In Cognitive Realm

Predictive analytics can open up new vistas for HR managers.

- Ketan Dewan

 Human resources departments are aware of the cost of employee churn to their enterprise. High turnover leads to high costs to recruit replacement workers, and lead time to train new employees before they can become productive. Added to this is the pressure to hire for new roles. This is prevalent across all companies and sectors and hence there is need for predictive analytics to aid, and perhaps even come up with some meaningful insights to enable informed and confident decision-making. As is commonly said, ‘We trust in God, everyone else brings data.’

The last thirty years have seen lots of systems of records being created in HR technology. These contribute to less than 5% of automation. Predictive analysis on MIS and past data undoubtedly provides insights into the future. However, no matter how good the analytics, the input data is past and hence there are challenges vis-a-vis the proposed insights. So, what are these systems of records? Simply put, they are the ones that will showcase your daily MIS. The dashboards are fancy, but the input is what happened previously and hence cannot change. And most companies try to derive insights from the past, while every day is a new day and every challenge is a new challenge. Hence, the need for HR leaders is not to have analytics in batch formats; rather they need data to move from hindsight to insight and from insigh