5 Ways Analytics Can Transform Your Company’s HR

More and more companies are starting to get serious about HR analytics – and for good reason. Doing so can have a huge impact on the company’s workforce and bottom line.

“Organizations are entering a golden age of HR predictive analytics,” writes Dan Ring for TechTarget. “Companies are using (them) to identify the risk of top talent quitting their jobs, and prescribe ways to keep them, develop profiles of top salespeople, pinpoint the traits of the most productive workers and reduce bad hires.”

Here are five areas where HR analytics can make a huge difference.

Recruiting

“Recruitment channel analytics is the process of working out where your best employees come from and what recruitment channels are most effective,” writes Bernard Marr for Forbes.

Collecting and analyzing data about recruiting will allow you to examine return per employee and value added.

"Only about a third of U.S. companies report that they monitor whether their hiring practices lead to good employees; few of them do so carefully, and only a minority even track cost per hire and time to hire," writes Peter Cappelli for Harvard Business Review. 

Performance Management

Your employees are likely your biggest investment and asset. HR analytics can help you individually examine their performance.

New systems could replace outdated performance reviews, Marr writes. “With modern data-capture techniques, it is possible to analyze performance more holistically and less focused on specific parts of a job that might cause employees to skew their behavior.”

Leadership

“Poor leadership can cost your business time, money and damage your firm’s reputation,” Ivory writes. “Management analytics help you examine the various dimensions of your management team.”

Marr suggests using surveys, employee interviews and a study of your culture to look at how your managers are doing. “Make the data collection anonymous, so employees can really open up and provide useful information.”

Understanding Turnover

Fixing leadership issues and improving performance management are all good ways to hang onto your employees. But, some will leave anyway. Analytics can help you understand what’s happening, and what’s healthy.

“Historical employee churn can be identified through traditional indicators such as the employee satisfaction index, employee engagement level and staff advocacy score,” Marr writes. “Surveys and exit interviews are also useful tools.”

Employee Engagement

"To improve employee engagement, organizational leaders adopt a policy of making decisions based on empirical evidence generated by big data analysis," writes Sarah Daren in RTInsights. "Furthermore, executives promote an organizational culture where all employees and business unit leaders participate in making data-driven decisions."