Workforce Simulation

As human resources departments take on duties beyond maintaining personnel files, managing benefits, and recruiting, their information and insights weigh more in company strategy. All historical data in your company can be used in making predictions, so data from HR is instrumental in predicting staffing needs and directions.

Workforce simulation (or forecasting) involves understanding the current employee base with an eye to future staffing needs. Considering factors like attrition, recruiter workload, and time required to fill open positions, where will your company’s staff levels be in a year? And how many recruiters will you need to meet demand for hiring? The goal of workforce simulation is to use data to mitigate the risk of staffing shortfalls through better recruitment and more effective deployment of employees. HR has a prominent role to play in predicting how the company will develop — provided they can access the data and become fluent in the tools needed for analyzing and visualizing it.

Alteryx Solution

Workforce simulation is an opportunity for HR to use analytic workflows to bring to the table the kind of metrics and visualizations that finance and business development bring. When execs see solid data from HR, they can use it to inform workforce decisions that affect the entire company.

For example, using analytics, HR could build models to simulate future staffing needs based on current attrition rates, recruiter priorities, and the unemployment rate for the industry. By abstracting and encapsulating the arduous, repetitive work of preparing data, analytics enables HR professionals to build models around compensation, affirmative action, benefits, and facilities — without needing IT support.

With Alteryx, you can:

• Connect to employee data from Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) platforms like Workday
• Automate the process of cleaning and preparing the data for simulation
• Use Regression or Classification tools included in Predictive Tools, or pull in Python custom simulation to predict attrition of current employees, time to fill of open positions, and workload on recruiters