People analytics can offer actionable insights about employees and candidates to help businesses make key decisions about multiple business procedures.
Every business leader would agree that their workforce is the most important resource as they carry out every significant task in an organization. However, organizations face critical challenges in finding and retaining suitable talent. Using traditional recruiting methods, employers go through numerous resumes and interviews to select the right candidate. However, the selected candidates may be inefficient or switch jobs within a year, which can prove to be costly for an organization. Hence, recruiters need to find an effective solution to address these issues. Organizations can utilize people analytics to address the challenge of finding suitable talent.
People analytics help businesses in identifying characteristics that are associated with successful hires. Recruiters can evaluate their candidates based on these characteristics to find suitable talent. As a result, people analytics helps in streamlining the recruitment procedure. Also, people analytics can help HR executives in increasing employee retention and hiring a diverse workforce. People analytics also allows organizations to find new recruitment sources and compare their workforce with their competitors. Another major concern for organizations is employee performance. People analytics enables businesses to discover factors that affect company-wide performance. Business leaders can apply such insights while creating talent development strategies and recruiting candidates to improve employee performance.
What is people analytics?
People analytics or talent analytics is the process of utilizing analytics that can enable HR executives and recruiters make key decisions about their employees. For this purpose, people analytics uses statistics and modern technologies such as artificial intelligence and machine learning to analyze large volumes of talent data to help organizations make informed recruitment and business decisions.
People analytics helps organizations to create transparency, understand employee needs, and respond to different business scenarios in a better way. People analytics also allows businesses to implement a data-driven approach for hiring and employee retention. Along with these core tasks, people analytics can improve multiple aspects such as employee development, productivity, engagement, and leadership. Also, people analytics enables HR executives to understand talent data for every employee in their entire employee lifecycle. With the help of people analytics, businesses can perform more accurate workforce planning. Hence, every business leader must be aware of the use cases and benefits of people analytics.
How can people analytics help your business?
People analytics can help businesses in the following manner:
Employee hiring
Hiring suitable talent can be an extremely tricky task for recruiters. To simplify this task, recruiters can utilize people analytics to identify high-performing employees. For this purpose, people analytics can study candidate data such as career motivation, past work performance, background experiences, and social life. Also, people analytics can help employers in deciding the ideal number of interviewers required to ensure that the right talent gets hired. With the help of such insights, businesses can reduce the costs involved in turnover and training. Hence, people analytics can offer a data-driven approach for hiring suitable talent.
Retention
According to statistics, average employee exit can cost a company almost 33% of the employee’s salary. Such employee exists can occur due to multiple factors such as low salary, high work stress, disturbed work-personal life balance, long commute, and poor work culture. HR executives can address these factors to improve employee retention. People analytics can help businesses understand various employee pain points using large volumes of collected employee data. Based on the employee data, organizations can understand whether an employee may leave their job soon. For instance, an employee who has to travel over 50 miles to work every day may resign after a year or so. Hence, organizations can be mindful about factors such as distance, work hours, and work culture to enhance employee retention. Additionally, detailed insights about every employee can help organizations in improving the employee experience.
Workforce planning
Changing industry trends can have a long-lasting impact on multiple businesses and their hiring techniques. Organizations are aware of specific sources for hiring different types of professionals that are suitable for their business. For instance, a manufacturing firm may be aware of the best source for hiring project managers. But, these sources may not offer similar results a few years down the road. Hence, organizations need to plan for these scenarios.
People analytics can help businesses conduct “what if” analyses for numerous workplace scenarios and demographics. With the help of such scenarios, businesses can understand various aspects of available talent and the impact of industry changes on different candidates. Based on these insights, organizations can prepare for changes in the market and develop strategies to adapt to the upcoming changes. Also, integrating advanced technologies like big data into people analytics can help businesses predict changing industry trends and their impact on available talent in the future.
Personalized training programs
Training sessions are necessary to help new employees understand their workflow and improve the quality of work. However, traditional training programs can prove to be expensive for a company and affect the productivity of employees in case of internal training sessions. Also, multiple employees can have a wide variety of skillsets and a single generic training program may not be suitable for everyone.
People analytics can offer meaningful insights about training data that can help organizations understand which employees improve after training sessions and which sections of training sessions help employees the most. Also, people analytics can deliver insights such as professional experience, individual interests, types of projects, and training taken by other employees. Based on these insights, businesses can create personalized training programs that cater to every employee’s requirements. In this manner, organizations can offer more informative training sessions for employees.
Employee retirement
HR executives have to identify retiring employees only based on their age, which may be an inaccurate approach as retirement can be based on multiple factors such as health and pension. To address this issue, people analytics can offer predictive tools that can identify which employees have a higher probability of retiring in the near future. People analytics can also enable organizations to consider various factors such as eligibility of retirement benefits, changes in job role or salary, and many other aspects that may lead to an employee’s retirement.
Global projects
Handling global assignments can be extremely complicated for employees. Hence, such projects may have high chances of failing. To address this issue, people analytics can help business leaders and project managers identify competent employees. By understanding the competency and aspirations of an employee, businesses can create an effective strategy for utilizing an employee’s abilities to ensure the success of a global project.
Sales
People analytics can be used to improve sales in various organizations. For this purpose, people analytics can measure historical data pertaining to project scheduling and employee attendance and correlate such data with sales numbers and customer satisfaction levels. With this approach, organizations can analyze employee performance, especially in industries such as retail and e-commerce. Also, people analytics can help businesses identify inefficiencies in current business procedures and make informed decisions in developing sales strategies. In this manner, people analytics can be used to enhance sales numbers and improve revenue.
To leverage people analytics, business leaders must adopt the right infrastructure and hire a high-functioning analytics team. The team for implementing people analytics can involve professionals such as business analysts, data scientists, statisticians, and HR experts. However, only hiring a dedicated team is not enough. Along with a dedicated team, organizations must focus on leveraging modern technologies such as AI and big data to use people analytics effectively. In this manner, organizations can utilize people analytics to its maximum potential.
