Big data is making big waves in the business world and a company’s human resources department is not immune to its impact. With the growth of big data, HR is all set to become more strategic and data-backed to assert its importance to senior leadership. In the present times, big data analytics and HR work together to create opportunities for businesses and enable the management to take evidence-based workforce decisions.

Big data not just helps the talent acquisition department but also helps the entire human resource department to make analytics-driven decisions. Big data can help human resource to speed up the hiring process, improve productivity, understand employee turnover, manage talent, improve sourcing and reduce the hiring cost, all of which will lead to significant competitive gains.

Adopting a cloud-based approach and using the HRSS data can make an enormous difference and open the possibilities to find the hidden insights. The key here in managing this progression from descriptive to predictive analytics lies in applying statistical techniques on the data and analyzing it. 

With the right knowledge, big data can empower HR leadership to get insights and make predictions about the company’s future. It would give them the clout to vouch for the recommendations they make on tackling industry challenges and making the best of available opportunities. 

When enterprises wish to develop HR big data analytics platform, there are several challenges that they must tackle. The most challenging piece is laying hands on the required data– which is reliable, organized and refined. According to industry experts the HR data mainly falls into categories:

• People data:  This data set mainly Includes employee data pertaining to their demographics, skills, engagement scores, awards received, work experience, compensation details etc. 
  
  
• Performance data: This includes the data recorded by performance instruments such as appraisal ratings, 360 assessment, talent profile, goal attainment, and succession and talent programs.
  
  
• Program data: Here the records from employee’s participation in programs, training and development workshops, attendance as well as data regarding the key projects and assignments are captured. 

Once the data challenged is solved, there are four crucial areas where the HR Analytics team can help preempt and solve your workforce issues with data-driven approaches. 

Talent acquisition

In the current dynamics of hiring, filling a position fast is not enough. Getting the right person for the job who fits the position skill wise, is highly engaged and fits to the culture is also important. This is where big data can help you to evaluate your quality of hire. 

Having precise knowledge of the skill gaps and hiring needs in your company allows you to hire more relevant people for the job. Having data driven knowledge of the candidate’s compatibility or relevance to the job helps the hiring team to pick the right talent from the pool and contribute to the organization’s success. 

Learning and development

Your employees must be ready for the future and learning and development of skills is the only way to do that. Data analytics can pave the way for determining whether your training modules are effective for the workforce. Here, the date based on the 

Data can also help you devise training programs around hot skills that are going to trend in the future. Not only that, getting the right information can help you know which employees need more coaching or direction from their peers. 

Culture and engagement

In the future, organizations should define their organizational culture very carefully.  The reward systems are very important to have a positive culture in an organization and enhance engagement levels. In this context, data can help businesses to evaluate the success of new processes and programs. 

For example, you can send out employee surveys at frequent intervals to instantly gauge the general perception of employees in the workplace. You can also know which policies are working for the employees and the ones which are not favorable.  And this will help you to have a highly-engaged workforce. 

Talent management

Recognizing your company’s best talent means that you are making efforts to retain your best talent and give the due credits for their hard work. Talent management is not only about performance reviews and coaching conversations, it is also about managing your workforce to improve themselves and feel engaged for the success of the organization. 

Thanks to the power of data analytics, sophisticated performance management tools will be created which will bring a shift from the conventional process-driven approach. The new generation tool will be based on more agile, intuitive and continuous feedback-based model. 

Human Resource and predictive analytics 

Predictive analytics is a very powerful tool which can offer various analytical solutions such as insights into employee benefits, their behavior, factors contributing to attrition and engagement scores, causes of delay in hiring etc. Moreover, analytics can also to 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 in HR practices.