Harnessing Talent Intelligence and Data for Recruitment Success

Rachel Davis, CEO at Armstrong Craven, recently joined Neil Kelly from Talent Talkbox to discuss the importance of Talent Intelligence and data within recruitment and how it can benefit your company.

The Evolution of Talent Insights and Data

Neil: Where are we up to in the landscape of Talent Insights and Data? How has it evolved?

Rachel: I think anything involving data at the moment is accelerating almost exponentially, and there is a real hunger in every part of business for data and then the analytics of that data. I think that it’s having an impact in all sorts of ways and some of it has been accelerated through the COVID pandemic. But I think one of the areas where it's really manifested itself in the TA world, in the HR world, is the increasing prevalence of Talent Intelligence as a function.

There are talent teams specialized in insight, specialized in data, that aren't purely working on HR analytics data (which still tends to be very much internal data), but actually they're specifically looking at the external talent market and what's going on out there, and what are the trends.

I think that the evolution of Talent Intelligence over the last six years is where it's really taken off. You're starting to see it creep into every area of talent.

Listen to the podcast: 

Talent Intelligence vs Talent Insights vs Talent Data

Neil: What is the difference between Talent Intelligence, Talent Insights, and Talent Data?

Rachel: Well, there is a great analogy that Toby Culshaw uses, and for those of you that don't know Toby, he's been in the Talent Intelligence world for absolutely years. He has a great analogy, which I cannot now remember in full, but it has to do with “knowing that a tomato is a fruit and knowing not to put it in a fruit salad” and I think somewhere along there is the definition, the difference between pure data and actually the insights.

Neil: So what he's saying is that it depends on what you're trying to do and what tool you use.

Rachel: Knowledge or data in this sense is knowing a tomato is a fruit. The intelligence or the insight is knowing not to put it into a fruit salad. I think that's the difference. For me, I always talk about data as a set of facts, but the data needs to be interpreted - the “so what?” is the important bit, because you can make decisions based on data, without actually really understanding what the data is saying and what it means to you individually, as a function or an organization. That's the danger. The interpretation of the data is therefore where insights or intelligence comes in.

Neil: You and your team have always been very good at asking the “why” and asking the “so what”. As you think about organizations, they're at different stages of this journey, of how to use data, how to use insight, and obviously intelligence as well, but ultimately, we would try and look at the value we are trying to create here. As a talent function along this journey, no matter what your maturity is, how would you think organizations should be defining value? When it comes to insights, intelligence or data.

Defining Value

Rachel: I was thinking about this and if you take it a step up to, how should organizations value the talent function first of all, I suspect if you pare it right down to its barest components, the talent function is there to ensure the right skills and the right people are in the right places at all times. That includes making sure that you've got access to the right talent that you need, the talent internally is being moved around as agilely as it can be, to protect and mitigate any risk from a succession planning perspective. The value that you can put on insights and data is fundamentally, using the right data, and data analytics, and insights or intelligence, will give you the evidence to make the right decision. That decision could be anything but I think it's also making the right decision fast enough.

A nice project that we worked on where there was some really clear feedback that came from it, that was really impactful - we do a lot of work in the Life Sciences sector - and this was for a US biotech based in New York state (about 45 minutes outside of Manhattan). They are a very, very heavily genetics-driven business. You can imagine, whether you're a scientist or not, the amount of data that is spewed out by genetics is a real issue. Even for the MDs, the medics and the scientists in the business that weren't geneticists, actually being able to understand and interpret this data, is really, really onerous. So they realized they needed an interface to make this data digestible and understandable for non-geneticists. So for the first time, they needed to hire app developers. They wanted to create apps so you can get this data digested on a tablet, on an iPhone, so it can be used properly. We did a lot of work with their talent acquisition function - they had realized that they didn’t know anything about app developers. “We're not tech recruiters. We're not a tech business. We're a life sciences business. So where do they even exist? We think, or we know, given where we are in the world, in New York state, these [people] are going to be from the likes of JP Morgan, Goldman Sachs, and Google. But we don't know how to talk to these guys. We don't know if they're going to be interested in us! What are we going to do?”

