By now you would have read scores of articles on how CoVID-19 changed 2020 hiring  and how it brought a wave of virtual recruitment strategies into the recruitment landscape. Since the pandemic is far from over, most of you must have even adopted this new style of recruitment by now.

But do you know what aided the recruitment industry to accept this reality with such agility?

Talent Intelligence

In the challenging pandemic situation, talent intelligence assists companies to understand the changing candidate behavior, patterns, and expectations. Not only that, it also helps in keeping up with the rapidly changing definition of employee engagement and satisfaction in a remote work setup.

Besides, as we’re nearing the end of 2020, the trends and patterns are further expected to change in the next year as well. Be it transitioning from remote to office setup or increasing dependency on technology for everyday activities. In such an ever-changing scenario, talent intelligence is a boon that helps companies proactively adapt to the evolving trends efficiently.

Definition of Talent Intelligence

At its core, talent intelligence strengthens an organization’s talent and recruitment capabilities by tying technology and data into one.

It extracts meaningful insights from everyday data and infuses the extracted intelligence into the ongoing talent practices. These insights help you understand what kind of strategies and processes are working for you and what aren’t. Besides, the data also helps you evaluate some of the defining talent management areas such as talent quality, candidate experience, recruiting metrics, and candidate engagement.

For example, with data on existing talent pools, ex and current employees, passive candidates, and competitors, you can know more about the exact skills and qualities your potential candidate must possess.

Moreover, you can select the right sourcing channels by evaluating the sourcing data and understanding the right sourcing channels that yield you good quality prospects.

What All Can You Analyze Using Talent Data?

1.   Source and Quality of Hire

Sourcing channel and hiring quality have always been every recruiter’s concern. And myriads of new sourcing channels have further added to this confusion. Data is the only rescue.

You must start by analyzing your sourcing data and understanding the success rate of various sourcing channels.

There are high chances that the platform attracting a large volume of applicants may not be same as the platform yielding you the maximum number of quality hires.

For example, the number of job applicants received from a job portal might be higher than any other sourcing platform. But your hiring success rate might come from referral or internal hiring platforms. Therefore, in place of operating on guts or assumptions, you must turn to talent data to give concrete and evidence-based support to your sourcing decisions.

Read More : Four Effective Strategies to Reduce Your Cost-per-Hire

2. Market Trends

CoVID-19 has forecasted some new trends that were previously nowhere to be seen.

For example, 84% of businesses will increase remote work after COVID-19 and 33% of companies will make some positions permanently remote. These data points indicate that trends are changing, and they will continue to change in the future as well.

This is where talent intelligence plays an important role. It helps you remain ahead of all the trends that may impact the hiring industry in the future. With enough information in your hand, you can play your cards right and lead the pack in place of tailing the competitors.

Understanding the remote working trends will also help you revise hiring strategies and policies to build a remote work infrastructure. These strategies would support candidates to come onboard and work with your company from their native places. The earlier you implement these strategies, the easier it becomes to attract candidates.

3. Talent Acquisition Cost

Cost-per-hire is one of the most crucial factors in deciding your hiring budget. Recruiters spend hours and hours sieving through thousands of candidate profiles online. Going by the stats, it takes $4,129 on average to hire a candidate. Talent intelligence reduces this cost drastically by optimizing each stage of the recruiting cycle.

For instance, you can use talent intelligence insights to understand which process of recruiting consumes the most cost and time. If scheduling an interview or manually screening resumes is eating a major chunk of recruiter’s time, then you can automate these redundant activities with an interview or resume screening tools.

4. Employee Churn

Replacing an employee can cost around 30-40% of their annual salary. And the higher you go in the hierarchy, the higher your cost gets. Therefore, replacing an employee is not as easy as it seems.

Read More: Calculating Real Cost of Employee Turnover

Hiring a new employee is not only hefty in terms of costs but also adds to the effort of a recruiter. The only way to eliminate this cost is to retain more and more employees. And that can be only done with the right employment strategies in place. To start with, ask the below set of questions and find their answers using data intelligence.

• How frequently are your employees leaving?
• Which department is experiencing the highest employee churn?
• What is the most common reason for resignation?
• What is your employee satisfaction score?

These are some of the questions that will solve the mystery of employee churn and will help you understand and fix the underlying problem. The deeper you dive into the data, the better perspective you get.

After identifying the problem, you can now take the next step and start crafting your solutions which may range from policy changes, new engagement activities to manager reviews, internal politics, and more.