Kickstart Your Workforce Strategy with Talent Analytics

In today's rapidly changing business environment, companies need a robust workforce strategy. Talent analytics don’t just optimize strategies, they are a necessary ingredient for accurate data-informed planning. While talent analytics can revolutionize labor acquisition processes and broader workforce strategies, most HR teams still are not taking full advantage of the data available.

The simple reason is it’s hard work and frankly overwhelming. Gathering and processing the full scope of available data an organization might need can be difficult to navigate – however, there is a solution available to synergize multiple data sets.

Labor market data analytics platforms like Horsefly Analytics integrates vast amounts of data from various sources, providing workforce planners and senior talent acquisition teams with a clear, comprehensive view.

The Horsefly platform makes it easy to navigate complex datasets, offering actionable insights into supply and demand, compensation trends, and demographic factors. By simplifying the data analysis process, we help enable HR teams to develop precise, data-driven strategies that adapt to market changes, optimize their talent acquisition processes, and build a resilient, future-ready workforce.

Workforce planning begins with clarity around the business objectives – the organization's current and future workforce needs will be central to any strategy, so being clear-minded on where the organization wants to go is crucial.

Key components for an effective workforce strategy:

• Forecast future workforce needs based on business goals and industry trends.

• Define Objectives: Clearly outline business objectives and talent requirements.

• Collect & Analyze internal data, surveys and consult expert data sources. This is the often overwhelming component detailed further in the next section.

• Identify the steps utilizing the data to build rigorous workforce approaches to your business objectives.

• Full Scope Strategies some of which may include: recruitment, training, and talent development.

• Ongoing – Monitor and evaluate workforce metrics year-on-year.

Enhanced Workforce Planning and Management:

1. Skills Gap Identification

• • Internal data reveals existing skill sets within the organization, while external data shows market demand for those skills. This combined insight helps identify critical skills gaps and areas needing development or new hires.

2. Future-Proofing

• • Understanding emerging skills and job market trends through external data allows organizations to anticipate future talent needs and proactively train or acquire necessary skills, ensuring long-term competitiveness.

Improved Recruitment Strategies:

1. Targeted Recruitment

• • External data on talent availability, salary benchmarks, and geographical hotspots for specific skills can optimize recruitment strategies. Organizations can focus their efforts where the best talent resides and offer competitive compensation packages.

2. Diversity and Inclusion

• • Analytics from both internal and external data can identify diversity metrics and trends, helping organizations to target diverse talent pools and build a more inclusive workforce.

Operational Efficiency:

1. Integration with Existing Tools

• • Horsefly's API seamlessly integrates with existing workforce management tools, ensuring a smooth flow of data and reducing the need for manual data entry and analysis. This integration saves time and resources.

2. Actionable Insights

• • Combined data sources provide more actionable insights for HR and leadership teams. For example, pinpointing high turnover areas and aligning them with external labor market conditions can inform strategies to improve retention.

Strategic Decision Making:

1. Informed Budgeting

• • By understanding market compensation trends and internal salary structures, organizations can better allocate budgets for salaries, training, and development.

2. Location Strategy

• • Deciding where to establish new offices or remote work hubs becomes easier with clear insights on where specific skills are most concentrated and affordable.

It is prudent to add to this that embracing technology in this way will be a learning curve for many teams. However, committing to a data-driven mindset within talent and workforce planning departments is where the most successful organizations need to find themselves.

Using talent analytics as part of all planning processes establishes a repeatable practice that enhances long-term efficiency and provides ongoing clarity on successes and areas for improvement. Additionally, by adopting an evidence-based approach plans are more likely to be objective.

Measured outcomes and trend prediction allow for a much more proactive HR function and ensure ongoing performance management will be better tracked.

Hiring quality improves as identification of top talent is easier, even when hiring at scale. A recent report confirmed that 62% of talent teams find more high-quality talent through analytics-based sourcing than inbound applications.

Data should be embedded in every decision, interaction and process

Workforce strategies need to focus on many elements, least of which is staff retention. Research indicates that 63% of companies find retaining employees more challenging than hiring them. Currently, approximately 120,000 individuals resign daily in the US, so it's imperative to prioritize talent retention efforts. The Horsefly Analytics platform enables organizations to land on the best strategies to address this very costly challenge.

Some of the challenges workforce teams need to address and the solutions that can be found with Horsefly:

• Locations: Search across 60+ countries and 170,000 cities to identify talent pools by granular role and skills data.

• Compensation Levels: Horsefly's compensation data allows for compensation planning with up-to-the-minute salary data for both internal roles and external recruiting.

• Diversity: Identify ethnicity breakdowns for specific job roles and skill sets around the world.

• Historic Trend Analysis and Future Projections: Provides insight into the past present and future to support planning for the future.

Come and pick our brains to kick-start your journey to a superior data informed workforce strategy.

Sources: Horsefly Analytics, McKinsey Company.