Predictive Analytics: A Magic Bullet for Field Service Hiring Managers? Posted on : May 27 - 2015

Talent management is one of the biggest challenges field service leaders face. Hiring and retaining the right employees, managing an aging workforce and training workers on emerging technologies are big tasks for any manager. But with predictive analytics making a buzz in the HR community, could data-driven hiring be the answer to service leaders’ talent struggles?

It’s still early days for predictive analytics in field service, but it’s no longer the stuff of SciFi films. It’s real science, and the data can have an impact on finding and hiring the right employees.

Big Data Gets Predictive

“The power of predictive analytics is you can understand where your investments are working,” says Gene Pease, CEO of Vestrics, a human capital insights company. Vestrics’s cloud-based predictive analytics software analyzes investments companies make throughout an employee’s tenure, and then applies advanced statistics to determine whether those investments achieve the desired business goal.

Pease’s vision is grand, and companies that have bought in have seen seen big cost-saving benefits. ACS, a Xerox company, experienced a call center turnover rate of 160 percent, and every departing employee cost more than $4,600 to replace. Vestrics measured the impact of five learning programs conducted over two years and found that hiring training supervisors led to lower agent attrition, resulting in more than $4 million in savings. View more