Measuring employee experience with People Analytics can boost your organization’s hiring success and, ultimately, the bottom line. A good employee experience (EX) is created through all the touch points your organization has with employees throughout the talent life cycle. Insights obtained from people analytics can help you optimize your EX at every stage – from attraction to exit. Data also enables you to improve the key areas of organizational culture and diversity. Here’s how.

Attraction

How do you know if your brand awareness campaign is attracting the right people to your organization? Take a look at the time-to-fill positions and applicants-per-job metrics. Seeing trends over time in these areas and checking them against industry benchmarks can highlight where you may need to invest more resources. Conducting pre-recruit surveys can also yield qualitative data to inform how good your prospective candidate experience is.

Recruitment

A number of recruitment data points can tell you how successful your organization is at providing a positive applicant experience. Tracking cost-per-hire and time-to-fill, for instance, can reveal weaknesses in the recruitment funnel, especially tactics that drive candidates away, such as long response times or overly-burdensome application requirements.

Another data point is offer-acceptance rate. Low numbers here might mean your organization needs to revisit salary and compensation structures in certain job categories.

Onboarding

How satisfied are your new hires after the first 90 days? How well are they performing? You can access this EX in several ways, starting with an onboarding survey. Strengthen these learnings with data on time-to-productivity and failed hires (new hires who leave within the first year), and you have a powerful way to assess the health of your onboarding experience.

Development

Your organization’s efforts to develop employees for future career paths — an important EX factor — can be measured through surveys and promotion rates. Low promotion rates can point to gaps in effective management or training opportunities or weaknesses in the overal career development program.

Also, look at historical data to better understand the career paths at your company: the average time to promotion, and which roles employees have progresses into, for example. This can assist managers in development talks with staff by arming them with data and examples of how employees in similar roles have grown.

Retention

The state of your company’s retention is a reflection of the EX in all the previous stages. The better the experience with recruitment, onboarding and development, the more likely an employee is to stay. Retention rates is then the most obvious metrics to track at this stage.

But there are others. The engagement rate, measured with employee listening tools like pulse surveys, tracks closely with retention rate; the higher your retention in most cases. Turnover rates are also an obvious indicator of retention success. With people analytics you can see in which parts of the organization attrition is the highest and review the risk factors

Exit

Why do employees leave your organization? Identifying the reasons people exit gives you insights that can help improve your EX. Exit interviews are the most common way to collect some of these insights. But your organization should also be diving deep into turnover rate data. Look at the levels of involuntary terminations, for instance, to learn if there are systemic problems with recruitment or employee development.

Similarly, analyzing how turnover is distributed throughout the organization (by location, demographic, business function, etc.) can expose red flags — or positive stories — about company culture or management.

Measuring Culture & DEIB

Two areas with a huge impact on EX are organizational culture and diversity, equity, inclusion & belonging (DEIB). People analytics can, in particular, provide actionable insights to improve the experience in both areas.

Measuring the state of your company cultures starts with employee listening strategies, namely culture, climate and engagement surveys. You can then examine these ratings alongside other metrics, such as productivity, turnover rate, failed hires and absenteeism, in order to tell a story about the state of your culture. That allows your organization to make better decisions about what to action on.

There are numerous metrics to track the progress of your company’s DEIB initiatives and to gain insights on the EX within a target group. It depends on which of the four parts of DEIB you want to focus on. For example, maybe you want to check in on the state of gender diversity in recruitment. For this, you could look at the gender breakout of applicants in a particular job category. Or you could explore equity in promotions by looking at promotion rates by different social identity groups. Finally, you could evaluate the level of belonging among employees using pulse surveys and metrics like turnover rate and retention rate.

Prioritizing employee experience is no longer a nice to have” but a must. With the right analytics tool, you can slide and dice your HR data in many ways to understand the state of your EX and in which lifecycle stages you need to improve it.