In the past couple of years, HR technology has grown leaps and bounds to encompass real hard quantitative data.  For the first time, HR and Talent Acquisition have a seat at the table and are able to inform business decisions with numbers and facts, not qualitative anecdotes.  Yet, as employers rush to use strategic analytics in these critical functions, the question remains- is it contributing to your bottom line?

Powering Your Business Decisions with Strategic Analytics

Strategic analytics are often touted as the solution to a myriad of business difficulties. But are your business decisions being guided by the data?  Ultimately, many employers are struggling to find real world applications for the amounts of data they receive.  Consider the following ways in which your organization can use strategic analytics to guide hiring decisions and ultimately contribute to the bottom line:

• Forecast hiring needs.  In many industries, there are busy seasons which require the hiring of more temporary or contingent workers. For many years, employers operated without a clear picture of what they need, at times hiring too many or too few workers to successfully navigate these busy periods.  Using strategic analytics, employers gain access to historical hiring trends and predictive hiring estimates.  This can help employers to hire effectively during these seasons and perform better overall. 
• Market rate intelligence.  Do you know if your labor costs are too high or too low?  Absent strategic analytics, you may be at the end of a very broad spectrum.  In many industries, the skills gap is really a case of paying too little and expecting too  much.  Using strategic analytics, Talent Acquisition gains access to detailed market rate intelligence which can inform employers how to adjust their hiring.  In industries such as healthcare, who rely on staffing suppliers to obtain large pools of talent, market rate intelligence can save the health system millions if they discover they're paying too high.  In other industries, such as manufacturing, this can assist Talent Acquisition in getting the craftsmen and tooling employees they've been desiring without fearing a loss to competitors. 
• Shine a light on attrition.  Attrition can be expensive to organizations.  The investment in hiring a new employee is often significant, so when a good employee leaves, employers need to start the process over again, reinvesting in another candidate without knowing if it will work out. Using strategic analytics, employers are able to make a business case for adjusting their hiring and retention methods.  For example, if your business decides it's costing too much to offer perks and benefits, you may find that cutting these causes attrition rates to rise.  Strategic analytics may inform your business that losing your best employees will cost you more over the long run than keeping your health benefits and vacation days. 

In HR and Talent Acquisition, many people are very excited about strategic analytics.  But if they're not being used to contribute to the bottom line, it becomes a question of why we're going through the process of gathering this information in the first place.