What Is Talent Intelligence? A Comprehensive Guide

The ever-multiplying complexities of modern recruiting require HR pros to find answers to pressing questions like which candidate is the most passionate about their career, who’s an excellent fit for a remote team, and who has the makings of a future manager.

Talent intelligence brings deep talent insights to your fingertips by analyzing talent pools coupled with internal talent assessment insights and tied together with predictive analytics.

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In this article, we’ll cover everything you need to know about talent intelligence and spotlight the popular talent intelligence tools in the market today.

• What Is Talent Intelligence?
• Importance
• Primary Benefits
• Components of Talent Intelligence
• Top Talent Intelligence Solutions
• Final Thoughts

What Is Talent Intelligence?

Talent intelligence is a new method for assessing potential hires, trends in the job market and internal performance benchmarks to improve role-specific hiring success. It evaluates existing workforces and employer branding to determine the company’s competitive edge. The framework analyzes deep behavioral attributes of candidates compared to company-specific performance indicators to hire the right person for the job and culture.

Importance

Talent selection is not a one-size-fits-all process. Accurately assessing candidates’ role alignment requires approaches that standardize the unique needs of each role and assessment techniques that measure your applicants’ distinctive strengths and attributes.

Your team can accurately zero in on top talent when they know what makes candidates an excellent match for the role. So first, you’ll need an accurate picture of your organization’s dynamics and inner workings.

Here’s how talent intelligence is essential to address the challenges of hiring modern talent:

1. Addresses New Talent Dynamics

If the Great Resignation proves anything, talent is always on the go. Not long ago, companies of all shapes and sizes realized the importance of targeting employed individuals who aren’t actively looking for a job change in their recruitment strategy.

Today, categorizing the labor market into active and passive candidates leads to myopic hiring. Despite sourcing all types of candidates, the endgame is still the same — to fill vacancies. Every company has unique talent requirements, and hiring to fill vacancies is a short-term solution.

Understanding how talent moves into organizations and why employees leave requires holistic knowledge of how recruitment and talent management efforts influence each other. Talent intelligence is a valuable instrument for analyzing the existing talent market and identifying industry-specific hiring trends that assist in data-backed hiring decisions.

2. Stabilizes Turnover Rates

While there will always be times when employees leave your organization, a steadily increasing rate of resignations indicates a larger talent management issue. Parting ways to change career paths is reasonable; quitting due to a toxic culture or vague leadership shouldn’t be a reason.

When employees resign, they take their knowledge and expertise with them. Replacing that experience, especially for a specialized role, is challenging. It’s no wonder that just mentioning employee turnover is enough to make any HR person flinch.

Talent intelligence takes a deep dive into internal talent mobility to diagnose why former employees resigned, identify who’s at risk of leaving and take proactive measures to prevent an employee exodus.

3. Supports Diversity, Equality and Inclusion

Millennials and Gen Z are the most diverse, highly value-driven generations taking over the workplace, and it’s no surprise that these young job seekers sparked a DEI reckoning in the workplace that influenced businesses to prioritize workplace diversity and inclusion. With baby boomers exiting the workforce, the World Economic Forum estimates that Gen Z will make up 27% of the global workforce by 2025.

Culture Amp’s DEI Report found that employers are adopting a data-centric approach to balance talent pipelines. The report found that 45% of companies use DEI metrics to make impactful decisions, and a majority of 70% implemented strategic DEI plans that explicitly included diverse talent-sourcing methods.

If your company needs to enhance its diversity efforts, talent intelligence is the way. Evaluating your workforce demographics and pinpointing where inequities might occur is valuable to setting strategic DEI goals and achieving those targets.

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Primary Benefits

While your recruiting teams breathe a sigh of relief when a position is filled, bringing in new employees doesn’t always guarantee success. The positive impact on performance, productivity and the bottom line resulting from hiring a new employee is when you know your talent selection tactics yield fruit.

Ensuring you hit the mark every time you hire requires a scientific talent acquisition approach. Here’s how arming your HR team with smart talent insights brings a bevy of advantages:

1. Generates Personalized Hiring Criteria

What makes a candidate a good fit? The answer changes with every new talent trend. Not long ago, recruiters realized that soft skills are equally important as technical skills. Today, more and more HR thought leaders preach the importance of power skills.

