1. Big Data Gains Traction in the HR Space
by DAVID BERNSTEIN on FEBRUARY 13, 2013
Big Data isn’t just for the Star Trek-loving geeks of the world anymore. Samuel Greengard at Baseline
Magazine says it well: “…the topic has jumped outside the boundaries of IT and spread into the general
enterprise. A growing number of business publications and portals, such as Forbes and Harvard Business
Review, are devoting ink and pixels to big data.” Big Data has pervaded many sectors of modern life, well
beyond its obvious business applications of customer service, operational efficiencies, and targeted marketing.
Education, health care and even politics have all been positively affected by the opportunity to gather insights
on their stakeholders and then make faster evidence-based decisions that influence the success of the enterprise.
While the human resources community has historically been cautious and therefore late adopters of new
technologies, there is already growing interest in the HR community about how the insights derived from the
mounds of data they already own—not to mention external sources such as government employment data—
could revolutionize the way the HR function makes decisions and measures its outcomes. HR has come under
increasing pressure to deliver business value as the C-suite recognizes the critical role talent acquisition plays in
achieving enterprise goals. With the foresight Big Data analysis affords, talent acquisition professionals can
truly contribute to a company’s profitability by proactively creating the talent pipelines required to meet the
hiring needs that are critical to the business plan.
A review of recent HR literature demonstrates an awareness of Big Data’s promise. Several publications,
including Talent Management and HRO Today, are planning special issues focused on Big Data. eQuest in
particular has received a warm reception from the HR and business trades as it has demonstrated the real value
of Big Data analytics to the talent sourcing function:
 ERE.net used eQuest’s data for an article on the best days to post a job.
 TLNT.com published our article on the possibilities of Big Data in HR, which became a social media
hit in the HR space.
 eQuest supplied data for Crain’s Chicago Business’s annual article, “Where the Jobs Are.”
 Sramana Mitra profiled eQuest for her Thought Leaders in Big Data series.

2.  Franz Gilbert, blogger at Around the HR World in 40 Days, has written about eQuest’s Big Data
capabilities and the global labor market insights we are able to extract from our data.
Recruiting Trends Bulletin, Personnel Today and Retail Performance Monitor will soon publish articles based
on eQuest’s job market insights and ability to transform the sourcing function from hind-sighted and reactive to
proactive and strategic.
Now, recognition of value and implementation are two different things. Because organizations first saw Big
Data’s promise in the realms of sales and marketing, those functions tend to dominate whatever Big Data
bandwidth an organization has. It’s incumbent upon HR professionals to educate themselves about how Big
Data can be applied to the domain of Human Resources in order to present a strong business case for using Big
Data in the HR function.
It will be important for HR to establish some quick wins with any money spent on Big Data initiatives. HR can
gain these wins by focusing the use of Big Data on single, critical business issue. Accurately forecasting which
job boards should be used for recruitment marketing and being able to measure how effective those campaigns
are running in real-time is an example of one such critical business issue that can benefit from Big Data
analyses. The analysis of candidate response patterns and job board performance is key to producing the
forecast of which job boards will yield the needed candidates. Real-time recruitment marketing analysis reveals
the insights into how effective the campaigns are running. Being able to investigate and then mitigate any
under-performance issue as the campaign is running provides a distinct advantage over any talent competitors
who often only do a historical analysis; if at all.
In the end, it is simple. Talent acquisition teams are tasked with the responsibility of putting the best talent in
front of the hiring managers, in the least amount of time, for the best cost. Failing to meet this responsibility
means the business risks not having the right talent in place at the right time to meet its business
objectives. Talent acquisition cannot fulfill its mandate without first ensuring that it has adequate talent
pipelines from which to prospect its interviews from. Having enough qualified candidates to choose from
means there is the ability to make faster hiring decisions. This quicker time-to-fill supports populating the
employee roster so that companies don’t have to wait on or miss out on business opportunities. A fully staffed
organization is one that’s far more likely to move with—or ahead of—market forces, innovate and successfully
meet business challenges.
I look forward to your comments!