Joy Eneghalu: How Analytics is Solving Problems in HR

Technology sneezed and the HR space caught a cold. Analytics has become so important in HR and we see this across various sectors. Analytics in HR has been able to give solutions to a lot of HR problems. Let’s take a look at the key successes of HR analytics in the HR space.

Reduce Recruitment Cycle Time

HR professionals who employ analytics claim that they have successfully halved recruiting time. I once read that a top telecom company wanted to compete with global media and IT players but quickly realized that it would have to recruit and develop large numbers of highly skilled managers and specialists.

The HR director consulted with HR analysts to help shape a comprehensive talent strategy and 100 new recruits were signed on during the three years of the program. This effort birthed a talent and leadership pipeline that was sufficient to fuel growth for the following five years.

Strategic Workforce Planning

Companies need innovative solutions to address today’s talent gap. Analytics is making this possible in these three aspects:

• Leading new fact-based approaches for sourcing, attracting and retaining top talents.
• Helping leaders quantify the future workforce gap, allowing for better strategic planning and a chance to address talent shortfalls earlier.
• Uncovering new labour markets and new talent polls that are underutilised.

Drive Business Performance

A company had already exhausted most traditional strategic options and was looking for new opportunities to improve the customer experience. Business leaders believed that to improve the customer experience and increase revenues, closing the turnover gap was key to this. To start they had to define the goals, then translate employee behaviour and experience into data that the company would utilize to solve the issue. The answer was gotten from analytics.

Four months into exploring insights derived from analytics, the results were encouraging. Customer satisfaction scores have increased by more than 100%, speed of service has improved by 30 seconds, attrition of new employees have decreased substantially, and sales are up by 5%.

Human Resources and Predictive Analytics

Predictive analytics is a very powerful tool that can offer various analytical solutions such as insights into employee benefits, their behaviour, factors contributing to attrition and engagement scores, causes of delay in hiring, and so on. Analytics can also be used for forecasting attrition and other HR-related metrics. For example, it can help to predict which employees will reach their targets or what would be their future engagement score or their possibility of leaving the company. It might help you find the efficacy of the performed CSR initiatives in terms of impact on corporate culture and employee engagement. Such insights and knowledge about the workforce will have a huge impact in boosting the efficiency of HR practices.

IBM believes that HR analytics can do a makeshift for HR from playing the mere administrative role to a more strategic game-changer. Companies like KPMG, Jumia and Cisco are already adopting HR analytics.

More industries are taking advantage of this analytic capability in their HR. The role played by HR analytics can help both the organisations and the executives handling the direct responsibilities make better decisions regarding workforce composition and to assess the performance of employees.

While some sectors are already making use of the HR analytics, other sectors need to incorporate it into their activities.

Health Sector

Analytics is increasingly weaving itself into the fabric of healthcare and will fundamentally shape the future of medical care and service delivery. It can improve the efficiency of healthcare while improving the quality of care, mine genetic data, reduce costs, effectively respond to disasters, and numerous other goals. A key objective for any analytics system in healthcare is to produce a valuable output for those taking care of patients, doing research, or making other decisions about how the organisation functions.

Finance Sector

Financial service organizations are struggling to attract young talent, engage their existing employees and optimize performance. HR analytics will help financial institutions to address some of their key challenges like a growing crisis as its existing workforce ages and struggles to recruit top talent to replace people who are nearing the age of retirement.

Financial institute employees are not rated as employers of choice for young professionals with in-demand skills in areas such as digital technology and data science. They are battling to re-skill older workers for the digital age. Many lack the tools they need to drive productivity and skills retention across the board. HR analytics helps financial organisations tackle these issues by allowing them to personalise the employee experience in the same way as marketing departments are working to personalise the customer experience.

Most HR personnels and enthusiasts find it hard or almost impossible to get into tech because they think it is mandatory to have a background in technology or coding skills. Some people also think that there is no correlation between analytics and HR. I’m happy to tell you that this is not the case with HR analytics. As long as you have the drive to improve yourself you can get into this trend and analytics is solving a lot of problems in the HR space. You can be a part of the Agile HR Analytics Bootcamp where you get to learn how to bridge the gap between analytics and HR.

***

Featured Image: Pexels