If Data is the New Oil, Data Intelligence is the Refined Fuel

By Aditya Malik, Founder, ValueMatrix.ai

What oil was in the 18th century, data is in the 21st century – immensely valuable and influential. With the run towards AI supremacy, businesses and organizations possessing qualified and unbiased data win. However, the data openly available is marred with conscious and subconscious bias, largely due to woke or un-woke nature of humans. We don’t know what we don’t know – right or wrong is only temporary, as in always waiting to be judged with time.

Thus, the raw data available to businesses needs to be refined to extract powerful insights and information, enabling organizations to react to dynamic situations and market forces proactively.

Businesses and industries across the globe, including (but not limited to) manufacturers, traders, marketers, and recruiters, are leveraging data-driven analytics to simplify operational processes and make more informed decisions. Amid the coronavirus pandemic and rapidly shifting marketplace, recruiters heavily relied on employee data and data-driven metrics to make recruitment more cost-effective and time-efficient.

About 56% of recruiters use data for increasing employee retention rate, 50% for evaluating skill gaps, 46% for understanding what employees want, and 39% of HR managers make use of data for predicting candidate success. Data analytics and insights can also help businesses prepare robust hiring plans, which are critical for the success of recruiting. A systematic hiring plan can help companies prioritise requisitions, streamline high-volume recruitment, and spot discrepancies in the hiring process.

Streamlining Data-Backed Hiring Plans
With an effective hiring plan, HR managers can find qualified and best-fit candidates on time, ensuring that all business operations are streamlined and that the process of filling jobs is carried out effectively. Robust data points, data-driven gamified cognitive skill & analytics, and computational psychometry heuristics enable HR managers to seamlessly align their hiring plans, making the process effortless and ensuring that all the recruitment strategies are on course.

HR managers equipped with necessary data and information compare forecasts with actual results, identify and fix hiring bottlenecks, and choose tedious tasks that are to be automated with deep tech solutions. Speaking of automation, new-age tech solutions are also leveraging data intelligence and data-driven analytics for performing repetitive and time-consuming tasks like sourcing candidates, extracting insights, and filling spreadsheets.

Reinventing Hiring with Data Intelligence and Tech Analytics
Data intelligence is the analysis of information to provide valuable insights for enhanced decision-making and increased productivity. Amid technological advancements, especially in Artificial Intelligence (AI), Machine Learning (ML) and other deep tech capabilities, HR managers are leveraging data intelligence and tech analytics to improve employee performances, streamline recruitment processes, and proactively respond to unforeseen hiring challenges.

Modern-day technologies that offer data intelligence enable businesses to attract more productive and talented human resources by ensuring transparency and bias-free recruitment practices. Data points and signals generated by deep tech capabilities also provide quick and seamless onboarding of new hires by verifying employee backgrounds and processing new employee paperwork in time. It is paramount to ensure seamless onboarding, as about 69% of employees continue to work in the same organisation, provided they have a great onboarding experience.

Business intelligence provides managers with vital reports, including candidate progress reports, candidate source reports, and average response reports, helping organisations reduce applicant drop-off rates and the net time taken at each hiring step. These solutions unfold common and trending hiring issues, tweak interview questions as per the nature of the job and improve employee retention rate. Cognitive computing skills based on data intelligence also help HR teams stay on top of the latest market trends, enabling them to anticipate hiring changes and manage unforeseen uncertainties.

Closing Thoughts
Data is one of the most prized assets that can help businesses in more ways than one can imagine. HR managers and recruiters are making use of data intelligence and leveraging robust technologies for making informed hiring decisions and improving the quality of new hires. But HR managers are suggested to rely completely on something other than deep tech solutions. They must involve manual interventions in the hiring process to ensure that hiring is done based on the merit and skill set of the candidate, ruling out chances of judgement bias, affinity bias, or affect heuristics.

Data will take the hiring space by storm in the coming years. Despite rapid advancements, rapid technological advancements are needed to ensure transparency and the inclusion of all data sources into a common network for a more streamlined hiring process.