How do you know that the candidate that you're going hire will become a high performer? Should you choose the candidate with 3.5 GPA and reject the candidate with 2.5 GPA? However, how do you know for sure that higher GPA will have better performance compared to those with lower GPA? And why company like Google and AT&T start choose candidate with less academic records or from non prestigious schools?
On the other hand, if you are a job seeker, with your current strength and weakness, education background and personal background, what kind a job that you should seek to enhance your career faster and live a happy life? Should you choose to become a management trainee or technical administrator?
Currently HR uses several methodologies to filter thousands of resumes to eventually identify top talents. Several criteria are set to separate "Potential" candidates vs. "Non-potential" candidates. For example: minimum education requirements e.g., bachelor degree or minimum GPA e.g., at least 2.7 or must reside within the city area. In addition, several test may be conducted to filter candidate. For example, numerical test, behavior test or aptitude test. All of these criteria and tests are utilized to identify "Good" candidate as "Top" talents. However, how do we know for sure tat these "Good" candidates will bring higher business performance?
Why Talent Analytics?
According to Deloitte study, based on a survey of 436 North American companies, the study reveals that advanced talent analytics is helping to achieve better talent outcomes in terms of leadership pipelines, talent cost reductions, efficiency gains and talent mobility - moving the right people into the right jobs
Talent analytics provides linkage from "candidate profile" to "business performance". Talent analytic can provide prediction of future performance for each candidate. This combination is only recently been introduced to correlate people with performance (source: www.talentanalytics.com).
Talent analytic will help us identify the best talent pool that will have the best potential for business performance (i.e., higher revenue, better precision, higher capability, etc). The best talent pool does not necessarily have the highest GPA from the best university. They can have medium GPA from mediocre university but perhaps have 2 year of experience. Talent analytic uses "candidate score" that match business performance criteria directly.
If you're a job seeker, Talent Analytics can help you the best career track for you to advance faster. The analytic will compare your "career score" to several job descriptions such as (Safety staff, Technical staff or a Management Trainee). Based on this score, Talent Analytics can provide a list of available job offer with the highest "career score" for you. It will be a win-win solution for both the job seeker and recruiter.
How to build Talent Analytics?
First you need to ask, what is my main business challenges that need to be address. What kind of Talent that I need to focus to address this problem. This is a very crucial factor to start Talent Analytics. In addition, do you need to consider staff attrition into the model? What should be the key performance indicator?
Recent report by Bersin (2012) mentioned that to develop talent analytics, we need to have the data that generally falls into three categories:
People data: such as demographics, skills, reward, engagement
Program data: such as attendance, adoption, participation in programs ranging from training and development and leadership programs to talent management and key projects and assignments
Performance data: performance ratings and data captured from the use of instruments such as 360, goal attainment, talent, succession programs and talent assessment.
Let's say your objective is to find talents for Petroleum Engineers for off-shore drilling company in Asia. You have a pool of talents. But how to pick the best candidate that will bring the best performance? First, you need to have these 3 types of data, People data, Program data and Performance data of your current staff. The people data should contain the data that you gathered before these staff join. Using modeling technique, we can compare these variables to the staff "future performance" that already existed today.
You can do this modeling technique to each and every job description that you have. Each Talent Analytic model will provide you with a score that will help you identify you next best performer. Voila! Now you have your Talent Analytic Engine.
Disclaimer: This is a personal blog. The opinions expressed here solely represent my own opinion and not those of my employer or any other institution.
Original article here