3 emerging trends in talent analytics

By Apeksha Kaushik, TimesJobs.com Bureau

Human resource managers are currently embracing talent analytics like never before. Companies are evaluating and analysing raw data to derive valuable insights which are helping them to hire the right talent, retain them as well as help them learn and grow internally.

Talent analytics takes into account all the data, rather than limited samples, so a full-fledged picture emerges. It looks for patterns in the data and discovers critical connections that might otherwise go unnoticed. Such data can be related to employees' pre-employment assessments to background checks to social media profiles.

They also gather data on the characteristics of their most successful employees. When big data is tapped this way, HR managers no longer need to depend on intuitions of interviewers and hiring managers or rely on obsolete hiring tools of yesteryears. Organisations are also leveraging big data to hire and promote top performers who will enable companies to meet with their dynamically changing business needs.

Suhale Kapoor, executive vice president & co-founder, Absolutdata Research and Analytics Pvt Ltd discusses how all this is leading to major trends in the talent analytics space:

Better quality hire and better intra-team collaboration
Organisations conduct validity study of potential employees who appear for interviews, which uses hiring tools like pre-employment assessments and behavioral interviews and compare it with their most successful current employees. Applying talent analytics revolutionises this validity study. Now, instead of limited samples which may be misguiding for the HR, the hiring data for every current employee is considered. Every interview response, every assessment answer, every piece of data from résumés, applications, background checks, social network profiles and performance simulations are taken into account. Numerous data points can now be studied to determine the most accurate predictor of success. Interviewers no longer have to rely on rehearsed answers given by candidates to questions such as "Why do you want to work here?" or "What do you think are the most important qualities of a good hire?" Using analytics also makes it possible for HR to integrate the various hiring tools to a greater extent. Talent analytics also improves collaborations between team mates and managers through transparent performance surveys and feedback procedures.

Adapting to dynamically changing business needs
In conventional hiring processes, businesses generally looked for top performers based on the previous month or year's requirements, not today's. However, talent analytics makes it possible for businesses to hire candidates that meet new qualifications. For example, a company needs to hire a sales executive. Talent analytics enables recruiters to easily take profiles of current employees with the best sales numbers and match those to the pre-employment assessment of job candidates. Talent analytics also assist organisations to directly track changes in hiring tools to changes in business performance, giving HR a clear and constantly updated picture of what works and what doesn't.

Actionable Predictive Analytics -trend in offing!
Predictive analytics are simply a set of decision-making metrics or statistics that alert decision-makers about upcoming problems and opportunities in talent areas such as recruiting and retention. Predictive analytics are clearly superior to traditional HR metrics, which simply tell you what happened last year. Additionally, Actionable Predictive Analysis also adds several factors (cost and recommended action) that increase the likelihood of decision-makers taking action after reviewing the analytics. Predictive Analytics has recently found its place within the realm of talent management; however, it was an essential component of the business world since a long time.