Competing on talent analytics.

Do investments in your employees actually affect workforce performance? Who are your top performers? How can you empower and motivate other employees to excel? Leading-edge companies such as Google, Best Buy, Procter & Gamble, and Sysco use sophisticated data-collection technology and analysis to answer these questions, leveraging a range of analytics to improve the way they attract and retain talent, connect their employee data to business performance, differentiate themselves from competitors, and more. The authors present the six key ways in which companies track, analyze, and use data about their people-ranging from a simple baseline of metrics to monitor the organization's overall health to custom modeling for predicting future head count depending on various "what if" scenarios. They go on to show that companies competing on talent analytics manage data and technology at an enterprise level, support what analytical leaders do, choose realistic targets for analysis, and hire analysts with strong interpersonal skills as well as broad expertise.