Podcast: What Metrics to Track to Stay Current With Workforce Trends

How can you use analytics to stay on top of macro workforce trends and bring valuable insights to your organization?

Andrea Derler, Visier’s Principal of Research and Customer Value, says a few simple metrics can make sense of 3 of the biggest trends playing out in the workforce today: talent attraction and retention; diversity, equity, and inclusion; and leader’s data mindset.

To help HR leaders get started, Andrea lays out the 3 metrics that are most relevant to each trend and discusses how to dig deeper to turn data into insight.

Talent attraction and retention

A review of applicant demographics will tell you if your current hiring sources are delivering the great talent that you need.

A recent survey from Visier and Deloitte Consulting showed that fewer than half of leaders are very confident in their ability to attract and retain talent — but attracting and retaining talent has never been more important. Tracking applicant demographics, time to hire, and resignation rate can help pin down where your organization is falling short and why.

A review of applicant demographics will tell you if your current hiring sources are delivering the great talent that you need. Are you relying on the same sources and having the same conversations with the same people, and do you need to branch out? To dig deeper, look at how new hires perform in their first 6, 12, or 18 months, and compare that to the hiring source.

Time to hire is straightforward but powerful. How many days pass between an applicant applying for a job and accepting an offer? Improving efficiency here can make your organization better equipped to fill roles, fast.

Lastly, resignation rate can tell you who is leaving and why, especially when broken down by gender, ethnicity, tenure, and other key groupings. While recognition and pay have been top reasons for resignation in the past, Andrea says that burnout and lack of career paths have become more prevalent lately.

Diversity, equity, and inclusion

Research confirms that more diverse teams perform better and are more creative, and organizations can use analytics to become more equitable and diverse. Tracking the diversity of the current workforce, the diversity across the hiring funnel and promotions, and how much you’re doing to mitigate bias is the right place to start.

The current ratios of genders and ethnicities in the organization as a whole, in each department, and in senior leadership will show you where you stand today. Also, the diversity of the hiring funnel and promotions is both a lens into how you got here and the path to a more equitable organization in the future.

Tracking how much you’re doing to mitigate bias in hiring and promotion decisions can be as simple as looking at when in the hiring process you lose diverse candidates or how promotion decisions are made. From there, you can ask questions like:

• Do we have enough structured interviews where each candidate is asked the same set of questions?
• Can we remove names from resumes to combat bias?

Leader’s data mindset

This last trend is also one of the newest, Andrea says, and it requires looking at how much data leaders and managers use to make decisions. To evaluate the data-orientation of an organization’s leadership style, Andrea suggests tracking how many leaders have access to and regularly use data, what decisions are made using data, and how the organization compares to others.

Having access to data is essential to using it for decision-making, so knowing how many managers and leaders have access to and regularly use data can provide a jumping off point to becoming a more data-oriented organization.

Having access to data is essential to using it for decision-making, so knowing how many managers and leaders have access to and regularly use data can provide a jumping off point to becoming a more data-oriented organization.

Along those lines, it’s important to track whether data is being used for hiring decisions, workforce planning, and DEI. Are leaders using actual metrics or relying on gut feelings?

And lastly, benchmarking and comparing against other organizations on key metrics like resignation rate and gender ratio in senior leadership can show you if you’re making good use of the data you have to make data-informed decisions and improve.

For more of Andrea Derler’s discussion of key workforce trends and the metrics you should be tracking, tune in to POPS! The People Ops Podcast.