HR analytics and data are increasingly being recognized as the best way to bring aboard and maintain the best talent as well as when making the difficult decisions to off board talent. Meaningful data is giving HR managers firm guidelines on talent management to drive company success.
As HR is rapidly becoming a data-driven field, the biggest companies have the biggest appetites for metadata. For example, Microsoft acquired LinkedIn mostly for the enormous database of potential recruiting information it offers.
On the recruiting side more information than ever before is being accessed because of social media and a variety of cyber data-gathering applications.
Recruiting is now so data-driven that before an applicant even walks in the door he or she has been fully investigated on sites such as Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter. Data aggregation software sifts and refines all that data on each applicant in a matter of minutes, producing a concise analysis for the recruiter to refer to during the interview. “In other words,” says Brian Greenberg, CEO of TrueBlueLifeInsurance, “when you sit down with a recruiter the chances are good that they know more about your own personality and potential than you do!”
A variety of companies benchmark data on recruits to create tests and games; other organizations employ data to conglomerate candidates for group interviews to weed out those who don’t meet the company’s parameters and preferences.
Real and practical information about candidates is produced by special algorithms. Such calculations extract pertinent information from a bewildering mass of data that is beyond the ability of an HR manager to do by himself or herself. Keywords and scores help make this process quick and efficient.
Analytics in HR helps remove the ego factor that so often allows real talent to escape. HR is not about what pleases the recruiter; it’s about what is best for the company.
That being said, it is also important to remember that it takes talent and intuition to interpret the information presented by algorithms and heat maps; and that is something that only the human element can provide.
When it comes to making difficult decisions to exit talent, Mullin International, a global outplacement firm, has been tracking data for its clients for the past 5 years. Keith Mullin, CEO said, “The more our clients understand the effect of our services on their exiting employees and their brands, better decisions can be made on how to best direct valuable resources and measure success”.
If you are not investing in an integrated analytics capability within HR and creating a BigData solution about your own internal people and payroll, you’re going to fall behind. The companies that unlock some of the secrets of their own people performance will greatly outperform their peers.
