Is It Time To Empower Human Resources More? Yes!

Adrian Dixon

October 22, 2019

post featured image

The bottom line: Human Resources needs to be further empowered within the business, especially at an apex time for talent. 

The landscape

While this attitude is gradually changing for the better, many current executives do view Human Resources as a compliance function. It’s definitely not a profit center at most organizations. 

Compliance is incredibly important, but several other core functions of an organization tend to run through HR: Recruiting, i.e. getting the best people, is the most notable one. But HR executives typically have a hand in culture, retention, and broader organizational health goals too. So while those things are not easy to track on a spreadsheet, per se, they are very important to the business and HR needs a bigger “seat at the table” as a result. But how?

Empower Human Resources Idea: People Analytics

The idea of ‘people analytics’ — basically using data on people and their performance to drive decision-making around business needs and hiring — has been kicking around for a few years. Some businesses are starting to embrace it.

It makes sense: Organizations have reams (or should) of data on performance, who does what in specific jobs, how those people are evaluated, etc. You can argue some of it is all subjective, and that’s true. But if you have a position called ‘Marketing Manager’ and you’ve had it for a few years, chances are:

  • 1-2 (or more) people have held it
  • Their managers have assessed their strengths and weaknesses a few times (again, you’d hope)
  • There’s some tie between that position and overall revenue goals/growth

If you have even 1/3rd of that data/information, you can begin to make some more informed decisions around recruiting and hiring. Traditionally HR tracks more “compliance personnel” data, i.e. existing employees, their payroll status, updated addresses, etc. 

You can also use information on who’s successful in roles to feed your AI recruitment tool towards more intelligent screening, i.e. “Look for these qualities when screening for these roles.”

If you want a “seat at the table,” making sure your hiring process is efficient and targeted at the right people — and ensuring that you get hires who retain for years — is a great way to get it.

The Issue With People Analytics: We’d have to think about HR differently (that applies to everything in this post). We’d also have to staff HR differently, because you would need people with analytical or statistical skills (or the ability to learn that).

Empower Human Resources Idea: Find Revenue Ties And ROI

Even if you have the most amazing product in the world, your people still design that product, develop it, market it, sell it, etc. Your money actually comes from the interplay of your people and your products, not just your products.

There are, however, ways that Human Resources can be closer to revenue and ROI — and that would help empower Human Resources and get them this ‘seat at the table.’ 

Some examples would be:

If you want to empower Human Resources, then you need to find ways to bring their functions closer to (a) the bottom line and (b) ROI. You need to make the department, and its responsibilities, more relevant to the people at the top of an organization — and they predominantly care about costs, bottom line, ROI, etc. 

How Ideal can help

We provide technology to be a force multiplier for your recruiting team — they save time, put that time back towards more relevant projects (i.e. building relationships with candidates), and the tech takes care of a lot of top-of-funnel screening activities, as well as automating tasks throughout the recruiting cycle. Your team becomes more efficient, you hire better, and you retain longer. Ideal helps businesses with all of this.