#11: Talent Acquisition Analytics — How Good Data Tells Its Own Story

The Changing State of Talent Acquisition

This week we welcome Todd Davis to the podcast. Todd’s career spans more than 25 years in talent acquisition, from his current role as a Global Talent Executive at IBM, to leadership roles at Ancestry, Amazon, and WarnerMedia.

Topics include: why HR lags behind other departments in analytic prowess, the limitations of focusing recruiting efforts on the top of the funnel (“we need more candidates”), approaches to up-skilling recruiters and hiring managers, how data analysis can reveal surprising opportunities in candidate sourcing and selection, the ways in which good data “tells its own story,” the good/fast/cheap triangle of project management, differing approaches to measuring candidate quality, how implementing consistent metrics across recruiters can lead to better insights, how to think about the apparent tension between analytics and the “human” side of talent acquisition, the role of intuition in making hire decisions, the value of conducting regular interviewer process audits, how flashy new pre-hire technology can distract from talent acquisition goals, why analytic dashboards have risen in prominence, and how dashboards focus our attention in good ways and bad.