The Big Data revolution has created a great impact in a wide variety of sectors – in industries, for worldwide predictions and polls, and several core functions within an organization such as sales, marketing, legal, and finance departments. Recently, the human resource departments across enterprises are discovering new insights with the help of Big Data Analytics. These insights can help them improve and strategize decision making. In fact, many organizations are starting to build capability in the field of human resource management and trying to imbibe a culture which emphasizes data-driven decision making competency.
Big Data in human resource is the next big thing in the industry which represents new horizons for human resource functions such as storing workforce metrics, headcount, comparison benchmarking, employee details, and so on. According to the Harvard Business Review, an article on The Big Data Opportunity for Human Resource and Finance states that 71% of CEOs view human capital as the top factor contributing to sustainable economic value, while 43% of CEOs indicated that investing in human resource is a high priority. On those lines, Big Data is helping HR organizations to adapt to predictive modeling to get deeper insights and understanding of the workforce, similar to how sales and marketing teams adapt Big Data to predict customer patterns and behavior. Below are a few key areas in the field of HR where Big Data is proving to be of a great advantage:
Tracking Employee Performance
By capturing, analyzing, curating, and ultimately sharing data related to the employee performance, the human resource departments are getting in-depth insights on employees. This data is not only useful for ensuring employee engagement but is also used for tracking consistent high and low performers. With the help of Big Data Analytics, the human resource teams are better equipped to evaluate individual employee performance.
Tracking Employee Attrition
In today’s flourishing job market, the opportunities for talented workforce are numerous. Burgeoning attrition rates are a challenge for almost every HR department. To counter this challenge, Big Data is being used to identify the reasons or causes which make employees quit or continue for longer tenures within an organization. Data capture techniques like employee satisfaction surveys, employee engagement surveys, social media updates, and exit interviews can help to predict and eventually prevent employee attrition. Organizations are embracing Big Data predictive analysis to determine how long an employee is likely to stay with the concerned organization. For example, to know how this helps, simple aspects like travel distance between home and work is found to be associated with employee retention.
Looking Beyond the Obvious
Most organizations use references such as university grade-point averages, educational qualifications, and work history to determine if a person is the best fit for the job being offered. Human resource teams are now gathering data by studying personality traits of prospective employees as part of the hiring process. At a high level, this aspect includes the overall happiness quotient the employee has and his interactions with other members within the organization. Such detailing provides a different perspective to the hiring managers rather than just focusing on skills and experience alone.
Using Social Media Data
Prospective job seekers heavily use social networks and this is a rich source of data for employers. There are tools available which can trace keywords in the data from the candidate’s social media posts and convert those into more meaningful and usable information. Employers can track data related to job profile searches, hiring websites that are visited by candidates online, and scraping of the online posts. This can aid employers to find talented job seekers and the HR team can redefine the hiring strategy accordingly. Using Big Data, organizations monitor the hits to the hiring website which also helps in determining the effectiveness of the recruitment strategy.
With the advancement in technology, the overall hiring process has taken the digital path. According to data from the Pew Research Center, 79% of U.S. job seekers who have looked for work in the past two years have turned to online resources. Although the online recruiting process make look challenging for the HR departments in terms of handling the volume of applications and maintaining applicants’ data, the concept of Big Data has made employee hiring, retention, recognition, and predicting future hiring needs more effective, and at the same time streamlined and thereby, have helped in reducing recruiting costs and timelines.