With Employees Working From Home, Workforce Analytics Moves to 'Must Have' for Savvy Organizations.
Channel: Peter Clayton
Date: 2020-12-18

Welcome to an HR Technology Edition of the TotalPicture Podcast,  with your host, Peter Clayton. Today we’re going to dive into our friend Ward Christman’s favorite topic… the HR Tech Collaboration Zone, with Ian Cook, VP of People Analytics at Visier. 
Ian participated in the HR Tech Alliances’ December Virtual Collaboration Zone event.  According to their LinkedIn profile, Visier is “the market leader in Workforce Analytics. Visier is a cloud-based solution helping you see the truth in your data." – Stuff like:
Planning your future workforce, 
Managing your recruiting pipeline, 
Stemming high-performer exit rates, 
Measuring training’s productivity impact, 
Measuring diversity goals...
and more. Are these people clairvoyant? We’ll dive into this in our conversation with Ian today. 

Ian, welcome to the TotalPicture Podcast.

TALKING POINTS.

1. Tell us about your background and your roles and responsibilities at Visier.
2. Tell us about Visier. I would like you to unpack the concept of “truth in your data.”
3. You focus on learning, and you said that learning is more complex than other HR functions such as Talent Acquisition. How so?
4. One of the takeaways from the December Virtual Collaboration is just how much data is available for analysis – your title is VP of People Analytics, so take us there, Ian. Give us a macro view of all this data that’s available to company leadership.
5. Let’s talk about data integrations – for those of you watching the video version of this podcast I’m going to share one of Ian’s PowerPoint slides that shows just how widespread this has become – Learning, Recruiting, Engagement, Talent Management, HRIS, Payroll, Time & Attendance, Sales & Productivity, Budgets and Costs from Finance and all the HR Tech companies aligned with these metrics. So step us through, Ian. How do you connect with the Cornerstones, SAP’s, Workdays, ADPs, and Salesforce platforms?
6. How does Visier present this data to your clients in an understandable and actionable format?
7. So there was a part 2 of your Collaboration Zone presentation that involved Visier’s new partnership with iCIMS that was announced at iCIMS’ inaugural INSPIRE virtual conference last month. –  tell us about your partnership with iCIMS, and the benefits from doing so. 
8. One of the complaints I hear from HR leaders is there are too many different applications and tools they need to log into to do their jobs, and that the applications don’t connect with other online tools. What’s your perspective on this as a vendor?
9. I want to return to something you posted on LinkedIn “Overall our customers have increased the representation of women in leadership by 11.5% and the improved retention by 70%. We expect this positive momentum to continue as more people follow the path built by our leading customers.” Okay, that’s cool. How was this accomplished?
10. Something else I found on your LinkedIn profile was something called the Thursday Debate. Here’s a recent one: 
Should the People Analytics function be:

1. An operational function focused on building products which improve day to day people decision across the business.

2. A research function that does projects to understand why or how people are impacting specific business processes or outcomes. I love this question because it gets beyond just crunching numbers because we can and put it into the Why? Why are we doing this? So what did the LinkedIn community think?
11. How can our audience connect with you and learn more about Visier?


RESOURCES:
https://hrtechalliances.com/
https://hello.visier.com/people-analytics-improves-female-leadership-ratio/
https://www.icims.com/company/newsroom/icims-announces-partnership-with-visier/
https://www.visier.com/