The Power of Talent Data
For all organizations, your knowledge is a huge part of what makes you successful. Your intellectual property is something highly valued and secured – and when people leave, it’s a huge drain on the collective knowledge of the organization. Your patents, trade secrets and employee know-how may in fact be more valuable than your company’s physical assets.
Lots of time and effort is spent on keeping data and information safe and relevant, making knowledge easily accessible across the organization, and protecting intellectual assets.
So why don’t we think of Talent Data in the same way?
Talent functions spend millions of dollars every year on things like Employer Branding, job ads, career sites, other forms of recruitment marketing and even on external agencies – all in order to gather information on potential employees.
A missed opportunity ⚠️
The investments made in gathering talent data is massive, but most of it goes to waste. Data is often stuck in an ATS that isn’t searchable or up to date, or dumped in mismanaged talent pools.
Talent Acquisition teams post job ads and end up getting many of the same applicants that have applied before (possibly a long time before!). It takes recruiters and managers ages to find the perfect candidate (the current average is 44 days) and, in many cases, this person was ‘known’ to the business the whole time.
Businesses need to treat talent data like any other part of their knowledge base. The data needs to be accurate, up to date, searchable and discoverable by the right people – not thrown into siloed, fragmented systems, and spreadsheets.
How to manage your talent data effectively 🗂️
To get the most out of your talent data, you need to stick to an enterprise-wide plan. Everyone should understand that each CV or candidate application is money and time the business has spent, and make sure to use that investment well.
Talent data needs to be:
- Stored in a single secure location
- Searchable based on things that are important, like skills and engagement (not just job titles)
- Accurate and always up to date, not only from when the candidate applied in the past
- Collaborative and useful to those that need it, not just a select few
- Owned by the business, not by recruiters and managers that historically have own this in LinkedIn (so that when they leave, the data goes with them)
- Actionable, with users able to get results from the information, not just a static report.
- Contextual, so people can understand the full history for a contact – every interaction, communication or outcome at the candidate level
- Measurable, to show how ‘healthy’ your talent data is, and where to focus on adding new types of skills to the pool as business needs change.
With new technology, it’s easier than ever to build a skills taxonomy for your organization that unifies your talent data – giving you a common language, and helping you bring your disparate data sets together quickly, without confusion.
Time to embrace AI 💡
AI can help enrich the data you get from people – it may be incomplete, and of course it will eventually go out of date – ensuring you have an accurate view of all the contacts in your talent pool, without manual effort.
AI can also automate workflows in your Talent CRM (such as adding relevant people to specific pools) and nurturing your Talent Community (keeping passive candidates engaged).
Today, it’s also possible to enhance your talent data with third-party insights related to the wider job market. This gives you useful benchmarks, and makes it easier to analyze your own talent pool in a meaningful way.
The results of getting this right are huge. With better talent data, at your fingertips, talent teams and hiring managers can quickly see which people have the right skills to fit their requirements, from the largest possible data set. Beamery clients, for example, have seen a 30% reduction in sourcing costs, 40% increase in recruiter productivity, and a 90% reduction in the time taken to fill business-critical roles.
Core to this is having an AI-powered Talent Lifecycle Management platform, including elements such as a Talent Marketplace and a Talent CRM, which gives you the ability to visualize your full talent data set at any given time. It reduces unnecessary costs associated with talent data mismanagement, resulting in lower spend across Job Ads and agencies, and less wasted time.