We did a project for them that firstly assessed the [app developer] talent market in New York. We looked at where the talent is, where are the concentrations? And yes, they're in Manhattan, and in trendy warehouses and lofts in Brooklyn. But actually delving right down into the motivations of that talent and what would it take for them to move - obviously they wouldn't have considered biotech as a career move. Now, on the one side, we've got our client, the biotech, who are used to hiring brilliant people with the overriding message of “come and save a life”. That's what we're all in this for. It's about making drugs, life-changing drugs, life-saving drugs, come and save a life. We put that to the population of app developers. What is your primary motivator? What might be your secondary motivator? We also collated salary data and all sorts of mobility data as well, but fundamentally it turned out that their primary motivation was really interesting - it was all about getting to work with, I'm going to say “sexy tech(!)”, cutting edge tech - that's what they wanted. It wasn’t the brand name of the company so much at all, It's knowing that they are getting to play with cutting-edge tech - and our client could tick that box. That secondary hook of ‘and by the way what do you think about doing this for a company that makes life-saving drugs’ was so powerful. And here’s the crucial part of the outcome of this project - the feedback was that this messaging enabled them to cut their time to hire on that program by 18 months. So that is phenomenally impactful because you've got an extra 1.5 years now of knowledge-share across the business, which is accelerating drug and product discovery. That does way more than just for your share price, which obviously goes up. It's genuinely saving lives. And that was with the right message, layered in the right way. If they hadn't done this project, they would be scrabbling around wondering why they can't prise this talent out of their trendy lofts and warehouses.

Neil: It's asking the right questions, and getting to the right answers fast, which is obviously going to speed up that process. I'm interested just to kind of pivot the conversation, in a similar theme in terms of getting the right insights. I know from the experiences we've had over the years that you've done some fantastic work in the D&I space. You've really excelled at asking the right questions to get to those answers. But I would like to understand more about the organizations out there that are trying to get to the right populations, trying to build a diverse workforce, but struggling to ask the right questions. Even to get to the starting point to say, what questions do we need to ask in our intelligence or research in the market, in order to accelerate these processes?

So I'm just interested to unpick that a little bit with you, building on the life science analogy, of how organizations are approaching this, and maybe some of the mistakes to avoid in the future.

How to Ask the Right Questions and Avoid Mistakes

Rachel: It's a huge topic, I'll try and unpick some of the areas. I think that when a business is looking at its diversity and the makeup of its workforce, the first thing they do is obviously to quantify and measure internally, and that's really important, easy enough to do - to ascertain the percentage of underrepresented talent, in whichever group that might be whether it's women or ethnicity or whatever.

And then the next step is to see “Have we got the right environment?”, particularly now thinking about inclusivity and belonging. Asking “Have we got the right networking groups in place to support our talent?”. These elements are all important to do, but very inward looking. When it comes to the hiring piece, there's still way too much of “we’ll just slap a metric on it then, we'll just say we want parity on a short list, or two or more underrepresented candidates on the shortlist”. They're still not tying it to the state of the market and what is the talent in that market - genuinely, can you have parity on the shortlist? Actually, that particular area only has 10% women, so you're not going to have 50% women on the shortlist. So there is that element of understanding that we do need to know what is out there and where is the talent that we need, where is it located?

But that's often where the next mistake can happen. Organizations will knee jerk to talent mapping to identify that talent and they'll go route one straight to try and attract it. But, the missing step is, “well how do we engage this talent? There's a reason why we haven't got it in our business in the first place”. So do we understand that primary data? The primary data (or word of mouth data) brings the color and depth that goes underneath the numbers and the data points. So the biggest mistake is just assuming that having identified people, you can just bring them in without actually understanding what are the barriers? What are the lived issues, barriers and challenges that people are experiencing in their careers? Does that apply then to us? What are their motivations? Often there are pockets of in-demand, diverse talent, how are we going to get there first and make sure that our message resonates the best?

Doing that layer of primary insight to understand that talent before you start to bring it into your organization means that it is easier to attract and they stay. And then they can progress their career with you and start to really make a change.

Neil: I'm intrigued to understand - so enterprise businesses have the structures in place, sometimes the budget, sometimes the time, and some just go and some just say we need to hire these people.

But then you've got the SME market, which whilst might have the budgets, doesn't have the time and maybe doesn't have the resources. The example you gave before sounded SME. Small, but rapidly growing. I don't know if it was or it wasn't. Would the process to go through this be any different if you're a different size of organization or have different levels of resources internally to go about this type of activity?

 

How Would the Processes Be Different if You're a Different Size Organization?

