A Comprehensive Guide to Talent Insights

Global businesses and TA teams across multiple industries are starting to realise and utilise the potential and power of Talent Insights. This approach enables businesses to answer crucial questions about areas imperative to future business success, such as hiring strategy, location strategy, organisational design, employer reputation, compensation and benefits strategy and competition.

Our insightful guide will help you discover everything you need to know - what Talent Insights is, what it is used for, the process behind Talent Insights, and its benefits. 

What is Talent Insights?

Talent Insights (also known as Talent Intelligence) uses external labour market data to provide a comprehensive view of the talent landscape. This complements clients' internal teams—people analytics, workforce analytics, and HR analytics — dedicated to assessing and enhancing the skills and qualities of internal talent.

This data enables businesses to gain deep insights into their people, what their workforce is capable of, where they excel, and areas they lack. Talent Insights or Talent Intelligence provides a full market landscape so businesses can benchmark their talent against competitors. 

What is Talent Insights Used for?

Talent Insights is highly versatile and can be used to provide bespoke insights into a range of business scenarios, including: 

Typical Questions That Talent Insights Can Answer

Talent Insights can provide in-depth intelligence into a number of business scenarios that can elevate their strategy and planning. Here are common questions Talent Insights can help to answer:

• What is the most effective organisational structure, and how does that apply to my company?

• Where is the best location for relocating a business or setting up new operations, and why?

• Why is a company’s employee retention rate so low? 

• Why is an organisation struggling to attract talent? 

• How does a business compare to its competitors in areas such as branding, salaries, locations, skills, organisational design, and hiring processes? 

• Why is a business failing to attract diverse talent, and what steps can they take to improve this? 

What is the Talent Insights Process?

The Talent Insights process represents a customised approach designed to address specific business challenges and talent strategies for organisations. An experienced team of researchers and analysts tailors insight projects to meet the unique needs of the client.

This process encompasses three key steps:

• Data Gathering - This combines traditional market intelligence analysis and digital data-gathering techniques supplemented by insights from individuals connected to the target market. This comprehensive approach aims to create a three-dimensional understanding of the market's challenges, opportunities, trends, and prospects.
• Evaluation and Analysis - This stage gathers, sifts through, and evaluates intelligence from various public domain and online sources. Personal market insights (also known as Primary Insights) from individuals directly connected to the target market are also incorporated. These individuals can be business leaders, industry commentators or a given talent population itself.
• Final Report - This report provides unique and unparalleled intelligence, insights, and strategic recommendations tailored to the client's business. The objective is to equip organisations with valuable information to inform their talent decisions and strategies.

What are the Benefits of Talent Insights?

Now that you're familiar with what Talent Insights involves and how the process operates, our next focus is on exploring the key benefits that Talent Insights can bring to your business.

Analyses Global Talent Pools 

By assessing the size and location of talent hubs in relation to specific skills and/or geographies, including potential growth projections, organisations can make informed decisions about talent acquisition and resource allocation, ensuring they have access to the skills they need to succeed in the competitive global market.

Improves Diversity and Inclusion 

Talent Insights data can reveal biases and disparities in hiring, promotion, and compensation practices, providing organisations with valuable insights to identify and address unconscious biases, which helps foster a more equitable and inclusive workplace and recruitment process. By analysing historical data on hiring decisions, promotion rates, and compensation levels, organisations can identify patterns and disparities that may indicate the presence of unconscious biases. In addition, by understanding the motivations, preferences, barriers and behaviours of a given underrepresented group, you can ensure your attraction and retention strategies are finely tuned.

Optimises Global Location Strategies

By utilising these insights, businesses can make evidence-based decisions regarding business relocation or setting up new operations. This involves analysing the talent pool, benchmarking salaries, comparing the cost of living, assessing the quality of life, analysing tax incentives, identifying competitors, forecasting the labour market, and assessing the risks associated with relocation. 

