The digital revolution has had a significant impact on just about every sector including talent acquisition. Today, employers and recruiters employ the use of applications and technologies to gather information on applicants, analyze it and make sound talent-related decisions.

Through these applications, recruiters are able to comfortably analyze big data even as talent analytics takes the center stage in supporting an effective talent management process. This is an exciting opportunity for data mining for recruiters as they can use it with multiple forward-looking firms. This is referred to as talent intelligence.

Talent intelligence refers to those technologies and applications that are used to gather, provide access as well as analyze information and data that is talent-related to help organizations in developing consistent talent-related decisions that are based on data.

There is need for staffing organizations to value and view their internal candidate/resume database as being a proprietary tool for business intelligence, where business intelligence is used in reference to the technologies and applications that gather, offer access to as well as analyze information and data to enable companies make business decisions based on data.

Among the talent intelligent solutions that are available on the market today include HRMS/HRIS solutions, Applicant Tracking Systemsand Recruiting CRM applications. These are also referred to as recruitment analytics solutions. These applications offer lofty claims with regard to their functionality and capabilities even though it is doubtful as to whether there are true talent intelligent solutions.

Important Aspects of Talent Intelligence Solutions

Although there are a number of aspects of the Talent Intelligence Solutions that sets them apart from the HRMS and ATS solutions, here are two crucial aspects of not only building but also utilizing a Talent Intelligence System:

Creating a Talent Warehouse

A talent warehouse refers to a database containing each potential hire that may be useful to the business. Talent warehouses are maintained and managed regularly to ensure that the details are fresh and up to date as new candidates are added and any changes in circumstances captured. Thus, it can be conveniently described as a breathing or living database. When managed well, a talent powerhouse is the most powerful tool that a recruiter can have.

A talent warehouse is not to be confused with talent mapping as though the latter is an equally valuable resource, it is more of a starting point rather than the result. On the other hand, a talent warehouse begins with a talent map.

Populating the Talent Warehouse

An ideal warehouse needs to be broad and deep. Although talent houses may vary in terms of size, a talent warehouse for a small organization that is situated in a single metro area should not have less than 20,000 candidate profiles/resumes. However, there is no limit to the maximum number of profiles or resumes that a talent warehouse can hold. In fact, it is not uncommon to find agency staffing organizations and large corporations holding up to several million candidate profiles/resumes within their repository. Even then, some may argue that the size of the warehouse matters.

In an ideal situation, a talent warehouse should be fed with new candidate profiles/resumes either manually or automatically from a wide range of sources such as referrals, internet, RSS feeds, blogs, LinkedIn, social media, career fairs, ad responses, internet search alerts, and job boards

Search Interface and Search Ability

Although having tons of human capital/talent data is great, it loses its value if you cannot extract precise, relevant and useful information from it for accurate and quick talent identification and acquisition. That is, the value of the database is not in the information that is found there but the ability to extract precisely what is needed by the user.

To be able to extract the precise talent data/ human capital that is required, recruiters undertake talent mining. Talent mining refers to the process of sorting through the huge human capital data that is synonymous with resume databases on social networking profiles, the internet and blog posts among other places while extracting information that is useful and relevant in relation to talent acquisition and identification. Talent mining may be performed automatically or manually.

Recruiters and sorcerers who use information systems undertake talent mining to enable them to extract information that matches what they are looking for. Overall, a talent warehouse should be significant when it comes to Human Capital Relationship Management (HCRM) applications in the same manner that a Customer relationship Management (CRM) application is to commercial business applications.

Generally, it is high time recruiting, staffing and HR managers who embrace technologies like business intelligence applications and data warehousing in order to improve their recruitment efforts, especially in terms of precision. The use of technology and applications simplifies the entire process by helping them in the analysis of the candidate profile/resume within a short period.

Author Bio: Kelly Barcelos is a progressive digital marketing manager specializing in HR and is responsible for leading Jobsoid’s content and social media team. When Kelly is not building campaigns, she is busy creating content and preparing PR topics. She started with Jobsoid as a social media strategist and eventually took over the entire digital marketing team with her innovative approach and technical expertise.