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Technology is transforming the jobs that we do today. The way the organizations create jobs is increasing the speed and transparency but all of that is creating a lot of data. We are talking about Big Data here. Data and analytics is going to become one of the key differentiators within Human Resources (HR) teams. Those who are able to bring together the abundance of data that they are collecting through efficient, effective online processes and to make sense of it through analytics will have a competitive advantage over those who aren’t able to capture that data.

When it comes to acquiring data for Human Resources Management (HRM), it is frustrating for organizations to not actually get linear data about human behavior. But human behavior is complex and it’s may be where Big Data will finally actually help bridge the gap between analytics and human behavior. If you understand the world of human behavior, the best you can do in terms of getting insights is to collect the patterns of behavior, but we live in perceptual data, feelings. So, what’s exciting about Big Data is that we believe that we will actually start to be able to capture those patterns of behavior and combine them with more linear analytics and start to deliver some much better Predictive Modeling and Advanced Analytics in the field of Human Resources.

There are so many examples that we could talk about, but analytics of data is enabling recruiters for example, to easily be able to identify which of the job sites that are working for them, for their organization, for a particular segment of talent for example. They are enabling HR teams to be able to do all sorts of correlations which have just been left to intuition and gut feel before, but be able to say, let’s look at our employee engagement data. If we plot that against compensation data, or performance data, we can observe that the shift is much away from backwards looking, what the data is telling us, and much more towards Predictive Analysis.

So, we are seeing the Big Data being used in scientific ways so that we can start to say not only what it is telling us about the past, but how we can use that to predict the future. The particular employee groups are at risk of leaving and these groups of talent are going to be particularly difficult to retain or to grow or acquire in the future.

So, the use of data being able to harness it having the technical, statistical, and mathematical skills to be able to take that data and make sense of it and use it in a future-oriented way is going to be a real trend that we can see continue to grow in the years and the decades to come. According to a survey by peoplehr, Big Data has a major role to play in HRM. It signifies the importance of using right data at the right time in a right way for HR. Today, many organizations around the world are making use of Big Data as it helps HR to maximize their businesses.