Big Data: HR’s Golden Opportunity Arrives

With the arrival of Big Data, HR is faced with an unprecedented opportunity to become more datadriven, analytical and strategic in the way that it acquires talent. Indeed, HR has spent much of the past decade trying to find increasingly better ways to apply metrics and analytics to its human capital decisions. Now, powerful new technologies make it possible for HR to blend its internal data with an unprecedented amount of data from external sources to make evidencebased talent management decisions and to raise the department’s profile as a strategic partner to senior leadership. This is particularly true when it comes to job boards, which continue to be a top source for employers to tap into active job seekers. Today’s more evolved job boards provide a goldmine of information, and the need for HR to successfully leverage this information to win the war for talent has never been greater. Thanks to the growing number of software vendors that have been successfully gathering and analyzing vast amounts of talent-related data, HR can now turn to these experts for much-needed assistance in launching their own talentrelated Big Data initiatives. (Note: For the purposes of this article, the term “talent management” refers to the life cycle of activity that begins with talent acquisition and selection and extends throughout their development, promotion and retention.)