Talent Analytics with Effective Reports and Dashboards

Talent Analytics is a specialism within People Analytics that deals with employee performance, productivity and behaviour. Talent reports help guide recruitment strategies, improve workforce planning decisions and manage employee turnover.

Better recruitment decisions

Talent analytics can help improve recruitment by identifying what works and what doesn't. Data can help HR teams improve the recruitment process, smooth the candidate journey and help hiring managers make more informed decisions.

Metrics can identify where bottlenecks occur in the recruitment and employee onboarding process. These metrics can help determine which parts of the hiring process need attention and reduce the time to hire new employees.

Analytics can identify ways to reduce recruitment costs by comparing changes over time, across regions and by different role types. Recruitment metrics and improve hiring decisions and reduce the rate of failed hires.

Improve employee performance and productivity

Performance management tools are a rich source of data. Talent analytics can mine this information source to find areas for improvement and new opportunities to focus on.

Combining performance data with data sources from across the business creates reports with real insight. Reports can identify how performance changes over time and correlates with absence, skills gaps and finance data.

Strategic workforce planning

Organisation design and future workforce planning rely on talent data. Analysing the current workforce shape, headcount, demographics, and skills will inform the planning decisions. Reports and data visualisations will help compare future scenarios and assess the impact of the different options.

Analytics can help HR teams identify skills gaps, plan their roadmap and monitor the delivery.

Succession planning and talent management

Data analytics can help identify top performers and retain the most skilled talent. Reports can provide insight into skills gaps in different teams and help managers make more informed hiring and promotion decisions.

Redundancy selection and planning

Determining the selection criteria is the first step to creating a fair redundancy process and avoiding discrimination. Selecting employees for redundancy should be based on a mix of clear and consistent reasons.

Redundancy selection should use a list of objective and measurable criteria. HR data should inform the employee selection process.

Talent data can help deliver an objective and fair redundancy selection process. Accurate data can support an ethical and transparent decision-making process.

The good news is that you probably already have lots of great data to work with. The most common challenge is knowing where to start and what goals to aim for.

Your existing HCM platform is a rich source of information, though many organisations struggle with data quality issues.

Here are 33 of the best metrics for measuring talent.

Employee performance

• Revenue per employee; client retention rates; objective and goal achievements; customer approval rating / net promoter scores.
• Manager feedback scores; 360 review ratings; peer and direct report feedback; employee engagement surveys.
• Benefit usage; absenteeism rates.

Staff turnover, attrition rates and exit reasons

• Involuntary exits as a proportion of total headcount; reasons for voluntary exit; overall staff retention rate.
• Average length of employment; rehire eligibility percentage; cost of turnover.

Vacancy applicant information

• Number of open vacancies; time to offer; positions unfilled; applicant location and other demographics.
• Applicant abandonment rates; applicants per process pipeline stage.

Hiring success metrics

• Failed hire rates; cost of hiring; time to hire.
• Onboarding process metrics; most successful hiring sources.
• New starter feedback; exit interview surveys.

Many HR teams don't have people with data analysis skills or the capacity to handle yet more report requirements. Existing management reports may already be taking too much effort and preventing the delivery of more advanced reporting.

Automating the data collection and processing tasks can reduce the ongoing burden of creating reports, but this is a skill set that the typical HR department doesn't have. HR teams are usually more focused on delivering traditional HR services. IT resources are often unavailable.

Managing data reliably and consistently is hard. Ensuring the correct matches between data sources (particularly when a single item in one data source relates to multiple items in another) can lead to incorrect results.

We help teams with a range of skills address these issues.

Employee metrics are inherently complex and can be hard to communicate. Different chart types will lend themselves to different metrics.

When creating analytics dashboards, consider what message the data shows and what story to communicate.

Changes over time are usually best shown with area charts. Line charts work well when comparing multiple values over time.

Scatter or bubble charts can highlight patterns or groupings when working with large data sets.

Simple bar charts or histograms are most suited to comparing single variables across different groups, such as teams, departments or regions. Ordering the bars by their value (rather than alphabetically) will make comparisons more obvious.

Pie charts are most effective when dealing with a single data point with a small number of values (such as gender diversity).