Data Trends in Human Resources

Candidate Targeting – As organizations work to attract talent in an increasingly competitive job market, the ability to target candidates’ profiles becomes highly differentiating. Organizations that have the ability to pull in social media data, combine it with recruiting priorities and assess candidates’ community impacts have an advantage at filling the funnel with proven team members with matching experience to open roles.

Benefits Analysis – Many organizations look to evaluate how effectively employees are using available benefits and the competitiveness of benefits packages against the job market. HR data can tell a strong story about both, helping HR teams understand what changes to make year over year to maximize their competitive abilities to attract talent. This data further enables HR and benefits teams to target their internal training and campaigns to ensure employees are maximizing the benefits available to them through awareness and reminders to take advantage of specific benefits.

Learning & Development Curriculum Planning – Many organizations look to create L&D recommendations for employees with the common focus being on courses defined by role. Moving beyond, many organizations are looking to analyze how staff take training, looking at when and the scores from specific tests of knowledge to optimize future curriculum based on organizational needs.

Churn Prediction – Employee churn can be a large cost for an organization, hard costs associated with recruiting and training and the soft cost imposed by rework and work slow downs. Organizations are looking for new ways to understand employee engagement, identify those at high risk of churn and enable managers to engage in appropriate ways to understand the employee’s needs, communicate career paths and work to provide opportunities the employee many not have been aware of.

Moving beyond 9-box – Traditional approaches, including the 9-box, measure an employee’s impact and potential. But these are a point in time evaluation by a single manager with input from working peers. The ability to move beyond and continually measure the impact of individuals and teams brings new visibility to managers to intervene to address performance issues, promote those with the highest potential and restructure teams to meet changing business needs.

Governance across HR Information Systems – HR data brings a unique set of requirements for analysis, appropriate use and internal sharing amongst teams. Your HR data journey should begin with organizational agreement on how to leverage data, how to identify employees for analysis and intervention, and what data must be collected to ensure uniformity in analysis and reporting.

Systems Integration – Once you have established what data is collected for employees, and how that data is modeled and appropriately used, you can focus on developing integration roadmaps for the systems supporting different aspects of HR needs. This includes employee management, payroll, benefits administration, learning & development and employee engagement & collaboration tools. Unified integration with free flow of data between these systems is critical to ensuring a positive experience by employees throughout their journey from candidate to employee and important for the HR analytics team to provide uniform reporting across different systems & employee touch-points.

Embedded Analytics Capabilities – Each function within an organization should have their own capacity and skills for doing data analysis, ensuring they can prioritize data needs in alignment with organizational objectives. Shared analytics teams can lead to bottlenecks and mis-matched priority. As you embark on your HR data journey, building a focused team that knows the data, is aligned on priorities and has access to all necessary systems increases the value of the output and chance of success for big initiatives.