The term ‘big data’ has now become a buzzword in the human resource management space when you speak of harnessing technology. While big data has already been used in other fields such as retail and supply chain, why should HR leaders be thinking twice before cashing on the potential of data analysis and deriving insights?

Well, the reluctance to embracing big data by most organisations is due to lack of awareness on how Big Data can help business grow. Below, we provide some key tips on how HR leaders can leverage on Big data.

HR department plays a vital role as the organisation’s strategic partner, so it might seem quite obvious that a great deal of company’s budgets are invested in HR technology and big data.

There are compelling reasons why leveraging on big data is imperative for today’s businesses to succeed. In the midst of digital revolution, the HR department is entrusted with more complex duties and responsibilities.

The biggest challenge as of now is to hire the best talents, retain the top performers, and produce better business decisions to establish a profit-based and people-driven business model.

In an organisation, the amount of insights that can be derived from data gathered is incredibly rich. The problem lies on how leaders can harness this massive information to develop employee performance, increase productivity, and improve the bottom line. Big data and analytics will help provide the best solution to this problem.

The data collected by an organisation from employees, the customer, and pertinent business information, show particular patterns indicating certain trend shifts. Organisations need to be watchful to identify these patterns, as they help make solid and faster business decisions targeted precisely at the right audiences. Here’s how big data can help:

See: Record-Keeping Policies: How Long Should You Store Data?

Simplify recruitment process

For every job opening, a company might receive hundreds of resumes in their mail box. Rather than investing your time sorting out all of the applications one by one, you can use big data to simplify the process. Using data from talent acquisition software, you can identify the keywords that attract the best talents.

Analysing the data from your current successful employees, you can track down institutions where your top performers come from. So, you can save on time thus focusing on efforts to retain such key talents and harness on their potentials for business.

For instance, from standpoint of an employee’s performance review being recently conducted, you can get better insights on the kind of personality traits that best suit your workplace culture. Through this method, you not just attract the most qualified candidates to your company, but also in turn make the process of recruitment a lot more simpler, faster, and cost-efficient as well.

Improve employee engagement

Engagement is the key to employee’s high productivity and company success. The biggest challenge here, is to figure out the most effective factor that will drive employee engagement.

Big data and analytics can help senior leaders and managers to arrive at decisions that matter to support employees’ career. They can then work in tandem to formulate a policy that will increase employee engagement. One way this can be done by the HR department is through surveys on employee motivation, satisfaction, and happiness levels at the workplace.

Predict turnover

Massive voluntary turnover is highly unfavourable to impact company’s growth plans. When one of your employee voluntarily hands over their resignation letter and chooses to walk out of the door, it simply means your business investments into grooming talent and training the employee is in all vain.

From an employee’s performance report, personal information records, past experiences, career tenure working for organisations in the past and financial data available, managers can delve deeper into the vast amount of data available to predict employee’s behavioural pattern at work and ways of life. You can conduct deep analysis on the data available and predict employee turnover in the times to come.

Manage talent planning

Recognising potential talents is crucial for company’s growth in the long run. Today, leaders rely on dependable data, rather than mere experience obtained from their predecessors. With big data the former gets further authenticated, especially when you create a talent strategy planning in accordance with your company needs.

When employees receive the right kind of training that encourages, motivates and boosts their career prospects to learn about the latest industry trends, they tend to stay longer with the company and contribute better.

However, embracing and implementing the right technology in itself doesn’t help businesses tackle challenges of everyday working. The leaders should possess sound analytical skills and judgement to observe, delve upon insights from big data and predict future business sustainability.

Leaders should be able to translate these insights into applicable and practical business decisions and achievable solutions. Big data if harnessed right could prove to be a perfect business solution to solve problems of human resources, particularly in terms of talent acquisition and retention.

Read also: Securing Data: Managing Trust and Confidentiality in a Networked World