Josh Barto
11/23/18
MBA513: Talent Management
Talent/HR Analytics Paper
What are talent analytics? Matthew Valencius defines it as identifying your position with recruitment, assessing your velocity, and understanding your acceleration (Bickham, 2016, p.166). The terms of position, velocity, and acceleration can mean different things to different people. Valencius compares these terms to mathematics in the same way I would use them (Bickham, 2016). How does a company use them for talent analytics? Position, in this case, refers to where is the company at with analytics. Does the company use a large amount of data in a wide variety of ways, or does it only use analytics in several focused ways? Velocity refers to if the company is moving employees quickly through the talent management system or not. Lastly, understanding the company’s acceleration in talent analytics shows whether the company is speeding up or slowing down with their processes.
Talent analytics is not necessarily a new idea, but it does not seem for certain that a lot of companies have adapted a form of this innovative thinking. In knowing this, Jeanne Harris, Elizabeth Craig and David Light describe six analytical tools for human resources for organizations to adapt: employee database, critical talent management, focus human resource investments, customizing the employee-value proposition, workforce planning and talent supply chains (Harris, 2011). When talking about having an employee database it is not about just names, contact information, and positions in the organization. This type of database is referring to knowledge, skills, abilities, and performance of individuals (Harris, 2011, p.6). In compiling this information and comparing it to the company’s most successful employees, the company can use this information in the company’s hiring process to narrow a search of candidates towards individuals who show characteristics that the company wants. Along with an employee database, critical talent management can be important to analyzing talent within the organization. Using talent management software, a company can analyze which sections of the company have the most impact and biggest performance and focus your best recruitment efforts on those sections. This leads right to the focusing of human resource investments. Using the information from critical talent management, human resource can focus investments based on the information obtained from that analysis. The next tool is customizing the employee-value proposition. This tool is straight forward. Using analytics, find what employees’ value most and use that information to create a model that will boost retention rates (Harris, 2011, p. 8). The next tool, workforce planning, is more of a present to future tool. Initially the plan should be to integrate the company’s strategy, finance and other planning processes (Harris, 2011 p. 9). However, as strategies and goals change for the future, so should the workforce planning. Lastly, talent supply chains refer to “real-time optimization, where processes adjust on the fly to enable a company to maintain the best possible mix of skills and supply of talent (Harris, 2011 p.9).”
Another area that talent analytics can improve upon is the performance appraisal system of employees. “HR analytics can help increase perceived accuracy of the PA system by giving more objective, accurate and unbiased data related to employee’s performance behavior” (Sharma, 2017, p.688). Many performance appraisals are subjective in nature. It is based off how a direct supervisor perceives that you are doing during a certain time period. If it seems that employee is productive, then the performance appraisal will be excellent. For example, if the supervisor had some data, such as, the employee completed a certain percentage of his/her goals within that time period, then that merits an excellent rating. Analytics can improve performance appraisals and take the subjectivity out of them. This would benefit any company.
Several of these tools seem more important than others. Employee databases, critical talent management, and customizing the employee-value proposition are the most important tools. It is critical to know what character types drive the most successful parts of the organization and which parts of the organization the company wants to focus most of its efforts on when recruiting top talent. The company should also want to figure out how its top talent wants to feel valued so that it can retain these employees. I believe workforce planning is next because it is also critical to sync the entire organization with the same values. Employee databases, critical talent management and employee-value proposition can improve both individual and organizational performance. If an employee knows that his character is the exact type the organization likes to hire, then that will make the employee feel like he belongs and drive productivity. Also, if you value most employees how they wish to be shown they have value, their want to produce will increase and thusly improve the business bottom line. Having a more objective performance appraisal will help the employees understand what they need to improve upon and, in theory, those areas will improve.
Matthew Valencious states “the basic building block of talent management is a program, project, or initiative (Bickham, 2017, p.167).” Each one of these tools to analytics can be a program, project, or initiative. When trying to derive what character types drive the most successful people, that can be both a project and an initiative. Gathering the data of the most successful people in the organization can be a project, but the want to make the change of hiring the people with the characteristics is the initiative. Performance appraisals are a program. Every year an employee can hear the same worn out sentence that a supervisor thinks they perform great and are an asset to the team; or you can turn performance appraisals into a year long program to evaluate statistically if an employee is performing average or above average.
Having these analytical tools is not enough. Boudreau and Cascio suggest five conditions for analytics delivery and use: receiving the analytics, attend to the analytics, believe the analytics, believe that the analytics suggest effects that are large and compelling enough to merit attention or action, and to see implications for their actions or decisions (2017). Believing in what the analytics interpret and the decisions made based off the data received is a huge part of talent analytics. If a company does not support what the analytics are telling them, or even believe what they are, implementing it was a waste of time, resources, and money to even begin the analytical process.
A company must believe that the analytical process offers real value. These six steps will help offer real value: develop a strategy with an eye to both current and future needs; identify key questions, or investment decisions; focus the question on forward-looking rather than backward-looking issues; to not settle for data at hand, but collect additional data to understand problem thoroughly; clean the data; and limit challenges to the data’s validity by standardizing definitions and processes for generating reports (“Barriers”, 2017). This is a solid process in determining that the tools you are using, along with the ability to believe that the analytics will work, will drive the company in the correct direction.
ReferencesBarriers to effective use of human capital analytics: Focus and strategy are needed to make the data useful. (2017). Human Resource Management International Digest, 25(7), 30-32. doi:10.1108/HRMID-08-2017-0139
Bickham, T. (2016). ATD talent management handbook. Alexandria, VA: ATD Press.
Boudreau, J., & Cascio, W. (2017). Human capital analytics: Why are we not there? Journal of Organizational Effectiveness: People and Performance, Vol. 4 Issue: 2, pp.119-126, https://doi.org/10.1108/JOEPP-03-2017-0021
Harris, J., Craig, E., & Light, D. (2011). Talent and analytics: New approaches, higher roi. Journal of Business Strategy, 32(6), 4-13.
Sharma, A., & Sharma, T. (2017). Hr analytics and performance appraisal system: A conceptual framework for employee performance improvement. Management Research Review, 40(6), 684-697. doi:10.1108/MRR-04-2016-0084
