What Is Predictive Analytics?

Successful sourcing and recruiting efforts have always required a deep understanding of talent. For a long time, however, recruiters had to rely on making educated guesses about candidates’ cultural and skills fits.

There have long been a number of ways to assess applicants, but these assessments are far from foolproof. Making any hire requires taking a gamble that the candidate will perform well.

Unfortunately, that gamble can be costly.

If the new employee doesn’t fit or only lasts a few weeks, the time and money spent training, onboarding, and welcoming the individual are wasted. Meanwhile, your already established team might suffer from a loss of productivity. Due to sourcing, recruiting, and development investments, replacing an employee can cost anywhere from 16 percent to 213 percent of the individual’s salary or hourly wage.

But things are finally changing, and HR and recruiting teams now have access to game-changing technologies that can increase hiring confidence and improve recruitment outcomes. Talent acquisition tech  is now leveraging machine learning and intelligent algorithms to harness the power of predictive analytics.

What Is Predictive Analytics?

Predictive analytics refers to extracting information from historical data and using it to predict future trends. Used across numerous industries to serve diverse purposes, predictive analytics help people make more informed decisions for better results. For instance, Amazon uses predictive analytics to suggest items of potential interest to customers, encouraging additional purchases by comparing a shopper’s buying history with the histories of similar users. Email filters, text suggestion/autocorrect, and music streaming recommendations are also everyday instances of predictive analytics.

Similarly, predictive analytics can use your sourcing, hiring, and retention data to help you make better hires. As Amazon uses other shoppers’ behaviors to predict your own, talent acquisition technology with predictive analytics capabilities can use the successes of past candidates to predict which candidates may succeed in the future, if hired.

The future is here, and it’s making hiring a whole lot smarter. With predictive analytics, organizations can improve everything from the candidate experience to overall company performance.

A version of this article originally appeared on the WCN blog.

Jeanette Maister is managing director of the Americas for WCN.