There’s been a lot of talk among HR technology vendors when it comes to the phrase ‘talent intelligence‘. Many platforms now incorporate that term as part of their feature set but what does it actually mean? Especially to the average Human Resources person who might be using it.
A recent thread on LinkedIn suggest the following as a definition;
“Talent Intelligence is the application of external data relating to people, skills, jobs, functions, competitors, and geographies to drive business decisions.”
But in a poll on that same thread there’s a slightly broader phrase that people seemed to gravitate towards;
“Talent Intelligence is the augmentation of internal and external people data with the application of technology, science, insights and intelligence relating to people, skills, jobs, functions, competitors, and geographies to drive business decisions.”
I think the phrase mainly evolves from the growing field of people analytics. Former ERE editor Todd Raphael said this recently about TI…”I think people analytics generally show what happened. For example diversity analytics showing where people dropped off at each part of the hiring process and where it was worse under which manager.
On the other hand talent intelligence would be forward thinking forecasts. The middle school teacher could make a great product trainer. The restaurant general manager can make a great customer service department leader or logistics manager or something else. Forecasting to make decisions for the future.”
In their rush to differentiate themselves a few vendors started redefining the term and now it’s being used more and more by others in the space. A growing number of player now identify their products as talent intelligence tools. Here’s a look at some of those tools who promise to deliver data about talent;
- retrain.ai – claims to be the first AI platform that breaks the data silos in your organization and synthesizes internal data with thousands of external data sources. By connecting three robust datasets about people, jobs and training programs, we generate useful, validated, unbiased and actionable workforce intelligence.
- Censia – The Censia Talent Intelligence Platform applies AI and machine learning to talent data enabling Talent Acquisition and HR professionals with continuous, extensive and actionable insights delivered as a headless solution via API.
- ENGAGE Talent – a talent intelligence platform that uses artificial intelligence to score the employment volatility within a company, in order to address retention, recruitment, and skill supply and demand gaps.
- LinkedIn – the use of data and insights to make people your competitive advantage. Includes data about skillsets, talent demand and supply.
It’s clear that today’s employers need to stay up to date on what’s happening inside and outside their own talent datasets. Doing so allows you to make better decisions and forecasting future hiring needs. Understanding this data will help you;
- Keep your salary and benefits on par with competitors to attract top talent.
- Keep your recruiting and HR teams focused on the bigger picture like the candidate experience.
- Getting and keeping the right candidates to help reduce turnover and increase retention.
- Spot problem talent areas before they arise.
However it is defined the talent intelligence sector is only going to grow in importance as HR becomes more data oriented.
Michelle Saunders a global recruiting executive says talent intelligence should be viewed holistically—internal and external, just as the full talent life-cycle. “In order to drive informed decisions we need to leverage external benchmarking, business use case, skills/adjacent skills, competencies, capability building etc..It is also the reason why a company’s most potent indicator for retention is their competition.”
