Picture this: You, the aspiring marketing mogul, apply for a job armed with all the desired qualities, qualification and work experience. You are asked to appear for an online test as the first qualifying step towards your latest career choice. However, you are rejected in the first go because, hold your breath, you are above 4 feet in height! Worse still, it wasn’t a regular Human Resource Manager but a computer program that sealed your fate because the data suggested that shorter people would perform better in a minimum – wage, client-servicing role during the Christmas season since after all, those elf costumes won’t fill themselves!
Welcome to the nonhuman world of Human Resource! Or, as the advocates of automated employment system would like to put it: Big Data approach to scientific hiring. Not to worry though, the prognosis isn’t as grim as pictured above. In fact, today Big Data is streamlining the recruitment process, making it far more efficient in finding the right person for the job.
Having an algorithm as the hiring boss who evaluates applicants, accrues data and gawp deeply into the candidates’ personal as well as professional lives and interests is certainly not new. What’s new is the scale.
Following in the footsteps of corporate czars like Google and Xerox, that have done this to hire the best talent as well as cut employee turnover to half, now even start-ups are trading in hunch-based hiring for computer modelled mode of employment and man-management a.ka. people analytics. And why not? Big Data analyzes massive amounts of structured and unstructured data that was hitherto difficult to process using traditional techniques. It not only speeds up the talent hunt process of organizations, making it even more target-oriented and more efficient but also yields big payoffs, massive cuts in attrition bring just one.
And the factors they study are disparate from applicants’ expectations. Professional history and personal interviews are no longer relevant for employers to fill jobs. Hunch-hiring is much less significant. Personality tests and data analysis are the new HR managers. In short, the computers and software make important recruitment decisions like – is the candidate the right person for the job, will he stick to the job or not, will he perform better than his predecessor and even more.
And not just appointments. HR departments are using Big Data to assess people on the job – appraisal, promotion, retention, and corporate culture are increasingly being managed by Big Data tools such as talent-management software. These tools predict success based on whether certain characteristics of a person are similar to characteristics of a target sample of people.
Further, people analytics ensures a bias-free recruitment process and help employers to objectively evaluate a candidate based on skills, experience and knowledge before an interview.
Can hiring get any more non-humanized than this? One wonders!
Evolv, a company that monitors recruitment and workplace data, strongly recommends the optimum use of Big Data in the process of hiring. It says workforce science enables businesses to reveal the true factors that contribute to employee tenure and productivity, and rule out factors that are irrelevant.
Evolv further emphasizes the point with the example of its client Xerox that provides global business process outsourcing, information technology, managed print services and document management through a workforce of nearly 50,000 workers. The company turned to Evolv to transform its approach to managing its workforce. A pilot program reduced premature attrition among 2,000 customer service team members. Xerox’s half year trial with Evolv cut attrition by a fifth. Workforce predictive analytics brought precision and profit to Xerox.
Like Xerox, Google – the Mecca of Big Data, too, reshaped its entire hiring process with the help of Big Data, creating history of sorts in the process.
Google and Xerox proved to the corporate world how Big Data can revolutionize the way business is done. They made HR managers the world over to sit up, take notice and incorporate algorithms and Big Data – both very powerful tools of hiring, in their employment processes. Used wisely, they can match the right people with the right jobs.
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