The Benefits Of Using HR Data As A Tool For Talent Retention

In a post for HR Magazine published this month, industry veteran Stephen Bevan talks about how the information harvested by human resources departments can be used to formulate many different strategies aimed at fuelling growth and shoring up the performance of an organization.

One of the most interesting and relevant trends Bevan identifies relates to talent retention, because as the UK economy returns to an upward trajectory and things generally become more buoyant, companies are coming under pressure to hold onto skilled members of staff, or those with future potential, to avoid hemorrhaging high value employees to competitors.

HR Analytics

Bevan points out that the HR department should have the right kind of information available to it which will allow it to work out which people are likely to walk away from a position and accept one elsewhere. However, he believes that such data is rarely utilized in such a way, which means businesses find it harder to work out the number of regretted and non-regretted staff exits which occur each year.

It might seem natural to assume that the best way to retain valuable employees is to offer bonuses to those who choose to stay put, but Bevan argues that while such tactics can be highly visible, they are not actually all that effective in most situations.

Instead he recommends that businesses take advantage of HR data using relevant software solutions to offer staff things that may be more important to them, such as increased responsibility in their current role, the option to further their career elsewhere in the organization or greater challenges so that they are more engaged with their position.

Establishing which strategy will be most effective for which employee can be achieved using HR data, although of course it also means that businesses will need to actually take steps to properly catalogue and analyze this information, or face it going to waste.

Plan of Action

Bevan suggests that businesses can look to the past in order to work out how to handle talent retention in the future. Those regretted leavers who flew the coop may still sting, but assessing the reasons for their departure and the demographics into which they fall will make it easier to work out which current employees might be at risk of taking a similar route.

The upshot of this is that businesses can retain people who can contribute to the long term prosperity of the business as a whole, while also saving time and money on the recruitment process and avoid giving competitors the advantage as soon as someone gets cold feet about a job.

Analytical tools are increasingly available to HR departments and cloud-based software makes it easier to manage the mountains of data that are being generated on a day to day basis in many organizations.

Human Resource software by CIPHR delivers impressive performance for businesses looking to maximize the potential contribution of the HR department to the growth of the organization as a whole.