Who is this guide for:

‍This guide is for HR teams trying to understand how HR analytics and HR tech can support their organisation’s growth, as well as improve employee attraction and retention.‍

What you’ll get from it:‍

A couple of ideas to create an attractive workplace and win the talent battle over your competition.

It’s all going faster. Are you keeping up?

Our society is evolving. Fast. And it’s only natural for the average workplace to evolve, too.

This constant and ever-accelerating environment is quite a challenge for HR professionals whose responsibilities involve taking care of everything that’s people-related.

HR leaders are still battling to figure out the new normal in the workplace after the world was taken by COVID-19, decrypting what Gen Z wants and needs while trying to build more diverse and inclusive work environments.

Uncertainty is gaining ground in the UK.

We live through the Great Paradox.

The Great Resignation is still raging despite high inflation and a brutal recession. As a result, many companies need help to hire talent, while others need to make tough redundancy decisions to stay afloat.

Workers want the best or nothing.

Workers are increasingly paying more attention to their well-being and work-life balance. They need workplaces where they can be themselves to reach their full potential. This is especially true for Gen Z employees.

As it is becoming a critical selection factor for top talent, organisations need to become more efficient at measuring their HR performance to fix whatever needs improvement.

Now, the amount of data to collect and analyse to see a complete and relevant picture is far too important for humans to be on top of everything. At least, not without the help of technology.

In other words, HR teams need to get comfortable with HR data analytics. And they need to do it fast.

What is HR analytics, anyway?

Simply put, HR analytics covers the data-led analysis of everything from reward to D&I, absences, engagement, or even HR operations. 

In other words, HR analytics covers everything people-related.

Why do all organisations need to invest in HR tech before it’s too late

Well, knowledge is everything.

As one collects AND processes information about their people, policies and the overall market, knowledge grants them the superpower of anticipation so they can always be in the know and one step ahead of the competition.

Now, people analytics involves metrics. But which metrics should you follow to measure your HR performance?

In application, there are hundreds of HR metrics you should be able to track to get a complete picture of your team’s performance. 

We won’t be listing all of them here.

Instead, we’ll look at proven tactics and technology HR teams should consider to support their organisations by improving the overall employee experience.

Work on your employer brand and optimise your recruitment process. 

May it be time to hire, recruitment costs, recruitment model, overall employer brand awareness or candidate experience, etc., you can track many indicators to get a clearer view of your recruitment funnel and performance.

Let’s take two simple examples.

1. Job ad clarity:

You publish a job advert and receive 100 applications. 

After screening candidates, you realise that only 10% are good-fit candidates. It could be that you didn’t publish or advertise your job ad in the right places, or maybe your job ad isn’t optimised for your ideal candidate profile.

Good to know:

With Pay Tracker Live, you can quickly search and compare how competitors build their job ads for similar roles.

Candidate experience:

You interviewed ten good-fit candidates, but none accepts to join your organisation.

Again, many metrics can help you understand the reasons for this scenario: too many interviews, failure to show your company culture during the interview process, poor candidate experience, pay under the market average, etc. 

Only by measuring key metrics will you be able to identify bottlenecks.

Good to know:

Pay is one of the most important factors to retain employees and attract top-performing candidates. Offer pay and overall compensation package under the market average, and you’ll struggle to keep and attract talent. Blindly pay over the market, and you’ll likely increase costs beyond what’s necessary.

Pay Tracker Live puts an end to this never-ending dance. It gives HR teams access to the UK’s most comprehensive real-time salary data. It gives them the information they need to stay competitive in the eyes of top talent.

Learn more about Pay Tracker Live.

Implement top talent management tactics.

An organisation is only as great as its people.

For this reason, it is paramount that HR teams track what their talent needs to keep up with ever-growing targets.

