Age of Data driven HR

HR function has evolved quite a bit since early days when it use to be mere time & attendance keepers to personnel up to recent advancement to Business HR.

At every step the competencies required for us to succeed differed vastly. Competencies like people management , customer focus , negotiation skills , communication skills etc have dominated for a large period of time. All these are essentially soft skills which can be easily developed by anyone. That's the reason we saw that it was relatively easy for any other functions to be a part or lead HR function despite of having no prior experience.

As per the research more than 80% organisations feel that HR Analytics is important , however less than 20% of these companies feel that they have been able to use data effectively for taking their HR related decisions.

In this age of AI & Machine learning, every single function needs to evolve and reinvent itself to stay competitive. For functions like finance , sales or engineering it was relatively easy to adopt data driven approach as these functions's have been using some form of analytics to measure their performance.

HR guys were never known to be good with numbers or analytics, hence today also relatively very few companies like Google have really been able to use data driven HR to drive their decisions. Most companies mis-understand nice looking dashboards using excel or some software as HR analytics.

For a company to really start this journey, you need a dedicated team of experts who understand data , can use statical tools and also understand how to co-relate this data to analyse and predict the information. Also you need to set clear expectation on what outcomes are you expecting out of your analytics team.

I feel that data driven HR will not be an option but necessity for every organisation in next 5 years so better start investing your time and energy in developing this skill if you still want to stay relevant in future.

Rajendra D Kulkarni

Director - Wren & Pecker Pvt. Ltd.