Author: employerbrandingadvantage

There’s a lovely story, courtesy of Tom Marsden from Saberr, doing the LinkedIn rounds of late. It references a US NBA basketball player, Shane Battier. As well as numerous awards, titles and US caps gained during the course of a notable career, Battier also received recognition as Team mate of the Year. This award relates the role he played within the team as data translator…

It’s hard to miss the explosion in the use of statistics within sport – the Moneyball film is a useful barometer. As a result, players across a number of sports are often given reams upon reams of data to consume on a weekly basis, detailing the previous encounter’s successes and failures, along with the performance of their next opponents.

(An example this side of the Atlantic? Much of the success of Eddie Jones’ England rugby team is ascribed to his improving the time it takes to get to their feet following a collision. The England coaching team made it clear to the players that because it takes them 0.4 seconds less time now to get up off their behinds, they are more readily in a position to contribute to both attacking and defending).

Back to Battier. His success was down not only to making sense of the data relevant to his own game – and extracting the actionable insights hiding in plain sight – but also taking the analytics relating to his own teammates and bringing this to life for them.

Whilst it’s fortuitous that his side, then Miami Heat, had Battier within their ranks, it’s safe to assume that he was something of an outlier within his chosen field. How much very similar data was given to other teams without the likes of a Battier to make sense of? And what amount of value did such data create or otherwise?

One of the emerging features of recruitment today is the growing prevalence of metrics and analytics. Happily, both employee and applicant tracking systems are producing more and more hard evidence, as employers construct solutions which seek to enhance the process by which an individual joins an organisation and the experience which aims to keep them there.

We live and operate as talent acquisition professionals in a world where the data is telling us something very clear about candidate availability.

The latest ONS figures suggest that the UK has 31,000 fewer people this quarter counted as not in work but available – and the figure for this time last year was 106,000 more. In 1997, there were just 1m non-UK nationals working in the country – today that figure is 3.48m, which makes some of Brexit’s worst case scenarios feel more than disconcerting, were such employees to decide that working in the UK is no longer for them. The talent pool available to UK employers is being drained.

Small wonder, then that Mercer’s recent 2017 Global Talent Trends report suggests that the time taken to fill critical roles has increased from 49 days to 81.

Finally, the same report quotes a hugely insightful finding from the Wall Street Journal. The average response figure for online job advertising is 219 applicants. And yet there remain 2m unfilled vacancies across Europe and an eye watering 5m across the US.

So is recruitment working?

(There’s a cheap gag in there somewhere that I’ll rise above).

Why is talent acquisition becoming harder, given the existence of such candidate audiences?

Has the needle swung too much in the direction of numbers and percentage points? Chatbots and algorithms? Does the candidate – and the employee – come across a process or an experience? What sort of impression do such candidates take away from such a process – one of personalisation or commoditisation?

Universum produced some interesting research late last month within its 2020 Talent Outlook. Amongst a number of gems were two stats which appeared to be in direct conflict.

According to the research, 81% of employer branding managers or directors felt that their organisation had an EVP in place. Perhaps slightly lower than we might have anticipated from such a population, but much, much higher than the 44% of CEOs, when asked the same question.

So comfortably less than half the CEOs asked about an EVP were aware their organisation possessed one – despite views to the contrary from their employer branding colleagues.

If an EVP hasn’t reached out to the CEO of that organisation, there’s little or no chance that it’s succeeded in engaging with external talent audiences.

So, whilst there’s is an obvious conclusion to draw, around analytics without insights (or a data translator) being meaningless, great technology without great people, being simply two dimensional, there’s something more important at play here.

Just as sports data scientists need to package the right metrics in the right way for their key audiences – the players themselves – so too do employer brand practitioners.

Human resources functions are now awash with data. The challenge, in order to release greater funding and investment for an employer brand and its predicating EVP, is to deliver analytics to key internal decision makers that make its case clearly, succinctly and compellingly.

Certainly the research I conducted last month in conjunction with Sam Monteath pointed to just such a conclusion. For 47% of UK talent leaders, the biggest challenge faced by their employer brand was the inability to release sufficient funding from the business. Similarly, when asked as to what represented the major blocker to their capacity to get the most out of their EVP, the most popular answer related to the employer brand being viewed as ‘an HR thing’.

Without meaningful metrics, metrics which point to the tangible contribution made to overall business objectives and strategy, it’s a major struggle to make a successful internal business case for the construction of an EVP.

Very simply, the data will exist within an organisation that, correctly extracted, should paint a compelling picture as to what a topical and relevant EVP can help deliver for the business.

The story of Miami Heat and Shane Battier is a tale of data failure, redeemed only by Battier’s ability to interpret the information – both exceptional and, within his team, an exception.

As employer brand professionals, we have to be cognisant of what the key metrics are to our organisation (and they will differ from employer to employer, sector to sector) and ensure that there is a case to be made as to an EVP’s contribution to such metrics.