Talent Relationship Management, Explained: A Guide for Recruiters
For the third quarter in a row, Lever has won two Comparably awards!
The recruiting landscape shifted over the last year. It pivoted from being a candidate market to an employer market. And, as the job market ebbs and flows, this presents an opportunity to be more intentional about optimizing your recruitment process.
If your company has pivoted away from high-volume hiring, it’s time to up your talent analytics game and prepare for what’s next.
Talent analytics — also known as recruitment analytics — is the use of data to: elevate the recruiting and hiring performance; provide a better candidate experience; achieve diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) goals; and scale an organization more quickly and efficiently.
In this post, we’ll cover the talent analytics you can use to scale your recruiting goals and find the right talent at the right time.
Which questions should talent analytics answer today?
Building a data-driven recruitment model is a strategic response to today’s challenging economy. It empowers the talent acquisition team and hiring managers to improve process efficiency and make the most of their resources (in some cases doing more with less) by using data to answer specific questions, including:
- On average, how much does it cost us and how long does it take to fill a role?
- Are there any issues with recruiters’ funnel efficiency and interview speed?
- What is the screen-to-hire conversion rate?
- What is the offer-to-hire ratio?
- What is the right number of interview stages to incorporate in our recruiting cycle?
- Do we have the right data to evaluate talent acquisition team members’ performance?
How can you improve your talent analytics maturity over time?
It’s never too late to get started with talent analytics, but the process is a journey that doesn’t happen overnight. You built this talent analytics foundation by revamping the tech stack and the processes.
Here are the steps you can take to advance your talent analytics:
Step 1: Assess the maturity of your talent analytics
As our eBook explains, there are five levels to rate the maturity of your talent analytics:
- Level 1, Foundational: Being reactive with data analysis and reporting activities and tracking them manually in spreadsheets instead of automated dashboards
- Level 2, Accelerating: Making moderate progress with goal-setting, reporting, and analysis efforts that are related to measuring recruiting and hiring goals set by leadership
- Level 3, Dynamic: Setting effective goals and reporting capabilities and analyzing of a talent acquisition team’s sourcing, nurturing, and interviewing efforts
- Level 4, Strategic: Having a dedicated person/team who owns talent analytics and drives clear and definitive measures and analyses for our current and future talent goals and needs
- Level 5, Transformational: Using a business intelligence tool to blend data from talent acquisition and human resources to get the insights to build scalable and sustainable recruiting and hiring strategies
The level that aligns with your current talent strategy can inform how you can scale your talent acquisition efforts through an updated process and technology.
For instance, if you want to reach the Strategic level, you will need to review your processes and efficiencies. Then, you’ll need to take steps to get buy-in to procure a talent relationship platform.
Not sure how to define your current maturity level? Take Lever’s Talent Maturity Assessment.
Step 2: Set the success metrics
It’s easy to over-complicate success metrics. Keep the list concise and prioritize the metrics that are relevant and important to your hiring goals.
Here are some points to help you with this step:
- Understand how your recruiting and talent acquisition metrics are calculated. For example, different companies calculate the time to hire in different ways.
- Identify any process improvements that will impact your metrics. For instance, a longer time in stage for panel interviews is expected.
- Identify any outliers and gaps in your data. For example, if numerous candidates have a “Source Unknown” label in your database, find out why that’s the case and devise a solution to get cleaner data.
- Set performance benchmarks by looking at the past performance of your hiring team.
- You can ask questions like: Did we meet our hiring goals compared to other quarters? Have we reduced the time and costs associated with hiring? Has our attrition rate of new hires increased or decreased? How effective are our sourcing channels? Have we seen any changes in offer acceptance rates?
Step 3: Identify and get buy-in of the stakeholders
Talent analytics isn’t just for the recruitment team. It helps keep the C-suite and other stakeholders informed about talent pool growth, pipeline progression, diversity hiring, prospects with pending offers, and archived candidates. Understanding the needs of each stakeholder group can help you get the buy-in for technology and process changes.
Here are a few scenarios of why you would share this data with external partners.
- The executive team likely wants to see your typical recruiting and hiring metrics’ monthly, quarterly, and yearly progress. Additionally, executives want to see blended talent acquisition and HR analytics that shows improvement with pipeline growth, the average number of days each funnel stage takes, and, most importantly, if headcount growth is on pace.
- The Human Resources team wants to see data about how long it takes the talent acquisition team to fill job openings (i.e., the average time to fill). They also need to get a breakdown of who’s involved with each active role — the requisition owner, recruiter, and hiring manager — to understand the hiring process better and who may be slowing it down or causing active opportunities to exit the recruitment funnel.
- Hiring managers need to view the same recruiting insights as the talent specialists to upgrade their portion hiring process. For instance, if there is a lower-than-normal volume of applicants for an available position (compared to past openings), hiring managers will want to know that to help generate more applicants.
Step 4: Choose and onboard the right technology platform
A complete talent acquisition suite should respond to changing business needs, including today’s challenging economy. Talent acquisition teams are pivoting away from high-volume hiring. They need an intuitive user interface and easy-to-understand talent analytics that empowers them to adjust their goals and be intentional about hiring.
Onboarding your preferred recruitment technology is as important as choosing it. We suggest working with a vendor’s team, like Lever’s customer success group, to ensure each talent acquisition specialist and recruiter can use the platform.
This will help clarify the tasks specific to their role (e.g., screening candidates setting up nurture campaigns) so they can understand and take advantage of their talent data.
Step 5: Get started and regularly assess your performance
When you use a talent relationship management platform like LeverTRM, start with a simple, small set of metrics and then build on them.
Here are the initial data points you can start with:
- Candidate Source: Cost to obtain talent based on time and resources allocated, “lead flow” into the talent pipeline, brand- and role-based advertising performance
- Candidate Pipeline: Candidate experience (CX) data, recruiter outreach rate, number and percentage of applicants and sourced candidates, offer-to-hire ratio, types of talent that make up the entire pipeline (i.e., by demographics, role, experience, location)
- Recruiter/Talent Acquisition Specialist Performance: Time to fill and hire, screen-to-hire conversion rate, total screens and interviews per month and quarter, candidate feedback scores
- Bottom Line Impact: Total offers and hires by month and quarter and by team and department, direct impact the talent org provides the business (i.e., quality of hire)
Learn how Lever can help you grow your talent analytics maturity over time. Request a demo.
