Memory Nguwi caught up with one of the top thought leaders in the people analytics filed, Eric Siegel
MN. What is people analytics?
ES: Also called workforce analytics or HR analytics, people analytics is the application of analytics to human resources, most traditionally to model which prospects may be best hires and which current employees are most a risk of quitting their job. It is analogous to using predictive analytics for marketing, but rather than predicting customer behavior (who’s coming and who’s going), the model predicts employee behavior.
MN: Which fields would benefit from people analytics
ES: Any company that wishes to optimize their hiring and retention processes would benefit.
MN: How has the field of people analytics progressed?
ES: The main advancement comes of the increased awareness and understanding of this value proposition within the human resources sector. This makes it more prevelant that the right data is tracked and the methods are implemented and deployed at organizations.
MN: What can organisations do you benefit from people analytics?
ES: Any company that wishes to optimize their hiring and retention processes would benefit.
MN: How does people analytics help the business?
ES: Optimizing hires and decreasing employee attrition are tremendous cost savers.
MN: What have been some of the challenges in harnessing the power of people analytics and how can the problems be dealt with?
ES: There are privacy concerns and cultural integration issues. I wrote an article about it here: http://analytics-magazine.org/predictive-analytics-the-privacy-pickle-hewlett-packards-prediction-of-employee-behavior/
MN: What are some of the notable value-adding cases where people analytics worked?
ES: Here’s a table of examples from my book, “Predictive Analytics: The Power to Predict Who Will Click, Buy, Lie, or Die”:
Eric Siegel is a founder of Predictive Analytics World (the Predictive Analytics World conference series. He is the author of the award-winning
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Eric has appeared on Bloomberg TV and Radio, Business News Network (Canada), Fox News, Israel National Radio, National Geographic Breakthrough, NPR Marketplace, Radio National (Australia), and TheStreet. He and his book have been featured in Big Think, Businessweek, CBS MoneyWatch, Contagious Magazine, The European Business Review, The Financial Times, Forbes, Forrester, Fortune, GQ, Harvard Business Review, The Huffington Post, The New York Review of Books, The New York Times, Newsweek, Quartz, Salon, The San Francisco Chronicle, Scientific American, The Seattle Post-Intelligencer, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, and WSJ MarketWatch. Follow him at @predictanalytic.
Eric Siegel, Ph.D., founder of the Predictive Analytics World (15k attendees since 2009) and Deep Learning World conference series, and executive editor of The Predictive Analytics Times, makes the how and why of predictive analytics (aka machine learning) understandable and captivating. He is the author of the award-winning Predictive Analytics: The Power to Predict Who Will Click, Buy, Lie, or Die, a former Columbia University professor who used to sing to his students, the host of The Dr. Data Show, and a renowned speaker and educator who's been commissioned for more than 100 keynote addresses by these industries: ad tech, construction, e-commerce, environmentalism, financial services, government, healthcare, human resources, insurance, law, manufacturing, market research, marketing, news media, pharmaceuticals, restaurants, real estate, and travel.