The capability to capture along with successfully gather insights from their overall data has led several enterprises across the globe to make their processes even more efficient plus bolster their growth. Data analytics has to turn out to be the norm across functions such as Retail, Marketing, Operations as well as Finance. Nevertheless, a department as significant and as pervasive as Human Resource (HR) has very recently made a move towards data analytics. However, the rate of adoption rate is still quite low with the essential expertise missing in several organizations, but there is sufficient buzz across this region.

What exactly HR Analytics means?

Human Resource analytics is an application of refined data mining coupled with the techniques of business analytics of human resources data. In simple words, it is a method of recognizing the when, what, how, why & where of Human Resource functions that include training, recruitment, retention, performance measure as well as engagement.

HR Analytics or in other words People Analytics, Talent Analytics or else Workforce Analytics, empowers the HR Manager to go on top of their instincts, also enabling them to take decisions on the basis of hard-core available data.

Advantages of HR Analytics

A number of times a lot of data is required every so often, for such an analysis is already available within the organization, such as academic history, age, geography, past experience, training taken, performance assessments as well as several such data points. Now, all these internal information is combined with the external information in order to get an overall depiction. HR Analytics aids in placing all this data organized, combine it with relevant data available externally, also assisting the HR Managers to ask relevant questions so that they can end up taking better decisions.

For instance, below are a few questions for which HR Analytics helps in providing a solution:

  • Why is the best talent within the organization resigning at a greater rate than that of others?
  • Skilling the gaps within an organization and how to fill up those
  • Figuring out the cause behind a high turnover in a particular team
  • How to enhance the productivity of teams?
  • Foresee as well as manage the rate of attrition
  • Foresee the accurate talent to hire for a particular role
  • The efficiency of the employee orientation program
  • What motivates employees across all the gender, region, age, etc.?
  • Does the performance rating method really reveal the actual performance of an employee?
  • How to interest an even more assorted workforce?

Some of the prominent Players in the HR Analytics edge

According to a research conducted by Deloitte a few years ago shows that the market of HR Analytics software has augmented by more than 17% in the year 2013 and has now reached to approximately $5 billion in size. Key vendors like IBM, Oracle, SAP, and Workday compete with even big players like Talent Analytics, PeopleFluent, Visier, Saba and Cornerstone in order to provide the service of HR analytics software.

Furthermore, SAP provides Success Factors Workforce Analytics along with Success Factors Workforce Planning. They also aid in foreseeing retention as well as arranges for extensive modeling abilities for workforce planning.

IBM Kenexa Talent Analytics that is powered by Watson Analytics allows HR professionals to just type in what they require to perceive through their talent data and the results are revealed as an easy to interpret visualization.

Then, Saba’s Intelligent Talent Management solution that is based on cloud service utilizes machine learning in order to enhance the mode of hiring, developing, engaging as well as motivating the employees by HR professional. The result also arises with the predictive abilities to cut over the noise and highlight the most vital & relevant information.

HiQLabs makes use of public data, internal data of the company or else a combination of both of these for its predictive models.

Workday’s highly demanded HCM solution combines HR as well as Talent Management into a sole system-of-record to aid cost reduction, increase operative visibility plus prepare the organizations’ for forthcoming changes.

Several organizations who have already deployed HR Analytics have productively reaped its benefits. For instance:

Black Hill Corporation utilizes HR Analytics for Preventing a Huge Turnover Catastrophe

Black Hills Corporation, which is almost a 130-year-old energy conglomerate, has doubled its workforce to approximately 2,000 employees after an acquirement. Alike several energy companies, an assemblage of challenges such as an aged workforce, the requisite for dedicated skills and an extended timeline for getting employees to overall competence that has created a noteworthy talent threat. Actually, predictions displayed that, within 5 years, the firm might lose around 8,063 years of understanding from its workforce.

Thus, in order to prevent a huge turnover catastrophe, the organization used workforce analytics for analyzing that how many employees will retire every year, the category of workers required to substitute them as well as where those new employs were most probable to arise from. The outcome was a workforce arrangement summit that categorized as well as prioritized almost 89 action plans aimed to address the prospective talent deficiency.

In a nutshell, with the data-backed assessments becoming key for survival, ever more HR management software might probably have in-built analytics so as to aid managers to seek out answers of their questions. Nevertheless, HR Teams might also have to advance their number crunching abilities so that they can ask the right questions from their data.