Today, big data provides immense benefits for businesses, starting from sales, to marketing and accounting, and everything in between. Probably, Human Resources (HR) is not a business function that comes to our mind when we think about big data, yet it is a business function that can acquire huge benefits.
Why Human Resources?
Analytics are best suited for helping the organizations convert website visitors, attract leads, and target their customers much better. Many of those bottom-line outcomes and positive customers are made possible by people. When organizations make the most of big data to find the right level of flexibility to offer work-life balance to the employees, determine the right benefits and perks that foster loyalty, and enhance the efficiency of training programs, they can make maximum use of their human capital in extremely effective ways.
Streamlining Hiring with Big Data
It has always been relatively easy to collect certain data on employees such as salaries, the value of sales data, and benefits packages. But the technology of today places big data at the fingertips of HR, making it possible to collect and examine data after, during, and before the process of hiring, empowering organizations to make smarter hiring decisions, and develop a more efficient workforce.
For example, Talent acquisition software allows HR teams to collect information that is required about the candidates, keep them with an attractive benefits package that is tailored perfectly to their needs, hire the highly desirable candidate and narrow down the pool of candidates to only the highly qualified applicants.
Big data is useful for monitoring and tracking the efficiency of recruitment efforts, allowing HR teams to hone in on the highly efficient recruitment strategies that yield top-tier candidates. As every functional business unit aims to do more with less, the power to recruitment costs by shortening the hiring process is quite appealing.
Tapping into Employee Motivation and Engagement
HR can readily locate and reward the top performers by tracking the activity of employees on the job. On the flip side, on-the-job data can provide insights into ineffective behavior and violations of policies or expected standards, activities that always impact the growth of a company in some way – allowing HR to take prompt corrective action.
Metrics on employee performance, motivation, and engagement can also allow organizations to retain their highly valuable team members and make effective use of their human capital. Big data can disclose if an employee is struggling in their position, for example, prompting management and HR to implement extra training and other support that can improve performance. In few cases, moving an employee to a different role or to another location is a win-win, making it possible to leverage their talents and skills in a way that benefits the business. Every employee requires job satisfaction and few of them are happy in the jobs in which they are struggling to succeed.
Enhancing Resource Utilization
In today’s workforce, human capital management is a big focus. Organizations who make effective use of their resources including their talent can attain more than the competitors who are wasteful with their resources. For example, poor scheduling can mean the extinction of a field services company as field techs become frustrated with ineffective routes and have to handle angry customers, as they did not arrive within the scheduled service window.
Many resources exist that allow HR to leverage data for better resource utilization and workforce management, from the tools that enable data-driven scheduling and dispatching to those that help balance the tasks that generate revenue with tasks that generate expense. It is all about efficiency in the modern enterprise.
Enhancing Employee Retention
Big data can be a strong tool for enhancing retention in industries that usually experience high employee turnover. Employee exit interviews offered some insight into the motivations of an individual for leaving the organization, but often, this anecdotal data did very little, if anything, to enhance overall retention in the long run.
The HR teams of today can locate patterns and trends, implement data-driven programs that are aimed at improving loyalty and provides the reasons for employees leaving the organization by leveraging data analytics. By making use of regular surveys on employee satisfaction that offer quantitative data, HR can examine their workforce in new ways to unveil the desires and needs of employees, providing the right perks and benefits, the right level of flexibility in order to retain top talent, and the right level of support.
Initially, big data did not arise as a tool for HR, but it is proving to be a strategic opportunity that is highly valuable for HR teams that make the maximum use of their power to foster retention, engage employees in a much better way, and provide more efficient targeted training. As per this post from peoplehr, organizations are looking to implement data analytics to aid the recruitment of their staff. Behind your business, your people are the driving force. So, you must utilize them to their fullest potential, and big data enables you to achieve this.
