1 – What is Talent Intelligence?
2 – How is Talent Intelligence Valuable?
3 – Where should someone start with Talent Intelligence?
4 – What are your predictions for recruitment in the second half of the year?
Jobtrain is the parent company of JTGO. The Jobtrain ATS focuses on helping large companies of 250 employees or more, while JTGO's recruitment software is designed with small businesses in mind.
The Talent Intelligence Unit caters for businesses of all sizes.
Recently, Jobtrain’s Director of Strategic Partnerships – Giles Heckstall-Smith – sat down with Talent Intelligence Director – Gary Towers – to discuss recruitment data and how to process meaningful information.
The technical definition is “the augmentation of internal and external people data,” but Talent Intelligence is more than just data. At a basic level, Talent Intelligence is information pulled together that helps us analyse recruitment.
It’s a strategic exercise – or methodology – that informs business decisions regarding employee engagement, recruitment, and retention.
HR analytics, salary research, market information, all come under the banner. Sometimes it can sit in Human Resources and sometimes it can be its own department!
The value comes from the flexibility and depth of the data this methodology can produce. We cover anything from;
Product launches – can your business support the launch with the right people and if not, what are you missing and how can you get it?
Manpower planning – what people do you need for overall business growth and how will you find them?
Performance optimisation – looking at a single point of weakness in your overall recruitment process that could transform the whole output – such as improving candidate drop-off.
Regarding performance optimisation, we’ve undertaken some research on images and videos in job adverts recently and learned that using these simple tools led to a 30% higher application rate! But what I noticed was that it improved the quality of the candidates as well. There was only a 20% rejection rate for candidates who applied after seeing an image or video in your advert. Because these videos and images show off your company culture most clearly, you’re reducing the amount of candidates who wouldn’t be the right fit, cutting back on admin and upgrading your talent pool in the process!
This assessment would then provide insights as to what could be improved and where to focus your efforts.
Start with what’s right in front of you. For most companies – that’s the applicant tracking system. All ATS’s will have some reporting functionality – JTGO's has a fantastic insights dashboard which can give you all of your key information at a glance.
Before you try to tackle the world and consume every piece of data, look at these three areas in your own process, pull together as much information as you can, and set your benchmarks.
Our approach is to start with the 3 E’s. Engagement, efficiency and ED&I.
And of course – if that all sounds daunting, that’s what our consultation and audit service is there for!
The current state of the market is that there are too many vacancies for the number of candidates. Everyone is clamouring to fill roles opened up by attrition and it’s having a domino effect.
The question everyone’s asking is; when will this end?
We noted back in January that the majority of candidates prioritised company culture and flexible working options when looking for work, but there’s every indication that these priorities will change. Salary expectations might become the top driver again.
If a recession does come, we might see companies resort to down-sizing to cut costs. If that happens the market might end up rebalancing. We won’t have too many vacancies and not enough candidates, we might have not enough vacancies and too many candidates.
These are all areas we’ll concentrate on with our second Market Insights Report later in the year.
Generationally, it’s becoming more and more important to understand how we can reach out to Generation Z, because they’ve entered the marketplace and they have their own expectations of work. We see that Gen Z currently want flexible working as an option, but it’s not their top priority. They want a workplace where they’ll grow, feel nurtured and safe, with the ability to embrace the social aspect of working life.
We’ve discussed recruitment strategies for Gen Z in more detail here.