A Leap Forward in People Analytics

Today's post comes to us from Workforce Institute board member David Creelman.

Take a look at this people analytics data prepared by Revelio Labs. It looks at turnover (churn) vs. revenue growth. There is something very odd about Costco at the bottom right.

© Revelio Labs (2021)

One thing that is different at Costco relative to their competitors is a high ratio of junior to senior employees, i.e. a flat organization.

© Revelio Labs (2021)

If you want to read more of Revelio Lab's piece on Costco click here: https://www.reveliolabs.com/news/business/what-makes-costco-a-great-place-to-work

However, I wanted to focus this blog on a larger take-away than just what's happening with Costco.

What we're seeing here are HR analytics that will be really intriguing to business leaders. The ability to use advanced technologies to gather and analyze data from a wide variety of public sources such as Indeed and LinkedIn to get a clear picture of an organization's talent strategy and its impact on meaningful measures is a huge leap forward.

Historically, HR analytics work has been myopically focused on the data we can pull out of our own HRIS systems. This new work from Revelio Labs points to a new and much bolder direction for HR analytics. We can now do all kinds of analysis that compares our organizations to competitors. We can look at which departments competitors are investing in compared to which ones we are investing in. We can look at where they are getting talent and who is taking our talent. We can look at estimates of diversity data even if our competitors don't report it.

The sheer volume of public data that is out there in the public sphere is astounding and I'm very excited to see what Revelio Labs and others continue to do to find value in that data.

What sources of data are your company looking at and measuring these days? What do you think are the most meaningful metrics in HR analytics? Share your thoughts in the Comments section.