By analysing employee data, in a similar manner to how they assess sales and marketing data, organisations can significantly improve business performance while reducing recruitment and hiring costs. It’s a challenge for organisations to leverage this data. But the rewards promise to be substantial.

Organisations are looking for the ability to make better talent decisions such as predicting employee performance as well as enhanced workforce planning and forecasting. Improved insights gleaned from employee data can lead to lower staff turnover, greater productivity and positive employee experiences.

According to research from Deloittes, HR is becoming a data-driven function, enabling businesses to make informed talent decisions and prevent hiring decisions based on ‘gut’ feeling. Josh Bershin highlights that organisations are loaded with employee, HR, and performance data.

For the last 30 years they have captured demographic information, performance information, educational history, job location, and many other factors about our employees. The ability to utilise this data to enhance selection, management and alignment of people to business processes and objectives promises significant returns by reducing or eliminating mis-hires.

According to Bershin organistions can leverage their data in the following areas:

Employee retention – what creates high levels of engagement and retention?
Sales performance – what factors drive high-performing sales professionals?
Accident claims – what factors and which people are likely to create accidents and submit claims?
Leadership pipeline – who are the most successful leaders and why are some being developed and others are not?
Loss analysis – why are some locations more prone to theft and loss and what causes the variation?
Customer retention – what talent factors drive high levels of customer satisfaction and retention?
Expected leadership and talent gaps – where are our current talent gaps in the organisation and what gaps can we predict in coming years?
Candidate pipeline – what is the quality of our candidate pipeline and how do we better attract and select people who we know will succeed in our organisation?

Predicting the future

Analysing data is not totally new for HR, but using it to make accurate predictions about the future is a relatively recent trend that’s gaining ground. Greta Roberts, formerly from Talent Analytics points out, “HR has long applied analytics to metrics like attrition rates. But these efforts have been backward-looking – What have been the past patterns of employee attrition?”

“Predictive talent analytics is much more useful, because it looks to the future: What will our attrition rate be this year, who are the people who will leave the company, and what can we do to reduce that turnover?”, adds Roberts.

Growing popularity of talent analytics

Talent analytics has been growing in popularity over the years. The Deloitte’s Human Capital Trends Survey highlights how 69% of the organisations surveyed are building solutions to use employee data to analyse, predict and improve organisational performance. Leading organisations are using these solutions to gain insights about the entire employee experience, job progression, career mobility and performance.