Read an interesting article on Andrew Carnegie- the famous steel baron and philanthropist of America. A typical rags to riches story, this much feted gentleman is also known for his acumen in hiring the best workers for his enterprises.

Cut to the present scenario. Yes, the world has advanced quite a lot. The influx of technology into each nook and crevice of the individual life has had a profound effect into what we do and most importantly get noticed.

The same applies to the business of HR especially Talent acquisition. To recruit the talent you want your organization must get noticed as among the best employers in industry. I’m sure Monsieur Carnegie would have presented his company as a wonderful employer in letter and deed. Technology must make it possible for every genuine organization sell itself as a great employer and attract the best talent (active or passive).

Let us admit it. Recruitment drives cost a lot of money and eat into the productive time of employees (interview effort). While there are perennial endeavors to identify more avenues of hiring talent on one side, a parallel stream has emerged to with great potential to channelize the process and gain maximum ROI in HR investments. This is Analytics!

Sample This: a giant networking company leaned heavily on data to drive its recruitment strategy and operations. In one instance a recruitment executive of this company convinced the business unit manager that candidates from outside his business’ geographical jurisdiction also be considered for vacant positions. He did so on the strength of data on both Talent supply and Talent demand. The manager otherwise would have preferred to consider outstation candidates only after exhausting the local candidates list. The incisive talent data the recruiter provided enlightened the manager to consider both local and outstation candidates resulting in faster recruitment and savings on the recruitment budget.

Why Analytics

Companies have oodles of data on employees past present and on coming. This data consisting of numbers alphabets and data points would remain as it is if not put to use through analysis. With Talent Analytics one is driven to capture data for each period of HR function and accurately as possible.

There a plethora of reasons why Analytics adds immense value to recruitment, chief among them being:

Aid stock taking of present situation: analytics provides unparalleled view of your current strategy with respect to recruitment. This includes the areas of good implementation and areas where improvement must be made.

Aid business of tomorrow: with analytics you can predict the future of your business and prepare for trends shown in the data like future traffic of applicants (mobile, laptop etc). This gives enough ammunition to make plans to achieve the goals and monitor them periodically.

Aid in deriving deep insights: with analytics you get innumerable number of insights. These help locate trends and factors responsible for these trends.

Aid in making safe assumptions: with analytics you will realize the actions/steps taken in your business is success or failure, in the incipient stage itself. This gives you valuable time to alter or re-engineer your process/steps leading to best usage of time and resources.

Analytics helps these organizations use their data to derive insights into their recruitment strategy, and provide the impetus to perform the necessary actions. This encompasses the important function of acquiring the right talent in an effective and efficient manner.

HR and Analytics

Recruitment has its own set of metrics within the HR function. These metrics help one gain insights into the performance of Talent acquisition and consequently the impact it makes to the HR business as a whole.

The metrics that HR must give importance to are as follows:

Recruitment Time: this metric measures the time taken from indent to hire i.e., from the time a request for hire is placed to the time the selected candidate(s) has come onboard the organization.

Costs of hire vs vacancy: the metric determines the cost of hiring someone to fill a position vis-à-vis the cost incurred in keeping the post vacant. The insight from this metric will help in deciding if engaging an RPO will make your hiring effective or you can do it internally or to bring improvements to succession processes.

Hiring process experience: this important metric provides feedback on the entire hiring process from candidates who attended the hiring as well as those who got hired.

Attrition hiring vs new hiring: this metric determines if hiring is done because of attrition or growth of business. The insight derived from this metric throws light on the engagement with employees, selection and succession planning.

Sourcing: this metric determines how effective are various media (job portals, social media, broadcast, email, RPO) used in sourcing profiles.

Hiring effectiveness: this metric determines the number of vacant openings vs the number filled. Through this metric one can derive the insight of Talent acquisition being on course to achieving its target or lagging behind.

Conclusion

Gone are the days when hiring decisions were made more on gut instinct, consulting a few here and there or relying entirely on head-hunter’s expertise. Now with data, and consequently Analytics, the power of making the right decisions to your recruitment is within your reach.

If you are looking to get the best analytics then Spire Technologies is the one you must partner with. Spire’s deep research in Big data domain especially in the field of HR has yielded game changing products to suit every need of Talent Management, right from Talent Acquisition to Attrition management. To know more about Spire and its expertise in Big data visit www.spire2grow.com