Blog: Utilizing talent analytics to improve quality of hire

Talent Acquisition

Utilizing talent analytics to improve quality of hire

With an increasing pressure on HR professionals today to monitor the business impact of their activities, measuring and improving their quality of hire becomes a critical first step towards the goal.
Utilizing talent analytics to improve quality of hire

Measuring the quality of hire has been an important metric for most recruiters. If the monitoring and evaluation of talent acquisition plans aren’t done, it often becomes difficult for HR professionals to establish the right set of practices.  

How can recruiters and TA professionals ensure that they are measuring the quality of hire to provide a favorable business case for their recruitment process?

The solution seems to lie with data and analytics. 

Yes, Data.  In today’s data-driven business world, the incentive to address any need boils down to its subsequent business impact. An effort which becomes futile if HR professionals don’t have access to the right set of data to draw insights and take subsequent action. 

Organizational data today exists across a spectrum, from well-structured and relevant data to random and unstructured ones. The more random and unstructured the data, the more taxing it may be to mine its inherent value. Conversely, relevant and structured data often yield material insights with less effort and more manageable sample sizes. But the collection of relevant data is just the first step in the entire cycle of measuring the quality of hire.  Using data analytics thus helps recruiters to look beyond simple gut based decisions that become contextual to the person executing it. 

In light of establishing a strong business impact of a company’s recruitment process, creating the right points of data collection, using contextual analytical frameworks and skilling recruiters to leverage these analytical technologies becomes necessary.

Breaking down analytics maturity

Although most companies usually have their own understanding on what ‘quality of hire’ means, the subjectivity of it is often a problem.  Using nuanced analytical model is often the cure that recruiters look to assess the business impact of their decisions and to make their processes more in line with the company’s need.  The Gartner analytical maturity model depicts the stages that an analytical framework follows. To leverage opportunities that matured frameworks provide, HR professionals need to curate the journey of data collection and analysis in a suitable and sustainable manner.  As the company’s analytical prowess matures, it is able to make more contextual decisions; recruitment decisions in this case.  

This makes it necessary for HR professionals looking at the talent acquisition aspect of people management to play a close heed to how effectively are they measuring the difference in the potential of the performance of an employee —and the actual performance to measure the impact on productivity.  

Gatner Analytics Maturity Model

The idea for most HR professionals in times of measuring the quality of hire should be to leverage talent analytical framework in a manner that it reduces the dependency on the human inputs while drawing insights.  Although it might sound counter-intuitive, analytical models are far better at looking at both structured and unstructured data to provide insights. The level of automation and the degree to which there is a need of human intervention ends up deciding maturity model of the company’s talent analytics.  Before HR professionals create their data points, a clear understanding of the role that talent analytics is imperative to monitor business impact. Course correcting often becomes a difficult process and hence, both- the what to measure and how to measure-should be kept in mind before venturing into assessing the quality of hire 

Creating proper candidate evaluation methods

The aim of candidate evaluations must be to provide a method to calibrate performance potential metrics to the actual assessment of candidates. Going beyond analytical frameworks need to be also used in a manner that allows recruiters and hiring managers to objectively and reliably organize applicants according to predictions of who is most and least likely to achieve on-the-job success. 

When it comes to measuring the quality of hire, two questions become pertinent to answer. 

1. Can the candidate the job that they are given? 

2. Does the candidate fit into the culture of the company?  

Getting a clear understanding of this ensures that HR professionals are keeping a tap on the performance levels of their employees. Candidate-evaluation methods must capture and present differences in performance potential that exist among candidates.  

Moving a step ahead from just predictive insights, analytical frameworks today have also reached a stage where the insights not just predict the future trends one might see but go beyond to suggest what should the course of action be. Given such maturity models of analytics, it becomes necessary for HR professionals to tactically leverage the data that their employee’s performance generates to actually enable analytical frameworks to assist them.   Given the need for HR professionals to look at both performance based data and the relatively unstructured data on measuring the cultural fit of the candidate, HR professionals should use talent analytics strategically. Coloring the entire monitoring with one way of measuring impact might make HR blind to some of the other, subtle achievements of their new hire. Using talent analytics to ensure a holistic assessment of their quality of hire should help HR business create a favorable mandate for their recruitment processes. 

And with prescriptive talent analytics assisting HR professionals to take the right course of action, HR professionals today can greatly improve their quality of hire. 

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Topics: Talent Acquisition, Recruitment

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