In recent years, the scope of HR analytics offerings has developed fairly rapidly.
Companies can now take advantage of data analytics tools that provide a variety of metrics to help inform their hiring, staffing and other decisions.
Opportunities for success abound if they do. Big data use, according to Deloitte research, can help companies outperform their peers in retention, quality of hires and having a generally higher-ranked employment brand.
A number of companies seem to understand the tools’ promise. Forty-one percent say the main reason they implemented human capital management technology was to get analytics information, according to a study from Brandon Hall Group. Yet some aren’t fully utilizing the data.
Deloitte’s survey revealed that while three in four companies believe people analytics use is important, just 8 percent feel their organization is strongly positioned in the area.
Simply gathering information will do little good if there is no mechanism in place to assess and act on it.
If your organization isn’t sure it’s making the most of its data analytics tools — or doesn’t know what benefits people analytics would provide — the following examples may spark some ideas:
Identifying — and altering — hiring patterns
Google, according to its re:Work blog, was able to reduce its number of interviews after using HR analytics to determine it could predict with an 86 percent chance of accuracy that four would be enough to tell a candidate should be hired. Previously, they could end up having 12 interviews.
Assisting with employee management
New applications, according to Deloitte’s most recent Human Capital Trends report, examine performance online and send suggestions to managers, based on artificial intelligence, to encourage coaching.
Locating potential areas of improvement
Certain data analytics tools, according to Deloitte, can now analyze hourly labor within an organization to identify patterns of payroll leakage, such as overtime, to help companies enhance workforce management practices.
Predicting which workers are primed to leave
A flight risk score that one company, according to an article published in the Institute for Operations Research and Management Sciences’ Analytics magazine, correlated with employees has helped it retain workers. INFORMS reports the practice could save $300 million in costs associated with replacement and global productivity losses.
People analytics can help your organization better allot its budgetary funds; when you know what’s working — and what isn’t — you can build and support programs that will provide the most effective outcomes.
Your use of data analytics tools, however, needs to be carefully thought out. Big data use, for example, should happen early on in the hiring process, before interviews begin — during recruiting, to analyze traits that may suggest success in a role, according to Gallup research.
In some cases, HR analytics findings may lead to the need for more research. Consider Best Buy, which discovered a 0.1 percent increase in employee engagement prompts a more than $100,000 increase in one of its stores’ annual income, according to a Harvard Business Review article. The retailer changed its engagement survey schedule from annual to quarterly.
With more frequent feedback on how employees feel, an employer should be able to better gauge what policies and programs workers like, dislike, want or need — and be better prepared to take action to prevent future attrition issues.
For more on HR analytics use, view these items on ways big data can help with hiring, big data use in adding top candidates — and HR technology releases that may help you track and analyze information and otherwise improve operations.