4 Ways Small Business Can Benefit from Cognitive HR

Cognitive computing is here to stay and it is revolutionizing healthcare, the way we shop, and the way we work. Data analysis in human resources (i.e. people analytics) is having a surprising impact on corporate profits by way of increasing job satisfaction, retention and productivity, which has made executives take notice. Over time, HR leaders are thinking more like owners, as HR departments adopt cognitive HR systems to increase hard numbers (like profits) with softer ideals (like job fulfillment). According to an American Statistical Association report on the SHRM website:

“53 percent of HR departments use big data to help make strategic decisions; 71 percent use it for the sourcing, recruitment or selection of candidates; 63 percent use it to identify the causes of turnover and for employee retention strategies or trends; and 61 percent use it to manage talent and performance.”

Companies like IBM/Watson have spearheaded the cognitive HR movement with their studies and are disrupting the HR industry. No longer can HR be looked at as a cost center.

What exactly does cognitive HR do? Cognitive computer technologies perform functions and give insight into human behavior far greater than what can be known through human intuition alone.

Cognitive HR technology, according to an IBM study, has the capability to do a number of impressive functions increasing human:

Understanding: A cognitive HR system looks for specific patterns in structured and unstructured information to retrieve the most important data.

Learning: Loads of data are added to a cognitive HR knowledge base, which is later used to learn the trends in the HR field.

Reasoning: When it comes to analyzing data, a cognitive HR system is designed to provide the HR practitioner with underlying insight on human behavior, motivational behavior and many more natural preferences and personal characteristics.

Although this technology and its complex processes are fascinating, you’re probably wondering what it means for the entrepreneur, small-mid-sized business, or for those small employers who don’t have an HR department.

Cognitive HR benefits for your small-medium size business (SME):

1. Cognitive technologies won’t replace humans, instead, they augment human intuition with insightful data. Using cognitive and people analytics increases your understanding, learning, and reasoning of people and people matters with information, analysis, and valid data pulled from studying millions of data sets from people, occupations, and corporate cultures.
2. Data analytics help to inform better leader decisions. Since information is power, data analytics on the human side of business (people) give the business owner greater insight on their prospects’ personal characteristics, behaviors, skills, passions and attitudes. This enables him/her to make more realistic and informed decisions, resulting in fewer surprises down the road.
3. Hiring managers can concentrate on other tasks rather than sorting resumes, testing skills, or interviewing candidates. Using cognitive technologies greatly reduces the time-to-hire and simplifies the hiring pipeline, especially if you have a predictive ATS, which can handle sourcing-to-onboarding and is created with the needs of small-to-medium sized businesses in mind.
4. Cognitive HR levels the playing field by removing bias. Historically, hiring has been predicated on things like gut instinct, personal bias, similar personality styles, or other more jaded viewpoints. When you rely mostly on intuition, you may find it can let you down, or can even cause you to go out of business due to turnover or unproductivity. Cognitive HR and people analytics levels the playing field by eliminating individual biases that often creep into hiring processes.

PeopleKeys has been hiring within the world’s largest and smallest organizations for over 35 years. In that timeframe, they have amassed best-practice behavioral data on millions of occupations in thousands of company cultures. Each day, the PeopleKeys occupational database gets richer with behavioral insights on a wide variety of new and emerging job titles and roles.