Tech Check: Questions to Empower Your Workforce Data

Situation

Navigating the market for talent remains difficult. Skills change constantly, and as demand for those skills shifts, salaries and bill rates fluctuate accordingly. Thanks to data from Lightcast and Brightfield, companies can identify the number of jobs posted at a location for a particular role and the prevailing rates.

Despite the precise data now available, hiring organizations can struggle with determining costs. Several challenges arise:

• Keeping up with changing titles, skills and fields: Skills named in the US Department of Labor database may not always align with those commonly used in specific industries, especially as fields of expertise evolve quickly. For example, the general category of “data scientist” that was common a few years ago has since broken into distinct areas such as analysis, engineering, data mining and visualization, among others.
  
  
• Tracking trends to determine costs: The costs of skills constantly change. The ideal rate to attract talent is a moving target that requires an employer to piece together data points over time to identify trends.
  
  
• Aligning internal terminology with the language of the market: How do you objectively compare titles, job descriptions, activities and rates you associate with a role to external data in the marketplace? Current machine learning technology provides a solution.

Client Success

Sevenstep clients depend on supply and demand data in their hiring strategies. Our Sevayo Insights platform can analyze data from multiple points in time and make comparisons with other data points, such as the employer's internal hiring history. The result is a recognition of patterns and trends that can help set an accurate forecast for a competitive offer rate.

For example, one of our clients relies on hundreds of delivery drivers across dozens of markets to provide products to customers. Achieving total route coverage is vital, so keeping up with driver turnover is critical. We found that incorporating market data into the client’s feed was crucial to informing hiring managers when rates were insufficient for their markets or when expectations needed to be adjusted.

Our Sevayo Insights analytics technology provided local supply and demand intelligence to inform each hiring manager. It monitored and flagged requisitions that were out of step with the market or when trends might force a change in strategy. Using this approach, the client has:

• Improved time-to-fill, achieving a reduction of two weeks in one quarter
• Enhanced competitive pay, resulting in a 55% improvement in converting passive candidates
• Boosted diverse hiring, including gender diversity, by pinpointing where the client fell below market trends in diversity hiring

Takeaways

Compare Apples to Apples: Normalizing data is critical. If your organization refers to a position by a title that does not match what is commonly used in the market, then an AI-driven analysis can prove essential in adjusting queries and research to find the right information.

Break Away from Frozen Data: Quarterly and monthly reports only deliver a snapshot of past conditions frozen in time. Seeing trends that influence the talent supply requires multiple, continuously updated data channels supported by analytics to reveal patterns and predictions.

Seek Answers, Not Data: Need to understand how well you are recruiting a diverse group against other employers filling similar roles or see whether your planned new location is ideal for the hiring you need? An analytics platform can provide precise answers. As a result, general data, guesses and assumptions play less of a role in planning.

Situation

Every new vacancy brings risks that can contribute to one common negative outcome: aging requisitions. Many factors contribute to challenging reqs. Examples include:

• A location may have a lower supply of candidates than expected.
• The offer may be too low to attract talent in a given market.
• Available TA resources may lack the domain expertise, connections or sourcing capability to bring in candidates quickly.
• The job requirements may prove too difficult to fulfill in a desired timeframe.

Client Success

In the past, TA functions may have blindly added or changed resources when they missed deadlines. Today, instead of waiting for a requisition to age, employers can predict and address challenges before they turn into performance issues.

For a difficult hiring need, Sevenstep’s innovation team applied its Sevayo Insights talent integration platform to analyze requisition performance over a period of years, tracking variables such as job title, time of year, offer-to-accept, time-to-hire and many other factors. Analysts correlated variables against requisitions that closed on time versus those that aged beyond scheduled fill dates. The goal was to identify patterns that proactively indicated a requisition likely to age.

Sevenstep then designated difficult assignments as “specialty” reqs, as opposed to “standard” reqs. Specialty reqs received different treatment, including fewer reqs assigned to recruiters, the deployment of more skilled or senior recruiting resources and an optimized sourcing strategy.

As a result of the pilot, TA effectiveness immediately spiked for the client:

• Time-to-fill dropped by 18 days.
• Aging reqs fell by 34%.
• Overall hiring timeliness stayed on track.

Takeaways

Do Not Wait for Requisitions to Age: Technology and expertise are available to create accurate predictions of hiring difficulty. A capable partner and technology solution can aggregate and analyze data to anticipate difficulties when requisitions are opened.

Proactively Deploy Resources to Match Recruiting Needs: Expect an outsourced recruiting partner to have resources ready to address predicted hiring difficulty. Sevenstep’s deployment of specialty recruiters against challenging requisitions created a positive impact that is now standard practice for many clients in challenging markets.

Treat Predictive Recruiting as a Necessity: If your TA team or partners do not currently provide data-based predictive intelligence to inform your recruiting strategies, a roadmap to incorporate analytics into the process can help move the function forward. An expert partner will have the in-house expertise to guide and execute such a strategy.