How are companies using data and analytics to solve HR problems?

I pitched the concept to my HR last week, actually.  It will be a big step for them as quantitative approaches to business problems are not yet ingrained in our culture (outside of R&D).  I want to prove that HR can be a force for good. I received many positive noises; waiting to hear back if we actually have budget and buy-in to make it happen.  I figure that if the Goog doesn't have a People Ops Program Manager slot open for me in Cambridge, I'll just make my own.  :) I've done some cursory research on what's going on in this space previously.  In general, companies take a piecemeal approach to HR analytics.  GOOG is the 400lb gorilla in the room, and really the only ones doing it from tip-to-tail.  Some companies will focus on only engagement, or only retention prediction, or perhaps only some basic salary trending vs locality.  I want to bring the whole shebang together.  HR is naturally a data-rich environment so the potential for a business-oriented data hacker is HUGE.

1. Companies in many areas are quickly seeing that there success depends on getting the people side of their businesses right. We work with more and more smaller companies that are thinking about this before they grow to a size where it will become difficult to manage. Companies are now able to use more data tools such as online survey tools, google forms, social media aggregators and cloud based HRIS systems - and they are doing so. In terms of the types of problems the big ones are always retention of talent and attraction of talent. This requires metrics on a range of topics and analytics to understand which things most impact the decisions involved in joining or leaving a company. Apart from this we are also seeing more of what we call People Intelligence metrics. This involves using feedback from employees to understand all sorts of things such as where you sit in the marketplace, what your processes are like, whether you onboard people well, where your best and worst managers are etc etc. We provide some other examples here: http://blog.cultureamp.com/more-ways-you-hadnt-thought-to-use-employee-surveys 2. I used to work in a larger consultancy company and most of the companies that we worked with or were approached by were larger and just changing approaches or vendors. Working in a cloud based provider of analytics now I am now seeing smaller and larger companies that traditionally have not done this sort of work coming along all the time. This suggests to me that there are a number of companies out there that are currently thinking about this but are still thinking about how they will be doing it. This is not a luxury item anymore :) 3. Some challenges include: Engaging employees in the process because you often rely on them for data. So, this means avoiding pitfalls such as super long surveys and never showing results or talking about them. Linking feedback data to harder performance based data such as retention metrics or performance metrics (financial or productivity for example). Often the data is collected at different times and is aggregated differently and/or cannot be tied together easily. This all needs to be thought of beforehand.

Adding to answer, these days Attrition analysis is also getting popular...

Of the experiences I have had, using an HRMS with the gamification and analytics features can help with plenty of HR understanding since these features bring in statistics with over all company overview of - Individual employees Departments Admin This model has proved to help my company with:1. Boost in employee performance and encourage healthy competition in the company. 2. Helped in achieving real business goals when expanded beyond points, badges and leader boards.3. Increased employee productivity.These features work as the score card and this one particularly includes not only HR & Payroll but also advanced features like HR analytics with detailed statistics model: https://www.sumhr.com/sumhr-features-overview/hr-analytics/