Talent Intelligence
Buyer’s Guide & ROI Framework

By itself, AI is not your biggest workforce risk. Your biggest risk is going into the AI era with a talent strategy that can’t keep up with the speed of change.

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As we enter an AI intensive decade, workforce strategy has become a board level risk, and a material P&L lever. Here’s how analysts frame the problem:

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1. Skills risk is now a board level issue.‍
   
   • A 2024 Gartner survey of HR leaders found that 41% say their workforce lacks required skills, and 62% see uncertainty around future skills as a significant risk to the business. Gartner‍
   • ‍Another Gartner study found that 74% of HR leaders believe most organizations are moving to a skills based talent management approach, yet only 2% say that approach is applied across all talent processes, a clear execution gap.
     

2. Skills & experience gaps are compounding
   
   • Deloitte’s 2025 Human Capital Trends research highlights that most leaders see new hires arriving underprepared and argues that organizations must pivot toward skills and potential based hiring to close experience gaps. Deloitte
   • McKinsey’s work on reskilling emphasizes that deciding which skills to build requires a rigorous, empirical comparison between current skill supply and strategic business needs, intuition alone is no longer sufficient. McKinsey & Company
     

3. Skills mismatch has macroeconomic consequences.‍
   
   • Boston Consulting Group estimates that skills mismatch now affects roughly 1.3 billion people and acts as a 6% “tax” on global GDP through lost labor productivity. BCG Global

At the same time, generative AI is accelerating role redesign. McKinsey projects that by 2030, 3–14% of the global workforce, up to 375 million workers, may need to switch occupational categories because of automation. McKinsey & Company McKinsey & Company

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Yet most organizations are still early in the transition:

• In Gartner’s recent skills based talent management survey, 74% of HR leaders believe most organizations are moving to skills based approaches, but only about 2% say they’ve adopted a skills based model across all talent processes. Fast Company

• Deloitte’s 2025 Global Human Capital Trends study reports that 66% of managers and executives say recent hires are not fully prepared for their roles, with lack of experience cited as the primary issue. Deloitte

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This buyer’s guide is our point of view, shaped by our work with more than 270 enterprises, including 5 of the Fortune 10, and by the ROI frameworks our CEO, Vijay Swaminathan, has developed with CHROs, CFOs, and Heads of Talent Intelligence.  

When you evaluate platforms, you should expect a line of sight to financial impact in at least three value pools:

Operational Metrics with Direct Financial Impact: Faster, Smater, Better Hiring

Our ROI framework highlights several direct, measurable levers:  

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1. TimetoFill (TTF) reduction
   
   • Why it matters financially: Every unfilled role carries vacancy cost, which manifests as:
     
     • Lost revenue (for revenue-producing roles)
     • Reduced productivity
     • Delayed project delivery
     • Higher contractor/overtime spend
     • Increased burden on adjacent teams
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   • Draup TI Impact Levers:
     
     • TAM expansion uncovers larger, more qualified talent pools
     • Alternate locations reduce hiring friction and wage pressure
     • Mapping the precise current and future skills
     • Skills adjacency broadens candidate options
     • Internal mobility significantly shortens ramp time
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     Financial Formula (Revenue/Commercial Roles):
     Vacancy Cost Avoided = Δ in Average Days to Fill × Revenue per Employee per Day
     This metric alone often produces double-digit percentage ROI for TI in Year 1 for large enterprises.
     
     Narrative for Non-Revenue Roles: For non-revenue roles, faster hiring eliminates the hidden operational drag that accumulates when critical positions stay open. Shorter vacancy periods reduce overtime costs, prevent contractor backfill spend, maintain workflow continuity, and avoid project delays that ripple across teams. Together, these effects generate meaningful and measurable cost savings, often producing strong first-year ROI for Talent Intelligence, even in functions that do not generate revenue directly.
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2. Stakeholder Satisfaction → Lower Friction Costs and Faster Hiring Cycles
   Metric: NPS-style rating across hiring managers, HRBPs, recruiters, and business leaders.
   
   Why it matters financially: Higher speed, satisfaction, and confidence correlate to:
   
   • Fewer failed searches
   • Fewer repeated hiring cycles
   • Lower rework costs
   • Faster time-to-productivity
     
     Each “restart” of a search costs most enterprises $10K–$40K. (Draup observation) TI reduces this churn by making hiring clearer, faster, and more predictable.
     Financial Formula: Cost Savings = Reduction in Restarts x $25K average
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3. Reduced Agency Dependency → Immediate Cost Reduction
   Metric: % reduction in agency-supported roles.
   Financial Value: Avoided agency fees of $10K–$60K+ per hire in many industries.
   