A recent study surrounding employer preferences by the Harris Poll uncovered the following:

• 83% of employers seek potential hires who are willing to learn.
• Other top skills are dependability and communication, which polled 82% and 81%, respectively.
• Problem-solving (79%) and the ability to adapt (78%) also appeared at the top of the list.

The hiring specifications referenced above all have one thing in common — they’re qualitative. And measuring abstract attributes is challenging when you don’t have the right insights. Talent intelligence clarifies your company-specific talent needs and the available candidate pools.

Knowing the characteristics of ideal candidates and role-specific performance indicators lays the foundation for selecting talent in a given capacity.

2. Improves Person-job Fit

Tracking recruiting metrics measures the effectiveness of your recruitment strategy. For example, many qualified leads for an open role indicate that your talent-sourcing channels are superb. But they can’t predict how well a potential hire aligns with your company’s future.

Ensuring that the compatibility of the people you hire extends beyond their job to their colleagues, culture and company is vital for long-run success. Talent intelligence insights predict how well potential hires match the role and your company’s values.

3. Enables Early Success

Once your selected candidate accepts the terms of employment, you’ll introduce them to the team and familiarize them with their duties and responsibilities. The same talent insights gathered from pre-hire assessments provide a foundation for a tailored role acclimatization process.

Talent intelligence uncovers behavioral patterns and unique characteristics of every new hire and enables providing the right opportunities that result in early success.

4. Optimizes Placements

Talent is sparse and fleeting, so being quick to spot, hire and retain quality talent requires keeping tabs on applicants who were exceptional despite not making the cut for a role.

When a role opens in your organization, your recruiting team works to find the right people for the position. However, talent intelligence finds the right job for the right person. Similar to the candidate relationship management process, talent intelligence insights make it possible to match exceptional candidates to other roles that better align with their competencies and aspirations.

However, unlike candidate relationship management tapping into internal databases to locate potential hires, talent intelligence determines the compatibility of every candidate for multiple roles.

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Key Components

By now, you know the advantages and reasons to implement talent intelligence. But where do you start? Let’s look at everything you need to know to get started:

1. Talent Databases

Advanced tech is making its way into every function of human resource management. When you implement different tools to manage the A to Z of talent management, you’ll have heaps of valuable data on your hands.

The first step of understanding the competitiveness of your employer branding begins with getting to know your company. Instead of generalizing your talent needs, analyzing internal talent databases lets you find talent requirements unique to your company.

Here are a few places where you can gather internal data:

• What is Talent Assessment?
• What is Behavioral Assessment?
• Talent Intelligence Platforms
• Pre-employment assessment tools
• Talent assessment tools
• Behavioral assessment tools
• Talent acquisition software
• Applicant tracking systems
• Talent management systems
• Candidate relationship management systems
• Recruitment solutions

2. Talent Market

Data coverage is a critical aspect that separates talent intelligence from traditional recruitment and talent management. First, the process involves analyzing internal workforce dynamics to identify performance benchmarks for specific roles.

Next, the analysis extends to the external labor market to determine the state of the current talent market. After assessing the strengths and pitfalls of your team, it’s time to cast a giant net across the marketplace to answer more significant questions like:

• Which are the most preferred qualities for specific positions?
• What do job seekers expect from potential employers?
• Are there any work preferences driving the talent market?

3. Industry Analysis

Once you have data on your existing workforce and potential employees, talent intelligence takes a step further and evaluates the talent scene in your industry. A thorough industry analysis lets you identify how competing firms hire new employees for similar positions.

Here are questions that talent intelligence can answer about your industry:

• What are the best hiring practices in the industry?
• Where does your company stand compared to its competition?
• Where do your former employees work after they leave your organization?
• How long does it take competitors to hire for similar roles?

Top Talent Intelligence Solutions

Our crack research team put together a list of the top talent intelligence solutions on the market today. Below we have the top four systems in no particular order.

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Infor Talent Science

Infor Talent Science is a cloud-based pre-employment assessment tool that combines predictive analytics with deep talent intelligence insights. It’s ideal for medium and large organizations with 1,000 employees or more. It’s best for health care, financial services, hospitality, retail and public sector organizations.

