Should HR Departments Care About Analytics?

The HR department of your company has a big job. They recruit candidates to hire, decide which ones best fit the bill, interview them, and decide where and how to place them. Then it’s also their responsibility to handle employee relations, and maybe even training and other issues.

With so much responsibility, a huge amount of data goes through them all the time. In order to do their job properly, they need to be able to turn that raw data into meaningful, usable information. To do that, you need a comprehensive, easy-to-use analytics program. Here are a few ways that such a program could come in handy.

Assessment Tools 

When trying to fill a position in your company, the first thing you do is cast as wide a net as possible. You post listings on job sites and on your social media channels, as well as talking to recruiters. This increases the pool of potential hires and maximizes the chances of finding who you’re looking for.

The problem is, it also increases the number of unqualified candidates you get. Then it’s HR’s job to wade through all of the resumes and separate the wheat from the chaff. It’s a long process that takes time and resources away from places where they might be put to better use.

That’s where assessment tools come in. An online test given to each applicant can measure their aptitude in certain areas, such as problem solving, teamwork, leadership, and more. It can even be customized to fit your company’s needs, and the position that’s available.

You set your scoring criteria, and an analytics program crunches the numbers, automatically weeding out all of the unqualified candidates. What you’re left with is a smaller but higher quality pool of potential hires, who are much more likely to be suited to the job and to fit with your company—all in much less time. As a result, you’re able to shorten the hiring process and find the perfect hire much more quickly.

Finding Connections

Analytics can also use existing data to find connections that your company otherwise might have missed. For instance, are there certain factors that your employees who stay at the company only a couple of years have in common? Do the employees who stay longer have a different commonality? Maybe those who stay on have a shorter commute. Maybe there’s a higher turnover rate in the sales department than in accounting.

An analytics program can uncover these connections and highlight potential problems within the company—as well as potential solutions. So if you’re looking to keep your employees around longer, perhaps focus on applicants who live closer to the office, and even make that a factor for your analytics program to look for in the future. Or for the high turnover rate in sales, perhaps you can look more closely at the department’s inner workings and see if there’s a problem with working conditions, a manager that people don’t like, etc. From there, you can fix the problem and improve employee retention across the board.

These are just a few of the ways that your HR department can use analytics to make its job easier, saving time and improving productivity. The raw data is all there. All you need are the means to process it and turn it into something usable.

Of course, analytics shouldn’t replace human decision-making, by any means. But the information it provides can inform those decisions, leading to better employees, a higher retention rate, increased productivity, and a better bottom line. If you’re not using an analytics program to transform your HR department, then all of that data is just going to waste.

Paypro’s WorkforceONE®  Human Resource module offers a comprehensive HR solution that’s amazingly easy to use. Your employees, managers, and Human Resource administrators will stay up to date and compliant. Contact us today to learn more, we are here to simplify your workforce.