Your company probably collects internal employee data to gain a detailed picture of the workforce, identify trends, improve administrative processes, and make data-driven decisions. However, external employee data collection can be just as eye-opening and beneficial.
What Is Employee Data Collection?
Employee data collection refers to gathering internal workforce information or related data from external sources. It can include employment details, job descriptions, salary data, benefits information, etc. Performance data and information from surveys (onboarding, engagement, and exit) can also provide valuable findings.
Collecting employee data raises the question of employee monitoring and privacy in the workplace. Therefore, you must be transparent about the information you gather (only upon consent) and how you use it. Ethics should always come first.
The same goes for external or alternative employee data. It must come from reliable sources that comply with data privacy rules and regulations.
Benefits of External Employee Data Collection
Many business-related platforms offer public employee data to help companies generate unique people intelligence insights. Here are the top benefits they provide.
Improving Talent Acquisition
Alternative employee data includes education details, skills, position, location, candidate experience, employment length, and other data points.
It can improve your talent acquisition strategies, helping you source top talent and allocate hires to the most suitable roles according to their skills and expertise.
Enhancing Recruitment
Data-driven recruitment is the best process for filling open positions without bias while increasing productivity and efficiency. In addition, it reduces hiring costs and creates a diverse and inclusive workplace.
Relevant, accurate, up-to-date employee data from alternative sources can facilitate such recruitment. This fuels your lead generation pipeline with an extensive list of qualified candidates.
Identifying Workforce Trends
Demographic, psychographic, and firmographic data can help you identify the latest workforce trends. Detecting patterns and actionable insights can help you understand what employees in your industry expect. You can address specific issues, ensure your workplace meets target employees’ needs, and attract more qualified candidates.
Another option is to forecast trends with predictive analytics tools. You can anticipate talent and skill gaps, accurately estimate recruitment costs for budget planning, and improve various HR metrics like time to fill, time to hire, first-year attrition, quality of hire, offer acceptance rate, and candidate experience.
Reducing Turnover Rates
Employee data can uncover reasons people leave their jobs, the average employment length, seasonal hiring dates, and other factors necessary for reducing turnover. It can show what increases and decreases productivity, overall performance, and other inputs and outputs. Moreover, it can help resolve the issues leading to costly churn and enable companies to retain top talent.
Generating Better Investment Signals
External employee data collection is ideal for tracking talent movement for investment opportunities. Firmographic data, connections, education, and professional experience show movement between companies and the latest trends for data-driven decisions.
Best Practices for Collecting Alternative Employee Data
Gathering alternative employee data requires thorough preparation, data compliance, and analytics to make sense of it and drive actionable insights. Here are the best practices to get started.
Assemble a Team for External Data Collection
Your data collection journey should start with putting together a dedicated team. This team should be responsible for identifying, sourcing, prioritizing, managing, and using alternative data. Moreover, it should consist of:
- Data scouts or strategists who will identify data sources and corporate enhancements new employee information can provide;
- Purchasing experts who will negotiate with data providers and manage contracts and licenses;
- Data reviewers who will assess the collection and use of new data sets to ensure they comply with data privacy laws;
- Architects and DevOps engineers who will develop a platform to integrate and manage data access;
- Data engineers who will convert data into usable information for analysis and interpretation; and
- Data scientists and analysts who will use analytical models to measure the data’s value in specific use cases.
Choose a Reliable Data Provider
Building a relationship with a credible alternative data provider like Coresignal is better than data harvesting and raw data acquisition. This is because you get structured data sets. You receive a broad data ecosystem of qualified, ready-to-use information under a single contract.
The best part about collaborating with data providers is that they regularly update their consumer and company data to provide the latest, accurate, correct, and complete records.
Develop a Flexible Data Architecture
Flexible, streamlined data architecture will help you determine the collection, storage, integration, governance, use, and management of newly acquired data. Assess your existing environment to understand how much data you will need, its incoming frequency, security, and integration with internal information. You will know how to adjust the data architecture, ensuring it supports all external sources, querying, ingestion, and analysis.
Do not forget about quality-assurance testing. Make it ongoing to ensure consistency by monitoring and identifying changes in quality to adapt algorithms or retrain machine learning models.
Conclusion
Alternative employee data collection is ideal for making data-driven decisions regarding talent acquisition, recruitment, hiring, onboarding, and retention. However, the process does not end with the steps above. They are only the tip of the iceberg that requires diving deeper to evaluate the data and discover its value.
Analyze it to uncover insights regarding talent intelligence. You will find the best candidates for specific positions and understand how to improve your business practices to attract top talent.
You will also make accurate talent predictions and forecasts for better business planning. Utilize predictive analytics tools to pinpoint potential issues, and discover opportunities before developing solutions and planning a laser-focused execution.
