We recently launched our talent research brand Luminos and in our first ‘Team Talk’ feature we looked at the rationale behind the brand and our strapline ‘powered by data, proven by people’, developed in partnership with our marketing friends at Engage Comms.

My fellow founding director Lee Parker explained: “Research is of course a lot about data, but we know that the value for our clients has always been in the way that we interpret that data and provide them with the “so what?” that we so often talk about. The human aspect of what we do is also vital. Harnessing real time feedback from real people and having the skills to ask the right questions to gain the insight our clients need. No automated system or AI tool will ever replace this. We take this combined data and human-led approach and clarify the complex, ultimately allowing our clients to make better people-based business decisions.”

When Lee and I first started working together in the talent research space almost 15 years ago, most of the information that “powered” talent research was gleaned from telephone conversations alone (showing our age!) The internet was very different back then and, as a result, the way in which we delivered projects was different and specifically how we sourced the information we needed to complete assignments and provide insight that informed our clients strategies.

This methodology has of course evolved over time, with the huge amount of information now available at our fingertips online, including of course the introduction of Artificial Intelligence (AI) which raises questions around the role of human input into data gathering altogether.

We would argue that new technologies and automation of some methodologies has transformed the way that we deliver projects for the better, with the human element being just as important as it always was. We have always maintained our approach to being creative about project delivery and finding information through various sources, but we now have to be cleverer about how we collect, interpret and use the huge amount of data available.

Our projects often start with mining this data online to give us a benchmark but this is then ‘proven’ through intelligence gathering conversations, often with hard-to-reach candidates, to verify the key trends and uncover the ‘hidden’ gems of insight to provide a fuller more detailed picture.

The human aspect of our approach also helps us with the “so what?” which, as Lee mentioned above, is a critical part of what we do. Rich data is valuable, but we pride ourselves on analysing it in a way that is relevant to the context of the challenges our clients face. This combined approach results in the high quality, outcomes-focused solutions that our clients need to inform their people based business decisions.

A great example of this in practice is our salary and reward benchmarking solution. There is a huge amount of data online (both freely available and paid for) around salary information and, while it is a good indicator, it isn’t always accurate and can often be based on advertised salaries, which we know doesn’t provide the real picture. We use this data as a starting point as it is also often useful to know what is advertised but then identify a range of relevant individuals who meet the brief of the role and reach out to them to have insightful, career-based conversations to understand their motivations. This gives us a better indication of not only their current salary but also salary expectations which online data would never provide.

We uncover insight into their drivers and aspirations to understand what would attract this talent to our clients’ organisations. In fact, we increasingly find that salary isn’t the main driver, which then helps our clients to think about how they can use our insight for more holistic attraction and retention strategies. We can also support the candidates by making introductions to help them progress their career, so there’s incentive in it for them to work with us. If we didn’t have relationship building skills and were just ‘data geeks’, we wouldn’t be able to add half as much value to our clients and this is something that AI will never replace.

By Natalie Douglass, Founding Director, Luminos. 

Interested in finding out more about our approach and how it could support your organisation? Get in touch, we’d love to work with you