Here are my comments on a very interesting article written by Bourree Lam for TheAtlantic.com. It raises an excellent question: can Big data really predict employee behavior?
Basically, we all know that HR is seated on a real golden-mine of information without really exploiting it. Asking employees what would be their ideal career path, what kind of training sessions they would be interested in, what skills they have developed during their latest project, all that stuff is great except if you do nothing with it…
Talent management systems have collected these small data and given HR means to use it, thus delivering a real added value to the company. But the truth is that HR is still not enough data-driven and only use around 15% of these small data. So, is it really time for them to dive into the Big data universe, trying to correlate weak signals coming from everywhere to predict answers to questions that haven’t even raised yet?
Some new functions such as data scientists or data analysts have recently appeared to help HR to get benefits from small and big data. If they can help to get 45% of small data really used instead of 15%, that’s great! But HR is probably not ready to do more than that, because they still lack confidence in data not fully reliable and results they can’t explain…
And you, what do you think about it? Please read the article, it will maybe help you to answer the question;)
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Big Data promises to predict employee behavior. But as it turns out, humans aren’t particularly predictable.
Five or six years ago, companies realized that they were sitting on a wealth of data about their own employees. « People started to realize, ‘Wait a minute, there’s a lot of data in here that we’re not using. Some of them are wrong. It’s not very clean,' » says Josh Bersin, the founder of Bersin by Deloitte, an HR research and advisory arm of Deloitte. « But if we look at it like we look at customer data, we could probably make much better decisions about who to promote, where they should be in the company, what role they would be successful at.' »
