With evolving technology, a constantly changing environment, and an increasingly flexible workforce, recruiters and hiring managers must embrace the intelligent use of data to find talent. Traditionally, recruiters would use boolean searches based on keywords and terms for a specific job role, but unfortunately this method does not provide enough information to understand the changing dynamics of the workforce.

In this blog we will provide an example of how you can use workforce analytics to find talent in five steps: 1) Identify your must have requirements, 2) Gather information to optimize the search criteria using population insights, 3) Narrow or expand your search with filters, 4) Identify different groups within your population of candidates, and 5) Recruit!

In this example you are looking for a financial analyst with experience in business analytics, Essbase, financial analysis, and pivot tables in excel. You want them to have a masters in Finance, 10 years of experience, and experience in large companies.

Step 1: Identify your must have requirements

Ignore the obvious skills, job titles, or nice-to haves. Identify the criteria that your candidates must have and would otherwise disqualify them. Also, avoid adding obvious requirements to your search , such as certain educational levels, degrees, or skills. Why? Many people don’t have fully completed online education profiles, they don’t list obvious skills that naturally come with the job they do, and note that most people work in fields extremely unrelated to what they studied in their college years.

In this example let's search for the absolute must have skills and look at the supply of US candidates. How many people have both Business analytics and Essbase listed as skills? What do we know about them?

Step 2: Gather information to optimize the search criteria using population insights

Independently, there are 50,152 people with Business Analytics as a skill and 43,880 with Essbase, but there are only 735 people with those two skills combined.

After analyzing the relevant skills, you can modify the search to expand the population to a larger segment of qualified candidates.

Step 3: Narrow or expand your search with filters

Based on the insights above we identify the job titles and education of people with the skills we need have a high correlation. However, the combination of the two main skills generates a very limited population. We can adjust our skills requirements to include the most relevant skill for this population, which demonstrates knowledge and experience in the areas we need. Our new modified search generates a similar expanded population.

Step 4: Identify different groups within your population of candidates

With the new expanded population, you can use demographic, geographic, and skill relevancy filters to build and save your perfect candidate pool. You can build a project with a multitude of saved candidates with similar attributes so you can personalize your messaging based on specific perona types (gender, age, experience, etc).

Step 5: Go Recruit!

Finally, get insights on each of your candidates regarding their work history, education, demographics, certifications and skills. Get validated contact information for candidates and download an entire dataset with rich attributes you can upload into your CRM or ATS to contact your top candidates.

"It is better to interview 50 people and not hire anyone than hire the wrong person."