   TI Contributions:
   
   • Better role clarity reduces “hard-to-fill” scenarios
   • Expanded TAM reduces the need for specialized agencies
   • Location intelligence avoids markets with high agency dependence
   • Internal mobility provides a no-agency alternative
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     This metric is especially valuable to Fortune 5000 companies, many of which spend millions of dollars annually on agencies.
     
     Snowflake Marketplace customers using our datasets report up to 50% faster talent acquisition and 60% reduction in talent costs, by combining global job postings, skills, and university data with their internal systems.

Strategic Metrics with Multi-dimensional Enterprise Value

These metrics illustrate how TI elevates enterprise-wide performance, not just talent acquisition efficiency.

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1. TAM Expansion + TTF Reduction → Revenue and Productivity Outcomes
   TAM (Total Addressable Talent Market) and TTF (Time to Fill) are two of the most financially meaningful levers TI can influence.
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   • TI expands viable hiring pathways by identifying:
     
     • Adjacent, transferable skills
     • Alternate geographies with stronger talent supply and lower cost
     • Competitor hiring intensity and pipeline visibility
     • Opportunities to redesign or right-size roles
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     This expanded TAM, combined with reduced TTF, produces measurable top-line and bottom-line impact.
     
     Revenue Impact Formula for revenue-generating roles: ‍
   • Revenue Captured = ΔTTF × Daily Revenue Contribution
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     Example: If TI reduces TTF by 15 days and each sales rep generates $4,000/day, then Revenue captured = 15 × 4,000 = $60,000 per hire. This is incremental value – not forecasted revenue – that would have been lost without TI.
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     Productivity Impact for Non-Revenue Roles: ‍
   • Productivity Continuity Value = ΔTTF x Fully Loaded Daily Cost

1. 
   Even though these roles do not directly produce revenue, reducing vacancy duration avoids significant operational drag. A non-revenue hire:
   
   • Enables critical functions (e.g., Finance, Compliance, Product)
   • Keeps project timelines on track
   • Prevents costly workflow delays and quality issues
   • Reduces dependency on contractors or temporary staff
   • Minimizes overtime burden on teams covering the gap
2. 
   Why This Matters
   By applying standardized, finance-aligned formulas across both revenue and non-revenue roles, Talent Intelligence provides leaders with a repeatable, quantifiable model for measuring real economic impact, turning hiring efficiency into enterprise value creation.
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2. Standardization of Hiring → Higher Operating Leverage
   Draup TI enables:
   
   • Dynamic job/skills architectures
   • Consistent competency models
   • Faster calibration between HR and business leaders
   • Fewer interview hours
   • Optimized recruiter workload
3. 
   Financial Impact:
   Average Hours Saved in Hiring × Number of Hires x Fully Loaded Cost per Hour
4. This drives structural efficiency gains across the talent ecosystem.
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4. Quality of Hire (QoH) and Retention Lift → Reduced Replacement Cost
   Quality of Hire reflects whether an organization is hiring the right talent; people who perform, stay, and grow. TI elevates QoH by improving the precision of every hiring decision.  
   
   QoH is measured through:
   
   • Early attrition probability
   • First-year performance
   • Promotion velocity and internal mobility
   • Manager satisfaction and role fit
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     Draup improves QoH by enabling skills-level precision, adjacency-based talent matching, and task-level validation of role requirements, dramatically increasing the likelihood of a successful, high-performing hire.
   • Why QoH Matters Financially
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     Poor QoH triggers expensive turnover. Replacement cost typically ranges from:
     
     • 50%–75% of annual compensation for most roles
     • 100%–200%+ for specialized or regulated positions (risk, actuarial, cybersecurity)
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     These costs include:
     
     • Lost productivity
     • Re-hiring and re-training expenses
     • Project disruption and rework
     • Increased burden on existing teams
       
       Even a small decrease in attrition, combined with a modest lift in productivity, produces significant enterprise-level savings.
       
       Financial Metric Example: ‍
       
       • Retention Lift Value = (Reduction in Replacement Hires × Replacement Cost per Role) ‍
       • Productivity Lift Value = (Productivity % Gain × Average Annual Compensation)
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     • Combined, these represent the total QoH financial impact.
       Bottom Line: Talent Intelligence strengthens enterprise talent density by ensuring the right skills, tasks, and roles are aligned from day one. This leads to higher performance, lower attrition, and substantially reduced replacement cost. This makes QoH a direct driver of enterprise value.
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5. Decision Influence → Quantified, Monetized Outcomes
   TI turns qualitative insights such as hiring manager satisfaction, business leader satisfaction, and recruiter confidence into financially measurable business value.
   
