Nowadays, if you are interested in technological developments even as an HR professional, it would be surprise not to hear the concept of big data while everybody is talking about it all over the world. From marketing to sales, all business departments is running after big data to be faster than the competitors to reach and process

the data which is getting bigger and bigger day by day. Although, HR is mostly not a trendsetter in business world, I think, it should catch the trends before it was too late for strategical development. Big data is one of these rising trends with its “potential to disrupt everything we know about consumer behavior, employment, healthcare and any other sector of our lives” with the words of Sandeep Chand.

The capturing, monitoring, recording, processing and obtaining results is what big data serves us to be better in all kinds of business. Gladsomely, we had started to see certain results of big data in HR field in Turkey. For instance, last year the career web portal kariyer.net shared an analysis “what will I do when I studied” by processing the data gathered from the resumes on the database. These kind of informations can be interpreted in two ways. First, it is positive to help teenagers to decide what they want to do and how they can draw their ways to reach the target points. On the other hand, I feel guilty to productize the human and regard the individuals as data by ignoring its uniqueness. It still sounds problematic when I think as an Human Resources employee. However, from sociological point of view, it’s clear that we need this kind of data to create healthier decision makers for example for the future career of young adults.

According to Chand, technology can help candidates to find their ideal job. I absolutely agree with him. For instance, in a job posting board, in the near future, we can face with the pop-ups “Candidates who applied this posting also applied”. He also asks “how can our technology help recruiters find their next best candidates?”. I think this could be a way to help the ideal candidate: Some companies monitor their employees while working and watch what they do other than working. If I can know that the experienced best developers in our company are surfing to get rest on the web sites of certain humor magazines such as Uykusuz, than I can get a result like “The successful developers spend their freetime on Uykusuz’s web site, so I should post our developer position as a banner on top of the web site to reach the ideal candidates.” This is only a simple example but it is open to improve. Besides, I’d read an article on theatlantic.com which reports that Microsoft has gathered data showing employees with mentors are less likely to leave their jobs, so Microsoft gets mentors for the newbies to hold them within the company. This is another example to see how HR started to use big data for its own future.

In his article, Sandeep Chand cites one of his hesitates which is that data elements are currently stored different locations with different levels of access and this data is so huge that normal computers cannot accomodate the volume of it. Actually I think this problem can easily be overcomed with the technological development in only a few years. For instance, the software company Kartaca found a way to store the “biggest big data” and store it in a indexed way to access easily.
Therefore, big data does not have this kind of a difficulty.

As a result, I accept that big data analysis will make the recruitment and employee management easier and more effective but to allow HR to do all duties robotically would be unhealthy in the long term. Human resources is the most people oriented field of business, so I suggest not to productize the all behaviors from the computer screens but to touch the people’s real feelings and needs to create the future.