Data Strategy Enables Path to Data Monetization

Cielo, a leading HR recruiting firm, performs top-to-bottom recruiting for organizations across the globe, helping businesses with their hiring and retention needs. The firm prides themself at being more than just a recruiting entity, but rather immersing themselves into the culture of their clients and becoming them—customizing their recruitment strategy so that it aligns with each business’ goals.

In doing so, Cielo collects a lot of data—everything from applicant demographics and skills levels, compensation packages, benefits, HR processes, and much more. The firm primarily uses the data to track status of hires and open positions, which helps Cielo’s clients track their recruiting and hiring efforts, and it also helps Cielo understand which clients need assistance reaching their goals.

Cielo’s parent company, Permira—a private equity firm, saw an opportunity to do more with the data that was already being collected. They wanted to create products that provided insights for Cielo’s clients that would help them improve their recruiting and hiring processes. They knew Cielo’s datasets had the potential to be more valuable for their customers and be more lucrative to Cielo, but the firm didn’t know where to start and how exactly to monetize it. 

Starting with A Data Assessment to Build a Data Strategy for Data Monetization

A data strategy assessment is an in-depth evaluation of technology, processes, and people—and Cielo needed to gain a better understanding of all three and where they needed to make changes before moving forward with data monetization initiatives.

We reviewed Cielo’s current technology stack and business processes and interviewed stakeholders to understand specific pain points and where the company wanted to see improvements in both the short and long term.

Because Cielo typically works in their customers’ environment, it is difficult to get a holistic view across customers to view trends, and they can’t segment data by various dimensions that would help them gain more insights, such as industry, geography, and company size. Additionally, Cielo’s own technology stack consists of multiple business intelligence (BI) tools—including SharePoint and Excel—where data is being manually manipulated for operational reporting.

Given these pain points, our first recommendation was to modernize their data architecture—this will allow the firm to roll-up data across clients and verticals and provide a more modern reporting experience to their customers. It will also allow Cielo to aggregate their data for forecasting, industry trends, and benchmarks, and initiate the process of monetizing the company’s data.

A modern data architecture is one that takes into consideration flexibility and scalability. This conceptual modern data architecture represents all stages of the data lifecycle, from original data source to reporting and analytics. Modern technologies can be used at each stage to get the most value from your data.

Since Cielo already had a python-based framework, we suggested they combine that with Snowflake, which will serve as their data warehouse for all of their client data, and implement Looker for their BI tool. This will support operational and analytical efforts within Cielo’s long-term vision. Additionally, Snowflake has a data marketplace which enables data monetization, so when Cielo is ready to move toward that path, it will be an easy place to list their data products.

We also recommended they clearly define key roles and tasks within their data engineering and data analytics departments and consider a data governance committee.

Once we created the plan for the firm’s data architecture, we were able to focus on identifying uses case for data monetization and build a data strategy roadmap to allow Cielo to monetize its data.

Data Strategy Roadmap Marks Clear Goals and Sets Path to Data Monetization

With a modern data architecture in place that allows them to easily integrate their own data and additional external data sources, Cielo can create meaningful and desired products for their clients. They can also expand to a larger audience, allowing them to add additional revenue streams. The data product Cielo envisions will provide their customers with insights into:

• Hiring metrics to help predict the lead time to hire a candidate.
• Salary metrics to help ensure offers are in line with the current market and that they’re not over- or underpaying potential hires.
• Skill level metrics—both technical and soft skills—to help clients identify where they should be looking to fill positions and what specifically they should be looking for.
• Diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) metrics to help clients understand how to diversify within their organization.

According to McKinsey & Company survey, data and analytics are changing the way business is done—as well as the nature of competition—in ways such as launching new data monetization products, including analytics services. Photo credit: McKinsey & Company

Cielo can provide these insights through forecasting and benchmarking reports, dashboards, raw data, or by providing consulting services for their clients. These products allow Cielo’s customers to improve their overall recruiting and hiring processes, ensuring the right people are put in the right roles.

Start With a Business Goal and Assess How You Can Get There

A data strategy is the foundation to leveraging data as an asset, but before you can build that foundation, you need to assess what you have—technology, process, and people—and what you need to change or improve on. A data assessment offers a streamlined approach to this process and can lead you to the path of business transformation—whether you’re looking to achieve a business goal or address a business challenge.