When talent is measured with data

Monday, 25 june 2018 | Redacción CEU

The fever of the data has reached human resource departments, but not without first passing through industries like marketing, finance or sales. Combining Big Data and Science Data techniques in this field is becoming a rising trend that, according to its promoters, will favor the management of talent and increase the profits of companies. What does the People Analytics phenomenon consist of? Can the talent of people be measured with data? Can an analytical approach be more human?

Companies have been using a big amount of data for years in order to better understand the behaviors and tastes of consumers and users. This interest in Big Data is typical of marketing departments, but it is beginning to move to other fields like the human resources area. People Analytics is a new approach that strongly came into technology companies such as Google and Facebook. Its objective was clear, boosting the talent within its own borders thanks to the intelligent analysis of data. Now, this model begins to extend to the rest of the business world.

The companies that bet on this approach have not only proposed to get to know better the members of their organizations and the candidates who postulate to their vacancies, they also want to boost the satisfaction and productivity within them. They start from the premise that the decisions in the world of human resources are often based on intuition, subjectivity or prejudice and that, therefore, it is easy to make mistakes. As a solution to this problem, they propose the definition and implementation of more structured processes that also offer a higher level of trust, being the treatment of data as its fundamental pillar.

How is talent measured in data?

Any member of a company generates a considerable amount of data in a constant way, even if the professional is not aware of this circumstance. Up to now, this information has only been taken into account at specific moments. However, over the years, these data are increasingly easy to measure due to the unstoppable development of technology. Workers, among many other things, send emails, share calendars, undergo activities that evaluate their behavior or offer feedback on work processes in their day to day. The People Analytics approach aims to take the traditional treatment of these data one step further.

This proposal sets out a more exhaustive analysis of all this information. Its goal is to facilitate and offer a greater guarantee of success in the decision-making process on issues such as the candidate recruitment, the employee promotion, the compensation and evaluation of performance or the composition of the teams. In short, it is about extracting the maximum potential of all these data. Therefore, the advantages which this new approach promises are many:

• Getting motivation keys from professionals
• The improvement of the candidate selection processes
• The detection of the staff satisfaction levels
• The promotion of bonds between coworkers
• Knowing how to predict the number of people needed for a project and defining their profile according to each moment
• Identifying the skill gaps in order to boost them
• Predicting and getting to know how to react to the talent drain
• The management of professionals in a more personalized way
• Dedicating more time to asks of value in HR

Of course, this approach also raises controversies. The use of the data must also have well-defined limits. The debate about the boundaries of the privacy is still open. However, for this new approach to be effective, it must guarantee the transparency of the use of these data and, of course, it must adapt to the current regulatory framework, the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).