People Analytics Resources Repository

Whether you’re a People Analytics beginner or a seasoned professional, having all the relevant resources from the field of People Analytics in one place offers a lot of value. That’s why we’ve created a list of key HR analytics resources, divided into several categories:

• books
• articles
• academic papers
• reports
• HR standards and data definitions
• people analytics examples and data sets
• videos

All resources contain clickable links and, with the exception of one or two academic resources and the books, all are freely accessible.

People Analytics Books

The People Analytics books in our list aim to help you understand the basics of HR analytics, its financial impact on your organization, and how to use it to drive better results. Each of these made a profound impact on how the people analytics field has developed. The books on our list also contain concrete examples and case studies to enable you to put theory into practice.

Bassi, Carpenter & McMurrer (2012). HR Analytics Handbook. McBassi & Company.

Becker, Huselid & Ulrich (2001). The HR scorecard: Linking people, strategy, and performance.

Bock (2015). Work Rules!: Insights from Inside Google That Will Transform How You Live and Lead.

Boudreau & Jesuthasan (2011). Transformative HR: How Great Companies Use Evidence-Based Change for Sustainable Advantage.

Cascio, Boudreau & Fink (2019). Investing in People: Financial Impact of Human Resource Initiatives.

Chammoro-Premuzic (2017). The Talent Delusion: Why Data, Not Intuition, Is the Key to Unlocking Human Potential.

DiBernardino (2012). Optimize human capital investments. Make the “Hard” Business Case.

Edwards & Edwards (2019). Predictive HR Analytics: Mastering the HR Metric.

Fitz-enz & Mattox (2014). Predictive Analytics for Human Resources.

Guenole, Ferrar & Feinzig (2017). The Power of People: Learn How Successful Organizations Use Workforce Analytics To Improve Business Performance.

Hoffmann, Lesser & Ringo (2012). Calculating Success: How the New Workplace Analytics Will Revitalize Your Organization.

Khan & Millner (2020). Introduction to People Analytics: A Practical Guide to Data-driven HR.

Lahey (2014). Predicting Success: Evidence-Based Strategies to Hire the Right People and Build the Best Team.

Levenson (2014). Employee Surveys That Work: Improving Design, Use, and Organizational Impact.

Levenson (2015). Strategic Analytics: Advancing Strategy Execution and Organizational Effectiveness.

Marr (2018). Data-driven HR: How to Use Analytics and Metrics to Drive Performance.

Mondore, Spell, Betts & Douthitt (2018). Predicting Business Success: Using Smarter Analytics to Drive Results.

Pease & Beresford (2014). Developing Human Capital: Using Analytics to Plan and Optimize Your Learning and Development Investments.

Phillips & Phillips (2014). Making Human Capital Analytics Work: Measuring the ROI of Human Capital Processes and Outcomes.

Ulrich, Kryscynski, Brockbank & Ulrich (2017). Victory Through Organization: Why the War for Talent is Failing Your Company and What You Can Do About It.

Sundmark (2017). Doing HR Analytics – A Practitioner’s Handbook With R Examples.

Waber (2013). People Analytics: How Social Sensing Technology Will Transform Business and What It Tells Us about the Future of Work.

Waters, Streets, McFarlane & Johnson-Murray (2018). The Practical Guide to HR Analytics: Using Data to Inform, Transform, and Empower HR Decisions.

West (2019). People Analytics for Dummies.

Practical People Analytics Articles

These are some of the most impactful and actionable people analytics articles written in the past decade. They include some older pieces that have set the stage for people analytics and still hold relevance today, as well as the top 40 HR & people analytics articles of 2018 and 2019, published by Dave Millner.

Ahmadi (2016). HR Analytics Implementation: A Step-by-Step Approach.

Blumberg (2017). A Call to Arms for the Future of People Analytics.

Boudreau (2019). HR as a “Prediction Machine”.

Burrin (2020). Case study: how Google uses People analytics.

Coolen (2014). The 10 golden rules of HR analytics.

Coolen (2015). The 10 golden rules of HR analytics (revisited).

Coolen (2016). The 10 golden rules of HR analytics (crowd version).

Creelman (2016). How to deal with Analysis Paralysis.

Fleming, Fountaine, Henke & Saleh (2018). Ten red flags signaling your analytics program will fail. 

Millner (2018). Top 40 HR & People Analytics articles of 2018.

Millner (2019). The best HR and People Analytics articles of 2019.

Peck (2014). They’re Watching You at Work.

Rasmussen & Ulrich (2016). HR Analytics: It’s Not a Fad. It’s the Future.

Turban, Feeman & Waber (2017). A Study Used Sensors to Show That Men and Women Are Treated Differently at Work.

Ulrich (2013). Are We There Yet? What’s Next for HR.

Ulrich (2017). Analytics on HR Analytics: What Really Works.

Ulrich (2019). Assessing Your HR Analytics Capability.

Van Vulpen (2016). 5 Reasons Why HR Analytics Projects Fail.

Van Vulpen (2018). Hidden Gold in HR Reporting and the HR Dashboard.

Vrolijk, Mol & Boon (2020). How to Ensure the Validity of People Analytics Efforts?

