The Usage of Big Data in People Analytics and Talent Acquisition Analytics

Human resource analytics and people analytics can be used in a wide range of decision making, ranging from talent acquisition to work environments. While an organization is just starting to function, the primary step of talent acquisition is performed by the founder, or the responsibility is shared between all in the pilot team. As the organization grows, demand for more talent and the requirements become complex. Ultimately, companies have to hire people who are solely responsible for acquiring more talent. This specialized and highly skilled job within the organizations is known as recruiting or staffing, and lately, it is known as Talent Acquisition.

Whichever term you use, it is so common now for organizations to have dozens of people doing this specialized job of talent acquisition. You may find Google and Merck as two of the most prominent examples, with about 300+ recruiters on board. It is also noted that talent acquisition has become another business inside businesses. With a large volume of activities, inputs, and outputs, the process of talent acquisition is complex and difficult to manage and control.

Considering these complexities, talent acquisition is also a crucial function like production management or supply chain management. Like any other business process, there are ways to measure the progress and success in talent acquisition, too. In other terms, with clear inputs as job applicants and straightforward outputs as hires, the professionals are dealing with a standard throughput funnel, in which a large initial pool of inputs are filtered down to a perfect final result.

Analytics in Talent Acquisition

Talent acquisition professionals try to find candidates and work on those through different stages of hiring. There are a lot of activities done, and eventually, the hire is made. This process needs to be handled correctly. As RemoteDBA suggests, the measurement for talent acquisition is not just limited to the number of hires to come out of the funnel. You may use a wide range of analytics and metrics to gain proper control over the hiring activities. The most crucial measurements in terms of talent acquisition management are:

• Volume
• Efficiency
• Speed
• Cost
• Quality
• Experience (of the applicants and recruitment professionals)

Having proper measurements and tracking will help you to see whether things are working well or not, and how to improve efficiency. In many cases, you should have to use proper measurements to make the best possible decision by considering the given circumstances.

Day-to-day operations of a company involve taking a lot of decisions. Decision making involved not only the decisions taken by the top management but also the decisions each employee needs to take to optimize their output. Counting these altogether, there are thousands of such decisions to be made each day down the command line structure of any organization. The ultimate quality of these scattered decisions determines organizational success or failure. Among these, talent acquisition is such a function, the consequences of which can decide the future of an organization.

Some Questions to Ask

When it comes to making the right decisions, it is all about asking apt questions. Say, for example:

• How can you attract the best talents around to your company in each specialized area?
• How can you decide how the best ones look like?
• Where can you find these superstars for your organization?
• How could you reach to them and get them to agree to leave their current jobs and join you?
• What compensation should you offer them?
• Apart from payment, what are other factors they consider to join your firm?
• Whether you should approach them to pay higher for their quality and let them do their tasks professionally, or you should hunt for hires with lesser pay to bring into your system and improve their quality over time?
• When and how you should defend the hiring decisions to make others convinced that you made the right choice?

Getting proper answers to these questions will determine the efficiency of your talent acquisition process.

Big data and analytics can be rightly applied to a range of decisions down the line in the process of talent acquisition. Following are some examples:

• Priorities: You can use analytics here to decide which candidates to focus on and what resources to use. It is also important to decide how many resources need to be directed to each of them.

• Goals: Decide whether you have to optimize talent acquisition for the cost, speed, quality, experience of the hire, or need to keep a fine balance of all these.

• Candidate characteristics: While doing analytics for talent acquisition, consider which characteristics need to favor the process of acquisition to produce high-quality hires.

• Company culture: To ensure the most efficient process and produce the best results, you need to keep the company culture in mind to stimulate an efficient process to solve a specific problem at hand.

• Screening instruments: Consider which selection instruments or methods you should use to filter down the applicants. These could be structured and unstructured interviews, sample job tasks, personality tests, integrity assessments, aptitude tests, cognitive skill tests, etc. It is also important to check physical ability for the tasks demanded. Medical inquiries, background check, criminal history check, etc. could also be used.

For analytics, it is also important to consider when and where should you invest the resources and which channels, technology, staff, training, and techniques need to be used to support the process. All these decisions add up and impact the success or failure of an organization. There is no doubt that optimized talent acquisition may lead to increased competitive advantages for any organization. If there is an attrition rate of about 25 percent a year and the talent acquisition efforts of the organization only produce less-than-average hires, then it won’t take more than two years to be lost half (or more) of your employees, which is below industry average. So, big data and analytics play a crucial role in terms of talent acquisition and, in turn, act as the decisive factor between the success or failure of an organization.