HR Challenges and Prospects of Data-Driven Strategy

Optimizing the recruitment process

By adopting a data-driven approach, HR services use specific data to improve their recruitment campaign:

• Make recruitment more objective by considering specialized skills (degrees, professional experience, spelling, computer skills…) as well as soft skills (initiative, team spirit, autonomy…). Objectivity beats subjectivity and instinct.
• Promote collaborative recruiting by asking teams and managers to fill out selection criteria grids.
• Save time by automating the candidate screening process. The idea is to allow recruiters to do more profitable tasks and avoid missing pertinent elements in the large number of resumes they may receive.

Data can also help improve candidate screening:

• Simplify the search for candidates and interact with pertinent profiles on professional social media such as LinkedIn.
• Respond to candidates who apply using personalized messages.
• Send targeted company updates to the candidates who were not selected.

The goal is to discover interesting profiles, sustain a long-term talent pool and enhance the company’s brand image.

Finally, by adopting a data-driven strategy, HR services allow a company to better manage its cost and optimize its investments during a recruitment campaign. The idea is to learn more about candidates’ behaviour. Which sites attract the most qualified talent? Which sites generate the most applications?

Facilitating employee integration

It’s been proven that the onboarding phase determines whether an employee will learn the company’s workings and prospects, understand the manager’s expectations, meet other workers, adopt the company’s culture and values, help new employees feel confident in their workplace, etc.

An unsuccessful onboarding process can have serious consequences: besides experiencing financial loss, the company will need to start another recruitment process. The numbers are clear – 1 out of 3[1] executives has quit following a poor onboarding experience. Likewise, 65%1 of executives have left a company in the 6 months following their arrival.

How can data improve the onboarding experience?

• Offer a digital and targeted experience.
• As employees’ integration moves forward, present personalized messages that fit their profiles.
• Identify new employees’ specific needs and suggest appropriate solutions (technical training, etc.).

Having experienced proper mentoring and a smooth integration, new employees will likely thrive in the workplace, whereas companies will ensure that the recruitment process was a success.

Improving the employee experience

It is currently crucial to retain workers by offering them a satisfying employee experience! Between reducing staff turnover and absenteeism rates, conveying a positive brand image, attracting new talent and improving workers’ productivity, the benefits are undeniable.

A data-driven strategy can help offer a better employee experience. By collecting and analyzing data through surveys and/or polls, HR services can get precious information that will allow them to improve employees’ well-being in the short or medium term:

• Learn more about a company’s employees by identifying their theoretical knowledge and technical skills.
• Offer targeted training that fits both the employee’s expectations and the company’s needs.
• Redefine the company’s compensation policy: adjust salaries in real time based on labour market tightness.
• Reduce or eliminate disengagement by adopting a retention strategy.

Aiding talent management

In the digital era, talent is increasingly flexible, mobile and able to self-educate.

How does a data-driven approach help to improve talent management and retain the profiles that a company needs?

• Closely monitor each employee’s skill improvement.
• Find the right profiles for new positions within the company’s internal talent pool.
• Suggest new missions, promote internal mobility, provide career guidance, etc.

Recruit, integrate, retain, encourage – collecting and analyzing pertinent data allows HR services to better meet collaborators’ expectations and therefore boost a company’s productivity.

[1] Cadremploi study on onboarding – 2019