Written by In order to be successful, businesses should always be asking themselves, “What can we be doing better? What can we be doing differently?” If you find that your current employer doesn’t think that way – run for the hills! A stagnant culture and overwhelming sense of complacency means that the business isn’t ready for the future. For those that do drive forward with vigor, analytics should be assessed on a regular basis.
Analytics can be implemented and observed for nearly every business function including sales, marketing, manufacturing, and communications. In today’s blog post, we are going to focus on subsets on geographic analytics and social media analytics to drive talent acquisition efforts and to enhance an overall brand. To root these learnings into something a bit more interesting, I’ve decided to create a case study using one of my previous employers to show you how location analytics and social media hyperlink analytics can help you create better business decisions and help guide your strategy. Let’s get started!
Finding New Grad Talent
iCIMS is a SaaS Talent Acquisition company located in Holmdel, NJ. Their business is dynamic, forward-thinking, and focused on helping clients use their software to locate and retain top talent across the country. iCIMS has a great internship program and university relations team. To secure talent for their internship program, as well as for new full-time hires, their team travels to various colleges and universities to drum up awareness and accumulate applicants.
Retention from their internship program seems to be rather high. I, myself, was a contractor for a half a year after my internship and saw many people in my class being offered positions. Although I cannot say how their hiring practices have evolved, what I do know is that their internship program still holds strong. To demonstrate the value of location analytics, I decided to see how iCIMS’ university recruiting team might leverage Google Fusion tables to help them make sense of their data so that they hire the best talent for their summer internship program.
I first began my exercise by selecting some of the most popular (and renowned) colleges/universities in New Jersey. From there, I delineated whether or not these institutions were public or private, their tuition cost, the average SAT score of the students, if there were alumni from that school working at iCIMS already, and if so, how many. This data can be viewed in my Google Sheets document. By entering this spreadsheet into Google Fusion Tables, I was able to toggle the functions and determine where the recruiting team should focus their efforts on.
As iCIMS is looking for top talent, they should be looking for a school whose students score between 1200 – 1580 on the SATs. We know that having alumni working at iCIMS is a big plus, but we want to make sure there are enough of them to make an impact. Schools who have between 10 – 150 alumni working at iCIMS will be considered as a priority choice. Lastly, we want to only recruit at public institutions because it is easier to coordinate events and we like the fact that public institutions are heavily focused on giving back to the local communities and businesses.
After toggling all of these specifications on the Google Fusion Table tool, 4 schools were reported as the locations where the iCIMS University Recruiting team will get the best and most talent for their efforts. You can view the findings here. At the top of the pack was Rutgers University, this school is the alma mater of around 150 of their current employees and boasted the highest average SAT score. In second place was NJIT, with the second highest SAT average and around 22 current alumni employees. The third was Rowan University, with a slightly lower SAT average score but with the same amount of current iCIMS employees as NJIT. In fourth, was my alma mater TCNJ. With a slightly lower average SAT score and 30 current employees, TCNJ could arguably be tied with Rowan – but to make things simpler, we will let that one go.
As we can see from the results of this exercise, iCIMS can now understand where they should put the most boots on the ground during career fairs and where they get the most quality full-time hires from. Location analytics has now made their jobs simpler and more focused – hopefully leading them to make wiser choices when hiring for next summer.
Identifying Influencer Talent
Now that iCIMS has identified a way to funnel fresh graduate talent into their doors using location analytics, they need to focus on strengthening their brand so that competitors and experts within the field turn a watchful eye towards them. One of the most effective ways to do so is implementing an influencer strategy. Influencers are people within or outside of your company that act as a spokesperson for your service, product, or overall business. The in-links and out-links an influencer supports will drastically influence your hyperlink analytics. By leveraging an influencer’s audience, your company will be able to tell which pieces of content is working and which ones are not. The clicks garnered from hyperlink analytics can also positively affect your SEO.
By using the Twitter Network Visualization Analytics Tool, Mentionmapp, we can potentially identify an influencer for iCIMS by looking at hashtags, keywords, mentions, and content interactions. If we look at the above Mentionmapp, we can see that hashtags like #Recruiting and those related to their external events are heavily correlated to their account. The blue account callouts show users who interact frequently with their content. After looking a bit closer, only two users are actual people the rest are companies. Because an influencer is usually a singular person, only @elaineorler and @mdiamondapp are left.
Upon further investigation, @mdiamondapp is neither an HR nor Talent Acquisition expert but rather a journalist for the local area. Because iCIMS is a newer (and larger) tech company in the area, it makes sense that he would want to stay connected with the business by following and retweeting their content. That leaves us with @elaineorler, could she be our influencer? Unfortunately not. If we look at her profile on Twitter and LinkedIn, we can see that Elaine is the CEO and co-founder of a competitor. It wouldn’t make sense for her to be a spokesperson for us simply because it would be a conflict of interest for both businesses. So where do we go from here?
If we look at the accounts related to Elaine’s we can see the name @jeanneachille attached to her in the Mentionmapp. In the above map, we can see which hashtags are closely correlated to Jeanne on Twitter and who taps into her content. We like the fact that #HRTech and #HR are popping up because those two hashtags really define iCIMS’ business. We also can appreciate the diversity in Jeanne’s following from media sites (@nytimes), to family (@katieachille), to HR businesses (@grokkerinc & @firstadvantage), to other Twitter influencers (@mattcharney).
The mix here is healthy and strong. Looking at her LinkedIn profile, she seems to act as a key opinion leader in the HR space and champions diversity/inclusion, women in technology, and has a love for culture. Another plus is that she is currently located in Red Bank, New Jersey – only a 25-minute drive to iCIMS HQ location in Holmdel. Clearly, pursuing her as an influencer, or at least a keynote speaker for one of their events, is a smart idea.
Wrapping it Up, Rolling it Out
As we can see from all of the information above, iCIMS could be enhancing their strategic talent acquisition efforts and strengthening their brand presence by using analytics. By using location analytics they can pinpoint the best young talent. By using hyperlink analytics with the help of a newly identified influencer, they can strengthen their brand presence as well as stir up interest in the communities of HR and Talent Acquisition experts.
To make sure that employees’ efforts do not go to waste, it is wise to prepare some form of report and plan of action to present leadership. If all goes well, stakeholders/team members will be able to use these findings and continue to leverage various forms of analytics to bolster their overall business strategy.
Alex Piwtoratsky. 