Leading organisations routinely use both internal and external data to build their brand, find new customers, manage risk, and make investment decisions. What if HR could leverage data just as effectively? That time has come. Accessing employee data outside your organisation isn’t just interesting — it’s powerful.

Today’s forward thinking HR organisations are well aware of the treasure trove of data available through outside sources — such as social networks — that can help monitor and build employment brand, identify and recruit talent, better understand compensation strategies, recognise flight risk, and monitor employee satisfaction and engagement.

Recruiters now routinely use social tools like LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, and others to source and identify candidates. LinkedIn alone generates significant annual revenue by selling access to people data — the largest customer being HR organisations using data to recruit potential hires. An important factor driving this trend is that data volunteered by individuals on social networking sites is often far more comprehensive and accurate than the data within corporate HR systems.

Lessons from the front lines

AOL, one of the original brands associated with the internet, is now a major media technology company with approximately 4,500 global employees, owning such brands as The Huffington Post, TechCrunch, Engadget, MAKERS, and Mapquest.

As one might imagine, technical and creative professionals at AOL (now headquartered in New York City) are in great demand. People who come to AOL also have the opportunity to work at Google and a variety of start-ups in the New York area.

The company has invested in talent and people analytics for many years, and has recently started to focus on understanding the factors that drive people to stay with the company or leave. Leaders realised that the biggest drivers of retention are not always compensation and benefits, but a variety of intangible issues, including other job opportunities available, the brands and positions at competing companies, and the skills and experience of their people. This is particularly true for Millennials.

To understand this issue, the company has embarked on a programme to leverage external, publicly available data about the demand for jobs and skills. Working with San Francisco-based start-up talent analytics firm hiQ Labs, AOL is now carefully looking at patterns among people who leave, what factors might entice people away from AOL, and what benefits and improvements the company can implement to help it attract people with top skills.

The head of people analytics, John Callery, believes that this focus on “people data everywhere” is giving the company a whole new perspective on ways in which it can better attract, engage, and excite current employees and technical leaders. The company’s experience working with hiQ Labs already shows that external data is a powerful way to predict and understand retention and to find ways to further engage the workforce.

As Darren Kaplan, CEO of hiQ Labs, states: “For applications like predicting flight risk or understanding the drivers of retention, our experience shows that public data can be significantly more predictive than internal HR data about people.”

Where companies can start

• Partner with marketing: Marketing teams are already solving the problem of monitoring, leveraging, and managing external data. They often have tools and processes in place to find and monitor data about companies and their people.

• Buy and access tools to tap into major social networks: Tools that explore LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, Glassdoor, and other networks are mature and available today. Companies of all sizes should investigate these tools and become comfortable with the use of external data for sourcing, recruiting, and monitoring their employment brand.

• Recognise that the drive for transparency is here to stay: While compensation and employee engagement data, though increasingly visible through services such as Glassdoor, is not yet public, it is possible to see such data becoming available outside a company in the future.

BOTTOM LINE

External data about candidates, employees, and potential contractors are now available throughout the internet. These data make up a critical part of a company’s strategy to understand its employment brand, identify strong candidates, understand employee engagement, and predict and try to reduce flight risk. This year, organisations should upgrade their focus on the use of external data within HR, as it has become a fast-growing part of the HR analytics strategy.

For more information about Human Capital Services at Deloitte, contact Jessica Mello, Director of Consulting at Deloitte, on 295-1500 or at jessica.mello@deloitte.bm

Deloitte’s 2015 Global Human Capital Trends report is one of the largest longitudinal studies of talent, leadership, and HR challenges and readiness around the world. The research involved surveys and interviews with more than 3,300 business and HR leaders from 106 countries. All the data from this research can be viewed by geography, company size, and industry using an interactive tool, the Human Capital Trends Dashboard, available at www.deloitte.com/hcdashboard.