This post about talent analytics was originally published in December 2019 and was updated with new information in June 2021 and October 2024.
Data analytics have revolutionized the way we do business. Marketing executives can track customer preferences to predict behavior. CFOs can get a real-time look at different business lines to track revenue and expenses across the organization. And in HR and talent acquisition, we can leverage data analytics to understand talent trends, job fit, retention efforts, and recruiting strategies at our companies.
Talent analytics help recruiting and HR professionals measure the effectiveness of their talent management strategies and provide insight into employee engagement and productivity. They help teams understand what makes a great candidate experience and how to place the right people in the right roles. But while 94% of business leaders say they have access to some talent data, 62% of HR leaders say they’re unable to leverage it.
Don’t collect data just to let it pile up. With talent analytics for HR, your team can go from reactive to proactive and make more informed decisions about how to best manage your talent. Keep reading to get a closer look at how talent analytics takes your strategy to the next level.
What Is Talent Analytics for HR?
Talent analytics — also referred to as people analytics or HR analytics — empowers recruiting and HR departments with key insights about their workforce. With analytics, you can pinpoint specific factors that are behind performance and productivity throughout your organization so you can better understand what drives success at your company.
Combining real-time observations and measurable data means you can make decisions with confidence. These insights can be applied to your strategic talent initiatives, informing recruitment and hiring efforts and individual performance goals, supporting efficiency and business growth.
The value of data-driven decision-making can’t be overstated. With talent analytics, you’ll almost certainly learn something you didn’t know or couldn’t confirm. You might find patterns in employee engagement and uncover areas that need improvement. You could also spot skills gaps that can be filled with targeted training or notice that certain recruitment channels consistently bring in better candidates, helping you refine your recruiting processes.
Talent analytics turns data into useful insights, helping your workforce become more successful. It’s no surprise that the market for talent analytics tools has experienced a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 50% over the past three years.
Read More About People Analytics:
4 Benefits of Talent Analytics for Every Team
You don’t want to get left behind as your competitors invest in talent analytics for HR. You need strategies based on data, not guesswork, to win over top talent in today’s market. Not to mention, you’ve probably already thought of a long list of questions you’d like your employee data to answer and problems it could help you solve.
Let’s take a closer look at some of the ways analyzing data benefits your recruiting and HR team, your top talent, and the entire organization.
1. Faster Recruiting and Hiring Processes
Your talent acquisition processes have a bigger impact on who you can hire than you think. 75% of employees say a good candidate experience played a role in their decision to accept a job offer. HR and recruiting teams have to balance providing a good experience with the need to quickly find, evaluate, and hire high-quality, qualified candidates.
With people analytics, you can create a fine-tuned and highly focused hiring pipeline and offer a candidate experience that impresses top talent. Modern analytics tools enable you to:
- Identify the traits and skills of best-fit candidates for any role based on past employee performance data and tailor your job descriptions accordingly.
- Automate the screening process to quickly filter out unqualified candidates and save recruiters valuable time.
- Personalize the recruitment process to make it more appealing and engaging for candidates.
- Prioritize candidate outreach by identifying the talent most aligned with the requirements of your open roles.
- Constantly monitor your recruiting and hiring data to prevent bottlenecks and maintain a competitive time to hire.
- Make better hiring decisions informed by real data and foster a culture of continuous innovation for long-term success.
Using people analytics in talent acquisition accelerates the hiring process and enhances the overall candidate experience. Strike the right balance between speed and quality to hire the best person for every role.
2. Get a Clearer Picture of Your Workforce
A key aspect of managing productivity is ensuring you’re monitoring the overall health of your organization. Aspects of organizational health include:
- Churn rate
- Quality of employee onboarding, development, and evaluations
- Employee demographics and diversity
- Compensation discrepancies
- Team dynamics
- Goal alignment
Talent analytics offers a big-picture view of your organization via standardized reports that assess workforce performance in the context of the entire business. This comprehensive perspective allows you to spot and diagnose challenges early on so you can act right away rather than letting problems get worse.
Using talent analytics alongside monitoring organizational health gives you insight into how different elements affect each other. This approach helps ensure that when you make strategic changes, they benefit the entire organization without causing issues in other areas. Embrace this balance for a productive, thriving workforce.
3. Retain More Employees
Knowing why employees leave is key to keeping them on board, and talent analytics can help uncover these reasons. Talent analytics can instantly reveal patterns like particularly high or low turnover in specific roles or departments or at certain times of the year. Those patterns might point to issues such as heavy workloads or a lack of growth opportunities.
This insight means you can launch highly targeted retention efforts. For example, offering flexible work hours can help reduce burnout, and clear career advancement options can improve job satisfaction. These strategies cut down on the costs of hiring new employees and help create a loyal and motivated team, boosting morale and productivity.
4. Perfect Your Talent Management Strategies
Using data to guide talent management is an excellent way to align company goals with employee needs. Talent analytics can reveal issues you might not see — and problems that could develop in the future — giving you the power to address them now.
With talent analytics for HR, you can formulate solutions long before small issues become big problems. These are just a few ways the technology gives you the power of proactivity:
- Give you access to real-time reports on significant recruiting metrics so you can stay on top of hiring efficiency
- Highlight skills gaps that could prevent future company growth so you can create training and development programs to address the gaps or hire to fill them
- Analyze performance data to design personalized career paths and learning suggestions, engaging employees and helping them thrive
- Evaluate productivity trends to predict the impact on productivity when roles are vacant or new hires are ramping, enabling accurate goal-setting
Use your valuable people data to consistently improve talent management strategies and provide the best support possible to your workforce so your people and your business can achieve success.
The First AI-Powered Talent Analytics Sidekick for HR and Recruiters
Making the business case for talent analytics software is easy when you consider the alternative — losing top talent to competitors whose strategies are data-driven and future-focused. Through talent analytics, you get a more holistic vision of what works and why it works, enabling your organization to set standards for best practices. You can build a fairer, more diverse and inclusive workplace and develop more impactful, personal, and meaningful talent strategies while increasing productivity.
Luckily, there’s never been a better tool on the market for analyzing your people data. With ClearInsights, the groundbreaking new AI-powered talent analytics sidekick from ClearCompany, you get:
- Actionable Workforce Insights: Gain a clear understanding of employee performance, productivity, and hiring trends.
- Customizable Reports: Tailor your reports to track KPIs that are aligned with business goals.
- Real-Time Dashboards: Visualize workforce data and performance analytics instantly to stay in the know and make decisions faster.
- Predictive Analytics: Anticipate your company’s talent needs, helping to inform strategic hiring and retention decisions.
Learn more about ClearInsights.
