I am trying to refrain from using the term “Big Data” as it’s become so overused. However, there’s no denying the power of using data as part of your hiring strategy.
Using data such as talent supply and demand information and competitors hiring activities can help recruiters to build trust and relationships with hiring managers; allowing them to have greater influence, give hiring managers the power to make more intelligent hiring decisions, and in many cases – reduce cost per hire and time to fill. The sheer amount of detail we have at our fingertips is changing the way we recruit.
At first, there were very few players in this space, but I think 2015 is the year that this will truly go Global. Here are just a few that are making big strides:
Wanted has been around for a number of years and together with Careerbuilder.com have built up a great database and introduced unique products such as their “Hiring Scale” which gives an indication of how easy or difficult a role will be to fill. Originally exclusive to the US, Wanted recently expanded their offering to cover Canada and I am excited to say, they are finally opening up their product globally. Many European countries, including the UK, Middle East and APAC will have talent demand information available (supply will be added further into 2015).
Talent Neuron was a small start-up that originated from Zinnov and was acquired by the Corporate Executive Board (CEB) earlier this year. They provide a few different offerings, but their Talent Trends product covers 95 countries and gathers data and analytics from over 800 sources. As they are now part of CEB, this looks set to become bigger and developed further.
At the Talent Connect event recently, LinkedIn announced that they are bringing some new product offerings next year. Following their development of the Economic Graph; their aim to map the 3 billion people in the workforce and making economic opportunities for all, LinkedIn will be using the data they have gathered to allow us to pull Market Insight reports at the click of a button.
Currently, LinkedIn offers Talent Pool reports on their Slideshare channel or you can request them from your LinkedIn representative, but the fact that this data will be more accessible shows how LinkedIn is beginning to up their game. This, along with an upgrade to the Recruiter search will bring some promising insights. There’s been no official launch data announced yet, but it’s coming in 2015, so watch this space.
This is a new product (and free!) that’s been launched by a UK talent attraction platform – JobstheWord. Currently only available in the UK, MapUp provides Talent Supply data in the form of a heat map. This gives you an insight into the available Talent based on your keyword searches. What’s interesting about this is that they scrape information from social profiles to build the picture. They are introducing upgrades and new product offerings next year, so this is definitely another one to watch.
Indeed has been providing market information/job trends data rather quietly. You can access this by scrolling to the bottom of the page and clicking on the small hyperlinks tucked away in the corner. Although they don’t provide a greater level of detail such as Wanted Analytics, there is some good information you can use, for free. (SimplyHired.com also provides something similar).
At their recent conference in Texas, Indeed announced that they are doing more work in the data space and are looking to launch something in 2015. As an aggregator, they are in a great position to be able to provide some good insights into the market and hiring activities.
So, while the big data craze is definitely showing no signs of slowing down, next year looks set to bring some exciting new products our way.
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