Hey, Talent Acquisition leaders: You need a data wonk.

I speak with lots of Talent Acquisition (TA) leaders, and the most common theme that consistently comes up with the challenges around the improvements they are trying to make in their organization, you can tie back to a lack of understanding how gain actionable insights with data. This relates to one or many of the following:

• Justification to increase TA headcount investments.
• Buy-in to make the necessary technology investments.
• Change bad behavior, be it in their own function or influencing the business to change.
• Support for strategic program initiatives.
• Showing the value, that TA brings directly correlated to business strategy and outcomes.

I am going to give you my opinion and observations on why it might be time to have a dedicated person focus on arming you and your team with actionable and insightful data to enable that change you’re looking for.

To be clear, I am not talking about hiring a person to run reports out of your ATS/CRM or any other technology platform. I am talking about taking your function to the next level by leveraging the power of the data under your own nose, but most importantly, commit to make the necessary investment to make this a reality.

Clearly there is an appetite from leaders to leverage data as you will see from the LinkedIn 2018 Recruiting trends report, but where I still see the disconnect, is while people are interested in doing more with data, the reality is the majority of recruiting functions are still struggling with the basics.

In my experience there are lots of reasons why leaders struggle with making sense or trusting their own data, but I believe that one of the major roadblocks to change and success, is few leaders want to invest the time and resources to make the change a reality. I believe part of the reason is people still think data is just about pulling reports out of your ATS, so really anyone (even part time) can do this simple task.

Let me give you some practical context about what I mean by hiring a ‘data wonk’ vs the approach you might be taking today of having someone (recruiter, HRTech person or yourself) as part of their job create reports for you.

Traditional Reports Person

• ‘Reports the news’, or basically provides you reports on the basics: Hires per month; Req loads per recruiter; Time to Fill; Source of Hire; etc.
• ‘Rear View Mirror’ metric reporting that just looks at what has happened (last month).
• Reacts to ad-hoc requests to go pull data from your ATS.
• Never questions the integrity of the data in the ATS/CRM in the first place on what they could be providing in their reports is not actually a reflection of the truth.
• Creates flat file reports (large excels files with multiple tabs).
• Never looks at external market or benchmark data.
• Never lift their head up to spend time researching, networking or understanding what other advanced Talent Analytics functions are doing.
• Challenges little in the data. Not that curious.

TA ‘Data Wonk’ Person

• ‘Creates the news’. They are constantly looking for insights of under/over performance in the data sets. They are not satisfied with just baseline monthly reports.
• ‘Forward looking’ (Even Predictive) metrics that help you forecast and help you take proactive action on opportunities.
• Proactively sends through insights that are actionable and help you tell the story for change and improvements.
• Continually inspects the integrity of the data in your ATS/CRM and provide recommendations on areas of challenge/improvement.
• Creates one-page scorecards that visually tell the stories quickly. Engages with leadership on the different ways to help visually tell the data stories.
• Continually looks at external data to help validate the existing strategy or enable supportive change of that strategy.
• Constantly researching, evaluating and networking with other smart ‘Data Wonk’s’ about advancements in the function.
• Challenges the validity of the data. Has more curiosity than the cat that got killed (in a professional good way of course).

Based off lessons learned, I would not blink twice about hiring a fulltime person solely focused on achieving the outcomes in my example above. The benefits and results outweigh the headcount investment multiple fold IMHO.

Don’t just take my word for it, look online and what you will find by many as a progressive Talent Acquisition functions is built on a solid bedrock of actionable insights from data. Here are few examples:

3 Ways Johnson & Johnson Is Taking Talent Acquisition to the Next Level

HROS# Case studies

For those of you that know my traditional writing style, where possible, I try and give some tangible examples vs hypothesizing of the subject at hand. Here is a deck (Talent Analytics: Maximizing the TA value) I presented to Talent Acquisition leaders late last year where I include examples of going beyond just traditional recruiting metrics and how to look for the insights that enable change.

If you are one of those people that is trying to take your function to the next level, it’s time to make that investment.