People Analytics Academic Papers

This section lists the most-cited academic papers on people analytics. One of the difficulties when it comes to selecting academic material is that publishing these materials can take up to a few years. This means that there is always a bit of lag between the latest insights and these insights being published by respectable journals.

Angrave, Charlwood, Kirkpatrick, Lawrence & Stuart (2016). HR and analytics: why HR is set to fail the big data challenge.

Aral, Brynjolfsson & Wu (2012). Three-Way Complementarities: Performance Pay, HR Analytics and Information Technology.

Becker, Huselid & Ulrich (2001). The HR Scorecard: Linking People, Strategy, and Performance.

Chalutz Ben-Gal (2018). An ROI-based review of HR analytics: practical implementation tools.

Davenport, Harris & Shapiro (2010). Competing on Talent Analytics.

Gardner, McGranahan & Wolf (2011). Question for your HR chief: Are we using our ‘people data’ to create value?

Khan & Tang (2017). The Paradox of Human Resource Analytics: Being Mindful of Employees.

Lawler, Levenson & Boudreau (2004). HR Metrics and Analytics: Use and Impact.

Leonardi & Contractor (2018). Better People Analytics.

Marler & Boudreau (2017). An evidence-based review of HR Analytics.

Mishra, Lama & Pal (2016). Human Resource Predictive Analytics (HRPA) For HR Management In Organization.

Momin & Mishra (2015). HR Analytics as a Strategic Workforce Planning.

Muscalu & Şerban (2014). HR analytics for strategic Human Resource Management.

Rasmussen & Ulrich (2015). Learning from practice: how HR analytics avoids being a management fad.

Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (2015). The Scientific Method.

Togt & Rasmussen (2017). Toward evidence-based HR.

Tursunbayeva, Di Lauro & Pagliari (2018). People Analytics – a scoping review of conceptual boundaries and value propositions.

Van den Heuvel & Bondarouk (2016). The rise (and fall) of HR analytics: a study into the future applications, value, structure, and system support.

People Analytics Reports

The number of recent people analytics reports is limited. In this section, we have listed the most impactful reports of the last five years. These reports show how people analytics has evolved and is now being embedded into traditional HR. While in Deloitte’s 2016 and 2017 reports, people analytics was mentioned explicitly, in their 2018, 2019, and 2020 reports, it is hardly (if at all) mentioned. Instead, people analytics is assumed to be one of the core HR activities.

Bright & Company (2016). Organising for HR analytics success.

Deloitte (2016). Global Human Capital Trends: People analytics gaining speed.

Deloitte (2017). Global Human Capital Trends: People analytics recalculating the route

Deloitte (2018). Global Human Capital Trends: The rise of the social enterprise

Deloitte (2019). People Analytics Solutions: Market Primer.

Kaur & Fink (2017). Trends and Practices in Talent Analytics.

HR Standards and Data Definitions

HR standards are about specifying how HR metrics should be measured and benchmarked to create uniform data definitions. This includes the quantities, formulas, and variables needed to calculate and produce these measurements.

ANSI/SHRM (2012). Performance Management, American National Standard.

HR Metrics Service (2014). HR Metrics Interpretation Guide.

van Vulpen (2019). How to Calculate Employee Turnover Rate.

HR Software Reviews Repository

ISO Standards for Human resource management overview.
The following ISO standards are all finalized and part of this collection of ISO standards for HRM.

• ISO 30405:2016. Human resource management – Guidelines on recruitment
• ISO 30408:2016. Human resource management – Guidelines on human governance
• ISO 30409:2016. Human resource management – Workforce planning
• ISO 30406:2017. Sustainable employability management for organizations.
• ISO 30407:2017. Human resource management – Cost-Per-Hire
• ISO 30410:2018. Human resource management – Impact of hire metric
• ISO 30411:2018. Human resource management – Quality of hire metric
• ISO 30414:2018. Human resource management – Guidelines for internal and external human capital reporting.

SHRM (2012). Cost-per-hire, American National Standard.

AIHR (2020). 51 HR Metrics Cheat Sheet.

People Analytics Examples and Data Sets

Below you can find practical examples of how organizations use people analytics, as well as data sets to practice your people analytics skills on.

2018 SIOP Machine Learning Competition Winning Submission Repository

A Tutorial on People Analytics Using R – Employee Churn.

Applying Survival Analysis to Reduce Employee Turnover: A Practical Case.

Datasets repository to practice and learn Programming, Machine Learning, and Data Science.

van Vulpen (2018). 7 HR Data Sets for People Analytics.
This article includes 7 HR data sets for people analytics with descriptions and exercises.

People Analytics Videos

These videos are packed with useful information on people analytics in a comprehensible format.

AIHR (2018). What is HR Analytics?

AIHR (2020). Creating value through HR Data & Analytics. 

AIHR (2018). How will Data Capturing Evolve in People Analytics?

AIHR (2018). What in People Analytics are you most excited about?

AIHR (2018). 5 Key Characteristics of the Digital Workforce

AIHR (2020). 5 HR Analytics Case Studies.

AIHR (2020). People Analytics: 5 Best Practices.

World Economic Forum (2016). Decoding Workforce Productivity

If you feel like we’ve missed key resources, please send us an email at [email protected].