As an HR professional, you are no stranger to countless documents and texts such as candidate resumes, LinkedIn profiles, online forums, job descriptions, performance reviews and internal employee and candidate communications.

Did you know that these text sources are an analytics goldmine and represent a wealth of vital data you can use to generate key HR insights? From improving hiring and workforce management to monitoring the beat of your organization internally, text mining and analytics should play an important role in your business.

External hiring process

Sifting resumes is a resource-intensive task, especially when having to process hundreds or even thousands of applicants for a single open position. One of the main use cases for text analytics is improving the hiring process by predicting future candidate performance at your organization.

Text analysis techniques and machine learning algorithms can automatically scan and process resumes, CVs and cover letters to rank which candidates have the skills and culture fit to be most successful in a particular role.

By filtering applicants based on specific qualifications, skills, technologies or even assessing a candidate’s verbal skills, analytics software can remove much of the manual work of the screening process, leading to more time spending interviewing top talent.

Internal culture gauge

Another way that text analytics can improve your HR operations is by monitoring workplace culture. Workplace culture is an important yet often intangible factor for modern employees, but your organization should strive to foster a positive and productive environment.

Using techniques such as sentiment analysis, text analytics can deliver HR insights and answer questions such as how employees feel about a major business change like an office relocation or business acquisition, which qualities successful employees demonstrate via performance reviews or gauging candidate and employee sentiment and tone in their email communications.

As the business environment continually evolves into a data-driven landscape, even HR functions have room to grow by adopting new analytical processes. Text analytics software can deliver external and internal insights that drive your human resources team to new heights.

An industry example of how text analytics can help HR

When IBM was overhauling its performance review system, the company turned to the internal network to ask employees for feedback on ideas for a new review system. Using its Social Pulse text analysis software, IBM surfaced one prevalent concern: employees did not like their performances being graded on a curve. Thus with data and analytics, the company was able to act in time and discount the used method of performance reviews.

Bonnya Mukherjee
Financial Analyst, Pegasus Knowledge Solutions