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People Analytics

Foreword: I feel like a brilliant HR student! Wrote this for a placement opportunity in my college. Read on!

The concept of People Analytics, sometimes also called Talent Analytics, has been around for a while. It was first heard of around 10 years ago, when companies tried to build HR Analytics systems to carry out simple HR activities. In the recent years, it has become one of the most widely discussed topics in the business world.

People Analytics, in short, can be defined as a scientific, data-backed approach to managing people and making people-oriented decisions at work. It replaces the traditional methods of decision making - those based on a combination of intuition and experience - with more calculated decisions by sophisticated analysis of data. Data can be collected through interviews, 360 degree feedback surveys, quarterly reviews, meetings etc. It is then analysed to determine the key issues in the organisation and make rational decisions.

People Analytics can be used to handle many people-related issues, such as recruitment, training, job design, compensation, performance management and performance evaluation. For example, companies with high attrition rate can now apply data to the situation to understand why employees leave, and can accordingly create and implement retention strategies. Companies can also use people analytics in recruitment, by identifying their existing top performers and creating a benchmark for new recruits. They can then look for candidates with similar skills and abilities.

The clear advantage for the organisations is that now they have access to hard data and can observe the relationship between HR and business productivity. This is why People Analytics is becoming more and more popular within high-performing organisations, like Google.

Experts believe that this function doesn’t simply belong within HR, it can be used to solve real-world business problems, too. For instance, IT companies can gather data regarding the kind of training their engineers need, and can come up with the desired training practices for them. The data required for taking such decisions takes into account several factors like age, demographics, education, experience, etc. Such factors contribute to external data, so one might say that People Analytics requires external as well as internal data. This is why People Analytics is not limited to HR, but is actually a part of a bigger function, that is, Business Analytics.

People Analytics is still an unexplored and evolving function, and holds a lot of potential, since it focusses on the most important asset of an organisation – its people. If practised correctly, it can directly impact the output of a company and give it the competitive edge that it needs to survive in the market in the long run.


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