   Concrete examples from Draup customers:
   
   • Selecting a lower-cost and high-talent supply market resulted in multi-million-dollar TCO savings
   • Redesigning a role expanded the pipeline 4×, reducing search time by 6–10 weeks
   • Identifying internal candidates avoided unnecessary external searches  

Enterprise-level Value Pools Enabled by Draup

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Draup offers capabilities (task intelligence, automation insights, location modeling) that materially expand financial impact.

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1. Role Redesign and Automation Modeling → Labor Cost Optimization
   TI identifies:
   
   • Redundant tasks
   • Automation-ready tasks
   • Opportunities for consolidating roles
   • Future-state job architectures
2. 
   Financial Outcomes:
   
   • Reduced labor hours
   • Hiring avoidance
   • Redeployment to higher-value work
     
     Financial ROI = Reduction in Labor Hours + Redeployment Value
     Across Fortune 100 enterprises, this often produces tens of millions of dollars in annual impact.
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2. Location Footprint Optimization → Structural Cost Savings
   Using Draup data, enterprises identify:
   
   • Lower-cost hiring markets
   • More stable long-term talent ecosystems
   • Ways to avoid wage inflation and high attrition markets ‍
   • Financial Value: Sustained savings across compensation, retention, and hiring velocity
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3. Strategic Risk Reduction → Lower Operational and Regulatory Exposure
   TI provides early insight and surfaces risk in:
   
   • Critical roles (cyber, actuarial, underwriting, risk)
   • Supply-Demand mismatches: Ageing or shrinking talent pipelines
   • Automation-vulnerable roles
   • Geographic concentration and Attrition hotspots
   • Compliance staffing
4. These insights reduce financial, operational, and regulatory risk.

Customer Evidence: What Leading Enterprises Are Doing

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PayPal: Building a SkillsFocused Talent Intelligence Function

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PayPal uses our platform to align workforce strategy and talent acquisition with marketlevel skills and location data. The company’s Talent Intelligence team leverages our analytics to benchmark skills, map adjacencies, and track skill evolution across roles and functions.  

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As Sam Fletcher, former Head of Talent Intelligence at PayPal, puts it, “Draup’s Ecosystem feature significantly reduces our research time, allowing for quicker access to actionable talent insights…with everything consolidated under one platform.”  

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The impact: faster labor market research, a more dynamic understanding of skills supply, and greater capacity in the TI team to support strategic decisions, not just ad-hoc requests.

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Enterprises Scaling AIReady Workforces with Etter

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Across industries, customers are using Etter.ai to:

• Identify which roles and tasks are most affected by AI

• Quantify potential savings from automation vs redeployment

• Design AIready job descriptions and skills plans

• Build transformation roadmaps that are explainable to business leaders and regulators  

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Etter is built on the same multidimensional labor and market data that underpins our talent intelligence platform, spanning 1.5M+ companies, 850M+ professionals, 12K+ skills and 4M+ career paths, giving leaders a factbase to connect AI strategy with workforce reality.

Conclusion

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External research is unambiguous: skills mismatch and AI-driven disruption are imposing a real, measurable tax on organizations. BCG Global At the same time, most enterprises are only at the very beginning of their skills-based and AI-ready workforce journey. Fast Company

Talent Intelligence Is Now a Core Driver of Enterprise Value

Talent Intelligence has moved far beyond its historical role as an HR support function. In an environment defined by economic volatility, accelerated AI adoption, and intensifying talent constraints, TI now operates as a financial engine. It directly shapes an organization’s cost base, productivity trajectory, risk exposure, and long-term revenue capacity.

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Draup’s ROI framework introduces the rigor enterprises have been missing: a system that quantifies, with precision, the financial impact of every workforce decision. Through this model, leaders gain visibility into:

• Cost efficiencies unlocked
• Revenue accelerated by faster, smarter hiring
• Risk reduced through proactive talent planning
• Productivity and performance gains across the organization

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For CFOs, CHROs, CIOs, COOs, and business unit executives, Talent Intelligence is no longer optional. It is a strategic lever for enterprise performance, enabling organizations to allocate capital more effectively, deploy talent with greater accuracy, and build a workforce capable of winning in an AI-driven economy.

The future of TI is quantitative, financially grounded, task-aware, and deeply embedded into enterprise planning. The enterprises that embrace TI as a financial discipline, not merely a talent initiative, will define the next decade of competitive advantage.

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As you evaluate platforms, use this guide to separate reporting tools from true Talent Intelligence engines. Favor vendors who can:

• Operate on a global, trustworthy data foundation

• Model skills and tasks at the level where AI and automation decisions are made

• Integrate deeply with your planning, reskilling, and AI initiatives

• Stand shoulder-to-shoulder with your finance team in quantifying ROI

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Those are the capabilities that will determine which organizations turn today’s skills crisis into tomorrow’s competitive advantage and which simply watch the numbers move in the wrong direction.