HR analytics help teams better understand the movements and motivations of their workforce through the clear-cut language of data. When HR teams take a comprehensive data-driven approach, they consider multiple points of the employee experience: compensation, retention rates, diversity, and inclusion—all of it, really. Understanding these analytics can help savvy teams determine how best to allocate resources and plan for the future.

In recruitment, understanding the makeup of your workforce, while at the same time predicting vacancies before they actually happen, can make the hiring process vastly more efficient. The result? Recruiters are primed to better target quality candidates. Simply put, HR analytics helps your recruiting team strengthen the organization overall through one of its most valuable assets—its employees. It is vitally important for HR teams to be fluent in HR analytics to make meaning of the copious employee data they have at their disposal.

While a single person’s data can tell you about the individual, the collective employee data (particularly for larger companies) can be leveraged to gain insight and translate the numbers into strategy and action.

You can focus your efforts on employee retention

There are several platforms that track employee data. For example, an Applicant Tracking System (ATS) can house applicant data such as resumes and interview notes, and Human Capital Management (HCM) contains a wealth of information on current employees such as salaries, hours worked, performance evaluations, skills, and employee goals. But you have to be able to put all of this information into context and discern trends in the larger landscape of your workforce. For example: Why do people leave your organization? Do you have a poorly managed department where turnover is high? Is there a lack of advancement or professional development opportunities? Did an employee just get bored?

A holistic evaluation of an employee’s job satisfaction will include a variety of factors that can enable HR to develop employee engagement strategies, or more simply, determine when an employee merits a salary increase or a promotion. HR analytics can deep dive into the numbers to help you understand your retention rates and how to better serve your workforce. Your current staff is your best talent pool, and retaining quality staff enriches an organization overall and fosters a broader institutional knowledge. The next best candidate for a vacancy may be an employee currently working at the organization, so the ability to organize and read data in order to fill positions internally is key to recruitment success.

You can recruit ideal candidates with ease and precision

Various employee tracking platforms exist that can automate processes, but AI-enabled platforms best help HR teams understand the data trends and create actionable data. These automated platforms mean the HR team doesn’t have to have a deep knowledge of data science to be fluent in HR analytics. One of the most important analytics for HR centers around hiring data and one of the best tech tools that provides a data-driven approach is the programmatic job advertising platform. With the ability to track and predict data with ease, a programmatic job ad platform can source quality candidates based on predictive data, create targeted advertising, and evaluate the efficacy of job ads in real-time. With programmatic, you can track the performance of a hiring campaign, keep data on time-to-hire and cost-per-hire with ease, and (more importantly) actually use real-time data and AI algorithms to increase the efficiency of your hiring process. So, built-in to the tech lies the ability to target quality talent more quickly, while keeping tabs on key data metrics to measure the efficiency of the process.

In every company there is a pattern to the way employees move through the company over the course of their careers. Whether you need to increase diversity, track employee performance and skills development, or improve your turnover rate, HR analytics can help you better understand how. While each individual is different, the pattern trackable through HR analytics can provide HR a roadmap for targeting problem areas, replicating successes, and improving the employee experience at your organization.