10 Helpful Ways Predictive Analytics Can Grow Your Staffing Agency

Predictive analytics is a particular category of the broader data analytics field that aims to predict future outcomes based on data and analytics trends and techniques. These techniques include machine learning, statistical modelling, and more. In the staffing agency environment, predictive analytics can generate accurate future insights that promote business growth and aid in the development of sustainable long-term staffing strategies.

Businesses can use past and current data and HR predictive analytics models as tools to forecast behaviours and trends days, weeks, years, and even decades into the future. A vast range of businesses and organisations now use predictive analytics to benefit their operations. According to a Zion Market Research Report from 2017, experts expect the global market to reach over $10.95 billion in value by 2022, growing at a compound annual growth rate of roughly 21% between 2016 and 2022.

The recruiting industry has gone through significant changes over the past few years, especially in light of the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. The face of business operations and staffing requirements have changed for good.

New technologies and technologically informed hiring strategies have certainly played their part in these changes too. Here is how social expertise, innovation, and predictive analytics will shape the growth of staffing agencies in the future.

The Benefits of Predictive Analytics for Staffing

Are you looking to learn why and how to use predictive analytics in HR? Predictive analytics has a wide range of immediate and long-term benefits for the staffing industry, including the creation of:

1. More Accurate and Reliable Forecasting Processes

Predictive analytics makes forecasting into the future more reliable, accurate, and cost-effective than past tools. It can assist staffing agencies in identifying key ways to reduce operational costs, earn more money, and improve their staffing processes using real-world data.

2. More Effective Recruitment Campaigns

Staffing agencies need to optimise their recruitment and advertising campaigns with HR predictive analytics. In doing so, they can generate more applicant responses, attract more talent, and nurture and retain their most valuable employees.

Effective recruitment campaigns also ensure that staffing agencies can identify the best recruits to fill positions in their clients’ organisations, ensuring more sustainable sources of income and steadier client bases over time.

3. Processes that Accurately Detect and Halt Criminal Activities

Staffing agencies can use predictive analytics to detect and halt fraudulent and criminal activities before severe damage occurs. They can use these tools to study user actions and behaviours and identify potentially suspicious activities, including cyber-attacks and corporate spying.

4. Accurate Forecasts of Employee Satisfaction and Turnover

Predictive tools can assist staffing agencies to stay ahead of changing job markets and hiring trends and gauge satisfaction levels within their teams. Furthermore, they can predict how their processes, policies, and guidelines may impact employee satisfaction, productivity, and turnover rates in the future using machine learning-based systems.

5. Strategies to Minimise Employee Turnover

Employee turnover is a huge, expensive, and constant challenge for businesses of all shapes and sizes. Predictive analytics can help prevent this issue by analysing pay range, inclusion and diversity, promotions, and individual growth to identify workers who are most likely to leave their places of employment.

Businesses can use this data to identify strategies to retain these employees and effectively minimise employee turnover.

10 Ways that Predictive Analytics Can Grow Your Staffing Agency

Predictive analytics can handle many of the time-consuming manual aspects of the staffing process. It frees up staffing professionals to pursue higher-level tasks, like in-person interviews, essential decision-making responsibilities, and more.

We’ve unpacked ten ways in which HR predictive analytics can help a staffing agency to grow.

1. Locating Talent for Clients

You can instruct predictive analytics tools to be programmed with data on employee life cycles, behaviour, attrition, productivity, and engagement, allowing you to search automatically for ideal employee models. The tools scan all available sources, discovering talent that may have been overlooked in the past.

The more you use these tools, the better they work. They learn from their data histories of hired candidates that display the best productivity and retention to optimise the future hiring process.

2. Improving Job Postings

Predictive analytics uses industry, location, occupation, and organisation requirements to create concise job postings targeting your ideal talent pools. It leads to improved responses from suitable candidates and fewer responses from under-qualified professionals.

