Tuesday, November 5, 2013

Big Data: Building your Optimal Workforce

How can HR departments recruit better hires, experience less turnover, increase productivity in their employees, and have  more effective processes overall?  The simple answer to this is with Big Data. A recent article from Modern Survey argues that big data should be an imperative part of HR business processes. The idea of Big Data is to take numerous databases and processes and synchronize them to function together, almost like an orchestra.  In return, your company will be able to “harness and optimize” your workforce.  Using Big Data allows HR to identify the best hires possible via predicative analysis.

In order to create the ideal workforce with strong analytics, be sure to kick-off your research with the following three steps: 

1)  Ensure that data is collected consistently over time,
2)  Implement strong management “with a good set of business questions for study,”
3)  Involve a competent analyst who understands your business.

These steps allow HR teams to predict who will succeed at a company, who may not be a good match, and how engaged an employee will be after one year of employment.  This data even allows HR to determine when someone is close to leaving a company within a year.  To gather accurate results, HR should be assessing performance and engagement annually and for the best results, assessment should be completed quarterly.  Being able to analyze and predict all of these pieces of information can help a company save a significant amount of money in the long run and enable them to target areas of improvement within the company.  While at first it may seem time consuming to put time and effort into analyzing this data, it can ultimately prove to be a good investment for your company. 

No comments: