HR analytics are a crucial part of the profession. Strategically gathering, studying, and using analytic data is how HR stays on top of workforce planning. Of course, using the right strategy to turn raw data into actionable plans is just as important as using the right software. Let’s dive into the types of HR analytics, and the best tech tools HR can use for this purpose.
What are HR analytics?
There are four main categories of HR analytics: descriptive, diagnostic, predictive, and prescriptive.
Descriptive: HR professionals analyse historical data to identify past patterns, trends and events. By doing so, they can pinpoint areas of improvement and possible future occurrences. This can include, for example, seasonal hiring patterns, or reasons for employees leaving the company within the past year.
Diagnostic: While descriptive analytics look into what happened, diagnostic analytics try to identify why those things happened. These analytics seek to discover root causes of workplace issues through historical data.
Predictive: This method uses statistical algorithms, and sometimes machine learning, to extract future predictions of behaviour based on past events. These analytics are behind data-driven decision making.
Prescriptive: Prescriptive analytics seek to use the same techniques as above, but to create recommendations for HR on appropriate actions to tackle issues or changing organisational needs.
Let’s say your organisation is experiencing a high employee turnover, costing your firm increased costs in recruitment and training. You first use descriptive analytics to find exactly how many employees were recruited but left the organisation within 6 months. Then you use diagnostic analytics to understand the reasons for these employees leaving – and you find the highest turnover occurred in Q4, due to lack of training support. You discover the senior employees usually tasked with training new members experience an influx of client projects. Your predictive analytics tell you it is likely that this turnover will occur again, and peak in the next Q4. Finally, prescriptive analytics recommend an approach to stop this – a comprehensive online training module spanning eight weeks, to support your senior employees.
How to use analytics software
The above is just one general example of how analytics could serve to benefit HR. However, this data doesn’t just appear; HR must rely on the right software tools to effectively collect it and assist in analysis. Because larger organisations are more likely to use analytics, this also means that there’s a bigger influx of data to manage.
Investing in software such as Winningtemp or Visier is crucial. HR analytics software works by integrating with your systems and asking the right questions to your workforce. Paired with tools such as machine learning, AI, and real-time insights, this software can give HR an accurate read of what’s going on in the workforce, and how best to react.
