Seeing Around Corners
The search for top talent: Accelerate your business with actionable insights
We’ve come a long way since the days of whiteboards and spreadsheets. With today’s digital technologies, we can store, access and manage candidate data more effectively than ever before. But the market is now more competitive than ever. With growth in demand for new hires, outstripping supply of readily available top talent, our systems and tools must work even harder and smarter, if we want to stay ahead.
It’s no longer enough to examine the past or consider what’s happening today. We need to know what our next move should be. We need to be able to see around corners, so that we can take advantage of what’s coming next.
Moving with Speed and Agility
Recruitment software is certainly no stranger to candidate data analytics. For a long time, technology has gone beyond simply storing and accessing a pool of talent data. Nearly all recruitment software today offers powerful searching and mapping capabilities, where data can be filtered by the Recruiter to identify target candidates, matched to specific job criteria. Beyond filtering, the tenacious Recruiter must go deeper into the data, particularly when it comes to analysing a candidate’s soft skills, such as digital transformation expertise and cultural fit.
This effort often involves using multiple systems, software and tools, all of which slows productivity and in so doing, risks missing a valuable window of opportunity. Instead, we need innovative new solutions that will enable us to move with greater speed and agility.
To stay competitive, Recruiters can no longer afford to spend hours evaluating target lists of candidates, before taking action. It’s a bit like entering the Paris Dakar Rally with the best high-powered racing car ever made, but not having the pace-notes. You can’t win the competitive race, if you’re still stuck at the starting line trying to figure out what to do next.
Being a winner is a combination of having the right team, the right tools and the right actionable insights to get you across the finish line ahead of your competitors.
Actionable Insights
The opportunity for software innovation is in making data more actionable for the Recruiter. Actionable insights connect the dots between fragmented pieces of data and action-based tasks. It ties everything together into a single holistic view, so you can quickly identify and target top talent to capitalise on untapped opportunities.
Let’s return to the racing car analogy. As the driver of a high-powered vehicle, the dashboard is your central control system. Everything you need to know is directly in front of you. In fact, you don’t even have to step out of the vehicle or look under the bonnet to know what is happening at any given point. The car’s computer system continuously analyses data behind the scenes, and presents the critical data in a single interface, exactly as needed. The dashboard provides an at-a-glance view of what has already happened and what lies ahead. From the cockpit, you can quickly and easily assess engine performance, speed, tyre pressure, as well as navigate the route ahead, all at the same time. It delivers advance warning signals and employs automatic braking when needed. You know how far you’ve travelled and how far you still have left to go and alerts you to when the next service is due. All this and more is available in an instant. So what makes all this data so quickly and easily digestible?
The uniqueness of the dashboard experience, is that it combines lots of component pieces of data together into a graphical interface and presented to the driver in a way that is actionable. It continuously analyses data and provides guidance and suggested actions at the right time, about what you must and should do next. As the driver, you are able to leverage these insights, to make critical decisions and take necessary action, all whilst travelling at high speed.
Imagine a similar dashboard experience for your talent pool, that combines key attributes and highly desired skills, experience, cultural fit, demographics, diversity, availability and historical engagements into a single holistic view. A graphical interface of actionable insights that maps top talent with client needs to identify untapped opportunities you can prioritize for targeted action.
Delivering insights in a way that is actionable is a critical success factor for Recruiters who want to win the race for placing top talent.
Where It Matters
Equally important as delivering smart and intelligent insights, is the need to tie insights to a Recruiter’s day to day workflow experience. Ensuring insights are delivered at the point they are used and in the format needed, ensures recruiters are fully prepared ahead of engaging with a candidate or discussing a potential candidate’s suitability with a client.
As the Recruiter makes a call, schedules a meeting or carries out an action-based task, vital Candidate insights need to be delivered at the right time, using actionable alerts and notifications, linked to action-based activities and tasks and accessible through any mobile device.
Invest in Innovation, not Product
Henry Ford once said “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.” It reminds us all that the route to accelerating and advancing our business lies in true innovation. Database target lists, searching and filtering capabilities are fast becoming the classic cars of their day. Sticking with the classic car is fine if you can afford the time and you’re not planning to go very far, but if you want to win the race, you need to be able to see around the corner as you move full-speed ahead.