• What skills do you have in-house? Are you missing essential skills to help your organisation achieve its targets?
• Can you cover for potential employee churn? Employees don’t stick around as long as they used to a few decades back. Do you have a succession planning plan? If so, can you measure your succession planning readiness?
• Do you have training programs? Do you need to hire talent to fill gaps? Or would it be more cost-efficient to train your people? More often than not, training is a great idea. It increases your people’s market value as they learn and grow their skills and shows your employees that you value them.

Research says happy employees stay longer and work more efficiently.

Find what drives your employees and work from it.

A study by Oxford University's Saïd Business School revealed that happy employees are 13% more productive than the average worker.

Keeping employees happy by meeting or exceeding their needs will also result in them staying around longer, thus reducing operational costs.

Do not overlook diversity and inclusion.

The latest market developments tell us that organisations not trying to build safer, fairer, more inclusive and diverse workplaces will soon be in trouble as they see top employees leave.

Top employees don’t complain. They leave.

For this reason, organisations must invest in developing their company culture and ensure all employees feel included, regardless of their identity.

Don’t be afraid to measure and address the elephant in the room.

It’s factual; there are real inequalities in leadership position occupancy. In October 2021, only 8 of the UK’s top 100 organisations were led by women.

Of course, gender disparities in leadership positions are only the tip of the iceberg, but the example speaks for itself.

By not measuring and comparing objectively, organisations live in denial and contribute to not supporting a needed mindset change – either by choice or by lack of means to measure and compare themselves.

Productivity needs diversity and inclusion.

D&I is now a strategic investment for organisations, as not addressing it affects performance and revenue. Indeed, research shows that low-performing companies, regarding D&I, are 19% more likely to underperform (source: McKinsey).

Turn HR into more than a cost centre. 

Quote us (and challenge us) on that, if you will, but we believe that HR is the new cool kid in town, and the time has come to go beyond counting.

If it’s well established that talent and culture are the cornerstones of success for all organisations, HR professionals have been kept out of the boardroom for far too long, and it simply does not make sense anymore.

Think about it:

• What is your organisation made of? Your people.
• Who carries your organisation? Your people.
• Who has the power to make or break your organisation? Your people.

The equation is quite simple: 

Your organisation = your people.

We recently questioned dozens of HR professionals to understand their challenges and roadblocks.

Here’s what they said:

• “Lack of dedicated resource”
• “Slow decision-making processes”
• “Senior stakeholders”
• “Sufficient buy-in from the top, to enable action”
• “Lack of awareness and time from leaders”
• “Ingrained behaviour and cultural norms”
• “Getting senior leaders buy-in”
• “Obtaining buy-in from all staff”
• “Getting people to see the relevance or understand the importance”

Can you see a trend? We sure can.

Most referred to slow decision-making from ‘the top’. One of the reasons for this is that senior stakeholders struggle to link HR to revenue. HR or workforce analytics is here to help quantify your actions and get rid of outdated views.

More data means more leverage for HR teams.

Let’s begin with a comparison.

In the early 2000s, marketers had to fight to prove their work's effects without being able to show many tangible results. Then came new technologies allowing them to understand their actions, tie them to revenue, and show the value of their work to management. 

This was when marketing teams moved from being the ‘cool group organising events and ordering branded pens’ to having a real seat on the board table.

History repeats itself, and the same is happening to HR right now.

Technology is turning HR into your organisation’s most valuable department.

Make data-driven HR decisions (and convince your board).

Yes, the Great Resignation taught us that employees aspire to more than high-paying jobs. However, pay remains crucial to attract, hire and retain talent.

For instance, at equivalent title, location and seniority, a company offering a higher compensation will likely secure more top talent than their direct competition.

There is only one way to avoid such situations: the knowledge you get from analysing data.

Looking at the average pay data for specific titles and seniority in a given region, you should be able to adapt your future job offers to the market.

To do this, you can either conduct manual research (and potentially spend hours to find and compute relevant data), go through salary surveys, or use technologies like Pay Tracker Live.