We've talked about the need for analytics talent, most recently just this week, but we haven't broached the topic of talent analytics. Until now, that is.
I talked yesterday afternoon with David Martinsen, senior manager of business intelligence at The Results Companies, a customer relationship management (CRM) partner for a variety of major-label companies. In other words, the call-center agent or service rep on the other end of your line may well be a Results agent. It has between 5,000 and 6,000 employees, depending on the season, Martinsen told me.
In this kind of business, people are the biggest resource. Unfortunately, attrition happens. A lot. And it's costly.
"So anything you can do to hire the right people up front will have a major impact on costs. If you can retain them longer, again you can lower the costs of recruitment and replacement," Martinsen says.
Finding the right people for the job has other benefits, too. When the fit is right, not only does Results see longer rates of employment but better work, too. "Customers are more satisfied, and the agents are more efficient in their calls -- and all those help us meet our goals for our clients."
Naturally, Results is always looking how to take its business to the next level. Last year, that led the company to seek ways of improving its recruiting processes so it could bring in the right talent, Martinsen says. For that, it turned to talent analytics delivered as a service. It wanted the capability, but not the work involved in developing it internally.
Startup Evolv offers what it calls data-driven workforce selection. The company describes the process this way: It analyzes data collected during the application process, correlates that data with job performance, and then uses insights gained through those correlations to predict employee fit.
For Results, the talent analytics service has helped take recruiting data out of a "black hole," Martinsen says. "Overall, we want to make sure we're tracking and able to report on data at any level of the employment lifecycle, and before we did this the recruiting process was like a black hole with too many unknowns to be of use in reporting."
Now Results has scores and can look at the impact of the recruiting efforts. So far, so good. "From Day One, Evolv made all of our recruiters smarter."
And smarter recruiters, armed with standardized questions and processes to follow, can make smart, data-driven decisions regarding potential hires. The proof is in the stats, Martinsen says.
In the year or so that Results has been using talent analytics, it has seen positive impacts on:
Retention. Thirty-day retention rate has improved by 12 percent, with an 8 percent improvement in the number of employees who hit the 90-day mark. That's big in this field, Martinsen says. "Somewhere between 60 and 90 days there is a big shift in the likelihood that an employee will stay long term. Those are important tollgates for us."
Customer service. People hired through Evolv rate 10 percent higher on internal quality scores. "The customer experience is a key selling point and our value add. This is a major improvement."
Agent productivity. Agents are handling 15 percent more calls per hour than previously. "People hired on Evolv are more efficient and skilled." They also adhere to client schedules better, with Results noting a 6 percent improvement here.
Talent analytics sure seems to be working at Results, which Martinsen says expects to see continued improvement as it sends more and more users through the Evolv data-driven hiring process. If you've got experience with talent analytics, share on the message board below.
Yes Broadway. Its so unfortunate for world as a whole that appliers are just too many for a single position. However, the blame is to be put on professionals as well. People just dont do enough research before entering a particular field esp the high school students. An adequate research can help them identify professions where demand is rising and the supply is not anywhere near.
I agree with you Beth @ no obligation to share details to a rejected candidate. An advertisement note for the job does specify the qualities need for the job. Even if a candidate has all of them it doesnt mean that others cant be better than him at those. Analytics and systems like Evolv should be to assess the accuracy of hiring decisions made in the past and to help avoiding the mistakes in the future. It aint an Employee Relationship Management System.
You have made an important point about sample size of candidates. Also I would like to add that for jobs such as those at Results, many candidates are likely to apply. This may not be a case for jobs as investment analysts or a heart surgeon. The sample size may be too small to even use systems such as Evolv as the number of applicants are like 1-2 for a job.
However, I am mentioning a specific scenario. Generally, I think analytics at hiring would work great.
@Shawn -- in an idyllic world, perhaps. But in all reality, why would a company that has deemed a job candidate unqualified for a posted position then take the time and effort and incur the expense of sharing access to its recruiting tool any further? Yes, the company needs to send a polite, "thank you for your interest" note but it holds no obligation to sharing more information than that. Call me harsh, but if a company is going to invest in people it should be investing in the people it wants to or has hired, not those it's rejected.
Beth, finding the right job for right person, with exact matching skills is not a big problem. Since unemployment rates are higher, many skilled peoples may be in job market. But attrition may be more, because of better offerings from the competitor. I know that in my company the attrition rate is up to 40% in certain years, when the demand is in peak. We tried different mechanisms, to reduce this brain drain, but in vein not success more than 15%.
I think giving applicants some access and way of understanding why they might have been rejected will be an absolute necessity in such tools as they are used more and more often.
As suggested below, it only makes sense that analytics could be used to hire analysts. Though I don't know how much a score should have right now. Also, as an applicant, I would want to have access to that score and an understanding how it is caculated, much like I have the right to a copy of a credit report if I was denied employement.
I notice that on Evolv's sight that part of the scientific selection process the use is to give potential employees a realistic expectation of what the job will be like. That I can see as a great asset to any potential position. I also see that they are also scoring the recruiters selection processes, not just the employee.
@Shawn, as true as your points may be, I still see a place for analytics in the hiring process -- that's one more business operation, like any other, that can benefit from the ability to analyze a set of data and predict future outcome. Will it be perfect? Of course not. No hiring process is perfect. Your personality might clash with the hiring manager. The business manager you'd be reporting might have set image in mind of the person he or she wants to hire and won't be budged from it. Maybe you aren't your best during an interview and don't shine to your fullest potential. The keyword searching to weed out initial candidates may be flawed. And while this sort of analytics is proving itself of value at Results, the method may be totally all wrong at another company. For companies that have huge hiring needs and where retention helps differentiate itself from competitors, I'd stand by the predictive value of this sort of approach.
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