TORC

Extracted from a Josh Bersin contribution to Forbes.com

In most companies the largest expense is payroll, yet few organizations can accurately predict whether a candidate will really perform well in the organization.

Bersin gives the example of a financial services company which believed that employees with good grades who came from highly ranked colleges would make good performers and their recruitment process was based on these academic drivers.

Following a statistical analysis of sales performance over the first two years of a new employee and correlating performance against a variety of demographic factors this is what they found:

What did drive sales performance:

An accurate, grammatically correct CV

Having completed some education from beginning to end

Having successful sales experience in high priced items

Demonstrated success in some prior job

Ability to work under unstructured conditions

What did NOT matter:

Where the candidate went to school

What grade they achieved

The quality of their references

We now have vast amounts of data on employees, performance, educational history and other factors – if we can apply analytics to selection, development and alignment of people, the returns can be tremendous.

 How to do it…….

We have the data (employee demographics, performance ratings, talent mobility, training completed, age, academic history etc) but we are not asking the right questions. The HR function needs people who can bring this data together, analyse it and interpret it to help inform the talent management agenda.

How to use it……..

Employee retention – what creates high levels of engagement & retention?

Leadership pipeline – who will be good leaders and will be developed?

Talent gaps – where can we predict talent gaps in coming years?

Candidate pipeline – what is the quality of our pipeline, how do we better attract and select people who we know will succeed in our business?

Business performance – what factors drive high performing individuals and high performing teams?

Conclusion

Big Data in HR is here; and the ability to use it to measure and predict talent performance is a major opportunity for HR leaders to create real value for the organization.