9 Ways Big Data Helps HR Improve Outcomes

For years, big data efforts have touched business functions from marketing to accounting. Now, HR pros are becoming the new data geeks because they’re seeing how big data can help improve HR outcomes.

How’s that possible?

When analytics is applied to HR data, you get people analytics. People analytics enables you to take big data a step further by giving you the power to see past the what…to why it’s happening…and how to fix it.

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Better, more accurate HR decisions

People analytics can help HR solve business challenges with more efficiency and accuracy. Here are nine ways big data can help improve HR initiatives:

1. Customize “best practices”. People analytics helps you understand that elusive “why?” behind the numbers. So you can pinpoint actions that deliver the best return for specific roles and specific times.
2. Efficiently address critical HR issues. By analyzing HR and business data together, you can better predict risk, improve engagement and collaboration, analyze an employee’s flight risk, identify candidates for promotion, and more.
3. Optimize time to hire. Per position, know the optimal number of interviews it takes to increase your chance of making accurate hires, while keeping desirable candidates engaged throughout the process.
4. Spend resources efficiently. Analytics provides a comprehensive picture of a situation, so you can identify potential bottlenecks and the root cause of an issue. This helps you optimize results while saving time and other resources.
5. Identify diverse talent. Analytics helps you uncover hidden biases in your organization’s review and compensation structures. It can also shine a light on bottlenecks, areas that need more education, and opportunities to create a more cohesive company culture.
6. Improve retention. People analytics can not only identify causes of high turnover, but also predict how likely an employee is to become a flight risk. This may be especially valuable for reducing “regrettable losses”.
7. Promote fairly. People analytics can help HR identify top talent for promotion who might otherwise be overlooked. In turn, this will help retain valuable employees.
8. Predict worker performance. What if you knew which non-traditional skills are associated with success in your organization? And for each role? When you combine soft data with hard (quantitative) data, you can predict a candidate’s likelihood of success.
9. Better define roles and functions. Analytics also helps you answer questions about the work itself. Such as which projects should be done in-house or given to independent contractors.

Late adopters may lose out

Despite the potential advantages gained from people analytics, a Deloitte survey reports only 32 percent of companies feel somewhat ready for people analytics. And only eight percent believe they’re fully capable of developing predictive models.

This means companies that have advanced people analytics capabilities now can gain a significant competitive advantage.

It’s not far-reaching to predict that at some point, using big data in HR will not be an advantage. Instead, it’ll be a necessity just to keep pace with the competition. But don’t wait to take action. Because large companies plan to invest more into big data over the next few years. This will likely leave most companies scrambling for already scarce big data talent.

So if you don’t have an HR data analytics strategy in place yet, or you want to advance it to the next level, act now.

You can grab tips on building a data team, see use cases, and determine your data maturity level in Upwork’s free ebook, “Data: The New Language of HR“. The guide also provides creative ideas to help you find the big data talent you need.

Download your free HR and big data ebook >>

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