Dive Brief:
- HR departments are increasingly being asked to use predictive analytics in order to align talent management with business strategy.
- For other lines of business, using analytics is fairly clear-cut in areas such as increasing sales or improving customer service, or lowering mistakes in clearly quantifiable ways, such as boosting sales calls per day, etc.
- According to an article at Predictive Analytics Times, HR faces a "different and somewhat unique" challenge not faced by most other lines of business -- the often mysterious challenge of managing people. And sometimes, HR's use of predictive analytics results in a major fail, writes author Greta Roberts, CEO at Talent Analytics, Corp.
Dive Insight:
Roberts writes that what HR's predictive analytics initiatives tend to see mirror what every other line of business does, but somehow for HR, a foray into predictive analytics can go terribly wrong.
The result, in fact, can be lost analytics project resources and funding, while HR scratches its collective heads because it has no idea why its PA effort went bad. In the article, Roberts provides a detailed look at how HR can use predictive analytics successfully.
According to Roberts, if HR departments use predictive analytics to solve real, line of business challenges driven by the workforce, HR can become an "instant hero." As a result, those HR departments then are given more resources, their projects are funded, they receive more headcount for their analytics projects, and finally, they will turn into one of the employer's most strategic departments.
