People Analytics
Artificial intelligence, for as much as I write about it, continues to amaze me in how many creative ways we can put it to use to aid in our human conditions. This week’s installment continues that trend on a human resources front, with an introduction to people analytics. As the name suggests, people analytics attempts to quantify different aspects about an individual, such as their level of education, experience, and other common factors under consideration by human resources in the hiring process.
People analytics, though the phrase itself is recently coined, has been done by humans, in some form or another, since the first resume was written. People analytics in the modern sense, leverages artificial intelligence on a mass-scale in order to screen resumes before they could ever reach the desk of a hiring manager. Human Resources Information Systems (HRIS) are quickly adapting from a place to store often unused employee data into a treasure trove of structured information.
When companies can successfully tap into their databases and extract useful information, they often uncover trends in the data that explain common issues like turn over, and problems in the recruitment and hiring processes. Possibly the most helpful to human resource departments is the ability for artificial intelligence to overlook human biases and discrimination and evaluate candidate resumes on quantitative metrics such as years of experience, keywords, and other patterns. After all, AI only evaluates the information we provide in the ways we ask it to.
Gone are the days of merely reporting on employee data, now reports must be insightful, data-drive, and maybe even interactive. Though database technology at its core has hardly changed in the last 20 years, the way we round that data up, interpret, and display it have changed considerably. Microsoft’s Excel for spreadsheets, charts, and graphs is an old mainstay in terms of visualizing data, but modern management wants more. One product that’s taken center stage in terms of data visualization is a product called Tableau. In the hands of a skilled user, human resources data, and data in general, comes to life.
Tableaui was founded in 2003, and has spent the better part of two decades creeping into medium, large, and enterprise operations around the globe. The company, valued over one billion dollars, is now a child corporation of a market leader in data analytics, Salesforce.ii The power of this application goes far beyond spreadsheets like Excel, and enables users to create stunning, colorful presentations with interactive facets and continuously evolving data-sets. Tableau can pull data from almost any conceivable source and render it in intuitive and easy to understand ways. They even make powerful server components to enable the intake and rendering of thousands of data points from disparate databases and other data sources. This makes Tableau an ideal candidate for visualizing data obtained from AI-driven people analytics, but it’s far from the only option available.
Though we are very willing to let artificial intelligence do the bulk of the thinking for us, the data that comes out the other end still needs to be finessed and shaped into something humans can make a decision on. Screening resumes isn’t the end here, not when we can expand the AI’s purview into performance data, disciplinary actions, and employees’ professional development. This way, human resource departments can get a holistic view of each person from the time they’re just a candidate, to interviewing, onboarding, training, all the way through retirement or offboarding.