Rachel: Yes you’re right, the example I gave was definitely for a smaller, very fast growing business. I think this is definitely the sort of luxury the larger organizations have to do more of. The global MNCs are the ones that went first with setting up talent intelligence functions, they tend to have the larger pockets. They will have access to more headcount and more resources, more data resources. They are still hamstrung to a certain extent when it comes to gathering the primary data, however because whilst they can glean a lot through candidates and existing employees, actually being able to go and benchmark yourself against competitors in the market, is harder. If you are a recruiter from company X or a Talent Intelligence expert from company X, your LinkedIn profile is company X, and your email address is company X. You can't phone up company Y and go, how does this work? And why are you doing this? And what do you think? You just can't do it. So whether you're a large or small organization, it is definitely that primary insight piece where you would look to a partner, Armstrong Craven, or others like us out there, to be able to obtain those insights. If you're a smaller SME, just on this journey, having that partnership as you're building the business case can be really important. There are some areas where you don't need it and you kind of know what you're doing and it's fairly steady state. So actually having a full time headcount for Talent Intelligence is actually not feasible yet in where you are in your evolution. Knowing that there are partners out there and I guess the benefits, equally, it goes back to the three C's and adding those capacity pieces.

As an in-house function, you may have the luxury of having one or more of the big [talent intelligence] products out there on the market. For most businesses, it's LinkedIn Talent Insights, or it might be Talent Neuron, it might be Eightfold, it might be all these other pieces of tech. But you may only have one, and if you only have one, that's where a partner can fill the gaps. We do quite a lot of work with organizations that say, “we do use this resource but it just isn't great in APAC”, so we can plug the gaps as that external partner. It's not very different depending on whether you're small, medium or large, because there are always barriers that you would face or the limitations as an internal team.

Neil: In terms of the value, the return on the investment is always very critical. “I'm a talent leader in an organization. I know we need to do this and I'm trying to sell that to the CHRO”. What are some of the typical scenarios of how you may guide a business in terms of that return on investment because I think, as you've alluded to, you can either layer up, or do a bigger project in one go. There's multiple access points to enter it. But generally, you have to present a business case to that. Talk through how I, as a talent leader, should be positioning that return on investment or that business case internally.

 

How Talent Leaders Should Be Positioning ROI

Rachel: It’s certainly getting easier because insights and talent intelligence data are now “a thing”. So I think there are lots of examples of businesses that have very effective Talent Intelligence functions that are measuring ROI in their own sphere and there are lots of case studies out there now. But I also think there will be ample examples of where a business has run into difficulties in its talent agenda because it didn't have access to data. So perhaps they selected the wrong location for a brand new offshoring BPO, for example, - they chose it purely on financial metrics and low cost labor, not thinking about the right kind of talent [supply] in that location. There will always be previous examples to draw on and also, you can use the urgency of the setting - if it's an investment hiring program that's driving this case for example,, a bit like the biotech example where this was an area they knew they knew nothing about - the “what if we don't?”, or “what if we get this wrong?” is actually a very impactful argument to be setting something up. If you're starting out, it might just be on a project basis, but you're talking about budgets that are likely to be smaller than the cost of the executive search to appoint the leaders. If you're positioning it correctly with the business leaders, and with the stakeholders, it can become a no-brainer because they know they're going to get the ROI.

Neil: What's interesting that you alluded to before, the business is becoming more and more involved in some of these discussions. Discussions around return investment but more importantly, the value. We need the data to drive our business outcomes and our business performance. Are you finding that beyond Talent Intelligence, you're having more of an impact and a discussion with the business now? Are they finding that data more useful abroad, outside the talent function, or are you finding it's still within very much the confines of HR or talent?

 

How Has Data and Talent Intelligence Created a Greater Impact and Involvement in Business Discussions and Enhanced Business Performance?

Rachel: I would say we definitely are experiencing more of a hunger from the business itself. I think part of that is probably bandwidth, and part of it is influence or sphere of influence of a TA and/or HR team. But I think one thing that's interesting particularly for organizations that are changing and growing, that is actually a lot of businesses across the world, certainly from a change perspective, is the pressure to get it right. The pressure from high up, (however how high you are in the business, there's always somebody higher than you, ultimately the shareholders), it's got to be right.

We are doing an increasing number of projects directly with the business itself. So with the chief procurement officer for their organization or again, in biotech, with market access, as they're looking to expand their footprints and get their team size right. That kind of benchmarking of; “what are our peers doing?”. But I’m not just talking about what does their org structure look like, but why is it structured that way, and actually, as they grew, what were the mistakes and what were the lessons learned? so that you’re not having to make those same mistakes. We need to take this data and analysis and we need to translate it into, what does it mean for us as a business, because we don't want to just be a carbon copy of one of our competitors. So that's something really interesting.

