HR and business leaders looking to improve strategic workforce planning and create talent-ready organisations will find talent analytics a powerful enabler. Organisations large and small, private and public, hold vast amounts of data that can help them find, engage and keep the most talented employees. Following the principle that past outcomes are the best predictor of future success, organisations are beginning to use employee data — such as resumé and exit interview data — to improve their employee attraction and selection process. For example, reviewing 10 years of resumé data for an organisation’s sales force may show patterns in education, experience or job history that continuously influence employee success or tenure in a sales role. This data can then be used to improve selection criteria when recruiting new sales professionals— ensuring these business critical, revenue generating roles are filled with the right talent in the shortest possible time frames. The 2013/14 Randstad World of Work research shows around a third employers across the Asia Pacific region are using workforce analytics and ‘big data’, but adoption rates vary by country.
Talent analytics take-up is greater in Asian countries. This may be due to the prevalence of talent strategy of multinationals and global corporations that operate on a larger scale in Asia, and the dominance of newer cloud-based HR systems with built-in talent analytics capabilities in high volume markets like China and India. More mature markets, such as Australia and New Zealand, see the benefits of talent analytics but often face the barrier of using data from multiple legacy systems in large organisations, while SMEs may be unsure how to take advantage of the technique and have less HR management resources at their disposal. Our advice is to start small — think of one human capital challenge you need to address and ask yourself whether the data available within your organisation can help.
The 2013/14 Randstad World of Work research found employers across Asia Pacific are using the technique to craft their talent strategy in a number of different ways. Half (54%) of the respondents currently use talent analytics to deliver more efficient workforce planning, along with more accurate talent mapping and addressing of skills gaps (43%). Demonstrating the wide variety of applications for talent analytics, 38% are also using talent analytics to more closely link employee performance and remuneration or to identify high potential employees for development.
Now is the time to focus on talent analytics to improve your workforce planning — giving you the visibility, transparency and insight to build a world-class talent strategy. Here’s some more advice on where to get started:
• Employee retention – what creates high levels of engagement and retention?
• Sales performance – what factors drive high-performing sales professionals?
• Performance analysis – why are some branches/offices delivering higher levels of productivity and what causes the variation?
• Leadership pipeline – who are the most successful leaders, what makes them successful and what’s the profile of potential leadership talent?
• Customer retention – what talent factors drive higher levels of customer satisfaction and retention?
• Expected talent gaps – where are talent gaps in the organisation and what gaps can be expected in coming years? Where can this talent be found?
• Candidate pipeline – what is the quality of the talent pipeline and how does the organisation better attract and select people who will be successful?
About the World of Work Report
The 2013/14 Randstad World of Work Report: Talent Strategy Game-Changer Series stems from over 14,000 survey respondents (more than 7,000 employers & over 7,500 employees) across seven countries in Asia Pacific – Australia, China, Hong Kong, India, Malaysia, New Zealand & Singapore.
