Big data and data analytics haven’t been the top priority of HR departments for long. But lately, HR has been becoming more and more data-oriented. Let’s see how data is transforming modern HR and how prominent companies are harnessing HR data.
Big data refers to massive arrays of structured and unstructured information and methods for its processing and analysis. There are three V’s that define big data:
Businesses retrieve big data from various sources including public sources on the internet (online publications, social networks, forums, etc.); historical data within the company, such as from archives; data from physical devices like entrance detectors; and so on.
You might wonder: Why use big data for HR if there are HR metrics and KPIs I could analyze?
Of course, HR metrics are beneficial. You can solve many HR problems with so-called small data at hand, using information about employees in Excel spreadsheets. However, as your business expands, spreadsheets won’t be able to analyze large and diverse layers of parameters. For example, big data helps you solve clustering tasks like distributing employees by category (benefits packages, demographics, and so on).
As HR is moving towards marketing, personalization, and ensuring a positive employee experience, it becomes clear you must build your talent pipeline just like sales managers build their sales funnels.
That’s when data steps in. Big data, in particular, provides vast possibilities to improve HR and recruitment workflows:
In this case study, we share details of our cooperation with Continental, a leading German automotive company, to improve their skills management strategy. Discover our approach to sourcing and evaluating data and see the results achieved.
Even though the advantages of big data in HR are clear, there are still few prominent examples of how businesses incorporate this technology into their HR workflows.
Primary reasons for the slow adoption of big data in HR include:
Cost and complexity of the technology. Sourcing and analyzing human resources big data requires hiring outsourcing specialists, setting up software, and building an IT infrastructure, which translates into significant investments. That’s why using big data for HR is still considered a luxury, not a necessity.
Data sourcing. It takes considerable efforts to acquire historical data, bring it into a unified format, interpret it, and analyze it on a regular basis. Also, big data . Without a significant amount of data (we’re talking about data on several thousand employees), it’s impossible to achieve relevant results.
Lack of experienced specialists. Despite growing interest in human resources big data, there’s an insignificant number of HR specialists with data analytics skills who make decisions.
Resistance from management. HR is all about people. That’s why one of the key concerns related to human resources big data and data analytics is leaving out the people part. HR managers still try to make decisions based on their gut feeling, which leads to increased risks of errors.
Legislation. In a nutshell, modern laws and regulations like the GDPR limit access to data and require consent from employees or potential candidates to collect and process data. In order to ensure legal compliance, you might get limited insights — or even none.
Long-term process. HR mainly operates with qualitative data. Let’s say we need to analyze factors that impact employee engagement. It takes years of thorough research to gather, interpret, and store the insights. Businesses obviously can’t wait that long.
Here are a few essential tips to working with big data in HR:
