How Four Visier Customers Leveraged People Analytics for Better TA

Fierce competition for the best talent

Companies live or die by their people and talent acquisition is the gateway to having the best employees. Companies that want to find—and keep—the best talent need to get a clear picture of the workforce with serious data analysis. According to CNBC, the job market in late 2022 is still hot: U.S. job growth blew past expectations in the summer, recovering the 22 million jobs lost during the pandemic. Despite the constant talk of recession, competition for talent is fierce. Workers are still changing jobs — 4.2 million people quit in June — and many of them are getting big raises and interesting career opportunities. 

Smart companies use every resource at their disposal to acquire the best talent in the competitive marketplace. 

People analytics illuminates your talent acquisition journey

Talent acquisition doesn’t just begin with posting a job opening. AIHR suggests 21 different recruiting methods you should track, and this is after the work of assessing your current headcount, your forecasted headcount, and if you have the skills needed for anticipated growth. People analytics helps by offering more than a static snapshot of how things are currently. The right data analytics shows trends, forecasts likely scenarios, and allows for what-if modeling. 

Here are four companies that have successfully used people analytics to get ahead of the game.

Bureau Veritas takes the pulse of its pipeline

Bureau Veritas is a French company specialized in testing, inspection and certification. It operates in a variety of sectors, including building and infrastructure, agri-food and commodities, marine and offshore, industry, certification and consumer products. They use Visier to help oversee the entire talent acquisition process from beginning to end.

The first useful metric is the candidate funnel. Visier’s dashboards show teams how many candidates are at each stage in the process.  Bureau Veritas works in two-week sprints focused on a designated number of priority positions assigned points by clients. The points dictate how to prioritize sourcing and recruiting efforts. The leader of the TA team can look at the number of candidates in each stage of the process to keep a pulse of how things are going. It also lets the TA leader know who needs help and where to remove obstacles.

Watch for new hire terminations

A VP of Talent Acquisition and Retention at Bureau Veritas stressed the importance of looking at candidates who leave within the first six months of hire. “I’m amazed at the number of TA teams that focus solely on recruiting metrics and not on what happens after the candidate joins the company. There’s a lot of noise in this metric so it requires data mining to ensure you have quality answers, but it’s invaluable.” He focused specifically on the terminations where the candidate determined the company was not a fit for them. “Let’s imagine your involuntary terminations in your sales organization starts to spike. You might want to meet with the sales leaders to understand where your team is missing the mark. It could be that the industry changed so candidates who were once great targets will no longer succeed in your new environment. This data can help you spend more time recruiting the right talent.”

Discover the most effective candidate sources

Using people analytics has led to faster and more efficient hiring. One way is by analyzing where hires are spruced from. If many of your hires come from internal referrals or other sourcing methods, it might not make sense to spend thousands of dollars on job boards. 

This analysis will not only help you decrease the time a job stays open, but also help you reallocate money spent on useless candidate sources to more effective ones. This kind of analysis also leads to more quality hires. Analyzing successful employees can help recruiters zero in on rockstar candidates versus someone who will just do the job. 

Anglo American hires smarter

Anglo American is a British listed multinational mining company with headquarters in London, England. They are the world’s largest producer of platinum, producing around 40% of the world’s output, as well as diamonds, copper, nickel, iron ore and metallurgical and thermal coal. In addition, they are very good at talent acquisition. Anglo American was named the winner of Visier’s “2022 Hire Smarter” award.

Having used Visier for more than five years, Anglo American is no stranger to a data-driven culture. Francesco Turchetti is Anglo American’s Group Head Talent, Learning & HR Systems and the champion for this people analytics initiative. Francesco, who had experience with the Visier solution at a previous organization, was responsible for putting together a team to lead the implementation. Anglo American chose Visier to support improved decision-making about workforce availability and costs, serve as a mechanism to progress the organization towards a more data-driven culture, and provide a single unified platform that enables effective data analysis.