This approach assists companies in refining their location strategy, ensuring access to strong talent pools, enabling effective attraction and retention of high-calibre talent, and ensuring a global footprint that contributes to their long-term growth and sustainability.

Enhance Organisational Design

Talent Insights provides invaluable information that serves as a basis for informing and improving organisational design strategies. Talent Insights analyses organisational structures and design trends, identifying best practices and pitfalls to avoid and providing insights into how the business compares to its competitors.

This data-driven approach empowers businesses to make informed decisions, optimising their organisational design for increased efficiency and effectiveness.

Improve Employer Branding

An essential element of Talent Insights is providing clients with insights into how potential candidates perceive their organisation. Armed with this understanding, clients can work alongside their marketing and branding teams to improve their Employee Value Proposition (EVP). 

This proactive approach not only supports the goal of becoming an employer of choice but also addresses any unfavourable perceptions that could dissuade top talent from exploring opportunities within the organisation.

Optimised Candidate Engagement 

Talent Insights provides a detailed understanding of how potential candidates prefer to be approached. This insight encompasses their preferences and dislikes regarding recruitment messages. By customising outreach messages to align with the preferences of specific talent pools, the recruitment process is significantly expedited, resulting in faster and more efficient hiring procedures.

Provides Competitor Intelligence 

Analysis of competitor operations relating to business units, functions, and geographies provides valuable insights, allowing clients to benchmark their talent strategies against their competitors. This benchmarking exercise can help organisations identify areas where they excel or fall short compared to their competitors and make informed decisions about how to improve their competitive edge.

Armstrong Craven Can Overcome Your Talent Insights Challenges

While talent Insights is an excellent tool for gathering intelligence, it does have some challenges if businesses decide to go it alone. These challenges include:

Data Quality and Reliability - The accuracy and dependability of talent intelligence data is pivotal in producing precise and practical insights. In-house TI teams are often constrained by having access to only one major TI platform, often because that is the platform used by the TA team.  Relying on only one or two data sources (which may lack varying degrees of global coverage for example) can lead to incompleteness of data, , potentially resulting in misguided or faulty conclusions.

Integration with Existing Systems - The functionality of Talent Insights services frequently hinges on data sourced from various outlets, encompassing internal HR systems, external talent marketplaces, and social media platforms. It is imperative to seamlessly integrate this data with current HR systems and analytics tools to obtain a comprehensive perspective of the talent landscape.

Data Protection - Talent intelligence data may contain sensitive personal information. Therefore, organisations must implement robust data protection measures and adhere to ethical guidelines to ensure that talent intelligence is used responsibly and ethically.

Continuous Improvement and Adaptability - The talent landscape constantly evolves, requiring talent intelligence to adjust accordingly. 

Confidentiality - companies that don’t have access to an expert external talent intelligence partner risk cutting themselves off from a deep and rich vein of primary insights from talent pools/experts that they simply can’t engage with as a competitor or if it risks disclosing a confidential business strategy.

With our expertise, we are equipped to address these challenges and offer comprehensive and impactful intelligence, unlocking the full potential of your organisation.

Our Talent Insights Success Stories 

Explore how our Talent Insights service has supported global businesses to elevate their talent strategies and empower their future.  

Providing Talent Insights for a Leading Online Retailer 

Discover how Armstrong Craven provided in-depth Talent Insights from the best female tech talent in the market in order to establish themselves as a leading employer of choice.

Addressing the Gender Imbalance in Tech | Armstrong Craven

Discover How Talent Insights Can Elevate Your Business 

Talent Insights provides businesses with a powerful tool to support them in making data-driven decisions in a variety of business scenarios, from location strategy to assessing talent pools to improving employer branding. Our team has over 30 years of experience delivering tailored insights to major global organisations. With our vast experience and expertise, we are ready to support you in feeling the full benefit of Talent Insights. 

Contact our team today to learn more about our services, including Talent Sourcing, Executive Search, Talent Insights, Talent Mapping, and Talent Pipelining.