For one, there are more applicants now than ever due to the increasing accessibility of employment platforms on the internet. Moreover, testing for traits and skills via remote interviews is inherently harder than when done personally.
For these reasons, recruitment and HR metrics of various establishments worldwide, such as cost to hire, quality to hire, and time to fill, have gone rock bottom for the past few months.
But much like how recent developments have made recruitment more challenging, there are also some positive effects. For one, people now have access to workforce intelligence.
A Brief Overview Of Workforce Intelligence
Workforce intelligence is a system with several capabilities relating to human resource management. However, its primary function is to gather and analyze employee data, patterns, and behavior. With this technology, companies can create comprehensive data sets that may prove to be useful for HR-related tasks. For example, it can help you determine if your employees are engaged with their work or not, and in doing so, enable you to take appropriate measures.
Here's a closer look at the different types of data workforce intelligence can help you gather:
- Structured employee data. This may include an employee's nationality, gender, age, contract length, attendance, and other information that machines can easily read.
- Semi-structured employee data. This type of data mainly refers to the answers to survey results. They don’t follow a specific format but can still be analyzed objectively.
- Unstructured employee data. This includes more subjective data, such as an employee's loyalty and motivation. This, too, can be analyzed by workforce intelligence.
Unfortunately, while this technology is available as software-as-a-service (SaaS) products, experts suggest building a system yourself as those tend to be more personalized. However, you must remember that while it does have its advantages, creating workforce intelligence solutions from scratch is extremely challenging. So, why go through all the hassle?
1. Recruit Candidates Based On Potential
If you're like most employers, you probably prefer hiring candidates with prior experience.
Unfortunately, when you start your hunt for potential candidates, you'll often come across people who are fresh out of college or have no prior experience. So, what do you do then?
While most employers would simply reject this particular type of candidate, experience isn't the only aspect that matters. You must also consider the candidate's potential, but that's often difficult to measure. With workforce intelligence, however, you can analyze employee performance data, compare it with the candidates, and determine if they have potential.
For example, rather than looking for experienced candidates, you can instead check whether the candidate has personal traits that are proven to be extremely handy to your business, such as:
- Timeliness
- Attention to detail
- Innovation
- Time management
- Initiative
2. Shorten The Recruitment Cycle
The recruitment cycle has several stages, including:
- Preparations
- Sourcing
- Screening
- Selection
- Hiring
- Onboarding
Each of these stages takes several days to complete, which is why most recruitment cycles tend to last for around 40 days. During this time, it can be difficult to focus on other business operations such as marketing and sales. That's precisely why shortening the recruitment cycle is always an excellent plan, but of course, it's not going to be easy. Fortunately, it should be possible with the use of workforce intelligence which can help with various HR tasks.
3. Reduce Recruitment-Related Expenses
Recruitment cost refers to the total amount spent for each recruitment cycle. While it's not exactly a common occurrence, it takes up a considerable portion of a company's budget.
After all, you have to consider countless expenses, such as:
- Signing bonus
- Employee referral bonus
- Job listing fees
- Third-party recruiter fee
While it may not be possible to completely eliminate these expenses, it’s possible to minimize them, and one of the best ways to do so is by utilizing workforce intelligence to do the following:
- Automate menial recruitment tasks
- Reduce the number of job posts needed
- Avoid overestimating salaries for new hires
- Minimize the need for employee referrals
By reducing recruitment and HR-related expenses, you can allocate more of your budget to other business operations, which can go a long way in improving business performance in the long run.
4. Forecast Workforce Demand In The Near Future
Recruitment isn’t something executives do without any reason. Most of the time, companies start recruiting people whenever there's an ongoing demand for a workforce. This often occurs when several people have been laid off or resigned from their jobs in the company. It may also happen if the establishment's products and services are experiencing a considerable increase in demand.
Either way, it's common practice to keep track of the workforce to decrease the downtime caused by the lack of manpower. Fortunately, workforce intelligence can help in this regard as well.
This is because workforce intelligence can anticipate whether an employee is likely to retire. In doing so, you can determine the perfect time to start your recruitment efforts.
5. Determine The Most Efficient Recruitment Channels
Nowadays, attaching job posters on walls and boards is no longer your only option to find potential candidates. You can now recruit in other, more convenient ways, such as:
- Social media
- Online job boards
- Company/corporate website
- Employee referrals
- Email campaign
Although all of these are worth considering if you're looking for an efficient recruitment channel, there will always be a particular method that works best for your company. For the sake of saving time and possibly money, many establishments put effort into figuring out which of these channels serve them the best. If that's what you're after, you may want to use workforce intelligence.
Workforce intelligence allows you to gain insights on every recruitment channel and enable you to compare and analyze the metrics for each individual channel. This, in turn, should help you find out the most efficient recruitment channels for your company.
Wrapping Up
As powerful as it may be, you must remember that workforce intelligence is just one of the many technologies that you can use to improve your recruitment strategy. So, rather than relying solely on this solution for your HR efforts, it would be best if you use workforce intelligence on top of other valuable strategies. Only then can you make the most out of your recruitment efforts.