Businesses strive to be data-driven to boost their operations and achieve better results across different departments. HR departments are among those that can benefit most from big data when making proper use of it.
However, any HR professional faces the challenge of using HR data for actual business impact instead of just being data-driven in words. Thus, here, we will discuss how to utilize web data and HR data analytics to implement procedures that make a difference in your organization.
What is data-driven HR?
Data-driven HR uses information to back its actions. These include talent sourcing and retention, HR data enrichment, talent analytics, and talent mapping. HR analytics enables companies to set clear goals and prepare for the future by avoiding reactive decision-making.
Collecting and analyzing HR data becomes an ongoing process instead of an ad hoc practice. This, in turn, allows for a data-driven HR strategy well aligned with the company's overall objectives.
7 steps for switching to a data-driven HR model
Organizations collect employee data for basic HR tasks, such as contacting employees, accounting for work hours, and tracking performance. However, creating a data-driven HR model requires more than that.
To switch to a data-driven HR model, your HR department needs to:
- Use data for HR decision-making
- Evaluate outcomes of data-driven decisions and track your progress with HR metrics
- Analyze performance data to identify trends and factors that affect your results
- Constantly monitor employee engagement levels and the performance of HR-incentivized employee programs
- Use internal and external HR data for the hiring process and recruitment decision-making
- Promote an all-around data-driven culture in all departments
- Use predictive analytics to forecast future hiring needs and identify the potentially best hires
Taking these seven steps will build a data-driven model in your organization. Nevertheless, efficient talent management requires continuous efforts. Thus, keep analyzing your model, researching trends, and making improvements.
5 ways data-driven HR helps your business
Achieving business impact with people analytics is not as straightforward as one would want. Only implementing a robust HR model like the one outlined above can ensure transformational business outcomes. With such a strategy, you can advance the following goals.
1. Improved hire quality and efficiency
Filling open positions with high-quality employees is among the most important HR functions on which the entire business directly depends. Due to the sheer volume of employees available for various positions, recruiting initiatives are doomed to fail without the help of data analytics.
With recruitment data analytics, HR teams can efficiently find the best fit from the large talent pool. Data analytics will help streamline the hiring process and ensure that the top talent is attracted before the competition gets to it.
2. Boosted employee retention
When performance is suffering, HR data analytics enables HR to identify the root causes of such issues, provide solutions that will satisfy everyone, and raise positive employee engagement levels.
With enhanced talent management, employee retention rates rise, protecting the firm's valuable human capital. Experienced employees can better advance business goals and bring immediate value to the company.
3. More efficient onboarding
The sooner the new hires can realize their potential within the company, the better. HR analytics allow for improving onboarding practices and tracking the outcomes of various training initiatives.
High-quality data management will also help new employees navigate the company's key platforms and procedures more quickly. Additionally, with accurate people data, personalized training programs can be created when general practices do not produce the expected results.
4. Positive employer branding
At a time of historically low unemployment, having positive employer branding is critical for competitive hiring. Thus, high-quality people management and pleasant hiring procedures, boosted by recruitment analytics, will have a priceless business impact.
No matter how great the internal company culture is, there will unavoidably be some employee turnover. People analytics can also help with this. With well-prepared exit interviews highlighting the learning and development achieved in the firm, HR professionals can turn former employees into dedicated advocates of the brand and use the information from exit interviews to improve in the future.
5. Better caseload management
The volume of cases related to workplace issues that HR professionals have to handle can be downright overwhelming. With people analytics, automating case management and uncovering actionable insights into what works when dealing with various issues is easy.
Better caseload management will also free up the time of HR representatives to prepare for future hiring spurs and research critical employment trends.
Sourcing HR analytics data
HR leaders need to source large volumes of diverse employment and people data. Use the following list of data sources as a guide to HR data analysis and collection.
- Internal employee data management systems
- Publicly available web data
- Training data from onboarding and employee training initiatives
- One-on-ones, recruitment, and exit interviews
- Employee surveys
- Historical data on labor market trends
You can collect the external data for your HR analytics on your own. Alternatively, you could enlist the services of HR data providers to enrich your data sets with additional high-quality data points.
5 recruitment metrics for data-driven HR analytics
Tracking the right metrics is the foundation of data-driven HR procedures. By combining internal and external data, you can benefit more from keeping tabs on the 5 metrics below.
1. Employment-to-population ratio
This metric compares a region's total population with the number of employed people of working age. It allows us to monitor the labor market in the region, identify underemployed territories, and kickstart further analyses of a particular area's recruitment potential.
2. Employees with underutilized skills
Tracking underutilized talent in other companies provides perfect opportunities to headhunt top talent. By looking at web data on job descriptions and comparing it with the employee's resume and employment history, you can identify underused specialists who will welcome an offer for a more challenging role.
3. Selection ratio
The selection ratio is the ratio of hired candidates to the total number of potential candidates.
You need to leverage web data from hiring platforms to evaluate the pool of available candidates and your selection ratio correctly.
4. Employee happiness
The main source of employee satisfaction data is, of course, your own employees.
However, to evaluate what your employee sentiment means, you need a point of reference. Web data about employee happiness in other firms, such as anonymous employer reviews, provide a reference point guiding your assessment of employee happiness.
5. Candidate experience
Once again, to understand the candidates in your firm, you must see the broad picture of current job search conditions. Additionally, your company reviews from job search sites like Glassdoor can give you an unbiased perspective on the quality of your hiring procedures.
How to integrate HR data into your business processes?
The entire organization will benefit from integrating HR data into people management. Due to its versatility and availability, it's the perfect choice for building data-based strategies.
1. Remove data silos
Employee data integration starts with removing data silos within the organization. Different HR teams have to be able to share data seamlessly to make the most of it. You can't have a data-driven HR department while the rest run on a gut feeling.
2. Enrich HR data
Enriching HR data with web data from reliable sources would impact HR procedures the most.
You can achieve this goal by building your own data-based candidate platforms accessible to all recruiting personnel in your organization. As an additional benefit, it would boost recruitment automation, allowing you to filter out candidates based on pre-identified necessary skills and qualities of the best-performing employees.
3. Implement talent analytics
Furthermore, by looking at online job ads of your top competitors, you can identify the skills they are looking for when filling key positions. If your workforce lacks those skills, it might be a human capital risk that needs to be addressed by investing in appropriate training.
4. Enhance talent sourcing
Finally, web data is the key to identifying the best recruitment channels. By analyzing datasets and knowing their primary source, you will find out which job search platforms or social media sites have the broadest selection of qualified candidates for various positions in your organization. In addition, you will recognize where competitors' job ads close fastest.
Understanding both the potential and the competitive environment of particular channels allows for strategically choosing where to invest your recruitment resources and thus optimizing your efforts.
In conclusion
The job of HR representatives has changed dramatically since the advancements in data technologies. At the end of the day, however, it is still all about finding the best talent and helping employees perform to the maximum of their ability while feeling satisfied with their job. Web data integration is the key to boosting HR analytics to create a data-driven environment within the organization.
