Talent is top of mind again as leaders struggle with how to capitalize on the opportunities of a changing postrecession economy while at the same time keeping workers happy and engaged. Even though many parts of the global economy are still struggling, there continues to be a talent shortage and many companies still struggle to hire and hold key talent. At the same time, younger workers continue to enter the workforce while older workers retire. These younger workers have a different expectation for the pace of feedback, career development, promotion, and what it means to be an employee. Also, the world of work has changed, with social media providing new ways to connect, engage, and find candidates. This enables candidates to promote their skills, while at the same time leaving a gold mine of talent data to be harnessed as a competitive edge for hiring managers.

At the same time, executives are putting pressure on their human resources (HR) departments to produce fact-based insights and strategies for critical talent issues such as: Do we have the right talent mix to achieve our objectives? Can we predict who are going to be the best leaders for the future? What development should we give these potential leaders? How engaged are our top performers in our key business strategies? Do we know which talents are at risk of leaving? What are we doing to keep them?

Workforce dynamics have always been complex during business cycle changes. However, what’s different in this economic cycle is that human capital executives and hiring managers now have Big Data analytics to leverage in attracting, acquiring, and advancing the right talent through the organization. The amount of available data on your employees and business processes is exploding, and Big Data is now everywhere, including the workplace. Real-time information on employee engagement, actions, sentiment, productivity, location, quality, and aspirations is everywhere, making it possible to tie talent to business outcomes in ways that were almost impossible before.

The implications are significant because talent management in many businesses has traditionally revolved around interpersonal relationships or decision making based on educated experience, rather than deep analysis. Advanced People Analytics provides a unique opportunity for human capital professionals and hiring managers to position themselves as fact-based strategic partners of senior executives, using analytically proven techniques to recruit and retain those top employees who drive superior value in companies.

People Analytics is a new domain for most HR departments. However, with the application of new techniques and new thinking to talent management, the field of People Analytics is becoming more mainstream. Leading companies are increasingly leveraging sophisticated methods to analyze employee and business data to enhance their competitive edge. The old approaches of gut feel and “that’s worked in the past” are no longer enough.

We wrote this book to be different from the other available books on People Analytics, and we are glad you have chosen to read it. The focus of this book is on practical approaches that can help a business leader create value from and make the most of the organization’s analytical assets. Also, unlike other books, we outline how to inject data analytics at every stage of the talent management process, from talent acquisition through retention. Furthermore, we have included real-world examples of what other companies are doing, both what’s working and what’s not working.

This book will help you think about People Analytics across your organization, evaluate whether you are doing People Analytics well, and provide you with frameworks to take your efforts to the next level, creating business value for your organization in the process. This is not a technical book; it is written to be relevant to someone with no analytical experience as well as to the person with a great deal of analytical experience.

The focus of this book is on effective People Analytics and how companies can create business value from their Big Data assets. By effective People Analytics, we mean analytics that start with a strategic human capital business goal or question, integrate disparate data sources together, create a prediction for the future, and lead to business actions with measurable results. We provide numerous People Analytics examples throughout the book with an eye toward those real-world examples that will be of interest to a business leader as well as practicing analytical professionals.

To support different workforce analytics covered here, this book will also provide you with interviews and frontline stories from leading People Analytics organizations, including: Accenture, Adobe, AOL, Best Buy, Black Hills, Bloomberg, Bullhorn, CareerXroads, CGB Enterprise, CVS Aviation, Deloitte, Dow Chemical, Facebook, FedEx, General Electric, General Motors, Goldcorp, Google, Harrah Entertainment, Hewlett-Packard, hiQ Labs, Johnson & Johnson, Lockheed Martin, Microsoft, Monster, Omnitracs, Pfizer, SAS Institute, Société de Transport de Montréal, Sprint, Starbucks Limited Brands, Transcom, The Container Store, Wells Fargo, Workplace Safety and Insurance Board, and Xerox.

Big Data continues to be touted as the next wave of technology and analytics innovation. From our perspective, the next wave of innovation is not just about Big Data, but more about how companies leverage Big Data analytics to take action and optimize their business. Having data is not enough; it needs to be leveraged effectively to drive and optimize business action that is coordinated at all levels of the organization. As it relates to People Analytics, Big Data is critical to providing real-time insights to businesses regarding how to maximize the value of the talent for the organization as well as maximize the organization’s value for the talent it intends to retain and develop. Throughout the book, we review our Seven Pillars of People Analytics Success in the context of Big Data, providing examples for each pillar to help illustrate the key concepts to effective People Analytics.

This book is written where each chapter builds on the preceding one, but each chapter can be read by itself as well. You will get more out of the book if you read it from beginning to end, but if you are interested in quickly learning about employee engagement analytics, for example, you can jump right to that chapter. Regardless, we encourage you to start with Chapters 1 through 3, which provide the foundation for the book as well as outline one of our key frameworks, the Seven Pillars of People Analytics Success. Throughout the course of this book, we explore each pillar of the People Analytics framework, offering insights on how to successfully leverage analytics for every pillar, and we provide frontline stories from companies that have successfully leveraged the framework to improve business outcomes. We will also share best practices and takeaways at the end of each chapter.

We are confident that if you follow the principles contained in this book you will develop high-impact People Analytics and generate business value from the Big Data and little data available to your organization. Some of the practices we outline are not easy to accomplish, but whether you are in a large company or a small one, you can apply your vision of People Analytics and create business value from your data.