Recruiting the right person to a key position in your enterprise is always a headache. However, technology can help you recruit and retain the best talent available. Intelligent CIO talks to Jonathan Wood, General Manager IMEA, at Infor, about how enterprises can enhance their recruitment processes using Infor Talent Science.
Infor Talent Science is a patented, cloud-based Predictive Talent Analytics and pre-employment testing solution that can help enterprises place the right job candidates in the right positions.
By leveraging large quantities of behavioural and performance data, Talent Science helps businesses through the recruitment process all from a single behavioural assessment.
With insights you can customize into predictive models, enterprises can better select, retain, and develop the right talent and even impact the bottom line.
Can you explain more about Infor Talent Science?
If we look at the trends around Digital Transformation what we are seeing is customers coming to us and saying ‘we know we have to digitally transform but how do we do that?’
We are talking about three key questions: What is it you want your customer experience to be?; Do you have the organisational structure and people to actually achieve that?; and how are you going to harness the data to make sure you have a consistent customer experience?
That may be a slightly strange way to start talking about talent but if you look at the key aspect of Digital Transformation, we are talking about how you use the talent you have in the business to drive that customer experience and we have taken that one step further.
We now have a talent solution and we are using talent science to help businesses understand who their employees are.
So what is it that makes an excellent employee? What is it that makes an employee stay with an organisation? What is it that makes a team work well together?
There is not much science that has previously been put in to that so we have worked with MIT to come up with a number of data models that feeds into our data science solution and that is driving very significant changes in how people hire, develop and retain their staff.
We are seeing retention rates increase by 30% to 40%, we are seeing hiring costs reduce very significantly. That talent science solution is at the heart of enabling the beginning of Digital Transformation.
In practical terms how would it help an organisation recruit the right people?
This is about profiling an individual that is looking for a role inside your organisation. So they take an online test, it can be done through the web very simply and that data model that we have, creates a report about that individual based on a profile that the business has created.
If you are looking for an individual who is a collaborative engineer with particular skill sets then you can form a profile that says ‘these are the attributes we are looking for’ and then the individual takes a test and it will score that application and give a profile about how close different aspects of that person’s personality and experience will match with the role that you are looking for.
What sort of enterprises are using this at the moment?
It’s a variety. We are in a very people intensive market so if you look across any large enterprise, from hospitality, people working in shopping malls, large retailers, anybody that wants to give a consistency of experience that is where talent science is relevant.
And this is used across all verticals?
Yes. Everyone is hiring and everyone is hiring all of the time. What this solution does is it puts more predictability into that and that is something that’s been missing. If you look at the last 30 years recruitment across any industry is as much art as it is science and what we are providing is the science.
Is this being used by IT companies to attract the right people?
Absolutely. If you look at team dynamics it’s hugely important that we have the right people with the right skills. If you have 10 people all with the same skills and all of the same mindset and with the same approach that can potentially be a little challenging.
How new is Infor Talent Science?
It’s relatively new. We have just released an update. We are in phase two. We use it extensively across our own business to ensure we get the right quality in place internally and it works extremely well for us.
What are the benefits for organisations that use it?
I think there are two key things. The first one is time to recruit. If you can put people through a consistent process and you have an output for that process then you can more consistently understand who is the right person for you to hire so you can make that hiring decision quicker.
Then you have the consistency of hiring. If you are hiring a high volume of people, if you want everyone to have a consistent mindset to deliver a consistent customer experience, how do you that at volume?
If you have an output that says ‘yes, this person leans more in the direction of the mindset that we want’ then that is someone that you can hire and you can take that decision quickly.
So hiring quickly, hiring the right quality of people, and if you have the right quality of people in your organisation that have the right mindset these people are more likely to stay with your business.
So then you are into retention and retention means reduced rehire costs, consistency of experience, happier employees, and ultimately that is generating higher margins.
It’s having a direct impact on the bottom line.
How important a region is the Middle East for your business?
We’ve designated India, Middle East and Africa as a growth region. We foresee very significant opportunity here because we are seeing large organisation take that digital leap in a way that perhaps European and North American organisations are going to struggle to because they are more encumbered with legacy solutions.
We are seeing great innovation across the customer base. We are seeing people coming to us and asking about solutions like talent science. If you look at Saudisation or Emiratisation then that fits perfectly with talent science.
It’s about enabling citizens to be more relevant in the market place. If they start by understanding what skills they have, how we profile people, how we support people, that then feeds into developing people’s skillsets and understanding where their strengths and weaknesses are, and how to support them to be better employees.
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