Competing for talent, retaining top performers and implementing growth strategies have long topped the priority list for HR professionals. Until recently, descriptive data analytics failed to provide HR with information that provides actionable insights for proactive hiring strategies. Big data is the opposite of yesterday’s performance analytics. More than just telling you about your current workforce, big data uses predictive analytics to help HR build and manage a pipeline of qualified candidates. Today’s reporting tools provide such detailed insights, pinpointing the data that impacts a company’s immediate hiring decisions can be overwhelming to sort through. Here’s how you can use big data to transform your recruiting strategy right now.
The U.S. Department of Labor estimates that the cost of a bad hire can equal 30 percent of the employee’s potential first-year earnings. With big data, the hiring process doesn’t have to be “hit or miss.” HR professionals can use analytics to implement talent acquisition strategies based on targeted traits. For instance, start by looking at hiring data provided by your candidate management system such as:
Employee turnover is a costly expense regardless of the size of business. A huge advantage of utilizing big data to predict employee behaviors is the opportunity to understand what makes employees motivated, engaged and therefore, more loyal to stay.
To better understand behaviors use tools such as, employee engagement surveys and exit and stay interviews to predict the factors that may cause employee dissatisfaction. If your staff works heavily in a team-environment, implementing team assessments to measure team dynamics helps the company gain insight on how the group is performing as a whole. Understanding the drivers of performance and retention also helps businesses identify characteristics of ideal hires based traits shared by top performers.
Prepare your company for growth by combining your knowledge about the workforce you have now with big data that provides insight about the future of the workforce. For instance, what demographic trends affect your business? What economic demands have a foreseeable impact on the success of your business? Using big data to predict future trends and patterns will give you insight to the skill sets your company will require from future talent.
Dig into bigger insights to predict employee longevity with data that estimates average tenure by role. Doing so enables companies to estimate hiring needs due to expected employee churn. It can also enable organizations to work on retention strategies at targeted timeframes of employment. Additionally, this data can also help you pinpoint training and development programs at various stages of employment.
HR professionals can now dive deeper into data and statistics that go beyond surface level, enabling recruiters to engage in actionable hiring results. By implementing big data analytics your company can maximize quality of hire and proactively build a talent pipeline for future needs.
