As organisations scramble to secure the best data for making people-related decisions, a talent intelligence sector pioneer foresees a future in which all analytics-related functions centred on people are merged into a single workforce intelligence organisation.

Currently, a variety of analytics functions operate within many organisations, and “it gets messy fast”, said Toby Culshaw (above), vice president strategy for talent intelligence at US-led data firm Lightcast. While ‘people analytics’ have focused primarily on internal research and data, by contrast, ‘intelligence’ typically refers to external data around jobs, skills, competitors and market locations within the ‘talent ecosystem’.

“So, whether you’re in people analytics, talent intelligence, strategic workforce planning, workforce planning, talent acquisition analytics, or recruitment marketing analytics… effectively, all of us are trying to scramble and find the future,” Culshaw said. “I think eventually we’ll merge into one workforce intelligence organisation. But at the moment [we’re in] that phase of how do we play nicely together?”

Culshaw recently joined Lightcast after a five-year stint at Amazon. Previously, he led talent intelligence at Philips. He was speaking in an hour-long webinar hosted by Lightcast in April, interviewed by his new boss, William Sims, the company’s senior vice president for professional services.

The world of talent intelligence has taken a beating in the last 18 months, experiencing many lost jobs throughout the recruitment and talent profession, Culshaw acknowledged. At the same time, demand for talent intelligence capability is high and rising, he said. In his new role, he said, he hopes to be involved with building technology support to increase organisations’ talent intelligence capabilities in dashboard self-service, for instance.

“I think we can build out a whole series of very scalable, very easily digestible data analytics and insights products,” he said. “I think there’s a whole raft of bundled services that are super interesting… something I’m thinking about calling ‘TI in a box’.”

This ‘off the shelf’ product would be especially valuable to small teams with limited resources, he said.

Image credit | Jack Aldridge Photography