HR Analytics

You heard the title and I’m sure you are thinking, do I really need to know about HR analytics? The answer is yes. We are now living in a digital world where we can’t solely rely on our gut feelings to provide insight to our clients. Without even thinking, we are collecting a ton of data, but are we actually doing with it? 

We must use more data backed referenced points to drive our decisions and recommendations. The data may seem scary, but it can help to show the impact of certain things to the organization. When we use data, we can help identify strategies and drive solutions within our organizations. 

Many may refer to this as evidence based decision making. But how do we get started is the question? In order to really understand the value of the data, you must develop a curious mind. It’s easy to simply walk into an organization and continue the old way of doing things because we’ve always done it that way. It’s looking for the data that substantiates why things are done the way they are done. 

So how do we gather this data? We can gather data in two ways. It can be either quantitative or qualitative. Quantitative data is data that is provided in a numerical format. It is data that can be quantified or verified.  An example of quantitative data would be the average of compa-ratio’s among managers or the average employer contribution to a 401K plan. We are often trying to identify statistical relationships.  We are answering the question of how much, how many and how often. We use quantitative data because we are testing our hypothesis or our educated guesses. We are trying to develop predictions for the future and check cause and effect.