Data driven recruitment

It should go without saying that leveraging data during your talent acquisition process is important. Having the correct data around compensation ensures you’re benchmarking your positions correctly, not only for new hires but also internal mobility as a candidate grows within your organization. Similarly, turnover data can be used to forecast how soon or often a position may need to be backfilled. This is crucial information to have top of mind while developing your hiring plans. However, an important data point that is often overlooked when developing a hiring plan is talent market intelligence.

But what is talent market intelligence?

Talent market intelligence, or recruitment analytics, is a data set that can be realized for the specific information you need for your hiring plans or strategic priorities. It is robust talent data that is available for organizations to tap into, covering everything from talent supply and demand, compensation, through to diversity  and all presentable by geography.

You can bring this data in at any point during your talent acquisition strategy. It’s excellent for reviewing the effectiveness of your recruitment strategy but utilizing this data early can have an immediate impact at the start of your recruitment push. Utilizing the data can help you formulate a strategy for each position while ensuring it aligns with broader initiatives like inclusion, diversity, and equality (IDE). This should lead to faster and better talent marketing success. However, even though the data is reported through a platform, it needs to be aggregated, cleaned, and analyzed– tasks that would need to be administered by dedicated teams to be used effectively.

Where does this data come from?

Like all good data pools, recruitment analytics come from a wide array of sources, both public and private, to ensure it presents the most accurate view of the market. The data that goes into this pool can originate from any of these sources:

• Government entities
• Job posting data from career sites
• Job board data
• Skill data
• Academic institutes
• National and regional salary surveys
• Salary benchmarks
• Talent supply surveys

The list above creates a cohesive story around the talent pool for a role, providing insight of who they are, what they do, and where they live. However, it’s not a silver bullet and needs to be continuously analyzed to be effective – in a fast-moving market like the life sciences segment, the data can quickly go quickly and needs  continuous monitoring for accuracy. A good recruitment partner keeps a finger on the pulse of the data trends and regularly adjusts their analysis to incorporate market changes.

How do you use talent market intelligence?

To effectively use recruitment analytics, you first need to understand what you’re trying to solve. Are you reviewing your talent acquisition strategy holistically or has a position been stuck and you’re not sure how to proceed? Or are you entertaining a new business hub and want to verify that the regional talent justifies the expansion? Knowing what your goal is for the data will dictate how it’s analyzed.

Case highlights include:

• Case #1: Hiring trends by location and job position.
  • Analyzing hiring trends by position and location can allow your talent partner to be more efficient in their approach, utilizing their time more strategically to give them the best success change. This type of data will also allow the team to make rapid adjustments as changes take place in the market. E.g., Clinical Operations is trending as remote, is locality hampering your search efforts?
• Case #2: Talent supply and demand comparison by position
  • Comparing the supply and demand of talent can allow for consideration to be taken on time to hire or if there needs to be an adjustment to workforce planning. E.g., research staff are in high demand, how aggressive should you be in the search?
• Case #3: Talent diversity by skillset
  • Having insight into diversity skillsets can create more effective pipelining strategy, and if utilized with intent, can make a marked impact on IDE goals.
• Case #4: Talent supply and demand comparison between locations
  • This can be exceedingly helpful to understand the competitive landscape for talent when exploring opening a hub location or relocating to a new office. Factoring in the talent population and regional salary variables can elicit an informed decision. E.g., Boston and San Francisco are life science hot spots, but does the talent demand and salary expectations justify the location?

A good talent partner will consult with you to understand your priorities, formulate a customized analysis, and help you understand what the data is saying.

How can I get talent market intelligence?

There are two paths forward to receive this data: build internal infrastructure to support having the analytics in-house or leverage a talent acquisition partner to run them for you. There are costs and time associated with building your infrastructure. You need to source the tool, make it fit for purpose, develop workflows and then train your talent acquisition or human resources teams – taking them away from other important tasks to work the data into a digestible format. So, while there is value in developing infrastructure in-house, it’s an investment not all organizations can or should make.

A good recruitment partner can offer these insights as part of an outsourced talent acquisition solution or as a stand-alone service. For example, a good Recruitment Process Outsourcing or Managed Service Provider partner will have talent market intelligence built into their service model. They will already have the infrastructure and team in place to provide clear, actional insights to you. They will first want to consult with you to understand your goal for the data, this will inform their team on how to report and present the information most appropriate to you. They can help walk you through what the data is saying and partner with you on a strategy to solve your challenge.

Utilizing a data driven approach to recruitment can lead to better retention through internal mobility, diversity and speed of hire. By formulating a recruitment strategy with market conditions in mind, talent acquisition leaders can be in a better position to hire at appropriate levels, in the right geography, and allow for proactive career development discussions and succession planning in anticipation of turnover. Strategically leveraging these insights not only reduces your hiring costs through more efficient planning but also productivity when turnover occurs. How ever you decide to gain talent market intelligence, you will see a marked improvement of your hiring outcomes.