How many times have you struggled to find qualified candidates in an ocean of subpar resumes? How many times have you been faced with the resignation of a highly valued employee, leaving a giant gap in your company that once again, you need to fill?
If you’re in HR, you know that the employee experience is increasingly prioritized in business. It has a direct effect on retention and is becoming a bigger point of consideration for candidates weighing an offer at your organization.
It’s not just you… HR is getting more challenging
Today, employee recruitment is highly competitive, and poor employee retention costs companies an exorbitant amount of money.
The solution for overcoming these challenges lies in harnessing the power of HR analytics.
HR analytics, also known as people analytics, refers to the data gathered from analyzing people in order to answer and asses critical questions about your company.
By integrating HR analytics into your systems, you can dramatically improve the success of your recruiting and retention strategies, while also improving the employee experience throughout the lifecycle.
Recruit the super talent in your industry
Finding and hiring the right candidate is getting harder. Managers and team leads depend on you to sign high-quality candidates with the right skill set in a highly competitive job market.
According to Nikoletta Bika from Workable, HR departments are finding that they “need to put extra effort into persuading passive candidates to choose their company over their competitors.”
Challenges include attracting the right candidates, fair and unbiased selection, accessing the necessary data to measure their projected success, and hiring people quickly and efficiently.
A tremendous amount of new tools have been developed to aid with recruitment alone.
For example, systems that analyze skill gaps in each department can also help you identify candidates who possess the right experience and skillset to find the best hire fit.
An essential tool for any HR deck is an Applicant Tracking System (ATS). Currently, half of employers across all sized companies have an ATS, and this number is increasing rapidly. ATS platforms like Lever, BambooHR, and Greenhouse allow HR teams to efficiently manage but also analyze candidates.
According to Career Builder, 78% of employers that use ATS systems report that recruitment is improved by software.
Using AI for recruiting — the opportunities and limitations
Tools powered by artificial intelligence can be a major asset to your HR analytics strategy.
AI could enhance your company with inclusivity and diversity by allowing you to avoid hiring biases. A diverse workforce includes a wider variety of perspectives and voices. But research continues to show that “even when employers strive to be inclusive, they may subconsciously lean toward candidates who are most like them, or what they call ‘unconscious bias’.”
Imagine if the process of vetting candidates was truly objective, and not influenced by the many societal and personal biases that often influence our perceptions of others.
However, this new AI technology is still being developed. It’s still programmed by humans… who have unconscious biases themselves. A new question we are facing is how to prevent these systems from perpetuating the bias issue instead of solving it.
HR analytics that use AI need to be carefully reviewed in order to acquire the best talent and enhance diversity in your company.
Use your internal data to give your employee experience a boost
Your employees’ experience has a direct influence on the quality of their performance and the likelihood of staying at your organization.
In the “work hard, play hard” culture of top companies today, it is up to HR to make sure employees feel valued and are engaged at work. HR analytics can be instrumental in helping you gauge how productive and happy employees are.
Keep your finger on the pulse
With a data-driven employee experience model, you’ll be empowered to take a proactive and personalized approach to fostering engagement, improving performance, and boosting productivity.
One aspect of the employee experience that demands greater focus is feedback.
Today, the annual performance review is not enough. Instead, HR analytics systems that enable automated assessments are the key to providing real-time, personalized feedback to drive continual performance improvement. Ad hoc employee surveys can also help you uncover organizational blind spots and identify issues across the employee lifecycle.
Longitudinal tracking can help you monitor and improve the employee experience over the long-term. It shows you where there are opportunities to provide additional learning and development, which improves employee motivation and commitment to the organization.
Platforms that keep a pulse on employee engagement allow you to remedy potential issues with the employee experience before the situation becomes more serious. Based on predefined criteria, you can set notifications to help your team make accurate assessments of when employees may need extra support.
Insights derived from HR analytics are particularly useful when shared across departments. This allows leaders to benefit from one another’s employee engagement strategies and learn from other team’s failures and successes.
Dive Deeper: What HR is Getting Wrong About Employee Engagement
Propel your employee retention rate
Keeping high-value employees is one of the main challenges for HR, and turnover can be a serious drain on finances. Losing an employee on average costs 33% of their annual salary.
With platforms like LinkedIn and Glassdoor accessible at the click of a mouse, it’s become easier than ever for people to find other opportunities if things feel less than satisfactory at work.
You can prevent voluntary turnover by analyzing data on employees’ tenure and resignations.
Don’t let anyone slip through the cracks
People analytics can be derived from exit interviews in order to understand the factors that led to an employee’s resignation. It can help you identify trends that contribute to turnover, such as a particular time of year, compensation, feedback, or other incentives.
Understanding these factors can help you identify proactive solutions to prevent them and ultimately reduce churn. For example, maybe your managers should change their approach to delivering feedback, or the company should plan fun events more strategically to increase motivation.
Your Human Resource Information System (HRIS) can help you identify employees who haven’t received a raise for a certain amount of time, or those who haven’t been offered any new opportunities or promotions for too long of a time period.
There is no better incentive to stay at your company, than reassuring a valued employee that there’s room to grow. Use internal and external career path data to ensure your systems of promotion are fair and realistic.
Platforms like Workforce, Successfactors, and Engagedly can keep track of these factors and alert your team when it’s time to connect with a specific employee and make sure they feel valued. The HR analytics at your disposal can help you keep valuable talent within your company.
Make the most of your HR deck
The good news about HR analytics is that, most likely, you’re already sitting on a goldmine of data.
According to Sierra-Cedar, large organizations have up to 75 different HR and business systems.
Now the questions you should be asking are, how do we fully utilize our platforms? And what insights can we glean from the plethora of information in front of us?
With a creative and strategic approach, you can harness vast amounts of people analytics, and utilize them to elevate your company’s talent and employee experience to the next level.
