, we extensively explore talent analytics, its components, and why it is crucial for a smooth workflow in organisations today. 

What is Talent Analytics? 

The term “talent analytics” – also called human resource analytics- refers to a data-driven strategy for your potential hiring pool and existing talent. It is a systematic analysis of employee data to derive insight into the workforce and better understand the strengths, weaknesses, and gaps of present and prospective employees that need to be addressed. 

Statistics and technology help to facilitate talent analytics with the purpose of helping HR and recruitment teams locate the best candidates and forecast the future. 

Implementing data analytics benefits businesses as it can enhance employee productivity by balancing efficiency with employee engagement. In addition, it takes into account biases and measures the aspects of your business that are most important. 

Deloitte’s recently published survey revealed that 4% of organisations surveyed believe they have predictive talent analytics capabilities. However, only about 14% of companies have a talent analytics programme put into action, yet over 60% have an agenda to want to build a plan. 

To make informed decisions, get accurate predictions, and enhance competitive advantage, top-performing organisations commit to leveraging talent analytics but never depend solely on data to qualify candidates. 

Additionally, large data sets are not necessary for talent analytics; instead, it’s about how you use this data to guide your decisions. For example, a top HR organisation like Workforce Group combines both data and other means to screen candidates to deliver diverse, culturally fit employees to your organisation. 

Talent analytics is a popular and multi-facet concept in HR that has been around for a long; it is interchangeably used with human resource analytics, human capital analytics, workforce analytics, people analytics, or hiring analytics. While they all combine metrics, talent analytics focuses explicitly on talent, motivation and engagement. 

A few years ago, a select few of the industry’s top organisations were using analytics to boost business performance. Today, many businesses are incorporating workplace analytics into all facets of human resource management (HR analytics), including hiring and performance management; this has shown to be quite helpful in locating unexpected talent sources and offering counterintuitive insights into what drives employee performance. 

What are the Components of Talent Analytics? 

As you gather data to inform critical decisions in your organisation, you improve individual and organisational performance. However, regardless of the data collection method you rely on, here are three components you must ensure that your talent analytics initiative includes: 

  1.  Hiring Analytics – Employers can learn more about potential workers by examining their talents through hiring analytics. It also directs the business toward a fair conclusion about the data. 
  1. Ongoing Feedback Analytics – Its goal is to assess the performance of the company’s teams by examining their skill sets, talent, and where they currently are. It focuses on the current workforce. Through continuous feedback analytics, you can identify: 
  • Employees that can be upskilled 
  • Those who have leadership potential 
  • The weak links affecting productivity 
  • Employees that can do better in different roles 
  1. Optimisation Analytics: As a means to ensure that the business has everything it needs to make its internal processes robust, optimisation analytics combines all facts and forecasts from hiring analytics and ongoing feedback analytics. 

Why Does Talent Analytics Matter? 

 Talent analytics is needed for context, meaning and insight; if used more proactively, the information derived from data and analytics reports can significantly help realise the full potential of employees and your organisation in the following ways: 

Understand Attrition Rates  

As work flexibility grows and attrition rate increases, talent analytics is pivotal in business settings as it helps organisations understand and analyse the reason for turnover. They can also develop a model that will increase retention rates by using analytics to determine what employees value most. 

Identify the Right Time to Hire and Cost-Per-Hire. 

Hiring the wrong candidates can be costly. For this reason, organisations can use talent analytics in their hiring process to make more strategic decisions in real-time relating to talent demands; they can also easily determine the right candidates for their company. 

 Talent analytics is essential for every hiring manager, recruiter, or talent acquisition specialist who intends to compete for the right talent at the right cost. For example, do you know your cost-per-hire? Understanding numbers is very crucial in this era. 

Identify Top-Performing Employees and High Potentials 

Another way that talent analytics matter is that it aids in identifying groups of high-potential and high-performing individuals. It assists in understanding these people’s behaviour, identifying leadership skills and potential inadequacies, and making informed judgments regarding necessary interventions. 

Improve Succession Planning 

Talent analytics allows organisations to effectively plan for succession, analyse business opportunity data, and identify which traits are indeed the strongest predictors of successful concession workers and which most influence retention. 

Improve Diversity 

Having a diverse team is beneficial for organisations. Teams with more diversity are more innovative and can drive results. They can address issues more quickly, are better performers and make smarter decisions.  

 Your diversity hiring initiatives can be influenced by talent analytics data. 

What we can do for you? 

The labour market has become tighter, while the talent gap is widening. For HR to meet the market demands, gain access to a diverse talent pool and make the best of their existing talent, they need to explore and utilise data-driven insights. 

Ready to transform your talent acquisition process? Whether large, mid or small organisations, Workforce Resourcing can maximise your recruitment budget and enrich your talent management strategies. We are committed to helping business leaders and teams by providing trusted and actionable data from assessment and other sourcing methods to get their talent strategy right. Also, we go beyond deploying data to deliver the best fit to you and set your organisation up for success. 

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