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I’ve been in the HR field for a long time. Twenty years, to be exact. In those two decades, I’ve learned that one truth applies across all companies—their No. 1 expense and asset is their people.
I know the cost and value of finding, recruiting, and retaining the best talent. I’ve helped countless companies find great people with the right skills, but my job has never ended there. A large focus of my career has also been helping companies make sure they adequately support those people so their talent can be retained long-term for optimal business success.
Yet despite people being their biggest cost, most important asset, and the lifeblood of their businesses, there is a lack of leveraging the critical tools and insights necessary to effectively manage their people and drive their businesses forward.
Today, we no longer need to rely solely on best practices or intuition in the world of HR. While these are great assets to possess, they’re prone to ambiguity or uncertainty. Historically, decisions about hiring, employee engagement, performance management, and retention have been made based on gut feelings or experience. This approach lacks any scientific backing that tells you if you’re steering the ship in the right direction or completely off course. What’s more, decisions have more often than not been made retroactively, as a reaction to unfavorable people outcomes versus proactively to strategically optimize the workforce and set employees up for success.
That all changes with the introduction of people analytics.
Thankfully, we now have the technology to extract valuable insights about our workforce in order to make data-driven decisions that have a direct and substantial impact on both people and profits. These real-time people insights are what’s powering the most successful companies today and guiding their everyday decision-making.
People analytics allow companies to:
- Optimize talent acquisition
- Improve quality of hires
- Reduce turnover
- Retain top talent
- Achieve DEI goals
- Stay competitive with compensation and benefits
- Determine succession planning
A common misconception is that people analytics is only designed for larger companies with mature HR organizations. Here’s the beauty of people analytics — you don’t have to be a data analyst to use people analytics. This is not a one size fits all market. There are people analytics tools and partners out there to meet the needs of companies of all shapes and sizes. What these technologies have in common is the ability to unify HR data in order to arm business leaders with actionable insights, so they can get a holistic view of their workforce and make informed decisions about their team. This is easily consumable data that points to clear action items for hiring and retaining the top talent. With these critical insights, HR decisions based on anecdotal evidence are a thing of the past — replaced with concrete evidence of changes that need to happen.
Yes, there is a lot of data in the HR space, and it’s all important. However, that data is useless if your leaders can’t easily connect the dots and see the full picture of what is working and what is failing. An ATS can only show you so much on its own. It needs to be connected to your people data so that your C-Suite has a clear and compelling picture of where you’re falling short.
People analytics are not a “nice to have” anymore. They are a must-have for business success.
