Why Benchmarking is King

I want to tell you about a secret weapon that will boost your talent acquisition process. It’s a weapon so elusive that only a few companies are unleashing it to ramp up their talent acquisition strategy and win over the best candidates. According to a recent AGS survey of HR professionals, over 75% are not using this weapon at all.

The name of this mysterious ammunition? Data analytics.

The fact is that HR people the world over have access to tonnes of data on their successes and failures, what their competitors are up to and how their social media is connecting with their audience. But they don’t always have the tools to capture this data or specialist analysts who know how to use that data to improve performance.

In today’s highly competitive environment, you want to secure the talent and skills you need quickly. That’s why you need a laser-focused approach to target your candidates and take them through a fulfilling recruitment process that will pay off.

Data helps your HR function operate at the top of their game by improving the process until it becomes a well-oiled talent-attracting machine. When you combine data with benchmarking, it will become a critical part of your armoury to ensure your company stays ahead of the competition.

Rewards of benchmarking

Benchmarking is the process of using data to measure current performance against our previous performance and that of our competitors. It helps us identify our strengths, as well as what needs refining and what needs ditching.

When you apply benchmarking to the talent acquisition process, you can pinpoint which elements of your process are working and which are not. You can then start to see what may be causing your user satisfaction rates to fall or why your quality of hire is dropping.

Regular benchmarking should become the standard. Today’s business environment
changes fast, so it’s important to continually improve your hiring process instead of wasting valuable time on tasks that don’t deliver.

There are several other advantages that come with regular benchmarking. For one, it provides an independent, unbiased perspective on how you are doing in the market compared to your competitors. When you understand the areas in which your organisation excels and where you fall behind, you can refine your strategy to focus on more of the good and less of the bad. The data will also prompt you to ask questions that could reveal serious strategic flaws or help you recognise where your competitive advantage lies.

More budget from the boss

Most HR functions these days are under pressure to deliver return on investment, especially when budgets are tight.

You can use benchmarking to improve leadership decision-making, your social media presence or even help you choose the best-performing tech for acquiring talent. It also acts as support for a strong business case, which can prove extremely useful when asking the boss for a bigger budget or to bring in more staff!

At AGS, we help clients boost the performance of their talent acquisition programmes through a series of audits and analytics, each bespoke to the individual company. We combine data an organisation may already have with data we’ll source through proprietary tools to provide an objective insight into their talent acquisition. This invaluable data drives performance excellence across the entire journey, be it the candidate experience to keep talent engaged from beginning to end, or the employer branding to ensure high levels of quality applicants in the first place.

Working with an analytics provider saves you having to invest in the latest digital tools, which can be costly in terms of price and the time it takes to train your staff to use them.

For firms that wait to get on the data journey, it is only going to get harder. Data is often the core foundation on which successful performance improvement plans are built. Against the backdrop of CEOs publicly acknowledging people as their most important asset, HR leaders increasingly harness data analytics to elevate their influence in business strategy right up to the C-level.

Data analytics is a potent weapon for sure. As long as you know how to use it!

If you’re interested to learn more about how AGS’ analytics service can help your business benchmark better, contact us using the button below.