When it comes to workforce planning, HR and procurement typically take different approaches. The disconnect between HR and procurement can also create a disconnect in the way that talent needed is found, hired, and retained, and the competition for finding top talent is tougher than ever before. In order to understand your ideal workforce, companies must consider integrating innovative HR technology, workforce analytics, and talent analytics to unleash your ideal workforce.

While silos take different approaches to workforce planning, talent analytics are a critical piece to the planning puzzle. Talent analytics will bring HR and procurement together, where both silos will effectively manage the process for understanding your company’s ideal workforce blend, and then finding the best talent. The idea behind talent analytics is to help organizations reach the goal of hiring new talent as quickly, efficiently, and cost effectively as possible.

Before we discuss how talent analytics can help futureproof your workforce strategy, we’ll give a brief overview of what talent analytics is and how it can help drive your business:

What are Talent Analytics?

“People Analytics is using digital methods to develop a deep understanding of how people and organizations relate to business performance to drive effective, informed and fast decision-making,” Dirk Jonker – co-founder, Crunchr

By definition, talent analytics is the process of mining data and business analytics to HR — which can be an effective approach for workforce planning. It helps businesses make sure that they’re hiring candidates for the correct skills while achieving optimal ROI.

One of the problems with data mining for new hires is that there is simply too much data. Not only is there too much data, but often times the data is stored in numerous locations — making the use of analytics more confusing and complex. Talent analytics can help reduce the feeling of information overload while collecting all of the data in a way that is convenient and easy to consume.

Taking A Practical Approach to Talent Analytics

It’s important for organizations to take a practical approach when it comes time to processing analytics. Although collecting data is relatively simple, it requires a new mindset in order to view the data in a practical manner.

There are four key components to taking a practical approach to talent analytics. These approaches include:

• Recognizing the need for context from your data: This means that your organization needs to think beyond numbers and understand what the analytics truly means, such as uncovering specific skills. While initially, your talent analytics or workforce analytics will reveal a slew of numbers, there is simply no context behind them without additional information. HR technology can help organizations see the grand scope of their data in the simplest sense possible.
• Asking “why” questions that goes beyond the data: When silos become overwhelmed with data, it’s important to take a step back and ask yourself practical questions—especially questions in the format of “why.” Asking these questions can help you gain deeper insight into your data, which helps it become useful rather than intimidating.
• Basing your decision making on talent analytics: Unfortunately, 60 percent of organizations can’t or don’t know how to take data and use it to make decisions. This is the area where strategy takes the stage, and HR and procurement need to unify in order to create an efficient workforce planning system. Furthermore, talent analytics data will help your company make predictive decisions, which will help future proof your workflow strategy.
• Using tools to gain extra insight: This is where top HR technology comes into effect for talent analytics. The right HR technology can pull data from multiple sources and make your talent analytics more insightful. 

Taking Talent Analytics and HR Technology to the Next Level

Randstad Holding heavily invests in today’s top HR technology to embrace social media, mobile, analytics, and cloud technologies for talent acquisition. Our Randstad Innovation Fund complements early-stage and expansion-stage companies, and helps to bring fresh perspective to HR challenges. Not only do we focus on talent analytics, but we also aim to bring the best technology for social sourcing, online platforms, and big data analysis to minority investments.