3. Identification of Ideal Job Posting Platforms

This software can pinpoint the best media to reach your agency’s ideal target audience and eliminate the platforms with substandard ROIs.

For example, an agency may focus its recruiting budget on online job boards, social media, or professional networks, based on its hiring position and which platforms produced the most successful candidates in the past.

4. Increasing Diversity in Hires

Automated tools are fuelled purely by data. As such, they create a hiring process that is completely impartial and unbiased. They enable your agency to seek candidates in places you hadn’t considered in the past, drawing from a wider talent pool and selecting candidates based on their suitability for the roles for which they apply.

5. Effectively Screening and Ranking Resumes

In the past, HR teams spent hour after hour manually screening and ranking resumes. Predictive analytics can perform the same task in minutes—presenting staffing professionals with a list of high-quality candidates that have been accurately pre-screened for suitability.

6. Ensuring More Rapid Hires

According to research from Glassdoor, it takes an average of 23 days — almost an entire calendar month — to acquire a single new hire when completing the hiring process manually. Adding HR predictive analytics to your agency’s arsenal streamlines the candidate selection process and enables you to hire your clients more quickly and efficiently.

Reducing the length of the average hiring process will reduce your clients’ advertising costs and increase the likelihood of you retaining those clients as a result.

7. Minimising Hiring-Related Risks

Staffing agencies and HR teams can use predictive analytics tools in forecasting which employees require additional training, the attention of management, and more. By predicting potentially harmful situations and managing them correctly, agencies can reduce risks, the potential of legal issues, and unnecessary expenses for their clients.

8. Developing the Efficacy of Line Managers

A significant percentage of employees who leave their jobs do so because of issues with their managers. Logically, then, the efficacy of line managers is a crucial predictor of employee attrition. Predictive analytics can assess the attributes of line managers that prompt employees to leave and past workers’ performance ratings, feedback, habits, levels, and tenure.

You can measure these factors against managers’ profiles to provide data on which actions of past managers caused employees to leave. Agencies can then design interventions to ensure that employees and leaders are appropriately matched and that you train managers to reduce the likelihood of high staff turnover.

9. Improving Performance Review Quality

Performance reviews are notoriously stressful for managers and employees alike. Analytics tools and sentiment analysis can provide real-time feedback that informs employees of what they can do to improve their performance at any given time.

These tools can give staffing agencies actionable insights into employee performances, minimise inefficiencies, and predict which future employee productivity challenges can be resolved here and now.

10. Predicting Development and Learning Requirements

Predictive analytics can play a significant role in employee performance when used in the correct settings. It can act as an agency’s ‘conscience’ by supplying data that helps to assess all the skills needed for an organisation to thrive and grow in the future.

Every hiring organisation needs to understand the skill sets of its current employees to design effective development strategies that will meet its future needs. The needs of businesses in 2022 will likely look vastly different from the needs of the same organisations in 2030.

HR predictive analytics tools assess workforce inefficiencies and employee skillset gaps to identify the skills and development tools that individual hires will need to meet their new employers’ needs. Additionally, the technology enables agencies to extract real-time data to see how hires are progressing towards the skilled state they need to reach to perform optimally in their positions.

Agencies can use employee data alongside their clients’ industry and financial data to predict the likely position an organisation will find itself in if it continues on its current trajectory with the skill set it has at present. Agencies can then make more informed decisions on employee training and development suggestions to ensure that their clients know how to upskill their hires in a way that best serves their long-term organisational goals.

The Bottom Line

Predictive analytics can be a hugely effective tool for growing staffing agencies, improving the quality of their hiring processes, and assisting them in retaining big-ticket clients in the long run. It’s essential to bear in mind that the quality, privacy, and security of the data used to program analytical tools need to be kept safe at all times.

We recommend that agencies phase in new analytics tools, using restricted first steps to use only the data that they know is accurate. Over time, they can expand their usable data sets and benefit from a more efficient recruiting process that helps their businesses and their clients alike.