Many organizations aren’t aware of the vast amounts of data they have access to, and don’t know they can use that data to get information they wish they had through predictive analytics. But some see the potential and are using predictive analytics to make business decisions that pay off.
Neil Rae is director of North American operations for Transcom Worldwide, which provides CRM and debt collection services. “Our business is about human capital and optimizing human capital,” he says. Looking at the structured data they have can give them a variety of insights, especially about their call centers, which have large numbers of employees.
Absenteeism can be a problem. “You’ve got to understand what is driving that,” he says. “You need to start modeling who are the most effective trainers, recruiters and supervisors. If you start playing with the data, you can reduce absenteeism and attrition and then improve the growth and revenue generation of the business.”
Bill McKinney is the vice president of talent and long-term development at Thrivent Financial, a nonprofit Fortune 500 financial services membership organization. Whether the organization is recruiting internally or out in the field, finding people who are active in their community and could be passionate about their role at Thrivent is key.
“We try to find somebody who’s well connected in the community and who’s potentially a good sales person,” McKinney says. These kinds of insights come from unstructured data — which, McKinney says, “gets tricky.” Gathering data from multiple sites — such as social media sites, review boards and so on — can be challenging because people may have different user names or profiles on different sites.
“You have to connect the dots to create a profile,” McKinney says. “You look at things like geolocations, what people are posting on Facebook, where they’re posting when they do.”
Once the ideal candidates are identified and it’s clear where these candidates spend their time online, it’s possible to target them with job-opening ads. When the specificity of who the organization is targeting goes up, the costs to get in front of them go down, McKinney says. “Instead of putting out ads in papers or billboards, we are literally putting it in front of specific people: ‘We think you will succeed and want you to do the job’.”
McKinney stresses that developing a single ideal profile isn’t necessarily the best way to find a candidate for a position. “If you take any job with a lot of people doing it, there are probably four or five profiles of what our highest performers look like,” he says. “You’re not just looking for one, you’re looking for four or five. You’ve got to do the work to understand what you know about the people you already have.”
Predictive analytics is growing, and will continue to grow as more organizations understand what it can do for them. If you’re interested in gaining deeper insights into your business data through predictive analytics, download our new white paper, The Power of Predictive Employee Analytics.
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