At the 2018 CareerXroads Talent Acquisition Operations and Analytics Colloquium, 50 leaders in the field convened to discuss what’s happening and what’s next in operations and analytics. Across the two-day session, it became clear that these two TA disciplines are continuing to grow in importance and the organizations that are best at using ops and analytics skills will be at the forefront of our industry.
While it’s been clear to talent acquisition leaders for some time that an analytics team must be proficient in spreadsheets and analysis, it’s more vital than ever that they can accurately and concisely interpret the data they’ve collected and scrubbed. More and more often we heard the analytics professionals describe themselves as “data storytellers,” and their stories are increasingly being compiled for talent acquisition and the business at large. Talent acquisition analytics teams provide depth and quantitative meaning to the more holistic “story” of talent acquisition.
Are you telling the story or still creating the outline?
As dashboards and technology get more sophisticated and more comfortable to implement, more of the traditional analytics work is being compiled automatically. This is a prime example of technology freeing up valuable resources. Instead of preparing and distributing standard time-to-fill and recruiting funnel reports, data analysts are now able to devote more time to studying trends and genuinely analyzing the data.
At the Colloquium we found there was a reasonably distinct split between companies just starting the process — paying much closer attention to their data — and those that are already developing deep insights and predictions. Regardless of the state of analytics in an organization, analytics teams as a whole now realize that they are no longer just constructing dashboards and presenting data. TA analytics specialists should between the lines and pull together insights from business metrics that will allow the company to answer tough questions intelligently as well as anticipate related needs of various hiring functions.
State of talent acquisition: what teams are doing
- More experienced teams: Develop the narrative around the data to help leaders make decisions
- Newer analytics teams: Setting the stage to evaluate data — defining the factors and behaviors
- All analytics teams: Testing the story and managing data integrity
