In the talent acquisition, precious time is spent in evaluating prospects and making selection. There is a lot of information on skills of prospects that is collected but then it is neither aggregated well nor processed well for future use.

• Selecting candidates for a position involves screening, evaluating of candidates through several rounds of tests and evaluation
• This generates lot of vital information on candidates skills and also market information
• But they are not put to use effectively

In the last two posts on improving talent acquisition we looked at how we can simplify the job description creation phase and the applications phase with Skills Profiling. Now, we look at the process involved after the applications are received for a job.

The recruiters receive several resumes for a position to be filled. And there are likely to be several recruiters involved in this stage, including the external and internal ones. They screen the resumes and shortlist those that will be useful for the next stage i.e. interviews or assessments. This stage itself has potential for gathering lots of vital data on the market. What skills are hot, what skills are scare, what combinations of skills are more prevalent, what combinations of skills are less prevalent, what is the cost of the skills, what locations are likely to fetch certain skills vis a vis other locations and so on. This information put together is a wealth which can be put to significant use.

For instance if we know that in one particular location supply of certain skills are high, then it may worth doing a more aggressive campaign for hiring those skills in that location. If we know that a combination of skills is less available but certain other combination is more available, maybe a strategic decision to better use the latter is possible. For instance a company may be looking for Business Analyst in Insurance domain. But if we find that BA in Insurance are less in supply but BA in Banking is more available, maybe the company can take a decision to hire BA in Banking and train them on the Insurance domain. This may save precious time and money for the company.

Once the resumes are shortlisted for assessment or interviews, the candidates are being evaluated on several skills by several people/interviewers. How much information is collected judiciously from these interviews. Yes, the mature organizations have stringent processes. But even here there are limitations in the use of the information that is collected at the interview time.

Most often the Interview Evaluation form is a formal necessity with the recruiter being interested in the final decision i.e. whether the candidate is cleared for the next round or is “rejected”. Once the interview forms are submitted, rarely will they be revisited. And the interview form itself is less useful in its current textual manner. We discussed how the Job Descriptions and Resumes can be replaced effectively with Skills Profile. So also can the Interview Evaluation forms. We can have the evaluation on skills scored for the proficiencies in a web form that is tab and mobile enabled so that at the end of the interview the interviewers then rate the interviewed candidate’s skills.

In any E-Commerce site in order to make a purchase, say of a TV, we have the option of comparing sever brands with ratings on different attributes. It helps us compare different products on the various attributes, some maybe critical or a must for us, which some may not be so critical. Some products maybe good in some while not in others. It helps us also make trade off based on costs.

Why not we take this and replicate this in talent acquisition? Have one single place where we have all the candidates and their scores on different skills evaluated at different stages by different interviewers. We slice and dice this information and take the most appropriate decision. This can be a very powerful mechanism for taking skills related information.

And storing the skills information of all the applicants can be a greater enabler for future requirements. Querying, retrieval and analysis will be far more effective. It is impossible to do this with documents, most of them textual and that so many of them.

Enormous amount of time and money is spent in the screening, evaluation and selection phase of the talent acquisition process. Simplification in information gathering process in this stage can improve the yield for the efforts and time and improve decision making.

Related: Talent Development with better skill profiling

Analytics in Talent Acquisition – the attributes challenges