The platform identifies role-specific performance indicators and the behavioral makeup of the existing workforce with Behavioral DNA® to evaluate candidates’ compatibility based on their response patterns.

Free Trial: Offers a free trial.
Free Version: Doesn’t provide a free version.

Competitive Differentiators

• Quality Check and Human Validation: Rely on accurate assessments verified by I/O Psychologists. Receive guidance throughout the talent selection process from Ph.D. experts who review hiring criteria and recommend benchmark revisions and offer additional validation to evaluate applicants equitably.
• Auto-generated Profiles: Save time aggregating candidate scores, information and other critical details by leveraging the AI-based initial profile creation tool. Rely on experts to check the accuracy of profiles and selection benchmarks before proceeding with candidates.
• Predictive Insights: Test candidates’ compatibility with the role and company culture by using deep behavioral patterns to predict future job success. Ensure early role-based success by leveraging talent insights to assign personalized career paths.

Primary Features

• Behavioral Assessment Tool: Use unlimited assessments to determine how well applicants match the open position based on predefined ranges. Use scorecards that summarize competencies and behavioral characteristics into weighted percentages to display behavioral alignment.
• Behavioral Tags and Targets: Set tags for attributes like mental flexibility, ambition and discipline for every candidate assessment. Visually map the degree of role alignment by assessing candidates based on performance benchmarks.
• Team Assessment Benchmarks: Customize the talent selection process with predefined ideal behaviors, values and characteristics required for the open role. Leverage 13 quality metrics and 24 core characteristics generated by the system and verified by experts.
• Interview Guides: Gain access to questionnaires developed by Ph.D. I/O psychologists and track how candidates respond with a quick reference to ideal answers.
• ATS Integration: Transfer applicants from an existing applicant tracking systems (ATS) to the platform where candidates can complete assessments.

Limitations

• Doesn’t offer a native mobile application.
• Requires strong IT infrastructure for implementation and licensing.
• Assessments are lengthy and can result in low completion rates.

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Wonderlic

Wonderlic’s WonScore is a SaaS-based pre-hire assessment tool accessible on browsers. The platform lets you evaluate knowledge, skills, abilities and attributes to predict the role-specific success of each candidate and grades applicants based on cognitive ability, personality and motivation. Predictive scoring improves person-job fit and reduces voluntary turnover.

Industry specialties include automotive, computer software, educational institutes, consumer services, information technology, staffing and recruiting.

Free Trial: Doesn’t offer a free trial.
Free Version: Doesn’t provide a free version.

Competitive Differentiators

• Advanced Matching Capability: Combine insights from an AI-powered candidate search, assessments scores and machine learning tool to evaluate candidate pools to find the best match. Balance talent pipelines with inputs from industrial-organizational psychologists.
• Quick PIN Access: Enable quick sign-in and access to view test results, launch online assessments and create future tests by assigning Personal Identification Numbers (PIN).
• Predictive Profiles: Identify top talent with comparable candidate scorecards detailing essential information on similarities and differences between responses and ideal ranges.

Primary Features

• Pre-hiring Assessment: Evaluate candidates on cognitive ability, personality, and motivation. Assign timed cognitive tests consisting of 50 with increasing difficulty levels as the test progresses. Determine personality-job fit and role-based success by assessing job performance and motivation indicators.
• Job Description Profile: Rely on AI-based job description profiles to locate and match suitable candidates based on responses.
• ATB Platform: Design assessments to guide students and place them in programs that match their skills and abilities. Test verbal and quantitative skills with timed assessments and allow test administrators to view test results and scores on the Ability-to-Benefit (ATB) platform.
• Onboarding Management: Provide a customized role acclimatization experience by devising onboarding strategies for the new hires based on talent insights from pre-hire assessments.
• Reporting Tool: Generate detailed reports in addition to individual student reports. Measure the impact of testing norms and programs for accuracy, fairness and compliance with U.S. Department of Education regulation and internal procedures.

Limitations

• Doesn’t offer additional validation by experts.
• Not available as a native mobile application.
• Doesn’t support native integration options.

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The Predictive Index

The Predictive Index is a SaaS-based pre-employment assessment tool that aims to uncover deep behavioral insights and diagnose internal talent engagement levels. The system is suitable for all business sizes and provides solutions for various industries like healthcare, financial services, hospitality, retail, public sector and professional services.