Visibility helps Anglo American meet goals

Anglo American has an excellent view of its workforce, enabling them to establish realistic goals and meet these goals using analytics practices. For example, Anglo American used Visier to create content for more than 40 different measures throughout the recruitment lifecycle process. These metrics go beyond initial selection and include evaluating quality and diversity of hires and bias in the pipeline. Visier has saved Anglo American hundreds of hours of work and helped focus on the qualitative aspects of recruitment so the business can recruit more effectively. Today, Visier People™: Talent Acquisition is the most heavily used content in the organization.

Providence: Experts in people analytics

Providence is a not-for-profit health care system operating in seven states which serves as the parent organization for 100,000 caregivers. One of their assets is Gary Russo, Executive Director of HR Workforce Intelligence, who has become an industry-recognized expert in using people analytics to help organizations optimize their workforce strategy.

Gary believes putting people in the right position is an example of putting the “human” in “human resources.” He told the story of his first job in HR when a prospective job applicant, when asked to put his mouse on the start icon, lifted the mouse and put it against the screen. “This stuck with me because the reality is he would be a perfect fit for a job we needed. It didn’t matter that he didn’t know how to use a computer. That was our job: to make it easier for him to get past our hurdles.” 

Gary gathered feedback about data challenges from leaders of various HR divisions (such as Talent Acquisition and Total Rewards) and other business functions (Finance, Legal, Nursing/Operations) and created early excitement by demonstrating how Visier would help them specifically. The collaboration between HR and Finance created a critical, unified voice in support of the value Visier provides. Finance, as well as other business stakeholders engaged throughout the process, became advocates on HR’s behalf. Now each of the different departments is better positioned to fully utilize Visier to achieve their goals, such as talent acquisition goals.

Bird’s eye view of the cost of vacancy

Providence uses Visier to connect all forms of lost labor including turnover, leaves of absence, injuries, into a single story about the cost of work not performed. The goal is to put dollars behind initiatives to speed up replacement processes and make staffing plans more resilient. People data is critical to defining the total cost of labor and will be paired closely with revenue and talent acquisition data.

NCI hires the right people at the right time

NCI is a leading provider of enterprise solutions and artificial intelligence services to U.S. defense, intelligence, health, and civilian government agencies. The company uses Visier to keep track of the effectiveness of their workforce, including hiring practices. By analyzing the data using each hiring manager’s time-to-hire rates, they discovered that hiring managers who had an efficient and transparent process were more successful in hiring candidates than hiring managers with a cumbersome process. 

Additionally, the HR team found that new hire retention directly correlated with the candidate experience. New hires who had undergone the better hiring process had a higher chance of staying with the company after six months. After discovering this, NCI implemented a standardized hiring process so every candidate would have the same quality and transparency in their hiring experience. 

Shorter ‘days-to-fill’

NCI is a government contractor with multiple long-term, multiyear contracts and days-to-fill is an important metric in this space—it translates to lost revenue the longer a position remains open. Before implementing Visier, it was hard to get an agreed-upon number. With the accurate data Visier’s out-of-the-box analysis, reports and dashboards provide, NCI can focus on the problem and not the definition. If a metric like days-to-fill is unexpectedly long, they can dig into whether it’s taking longer to fulfill the requisition because of a unique skillset or another reason such as a compensation issue. 

Because the team can demonstrate the total time with data, meetings are no longer a finger-pointing exercise. Instead of managers saying, ‘recruiting is not getting me enough candidates,’ the people analytics team can show them the data that shows, for example, a lengthy interview process resulted in candidate attrition. It’s now a collaborative conversation where HR and the business can dig in together to see where help is needed in the process.

People analytics leads to better talent outcomes

Mature HR executives turn to expertise from organizations like Visier to build out analytics technologies and capabilities to not only hire smarter, but achieve other business goals. The workforce represents the biggest expense for the majority of enterprises. Not only is the workforce the costliest requirement of doing business, it is also the most important. In an IDC survey of HR executives, over 75% of respondents indicated that HR analytics was their most important HR technology initiative. But in some cases, HR has struggled to develop regular, ongoing reporting on HR metrics. 

HR benefits from having the right expertise and a business partner that understands how to take data and create meaningful and actionable information.  As with every business decision, having the best talent acquisition strategy relies on having people analytics insights at every step of the journey.