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Entrepreneurs Can Leverage People Analytics to Make Smart Hires

People Analytics augments helps you attract and retain talent while making the existing ones more efficient.


The team with the best players wins. Therefore, it is critical for an entrepreneur to build a strong team that can steer a startup towards success. But finding the right people for your business can be as challenging as setting up the business itself in the first place. And we all know that playing solo is never a good idea.

Nearly 60% of businesses fail due to a badly constituted team and not having the right team to back your project could cost you more than your Capex (i.e., capital expenditure). In fact, the most important priority after receiving funding is scaling the company with fresh new hires, to accelerate business growth.

While hiring an early team requires quite a lot of hard work and learning, sometimes even mistakes, doing it the right way is critical. Especially at a time when candidates are spoilt for choice, when other companies are exciting brands, offering a lot of perks, employee benefits, and higher salaries.

If you run an early-stage startup, the odds are stacked against you. Would you require a generalist or go for a specialist on board? will you hire independent freelancers or someone who has the potential to help you generate greater revenues? Now, be it a freelancer or an on-demand team, the prime motive should be to have smart hires in the team. From HR managers to data engineers, and in-house marketing teams, a startup needs it all when it comes time to scale up.

Today, startups do not shy away from leveraging technology to stay in the game. And the answers to these questions lie in the very technologies leveraged for a range of business operations.

“Data is the new natural resource for the connected world.”

Data is the new natural resource for the connected world. Entrepreneurs are very particular when it comes to harnessing the data by analyzing it and gaining critical business insights. Imagine what similar analytics can do to your talent acquisition and retention.

 

People Analytics explained

Introducing analytics to your people strategy, according to McKinsey, is crucial to driving lasting and effective change, be it hiring, retention, or configuring a team. People Analytics has been there as a concept where we used to map our progress earlier on how we hired talent and where we deployed them, not to forget the siloed performance metrics.

However, true business success is achieved not just by determining how talent has performed, but also by counterintuitive insights about critical factors driving talent’s capabilities, efficiency, and productivity. In today’s world, where competition is at its peak and talents are leaving organizations at breakneck speeds, also a post-pandemic effect known globally as The Great Resignation.

So, it becomes vital to optimize people analytics across various phases of a hiring process to get quality hires in the minimum time frame.

Here is a broad look at what People Analytics does:

  1. It improves the hiring process by easing the manual processes and minimizing human errors, thereby reducing the time to acquire talent
  2. It helps increase the quality of hires by diminishing subconscious bias at an early stage in the hiring process
  3. When equated with key business outcomes such as increased sales or profits, it helps figure out what kind of talent is best for the teams

If you are an entrepreneur looking at building a kickass team then here’s how you can use people analytics to make smart hiring decisions that can benefit your startup in years to come.

 

Pre-hiring candidates

By analyzing a potential candidate’s qualifications pre-hiring, shortlisting becomes easier and you do not have to rely solely on your instincts. Moreover, startups are known to have a culture of their own. People Analytics can help gauge if somebody qualified is the right fit for the existing culture or not, because if it’s a misfit, qualifications wouldn’t matter in the long run as they would be uncomfortable and eager to move out of the organization quite early.

 

Hiring employees

More than 60% of business leaders say that talent sourcing is one of their top priorities. With People Analytics, talent acquisition can be improved drastically by identifying key qualities of a potential hire that fits the business requirements and analyzing various talent pools to attract the most relevant candidates.

Analytics further unearths information as to where the recruiter should optimize while going for recruitment activities and also determine the effectiveness of recruitment by analyzing pre and post-hiring performance and tailored assessments.

 

Retaining talent

Talent retention is one of the biggest challenges for startups, especially if they are in technology. Given the high attrition rates and irresistible pay packages, often a position is vacant sooner than expected. Here analytics can help in determining the reasons for losing a top performer and predict which category of talents will tend to stay or which kind of work environment annoys them.

By fostering data-driven decision-making, entrepreneurs can identify hiring sources for the best candidates and decrease the cost per hire. Before jumping right at it, you should keep in mind certain best practices such as choosing the right hiring metrics such as time to hire, cost per hire, key sources, pre- and post-hire experiences, etc. Next, put all the data into perspective as numbers tend to be right at times when human instincts aren’t, so put the data to work. Do not hesitate to experiment with various tools.

 

As an entrepreneur, it is always advisable to approach the right pool of talent. The inline talent community is relevant in such a scenario where you can find professionals whose attributes match those of your company. People Analytics augments your competence with data-driven technology and helps you attract and retain talent while making the existing ones more efficient.

 

Eileen Chan is Commercial Director at Hire Digital, which helps enterprises and high-growth startups build and enhance their digital capabilities with a world-class network of digital marketers, developers, and designers. Clients including Expedia, Shopify, and Philips have access to high-performing talents on demand.

 

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