Marketplace 101: 3 Things to Consider When Selecting An Analytics Partner

staffing analytics partner

Now more than ever, data transparency enables you to analyse and improve your business, empowers your teams to make meaningful business decisions, and keeps everyone connected in an increasingly remote world. 

Before you start shopping for an analytics technology, it’s important to note what outcomes you want to achieve, how you’re currently managing the metrics related to these desired outcomes, and what behaviors or processes you might improve to reach these outcomes. 

How do you plan to leverage the analytics?

When choosing any new vendor, your goals should come first. 

Regardless of whether you run your own business or you’re helping your company to evaluate options, knowing the outcomes you’d like to achieve will both drive evaluation and help you to narrow down your options.

When it comes to analytics, it can be easy to focus solely on the need for transparency and simply being able to get the metrics you want. However, in the interest of reaching your goals, it pays off to start with what you want to do with the metrics and work backward.

In the words of cube19, the right analytics “allow you to put tracing paper over success and plot a course for new hires and underperformers to accelerate with.”

For example, if you want to gain more insight into your recruiters’ most valuable activities for potential areas of improvement or changes in KPIs, you’ll want to make sure that the chosen analytics vendor offers deep insights into call numbers, submittal numbers, and anything else that recruiters are doing day-to-day. 

Once you have defined outcomes, you’ll want to break those outcomes into specific needs and questions for your potential vendors. At the end of the day, your analytics partner should make your outcomes their own as they work with you to find the right solution. 

How do you currently manage your metrics and data?

You have already established that you need to make a change, but solutions alone won’t fix all of your reporting woes if you don’t have a deep understanding of how your teams are getting along today. 

A bit of internal discovery can go a long way. Survey your internal stakeholders on the metrics and KPIs they’re responsible for day-to-day. If you are the one responsible for metrics, outline your own process, and share with other leaders and users to see if you’re capturing the whole story. You might be surprised by what your colleagues rely on to manage their metrics. This process can also bolster or drive your established outcomes. 

As you connect with your teams on their use of metrics today, keep a running list of everywhere they pull data from. If your teams use any systems that are not plugged into Bullhorn, integration might be your first step to improving how you manage your metrics. 

Tools like cube19 and InsightSquared can pull data from multiple sources, but unifying your data, particularly during a time when teams are moving to increasingly remote or blended work environments, is a tried-and-true way to establish consistency across all data. 

Think about communication data as an example. Now that your team may be partially or fully working from home, it’s likely that they have become even more reliant on video calls, texting, or making calls from their cell phones. 

Make sure you’re asking potential partners how and if they integrate with Bullhorn, and how they help to unify multiple data sources.

What processes and behaviors do you want to change?

You’ll start to answer this question by identifying your goals at the beginning of your buying process, but as you evaluate, dig into what accomplishing those goals will mean for how your team functions. 

For example, do you want to measure the correlation between number of submittals and number of placements so that you can figure out which activities leading up to submittal are resulting in the most placements?

Are you trying to increase redeployment? Getting a better sense of the communications and activities that are influencing redeployment already might help. You might also want to measure time to redeployment so that you can compare not just the effectiveness, but the efficiency of a new process. 

You also might want to identify the most successful teams and activities to replicate across your business. 

Bullhorn customer Talent International partnered with cube19 to create a blueprint for their consultants to identify their next steps, a way for managers to isolate where micro-training will be most fruitful, and a platform that provides leadership with a vantage point from which they can oversee and influence the entire performance of the company. 

Who are Bullhorn’s analytics partners?

cube19 and InsightSquared offer actionable insights through their customised reporting and dashboards. Their solutions can help you to create data transparency, drive better business decisions, and keep your teams connected.

Make sure to browse all of our partners by desired business outcome today, and reach out to your Bullhorn contact with any questions you have! 

 


Subscribe to the Customer Blog

Subscribe for trends, tips, and insights delivered straight to your inbox.