Recruiting, Talent

What Is Talent Intelligence?

Have you heard the term “talent intelligence”? Talent intelligence, as the name implies, is the process of collecting, analyzing, and using information about your market’s talent pool, both at your organization and in competing organizations. This type of information helps a company better understand the available talent pool and make data-based decisions. Having good data on the talent marketplace can also help energize your recruiting efforts and help you be more effective in those efforts.

Here are some types of information that would be considered talent intelligence:

  • What roles are currently open at your competitors, and what level of education and experience are your competitors recruiting for in their open roles?  
  • What types of benefits would satisfy potential employees in this industry?
  • What pay range is being offered at your competitors?
  • What types of performance expectations are out there in the market?
  • What is the organizational culture at your competitors?
  • How long does it take others to fill vacancies?
  • Where do your employees work next when they resign and get another job?
  • Which recruiting channels are your competitors using?
  • What recruiting channels perform the best for each type of role in the industry? Which provide the highest number of applicants and the highest-quality applicants?
  • Why do people leave your organization? Why do people in this industry typically leave their roles?

Remember that when you’re thinking about competitors in this context, they are competitors for talent. This typically includes organizations that are competitors for customers but also may include a broad range of organizations that hire for similar roles in entirely different industries, meaning the competitors for talent could be a longer list than the competitors for customers.

How to Gather Talent Intelligence

Although these data are useful, they can be difficult to gather. Here are a few places to gather intelligence on the talent market:

  • Market research studies by third parties
  • Exit interviews from departing employees
  • Current candidates
  • Current employees
  • Industry forums
  • Competitor social media sites
  • Salary aggregate sites
  • Utilization of artificial intelligence (AI) to gather data via third-party software
  • Existing HR/customer relationship management (CRM) software, other recruiting software, or applicant tracking systems
  • Website analytics (to assess where people go on your website when looking for jobs)

Staying up to date on the talent marketplace can help organizations make better decisions in a timely manner. For example, understanding what the competition is doing can help you:

  • Be better-equipped to attract top talent by knowing competitors’ appropriate range of salary and benefits;
  • Better understand what others are doing that’s working so you can implement the best options, too;
  • Free up your HR team to focus on things that are more people-oriented and require in-person attention, like interviewing and other related items (which could be done by utilizing software and third parties to gather this type of information); and
  • Get the right candidates in the first place and thus reduce turnover.

What else has your organization done to improve talent intelligence? What has your experience been?

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