Big Data and Recruiting: HR's Newest Trend

You’ve seen it on Twitter with the hashtag #BigData. You stumbled across it in The Wall Street Journal, complementing your morning grapefruit and cup of coffee. And it’s certainly going to be a topic for discussion at one of your next company staff meetings.
The amount of data in the world has been exploding – so much so that 90% of the data in the world today has been created in the last two years alone. The trend has been widely covered over the last few years as the next frontier for innovation in technology, but only recently have those in the recruiting and talent acquisition fields taken a closer look and realized the massive opportunity for HR business decisions as well. Here’s a quick overview of what our community has been discussing and how it may soon affect your business:

• According to Josh Bersin, companies like UPS and Lowe’s are well along in the development of Big Data strategies to understand their own employees. But unlike Marketing and Sales organizations, HR teams are not filled with statisticians, analysts, and data visualization experts yet, and Bersin’s research shows that only 6% of Human Resources teams feel they are “highly skilled” at data analysis. We’re just getting started…

• At Luxottica Group, the Milan-based eyeglasses conglomerate, data analytics have disproven assumptions about gaps within the company’s recruiting strategy. The data showed it took an average 96 days to fill a position with an external candidate. The management team believed that the company’s recruiters acted too slow, but a statistical analysis found hiring managers dragged their feet about making decisions about who to hire. It now takes the company 46 days to hire external candidates, according to a recent Wall Street Journal article. Data alone is not enough. Interpretation and analysis are the key…

• Analytics platforms derived from large data sets can vastly improve decision making. Cities like Atlanta, GA and Newark, NJ are tracking the number of citizens pursuing job opportunities, the type of positions being sought, the level of position, and the industries in which job seekers want to work. This data can provide government leaders with hyper-local insights that can help steer key strategic decisions to foster future job growth. Analytics platforms – tracking data continuously over time, can lead to the improvement of services, both private and public…

Access to data, for organizations of all sizes, has always been critical to success for companies in the technology, finance, insurance, and government spaces. And now, HR departments are poised to gain substantially from the use of big data. According to Bersin, “This is the time to apply data science to Human Resources. It isn’t easy, but the payoff is huge.”