The term ‘Big Data’ may seem mysterious to anyone who hears it for the first time. Big Data is one such concept that enterprises today are using to add value to their businesses.
What is Big Data?
Big data is used to describe large volumes of data. This can be both structured and unstructured data. Big data is data that is huge in size and grows exponentially with time. As the data is too large and complex, traditional data management tools are not sufficient for storing or processing it efficiently. But analyzing big data is crucial to know the patterns and trends to be adopted to improve your business.
How Big Data Benefits Businesses?
Data has the potential to impact a business if used wisely. Businesses that focus on big data specializations can improve their overall operations and help make faster, intelligent decisions. It helps them get better insights and plan strategic business moves. It helps analyze data from various sources such as mobiles, emails, databases, servers, etc. It helps capture, format, manipulate, store, and analyze data to help a company get or retain customers, improve operations, and increase revenues.
Let us now understand the top big data use cases in the field of human resources (HR).
1. Employee Retention
Predictive analysis aids in employee retention. Big data helps move beyond simple headcount and be more predictive than reactive. This will help the HR department understand the workforce and make them do whatever they can to retain their workforce. Employees tend to stay longer in organizations if they receive the greatest rewards. HR software will help optimize salary and benefits realistically for current and future employees.
2. Knowledge Management
Training is an important part of any workforce. Using HR software can do wonders in making a company’s processes smoother and simpler. Looking at metrics and analytics in a company-wide spectrum helps in managing and improving employee training in a significant manner. Talent analytics helps organizations analyze gaps, if any, in staff knowledge and develop proper training programs for them. Knowledge management paves the way for innovation and development.
3. Employee Productivity
Performance metrics have been one of the widely adopted uses of big data for HR and are used to facilitate optimal performance by teams and improve workplace conditions. Employee productivity is a major factor in the success of any enterprise. In order to be productive, your people need to be happy and motivated. The use of big data in the HR department provides a holistic view of employee productivity and performance. It helps build strategies to measure success. Companies must recognize and reward employees based on their efforts also, and not solely on the results they bring. Assessing problem areas and communicating and working with employees will inspire them and make them more productive.
4. Talent Forecasting
Relying only on technology will not always turn out to be effective. The human element of HR also matters a great deal, as it can help solve problems more efficiently than computers. Using popular HR tests such as personality and cognitive ability, the hiring process can be enhanced, and the quality of the hires can be increased. For this, the test results of the most successful employees must be analyzed. Patterns can be established that can be compared with those of potential candidates. Though this isn’t a foolproof solution, it can help make a choice between two equally qualified candidates and also increase the chance of hiring better employees.
5. Decreasing the Cost of Bad Hires
An HR analytics model has the potential to cut down on bad hires. A wrongly chosen employee can cost the company dearly more than the salary and benefits that are given to the employee. Some of the examples of what a wrong employee in the wrong place can do are training expenditures, recruitment costs, negative reviews from clients, and productivity loss. The primary challenge of data analytics is using big data to predict a match between the skills and personal beliefs of the candidate and the company’s driving values and needs. A study by Accenture revealed that 94% of talent executives use Big Data to identify candidates. Companies can also create a unique points-based system to measure candidates against each other based on criteria such as skills, accomplishments, personality traits, and experience. These will help eliminate subjective bias from the hiring process and will ensure that frauds are removed from the candidate pool.
Conclusion
Learning the art of managing big data is crucial to any HR department if it wants to develop and advance. Learning to process and interpret big data will help them to distribute their resources in a better way and find employees with better capabilities. Though tests, interviews, and personal interactions are still the primary recruiting tools used by organizations, big data ensures that organizations save time and money by making the right decisions right from the beginning, thus saving them the trouble of learning from their mistakes. I hope this article helped you gain insights into the top big data use cases in the HR sphere.
If you wish to learn about big data specializations, you can check out Global Tech Council.