The system leverages a scientific method based on psychometric evaluations and job assessments to determine role alignment.

Free Trial: Offers a free 6-minute sample assessment.
Free Version: Doesn’t provide a free version.

Competitive Differentiators

• Candidate Recommendations: Rely on the system to match candidate responses with role requirements and gain auto-generated candidate suggestions.
• Integrated Platform: Allow your team to use tools they’re familiar with by connecting the platform with existing recruiting technologies. Reduce the learning curve associated with implementing new tech and create a tailor-made hiring ecosystem.
• Mobile Capability: Access insights and responses at your fingertips. Monitor evaluations and candidate scores on a native mobile application on your preferred device.

Primary Features

• Candidate Assessments: Leverage a range of assessment options and categories that blends psychometrics and technology to evaluate candidates based on attributes like behavioral patterns, cognitive abilities and job-based skills. Identify critical personality traits like dominance, extraversion, patience and formality to determine candidates’ temperaments for the role.
• Team Evaluations: Conduct internal assessments to identify performance indicators and engagement insights. Leverage insights into internal talent dynamics to improve employee engagement and hiring tactics.
• Job-fit Ratings: Identify best candidate matches by accessing auto-generated rankings. Gain insight into which applicant is a better fit with quick visibility to comparative ratings.
• Customized Hiring Criteria: Evaluate potential hires based on customized benchmarks generated by the system and validated by an advisory board of I/O psychologists. Gain access to targeted interview questions based on behavioral data.
• Career Development Management: Leverage the talent mapping tool to find the best candidate, optimize placements and improve retention by developing suitable career paths. Develop action plans with clear next steps to improve communication and team collaboration.

Limitations

• Candidate assessments lack built-in AI capabilities.
• Doesn’t provide human validation for test results.

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TalentQuest

Part of the TalentQuest talent management suite solution, TalentQuest is a cloud-based behavioral assessment tool suitable for companies of all sizes and types. The system measures individualized behavioral patterns and motivations and connects data points to uncover ways to make impactful hires.

16-factor personality trait and cognitive ability tests accurately determine role alignment and predict future success.

Free Trial: Offers free sample assessments.
Free Version: Doesn’t provide a free version.

Competitive Differentiators

• Informed Hiring and Promotion Decisions: Make optimal hiring decisions with quick access to candidate profiles that display vital details in a side-by-side comparison view. Develop talent grids to improve new and existing employees’ succession planning and career development process.
• Extensive Integration Options: Connect the platform with your choice of ATS, human resource information systems (HRIS) and other recruitment tools to create a system that co-exists and functions with full context.
• Advanced Recommendations: Enable early role-based success with AI-powered recommendations at every stage of the hiring cycle. Exercise choice to accept or reject auto-generated suggestions for interview questions, onboarding actions and employee coaching.

Primary Features

• Assessment Tools: Evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of external and internal talent pools and access automated assessment reports for quick action.
• Candidate Scorecards: Develop personalized scorecards highlighting specific personality factors of every candidate compared to a similarity index and behavioral target.
• Psychometric Evaluation: Leverage Cattell’s 16-factor personality trait and cognitive ability assessments method to measure behavioral compatibility with the role, team and company culture.
• Behavioral Benchmarking: Conduct internal analysis to uncover role-specific performance indicators and leverage those insights to set benchmarks while evaluating potential hires.
• Career Pathing: Optimize placements by mapping results from previous candidate assessments to other existing job profiles in your organization. Pinpoint better-suited roles for specific candidates based on available benchmarking data.

Limitations

• Can’t calculate the weightage or impact factor of each behavioral trait.
• Doesn’t provide human validation of assessment results.
• Not available as a native mobile application.

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Final Thoughts

Searching the labor market for available talent is the old game. You’ll need a new, innovative way of assessing candidates that go beyond screening resumes to understand behaviors, attitudes and personality traits. Talent intelligence connects the dots between industry-specific hiring criteria and your unique talent needs, giving you actionable insights to keep up with the changing talent dynamics.

Which of the benefit mentioned above resonates most with your company? Are you considering implementing talent intelligence tools? Let us know in the comments!