Has HR analytics arrived in Asia? Here’s what I found

Photo credit: Dmitriy Shironosov / 123rf

Stephen is a TIA Star Contributor and publishes exclusive, high-value content that serves the Asian tech community. Read more from TIA Star Contributors here.

I was at the Wharton People Analytics conference, watching a machine learning expert describe the power of algorithmic hiring.

“Can an algorithm make a better hiring decision than a human?” the speaker asks, his eyes flashing mischievously. “Of course, and we’re getting there. The world of HR analytics is on the verge of another revolution,” he adds.

It got me curious about one thing: Is people analytics as developed in Asia as it is in the US? If not, what opportunities remain untapped?

A full-blown movement

People analytics (sometimes called HR analytics) is the use of analytics to help organizations make better decisions about their workforce. It is the intersection of data science and HR—two previously disconnected fields.

People analytics has grown from a cottage industry in the US to a full-blown movement. Many companies have built their own people analytics divisions, which have discovered various use cases from machine learning, resume screening, to natural language processing in tracking a team’s sentiment.

Asia is, in some ways, ahead and behind the curve. In many parts of the continent, there is a wide availability of data about individuals and a deeper culture of tracking and quantifying success. The college entrance exams in Singapore, Taiwan, Korea, Japan, and China, for example, reflect cultures focused on objective measures of talent. This creates a level of buy-in for people analytics that doesn’t exist in the West.

Most of Asia also have less strict regulations on privacy and tracking. China, for example, now has social credibility scores. If your score is high, you have better access to loans, are a priority for bureaucratic paperwork, and even get better options on dating websites. This type of tracking would have been culturally rejected or even considered illegal elsewhere.

This multifaceted environment has led me to wonder, what opportunities exist in the Asian market? What is already happening in the people analytics space?

I’ve spent the past few weeks researching about this, speaking with different experts across Asia. I found that there are three main spaces with particular interest and opportunity.

Improving feedback and talent assessment

I spoke with CheeTung Leong, co-founder and CEO at EngageRocket. His Singapore-based survey tech company began when he and his partner, Dorothy Yiu, noticed that the most labor-intensive part of their work at Gallup was the logistics around surveys.

His company helps simplify the feedback process by making surveys easier to do online. But Leong emphasized that significant manpower is necessary to make any HR process like this work.

Competitors in North America and Europe faced similar challenges, so it was difficult for them to enter Asian markets quickly. For EngageRocket, this barrier to entry was an advantage for them at first.

Hiring analytics

Social network analysis and space redesign

Can Asia catch up?