Optimize Your Greatest Asset -- Your People: How to Apply Analytics to Big Data to Improve Your Human Capital Investments

Appendix BDriving Talent Development with Data

By Gene Pease and Kip Kelly

Introduction

Organizations are increasingly relying on advanced analytics to make better, more strategic business decisions. The data revolution is transforming the way companies operate, and the effects are being felt in every industry, at all levels, in every department—including human resources. Leading-edge companies are already tapping the potential of advanced analytics to improve talent acquisition, employee engagement, retention, and talent development. For example, Gild, a technical recruiting firm, identifies highly skilled engineers by analyzing open-source code, reaching out to those engineers who meet their “quality” threshold. Online retailer eBay uses analytics to counter employee attrition. Beth Axelrod, eBay's senior vice president of human resources, said in Forbes that eBay uses advanced analytics to identify managerial or departmental hotspots for talent loss. “If somebody has been in a role for three years, hasn't been promoted, and hasn't changed roles, there's a far higher probability of attrition than someone who doesn't have those circumstances,” she says. Yahoo! CEO Marissa Mayer's decision to change the company's telecommuting policy was based, in part, on analysis of computer logs that showed that remote employees weren't logging in to the VPN often enough.

By and large, however, most HR and talent management professionals are not applying advanced analytics to their organization's ...