Then what we do is make sure we're joining that back up to the TA agenda. So if this has come from outside of TA, ultimately there's org design, which should be including HR anyway. But at some point it's then feeding into the actual TA agenda. But if it isn't, because it's siloed, then we make sure we're joining that up and connecting all the dots for the business.

We talk about how Insights should feed into the entire talent agenda: it can feed into the whole of HR - org design, comps and bens, TA, even L&D, certainly into succession planning and so into your business units and so on. We tend to look at it enterprise-wide.

Neil: What we see in the market now from a TA perspective is the verticals are becoming more and more defined. So, the relationship between marketing and recruitment marketing or employer branding is becoming more of a hard line. Are you finding from a Talent Intelligence perspective that the relationship into other data points or insight teams within the business, is becoming more of a structured relationship now or not?

 

The Relationships Between Talent Intelligence and Other Functions

Rachel: Yes, but slowly. I think there's a lot of, I'm going to say soul searching - “where even should Talent Intelligence sit?” Because actually a lot of Talent Intelligence teams are still relatively small in a lot of businesses, they may even just be one or two heads. They are still very much in TA and they're often grouped together with sourcing and therefore are they there to do talent mapping and a bit of analysis? What is their purpose?

There is still very much a debate on where is their place? Talent Intelligence is absolutely intertwined with TA, but I don't think it needs to be part of TA. It does have to be seamless however, but Talent Intelligence could point into the business. Because for example, TI should be involved in M&A as they're providing the talent data [as part of the due diligence process]. You're going to buy this company. It's not just about looking at the leadership team and asking whether it is any good. It's about the depth of talent and also the depth of talent in the market? Can it supply your growth plans? If you're buying something in the Midwest in the US for example, and that business is the only one located there, and you've got a 5X growth plan for them, you need to be thinking about that talent agenda pre-acquisition.

Having Talent Intelligence buried away as part of TA is not necessary, that's missing a trick. I think it's evolving, but quite slowly.

Neil: Is there a particular skill set you think you need to enter a role within Talent Intelligence? If I were somebody who's been a 360 recruiter but has an interest in data, is that enough, or do I need to go and search for a degree?

 

Particular skills you need to enter a role within Talent Intelligence

Rachel: We have a specialist insights and talent analytics team and a lot of those are data scientists of some form. I think more generally, and we are seeing the move and the interest of recruiters moving into this space. I would say an interest in data for sure, I would say passion for data actually would really help but it's that Intellectual curiosity is a must. It is getting to the bottom of it and I think coupling that comfort and ease and use of manipulating data, It's the EI and the EQ that is needed because you've got to be able to think enterprise-wide. You've got to be able to put this data and see it through the eyes of your stakeholders, and you've got to be able to influence the findings sometimes. The findings may not be what the business really wants to hear and then it just gets put on a shelf and forgotten about. But that's where you then suddenly get into this reverse argument of, there was no value in it because the business didn't do anything with it. Then all of a sudden you're in real danger of it was an experiment I think we'll pull out, thank you very much, which you do still see. There is movement and growth and retraction in Talent Intelligence teams, it's influence in communication skills, which we talk about all the time as being essential in TA anyway. But they are absolutely crucial in a Talent Intelligence role, I would say.

Neil: The final question is the area we always like to finish on, in terms of the skills that people should be developing. I think you might have mentioned it already, but if there's maybe one or two skills that you think somebody who's got a real interest in moving into this area of the business, what would those skills look like? Or would they be from your side?

Rachel: I probably have touched on it certainly from the kind of competencies, the personal skills that you need. It's the ease of data and working with data, the curiosity and the influencing. But especially in Talent Intelligence, you've got to wake up to AI. I think everybody is going to have to get used to AI in the same way that we now know how to use anything else digital in our lives and that is a whole area of training. Those individuals who are going to get on the front foot of AI will be stealing a march on everybody else. We are all going to have to learn how to ask the right questions of AI, in order to get the right answers. And that is going to be a skill that all of us need, but in Talent Intelligence and in TA, fundamentally, that's going to be the most crucial thing.

Armstrong Craven is a global leader in bespoke research-driven talent solutions. We work with many of the world’s best-known and most respected organizations. Contact our team today to learn more about our range of services, including Talent sourcing, Insights, Pipelining and Talent Mapping.