Throughout the candidate and employee journey within your organization, they are leaving behind fragments of data. Having a look at a single data piece might not be that helpful, but gathering it together, will help you understand a fuller story of what are the real insights.

People analytics is defined as the deeply data-driven and goal-focused method of studying all people processes, functions, challenges, and opportunities at work to elevate these systems and achieve sustainable business success

Oh, doesn't that sound complicated? Let's put it into more simpler terms. People analytics take all the collected data (both people; HR, organizational, customer etc) and transform it into actionable insights. Insights that you can use to improve business.

For example, knowing that candidate M had the time to decision during their recruitment process of 55 days, does not really have meaning. While knowing that your R&D department's average time to decision is 32 days, tells you that the candidate experience for candidate M should get a deeper look into. And when you have supporting data points telling that also bring in factors such as cost per hire etc, you will have an easy convincing reason to prioritise in times of low resources specific recruitment projects.

Utilising the power of data in an accessible and agile way, you will benefit in identifying the correlation between people strategy and business performance. With the help of data, you will be in a far more comfortable position to actually answer business-related questions like:

• Why are our leavers leaving mainly due to our total reward offering if we have been increasing the budget by 15% YoY?

• Why is our workforce off-time yoyoing from one year to another? How to balance that with our workforce needs in high seasons?

• What are the employee demographics for reluctant leavers?

• Who of our employees are at high risk of resignation?

• How is the performance management approach supporting Talent Strategy?

How to gather data

I often hear responses that the company does not have the resources for gathering that data. Or that a tool for people analytics is hard to get budget approval from Finance.

The good news is, that you do not really have to do much extra to gather data. You already have the data!

And the even better news is, that for beginners I would suggest starting from a simpler method than an all-out analytics tool. Having your collection of spreadsheets, HRIS, Recruitment tool etc is enough, to get dynamic dashboards. I can recommend for example Qlik or Tableau for it.

What data to look at?

This is a starting sample.

1. Organizational performance

   • Revenue per employee

   • Operating margin

   • Earning per share and total shareholder return

   • Return on assets

2. Workplace monitoring

   • Headcount & headcount YoY growth

   • Open headcount count

   • Talent Acquisition

     • Time to hire

     • Cost per hire

     • Qualified candidates per opening

     • Candidate conversion rate per stage

     • Offer acceptance rate

     • Candidate NPS

     • Internal candidate rate

     • Referral rate

   • Absentee rate

   • Average performance rating

   • Attrition

   • Turnover

   • Retention

   • Average tenure

   • Demographic data

   • Job architecture

3. Key customer metrics

   • Customer NPS

   • MRR

   • MRR YoY growth

   • New client %

   • New client retention rate

   • Churn

   • The average revenue per customer

   • Product stability

   • % of bugs

   • % of Critical incidents

   • Duration of critical incidents

   • VoC from Trustpilot, G2, Google Reviews etc.

4. Voice of Employee

   • Onboarding NPS

   • 1:1 conversation-based assessments

   • Performance results

   • 360-degree feedback

   • Pulse checks

   • Exit interviews

   • Candidate experience surveys

   • Glassdoor, MeetFrank, LinkedIn, Xing,

🔖Read more from McKinsey about How to be great at people analytics.

AIHR overview on their Essential Guide for People Analytics & if you mainly working from inside an Excel Spreadsheet, here are 17 formulas and functions for you.