Good Bye Dark Ages, welcome Renaissance - part 2 of my People Analytics Journey

Part 2: The Renaissance

After reading so many interesting articles and interviews about the fascinating People Analytics ball game I want to share my personal journey too. This one started around 5 years ago in the Talent Acquisition domain and expanded to the broader HR field. This second chapter will guide you through the evolution of talent acquisition analytics. You can find the first part here.

“We talk about people, this is not a factory”. Ouch!

Instead of stopping all analytics activities we decided to move on and share where people recognized the added value: in the different business segments. Market leaders and hiring managers were positively surprised about the relevant information they received. A natural shift took place from “order intaking” (“I want a candidate who currently works for competitor XYZ, because this company is famous for its software development initiatives”) to a more integral talent market advisory chat: if software development is key to your business success, and our historical data tells us that candidates who joined us from competitor XYZ are located around 850 kilometres from here, they are offered 25% higher salary compared to our peers and we know their potential tenure is relatively low, is it worth the investment? Obviously the answer most often heard here was no. But as so-called self-appointed business partners we have to come up with relevant alternatives.

This requires an in-depth knowledge about the crucial internal key processes (what’s your value chain) and where to get added value from the labor market, which is not limited to direct competitors only. This has brought the discussions about hiring needs and talent management as a holistic concept to another dimension.

And now, finally, the buy-in was there! No longer people were talking about the relevancy of data usage in talent acquisition, as they now saw the benefits of it during the storytelling piece. Here, the best marketing for us has been the “spreading the word” snowball effect which took place. Talking about the bigger labor market, offering business leaders a more strategic perspective about their (future) workforce has triggered other questions.

Let’s start some action. We were asked to perform market and competitor analytics about diversified topics:

-         New market entries. What’s the behavior of new competitors entering our markets related to talent management? What are their hiring strategies? What can we learn from their org charts and recent hires? This has resulted in relevant insights about their business strategies and focus.

-         Competency analytics. Imagine your company believes Internet of Things will be the key differentiator in the market, and expects high volume recruitment in the next months. Obviously, it would be beneficial to understand where these competencies can be found: what are the leading universities, where can we find concentrations of people matching our needs, for which companies do they currently work, do they work for big multinational companies or for start-ups? As soon as you know where to find relevant hubs, you can check whether your recruitment and your HR strategies fit with market conditions and requirements, and you can assess your change to succeed.

-         Local labor market dynamics. Imagine, for business and marketing reasons, you consider to establish a new office in Silicon Valley, as it is the place to be for your industry. Here again it´s crucial to ground your decision with facts, with data. What are local wages, can we afford, what´s our local value proposition, can we at least attract talent? Based on these insights again you are well-prepared and fully equipped to reach your goals.

-         New site selections. Imagine you have a growing business in LATAM and want to scale to Europe. What’s the best location? Of course you can opt for the place with the best weather and nice food, but maybe other variables make more sense. We performed several studies about this topic, where we took the price of real-estate, the power of labor unions, future compensation/wage developments, number of university graduates, access and distance to big hubs, availability of different languages, competition, political stability and many other topics into consideration. Based on the business needs we put weight to pre-selected variables, enabling us to come up with solid advice where to build new offices.

Finally, the Golden Age of data-driven HR is up and calling. Satisfied? Still not, the possibilities of people analytics did not reach their limitations yet.