Many executive talent teams invest significant resources to keep their data updated but still find it less than helpful in prompting action. In this post, we’ll explain why visualizing your data is the best way to take advantage of data clean-up efforts, and how dashboards maximize impact. 

Why Policing Data Quality Only Gets You So Far 

Legacy CRM software takes a significant investment to maintain data integrity. There are a few reasons for this. First, it’s not uncommon for teams to store data in multiple systems, and depending on how easy or difficult integrations or exporting and importing can be, this can be a major blocker to centralizing information in one place. Second, once you manage to get data into a CRM, it becomes outdated as soon as it is entered.

Teams that track large amounts of information or are particular about how data gets entered add complexity to this process, which adds time. Finally, teams are not immune to turnover, and more people in a system means more opportunities to input data in potentially different ways.

To combat these factors, talent teams often enforce strict data entry procedures, partner with external vendors, or hire additional staff to ensure data stays updated.

All of these measures to perfect the talent data within your CRM are helpful, but even after significant investment, your data isn’t fully actionable until you can properly visualize it. 

Shifting Away From a “Search-First” Model

Let’s say you have a unicorn talent team that meticulously tracks 12 data points on every executive you engage with over time. When you get a request from a client looking for a specific CEO candidate with a background in fintech who has successfully scaled a company from 100 million to 250 million in revenue, you’ll likely search within your CRM for some combination of these inputs:

  • Title: CEO, Chief Executive Officer
  • Industry: Fintech, Financial Technology
  • Custom tags: 100 million, 200 million, 250 million 


This is the “search-first” model of leveraging your CRM. You search for specific criteria associated with the client’s requested search strategy. 

If you’ve policed your data quality perfectly and every contact in your database has custom revenue tags, and an associated industry tag, you might surface 14 candidates.

Is that the right number of executives out of your total database size of 200? How can you tell? 

At this point in the search process, most teams will engage in extra work to validate whatever search return comes back. If the number of candidates feels low, executive talent leaders might share the list internally and ask key stakeholders: Who else do we know in FinTech? Didn’t Partner A speak to someone in that space recently? Did we track that? Is that person on this list? 

Often, there is more institutional knowledge lurking outside of the CRM. 

Continuing with our hypothetical scenario, let’s assume you uncover four more candidates who were missing from your database, bumping your candidate list up to 20. That’s a 25% increase–a major win! 


What if you could go even further simply by understanding your talent data better?

That’s where visualization comes in. 

How Visualizations of Talent Data Maximize Network Potential 

Visualizing the talent data contained within your CRM helps you better understand its structure. Dashboards with charts and images highlight patterns and trends you can use to direct future initiatives or demonstrate the impact of your team’s work. 

When you view your data in a typical list view in Excel, with row after row of executive talent, it’s hard to make sense of any meaningful information. Dashboards allow you to visualize how many executives you have across different functions, sectors, or tenure. Yes, you could find this information in a spreadsheet, but as soon as you add another executive to your database, you’re committing to re-doing that work. 

When you get a request for a CEO with FinTech experience, looking at a dashboard first lets you see how many CEOs you have across your network and how many FinTech leaders are represented, but it also expands the aperture allowing you to see more creative approaches to a search strategy that could be more effective at placing the right candidate.

For example, if you’re well connected to a large pool of CROs with more than 4 years of experience, you might reach out to catch up and see what new opportunities they’re open to in the near term. Maybe some of them are even a fit for a CEO role. If you don’t have many executive candidates with FinTech experience, and notice the largest group of candidates all have SaaS experience, you can unlock new opportunities within your existing network, without expanding your network mid-search.

CRMs Are Built for Search, Not Talent Networks 

Most CRMs are designed to generate lists in .csv or Excel file formats. These lists are helpful to a degree–they allow you to process large amounts of data and aggregate multiple sources into a single view and produce graphs, charts, and pivot tables to analyze and explain trends. 

The downside is how much time it takes to manipulate the data into the right format, followed by the need to repeat this work every time data changes. This is why many executive talent leaders bemoan being “stuck in spreadsheets.”  

This is especially true for executive talent leaders who only spend a small percentage of their time actually running searches. According to the latest survey results, only 20% of talent partners reported regularly executing executive searches for portfolio companies. When that’s the case, the ability to export lists of candidates becomes even less useful.

Data visualizations that sync to your CRM data so they automatically update based on your team’s activity in the system prompt action that lists simply can’t provide.

They can highlight critical gaps where your team should spend more time engaging with potential candidates or subject matter experts in new sectors or at different experience levels or show you trends like the most successful sourcing methods for new executive talent.

Conclusion

When you use your talent CRM with a “search-first” model, you only surface candidates who meet a narrow criteria range, even if you have perfect data (which virtually no team does). When you can visualize your data through a connected dashboard, you can see more possibilities at the outset for potential candidates to place in new roles, or gaps in your network you’d like to fill. This increases your network potential exponentially to maximize your team’s investment in data cleanup.