Gild sharpens its hiring focus with new BI tool

Following its release last month of a generalized recruiting platform, on Monday Gild rolled out a new BI component that adds new reporting, analytics and graphical capabilities.

Now a part of the Gild Platform, the new Business Intelligence for Hiring tool aims to eliminate the need for external BI products by applying predictive analytics to every stage of the hiring process.

With personalized dashboards that can be custom fitted to each hiring role, the tool automatically gathers data into graphical reports that can be tailored specifically for the audience at hand. CEOs, for example, can see the return on investment of each hiring expense and benchmark those numbers against competitors' results, while hiring managers can uncover data such as which sources produce the best candidates or where recruiting campaigns are most successful.

Wizards are available to help guide report creation, and data is refreshed automatically. In addition to offering a library of reports that can be customized through a drag-and-drop interface, the new product allows savvy users to write their own queries and use Gild's integrated development environment for integration with third-party tools such as onboarding applications. A new graphing tool provides more sophisticated visualizations than were available through the Grid Platform previously.

Gild's Business Intelligence for Hiring is now available as part of the Gild Platform, which offers recruiting functions including applicant tracking, managing potential candidates, job postings and automated interview scheduling along with integrated recommendation systems.

Many vendors of human capital management (HCM) software are "going the way of embedded business intelligence these days," said analyst Frank Scavo, president of Computer Economics.

Workday, for example, has an entire analytics solution that is embedded with its HCM and financial applications, Scavo noted.

While such embedded tools may not be as powerful or as fully featured as those offered by pure-play analytics vendors, they make up for this by optimizing the solution for their application and delivering the analytics in the context of the business process.

"Many organizations may find that a combination of general-purpose tools and embedded analytics gives them the best of both worlds," Scavo said.