Matching the right talent to the right role is critical. However, many employers are stuck in the 20th century, hiring through resumes alone. As the talent market continues to evolve, organizations must focus on better understanding skills to truly gauge the depth of their talent pool and forecast future needs. It’s time to develop “talent intelligence.”
Although tech is indispensable to the hiring process, many talent acquisition teams struggle to implement newer solutions, like talent intelligence and matching. In this article, we focus on external talent matching and how it helps you get started on your talent intelligence journey.
Defining Talent Matching and Talent Intelligence
Talent matching is mapping external individuals to relevant job opportunities in your organization to help them utilize their skills in meaningful ways, keep them engaged, and enable you to achieve larger business goals. But, without technology, it’s a cumbersome process. Keeping track of your employees’ evolving skill sets and determining which gaps to fill is challenging – especially for large-scale organizations.
Talent matching falls under the purview of talent intelligence – the use of “people data” for improved hiring, management, and retention. Talent intelligence solutions make matching and management infinitely easier with the use of artificial intelligence (AI). These talent platforms provide access to employee data and data from your competitors, like their candidate pool, skills, functions, workforce composition, open roles, and compensation packages. Analysis can reveal talent patterns in your organization and help you understand both existing needs and the work environment
While talent matching primarily appears to enhance talent acquisition and recruitment, it has a domino effect. An active data set with insight from internal and external workforce data can be instrumental in workforce planning, outlining learning and development opportunities, and overcoming organizational skill gaps. Here are some advantages of talent matching and intelligence for your organization:
- Tailored learning and development opportunities for onboarded talent
- Improve employee engagement and satisfaction
- Helps you understand your workforce makeup and imminent talent needs
- Provides access to market and competitor hiring data and management
- Decreases hiring and talent acquisition costs, while increasing efficiency and efficacy
- Boosts employee productivity and retention
How Talent Matching Works
Talent matching platforms allow organizations to cultivate the most value and align incoming talent to open positions. Let’s explore how talent matching works.
1. Insights from candidate behavioral data
Talent matching platforms often rely on data to find and target qualified candidates, known as behavioral targeting. Similar to serving consumers product ads based on their browsing data, in the context of job advertising, behavioral targeting uses data about a candidate’s job preferences to display ads that are relevant to the candidate’s interests and online habits.
A variety of data sources are used, including frequently visited websites, job ad clicks, time spent on websites, geolocation, and browsing history. This also includes information from third-party cookies, mobile apps, applicant tracking (ATS) and candidate relationship management (CRM) systems. Data from these and other sources is combined and analyzed.
From this, behavioral and usage patterns define candidate segments that can be used to focus your job ads on a specific set of candidates. Serving targeted ads ensures that candidates see openings they are interested in, increasing their chances of conversion. Moreover, it saves recruiters from having to weed out irrelevant and uninterested applicants!
Read More about behavioral targeting: As the Cookies Crumble: The Rise of Behavioral Job Advertising
2. Remove limitations of keyword and title searches
Recruiters spend hours every week navigating complicated systems to look for talent. Traditional job boards and ATS heavily rely on job titles and keywords to find profiles that match. For instance, searching for the job title ‘Program Manager’ will automatically omit candidates that don’t match the search query exactly. On the other hand, it also generates false positives – there’s a keyword match, but the candidate does not possess the right experience or skill.
These tactics are rudimentary and time-consuming at best, and ineffective at worst. Artificial intelligence (AI) powered talent matching platforms go beyond idle searches of titles and keywords, shifting the focus to candidate skills and experience. Talent intelligence software combines one or more information sources to ascertain patterns and enhance job-candidate matches.
As our data science team explains, tools like Joveo can expand titles to include variations like ‘Program Manager’ and ‘Project Manager’, to boost conversion rate. In addition, to remove geographical limitations, Joveo also creates copies of the job for nearby locations to widen the talent pool.
Another underrated benefit of AI-powered targeted search is that it puts candidates at the center and incorporates the different titles and job roles that exist in the market.
3. Bring back qualified candidates for new roles
Candidate rediscovery is crucial to your talent acquisition strategy. Over the years, organizations accumulate hundreds and thousands of resumes. However, old-school tools are unequipped to support large data storage and retrieval. Missing profiles mean that candidates who abandoned your job applications or did not make it to the final round are overlooked, and you will have to start the hiring process from scratch.
Talent intelligence solutions can manage large data sets and can safeguard vital candidate information over time. With AI, talent intelligence platforms discover and retarget qualified candidates from previous application cycles. Moreover, talent solutions give you their most updated profile enabling dynamic job-candidate matching based on the role you are hiring for.
Since these candidates have already interacted with your brand, bringing them back to the recruitment funnel might be easier.
The Future of Talent Matching
Amid rising concerns of recession, perspectives surrounding talent acquisition are bound to change. The uncertain market presents unique challenges when it comes to hiring and talent acquisition. Organizations increasingly trust technological solutions like talent intelligence platforms to transform how they hire and manage talent.
Talent matching is an AI-enabled way to locate relevant external candidates for your open roles. It is a data-driven and objective strategy to hire better talent. Talent matching solutions significantly expand your candidate pool by using online behavioral data, location, browsing history, and expanding search algorithms to include associated titles and nearby locations. Furthermore, retargeting candidates from past talent pools and matching them to present relevant roles also helps you kickstart your hiring process.
Tools like Joveo replace the guesswork, complexity, and inefficiency of today’s recruitment practices with intelligence, transparency, and power, delivering more relevant candidates, more certainty, and more success to employers around the world. To learn more about Joveo’s programmatic offering, schedule a demo and see our platform in action. And follow us on Twitter and LinkedIn, where we’re always working to help you get the most out of your recruitment advertising.
