Your workforce represents your company’s largest expense, its top differentiation and its greatest risk. It is very important that they are delivering at peak performance all the time to ensure that your company is able to achieve its objectives. Here’s how workforce analytics and predictive analytics can help ensure that you are able to keep the performance level of employees at a peak level.

Advanced workforce analytics can be used to help proactively manage talent. From predicting future top performers to being able to flag potential exit candidates and grooming successors for key positions, today’s workforce analytics offer powerful tools for employers.

Workforce analytics can be used at all three major phases of talent management — talent acquisition, retention and nurture. To help your company select either its beginning projects or to expand existing efforts, here are some of the top ways companies are using workforce analytics to manage talent today, presented in the three phases.

In talent acquisition

Your organization and business teams care about acquire the right talent faster. Sophisticated analytics can provide companies an alternative to applicant tracking systems and their overreliance on keywords. Workforce analytics are meant to search applications and resumes based on much more comprehensive algorithms and far more data.

Analytics solutions can automatically scan submitted profile of applicants, pull in external data, like their social media activity; carry out extensive background checks; and automatically create a short list for manual review. This can drastically cut down the recruiting lifecycle.”

With analytics, you can also find talent similar to current top talent. Workforce analytics may also support what is already working.  Job candidates can be matched up against profiles of successful incumbents to help hire the right people.

Based on profile of candidates, their social profiles and other data capture, analytics can also predict key employee retention risks or any compliance risks.

In talent nurturing

Predict and harvest potential. Successfully measuring an individual’s potential is the key to identifying top performers early so companies can groom and reward them accordingly. Weeding out poor performers early to cut costs in training and managing them is important to maintaining a healthy bottom line, too. Workforce analytics can help to provide these insights.

Analytics tools can also point out skill gaps in otherwise high performing employees and to prescribe the correct training needed. By identifying skill gaps at the right time, organizations can take quick decisions to fix these  gaps and this
typically leads to higher job performance. It’s a win-win, especially when it means you don’t have to go hire more people to
fill the gap and can still get the job done.

By looking at an employee’s growth potential with their attrition risk, organizations can carry out highly focused interventions on just those employees.

For organizations it is also very important to prevent or manage turnover. When key or well-connected employees leave, it can cause a lot of damage. If proactive or pre-emptive actions are not taken when key employees are viewed as retention risks, they are likely to be less committed or productive. Workforce analytics can help by alerting employers or managers to morale problems, productivity changes in individuals or groups, and indicators that an employee is looking to change jobs.

Often, people who leave their jobs exhibit certain traits over an extended period of time before they actually take the leap. Statistical models can pick up on those traits and flag such people well before they actually decide to leave their positions.

In talent retention

Workforce analytics can be used to help ensure fair compensation to retain talent and improve morale.  Analytics can be used to analyze compensation anomalies where individuals may be being under- or overcompensated based on performance, years of service, etc. Fixing such irregularities can improve morale by ensuring a level playing field.

The behavioural analytics embedded in many workforce analytics products today are designed to detect behaviour patterns that may predict future problematic behaviour. These analytics are sometimes used to avoid problem personalities right in the hiring process.

Often, pre-interview behavioural analysis involves the use of social media, psychological testing and data in public records. Experts say that it’s more common for behavioural analytics within workforce analytics to analyze the behaviour of current employees as part of productivity or security measures.

Workforce analytics can also be used to conduct succession planning, especially analyze individual career paths and individual capabilities. These can then be used to identify, groom and retain potential successors to key personnel in business continuity planning.

Highlighting an adequate number of successor candidates mapped to each critical role helps ensure continuity of operations for the business, should a key executive leave. Highlighting the amount of time between promotions, particularly for key employees, such as high potentials or senior role successor candidates, can prevent losing employees that are earmarked for critical roles or employees the company has invested heavily in.

How much should an organization invest in workforce analytics?. Well the answer is really based on what kind of value you would want from these tools. If you are able to deploy the tools well, it can help you in all the three vital processes including hiring talent, nurturing talent and in retaining talent. This can go a long way in ensuring that your organization realizes its business objectives.