Last week, Madeline Laurano and I had the pleasure of joining HireVue for its first annual Digital Disruption event in beautiful Park City, Utah. It was a great event for many reasons: mountain views, great content, good networking. But what made Digital Disruption particularly enjoyable for me was the conference attendees. In fact, I spent much of the week talking with Hirevue clients. The attendee list included many forward-thinking talent acquisition professionals who were excited to compare notes on how they’re attracting and engaging talent.
Some wanted to talk about what social talent acquisition looks like at their organizations; others wanted to talk about key practices in employer brand management. Regardless of topic, however, each conversation kept coming back to the same challenge: business impact.
Business impact has been top of mind for me lately. A number of our clients from the solution provider community have been requesting research on the business impact of talent acquisition so they can validate the value proposition in product marketing. Many of my friends in the practitioner community – including newly made friends from last week – are asking about key practices in measuring and demonstrating business impact so they can garner greater leadership buy-in for more strategic talent acquisition.
The interesting thing about impact is that it means something different for every organization. Many include the basic efficiency metrics like cost per hire, time to hire, and the like. But as you begin evaluating the impact of social, mobile, and video on candidate experience, and then evaluating the impact of candidate experience on employer brand, and then the impact of employer brand on quality of hire… evaluating impact can get pretty complicated.
Many HireVue clients are still focused on measuring and demonstrating basic impact models, especially around time and cost savings directly resulting from the use of on-demand video interviews. But as HireVue expands its product offerings beyond just video interviewing, and begins dabbling in talent analytics and behavioral assessments, the more advanced clients want to quantify the value of these new tools and technologies.
As I see it, the most attractive use case for analytics and reporting in talent acquisition isn’t predicting talent needs or spotting gaps in succession planning. Rather, it’s the basic ability to demonstrate the actual value of contribution by a talent acquisition team, to track the outcomes of recruitment marketing efforts, or correlate improvements to onboarding with improvements in new hire retention.
Of course, this same data can be used when creating a business case for investments in social sourcing tools or employee referral platforms – and that’s why solution providers are looking for research on this topic.
I’ve got a couple of reports due out later this summer on business impact (one on onboarding and another on employer branding). The nerd in me is excited to dig into the data and build models for measurement. The writer in me is excited to gather stories from organizations that are ahead of the curve – both in establishing key practices in some advanced elements of talent acquisition and embracing cutting edge technology.
As I begin researching these topics, I’d love to hear what business impact of talent acquisition means for your company. According to Brandon Hall Group’s 2014 Talent Acquisition Benchmark Survey, hiring better talent is the top priority for the majority of you. How are you accomplishing this? How are you measuring your efforts? How are you demonstrating impact?
Shoot me a message if you’d like to share your story. Otherwise, stay tuned!
–Kyle Lagunas, Talent Acquisition Analyst, Brandon Hall Group
@KyleLagunas
