A talent intelligence platform is an investment. Like many investments, its costs are felt immediately, while its benefits lie in the future. Consequently, not everyone on a company’s leadership team may be immediately comfortable with embracing a talent intelligence platform.
To demonstrate the value of investing in talent intelligence, it helps to identify the benefits of the technology in concrete ways. That way organization leaders and teams see how the new tools will streamline work, improve outcomes, and accelerate progress toward business goals.
Identifying the benefits of a Talent Intelligence Platform
Artificial intelligence is poised to change the world. A PwC study estimates that global GDP will increase by up to 14 percent by 2030 due to the adoption of AI. What’s changing on a global scale, however, can be difficult to pin down to a business or department scale.
When asked to invest in any new technology, the natural question from organizational leadership is: “What’s in this for us?” Thus, the natural first step is to identify the benefits of high quality talent intelligence.
Benefits of using artificial intelligence to improve skills-based hiring include:
- Accelerates and scales hiring.
- Reduces costs.
- Improves the candidate experience.
- Supports diversity, equity, and inclusion goals.
Outline how the new platform will provide these benefits, as the connection between the outcomes and new tools may not be immediately clear to everyone on the leadership team. Leaders want to see the impact of new investments, especially tools like artificial intelligence.
Here, examples and case studies can provide valuable context. For example, in describing various benefits of talent intelligence platforms, Venturebeat writer Louis Columbus uses virtual recruiting events as an illustration. During a virtual recruiting event, AI and machine learning “match candidates with available positions based on their skills and potential.”
This technology offers a step up from traditional keyword matching, which cannot adapt its approach based on either the candidate’s information or on patterns identified in past data. Keyword matching found only those candidates who happened to use the same keywords; AI-based virtual recruiting events can better understand concepts expressed in different ways by different candidates, matching those candidates’ skills to promising opportunities.
Talent intelligence can address other pain points as well.
“Speed and accuracy of information has become more important than ever for recruiters,” says Ruben Moreno, an executive recruiter at Blue Rock Search. A talent intelligence platform that taps into various sources of information can more quickly identify the skills and abilities that are relevant in the moment, as well as how a candidate’s application fits within this overall view.
Faster, more accurate results can in turn help hiring teams make the right offer to the right candidate before that candidate accepts work with a competing company.
Integrating Talent Intelligence with HR teams
Much of the excitement surrounding talent intelligence comes from its scale. By seeking patterns and making predictions based on an ever-growing collection of billions of data points, talent intelligence offers an unprecedented view of how workers learn, develop skills, and adapt to various job positions or changes throughout their careers.
Yet technology cannot implement the insights it produces in order to create a more skilled, resilient, and diverse workforce. To meet those goals, the technology must become part of the toolset used by leadership and staff in making workforce decisions.
Thus, talent intelligence has a deeply human aspect — one that leadership needs to understand in order to make sound decisions about talent intelligence platforms.
In a 2020 Deloitte study, 96 percent of CEOs counted DEI among their strategic priorities; 90 percent saw “talent recruitment, development, advancement, and retention as their top priority,” writes Brianna Rhodes at TPInsights.
The right talent intelligence can have a profound impact on meeting diversity, equity, and inclusion goals, which in turn have a profound impact on hiring. To have this impact, the technology needs to be integrated into organizational goals and daily practices.
Generating buy-in for a talent intelligence platform, then, requires more than a focus on the technology. Leaders do need to understand how the technology influences key goals. They also need to understand how humans interface with the platform, use its information to drive decision making, and in turn see their own careers affected by its insights.
To get buy-in for a talent intelligence platform, work on making its promises concrete for the leadership and human resources teams that will use the platform and its insights. Leaders who see the connection between the new tool and changed results are more likely to embrace the platform — and maximize its potential.
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