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Why Talent Intelligence Systems Should Be HR’s #1 Priority

Adrian Dixon

April 7, 2021

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For many global organizations, enriching the full employee lifecycle, starting with hiring and retaining the best talent, is their top priority. A talent intelligence system can provide an objective and insightful look into your workforce on a granular level.

New and trending tech can be eye-catching and there’s no shortage of ways to optimize your process. For human resources teams, an integrated talent intelligence system provides unique insights into how to hire and retain the best talent for your organization.

To start off, let’s define what a talent intelligence system is

A talent intelligence system refers to the process of capturing, extracting, and analyzing data. This talent data provides invaluable insights into your recruitment needs and HR decisions.

A talent intelligence system directly integrates with your ATS to generate insights into your quality of hires, work performance, employee development, business performance, and much more.

The future of talent analytics

People analytics is the hot topic of interest, ranking second in LinkedIn’s 2020 Top Talent Trends Report. 71% of companies believe this is an urgent priority. HR teams are increasingly interested in making more strategic decisions about talent and understanding their workforce on an objective level.

One of the current challenges HR faces is a skills gap in data analysis. Many talent acquisition professionals are tasked with mining data and generating insights without a background in this field.

Talent intelligence systems integrate directly with your ATS and connect the dots between data points for comprehensive reporting into your talent. There’s a wealth of data within your company’s current systems, including performance data, employee skills within profiles, and so much more HCM information that is rich with insights.

Armed with an analytics mindset, HR teams can now use this data for decisions without spending their days generating these statistics.

The most attractive capabilities of AI-based talent intelligence are the ability to cut operating costs and remove inefficiencies from your process. However, this technology can also give their recruiters a more accurate picture of the talent within their own workforce. This visibility can lead to better understanding employee churn, improve productivity, and start assembling stronger teams from within.

From an enterprise perspective, this is an incredibly strategic tool for large organizations.

Investing in AI gives your business operations the opportunity to digitally transform their everyday processes. Stats include:

  • 70% of organizations in 2020 have a digital transformation strategy.
  • 58% of companies reporting that data and analytics software is key to managing and scaling their business.
  • 49% of organizations are using AI-assisted processes to better manage business performance through data availability.

Focusing on the candidate and employee experience

Talent intelligence is key to gaining a competitive edge. At a base level, it’s the simple process that starts with collecting and analyzing data about your talent pool for more accurate and fair decision-making.

Across the employee lifecycle, talent intelligence offers an objective lens into upskilling, promotion, and all types of individual success metrics. Marie Herlihy at Hubspot notes how the prioritization of talent intelligence had a similar evolution to that of customer success.

  • Focused on relationship building and working to achieve goals from the beginning.
  • Measured by success metrics of the customer rather than revenue metrics of sales team.
  • Ultimately building a more strategic partnership between the organization and the customer.

Technology can be instrumental to how HR teams understand and make decisions about their people. Instead of focusing on surface level information, talent intelligence provides information such as who is a good fit for your company within existing candidate pools and what employees are overlooked for opportunities within internal teams.

From a talent acquisition perspective, this means gathering qualifying information, evaluating a high volume of resumes, and giving every applicant a fair chance to be evaluated based on their experience.

Building a more diverse workforce

It always comes down to your people at the end of the day and workforce planning is one of the largest challenges organizations face. Talent intelligence systems offer the ability to identify and monitor urgent hiring needs, as well as track talent patterns across your organization. However, one of the top priorities for HR this year is the commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion.

This is where talent intelligence systems offer a clear advantage. By mitigating unconscious bias right from the beginning, talent acquisition teams can shortlist their ideal candidates based on their experience.

A common misconception when delving into the world of people analytics is that employees are seen merely as data points. In the simplest terms, it means all candidates and existing employees can be treated objectively and fairly.

This objectivity plays a role in the early stages of screening, with name, gender, and race removed from automated resume screening. Artificial intelligence evaluates each applicant based on their experience, using data to compare people as opposed to unconscious factors like physical appearance, gender, previous company experience, and more.

Hitting time to value is key for seeing a return on your investment.

  • The short term impact right after implementation is those immediate insights, increased efficiency, and your acquisition team’s focus on higher value tasks.
  • Looking long term? See how your entire organization benefits from better hiring accuracy, fairer hiring practices, and an overall stronger and more diverse team.

Using automation as a tool for engagement

There is often a push towards automation during economic recessions and there can be a misconception that automation replaces human work. Automating menial tasks is what leaves the space for meaningful work, like connecting with candidates and developing internal strategies to help with employee performance. And reducing tedious tasks in everyday work is just the beginning.

Consider talent acquisition chatbots as an example.

It’s never considered as a human replacement from the interviewer’s or applicant’s perspective. The chatbot acts a straightforward touchpoint to gather more qualifying information and improve the overall candidate experience. It also decreases the dropoff on the careers page with this direct engagement.

Automation can improve your acquisition team’s operational efficiency, but also improve the overall candidate experience as they receive regular touchpoints.

It goes without saying that automation works best when integrated with existing workflows. Automating repetitive tasks frees up your team’s time to invest in higher value work, such as face-to-face interviews with shortlisted candidates.


Talent intelligence systems are the key to keeping up with the ever-changing digital landscape. More than staying on-trend, it is HR’s next step in playing an important role in overall business strategy and success.

Request a demo today to learn more about how talent intelligence systems can make an impact on your organization.