Abstract:

Purpose:
This article reviews the major lines of research on HR Analytics for Digital HRM Transformation and provides input for future research.

Literature Review:
The world is increasingly digital, and the term “digital” is in fashion. Associated with “digital”, a bet that has been increasingly consistent with concepts such as Big Data, Data Mining or Business Intelligence & Analytics has emerged through the business world and associated with these, marketing intelligence, HR Analytics or Fintech. As stated by Angrave et al. (2016) the HR world is convulsed with the appearance of concepts such as Big Data and the potential for transformation it will have for HRM. According to the authors, that Human Resource Analytics (HR analytics) is the future of HRM, as a strategic management function is being sold.

The topic Analytics is a discipline that was developed in the relationship between engineering, computer science, decision-making strategies and quantitative methods to organize, analyze and create meaning to a wide range of data that were generated in various contexts (Mortensen et al., 2015). In human resource management (HRM), the topic analytics appears as workforce analytics, people analytics and HR analytics (e.g. Heuvel & Bondarouk, 2016; Mishra et al., 2016).

According to Marler & Boudreau (2017) HR Analytics can be defined by “a HR practice enabled by information technology that uses descriptive, visual, and statistical analyses of data related to HR processes, human capital, organizational performance, and external economic benchmarks to establish business impact and enable data-driven decision-making”(pp. 15). It is a multidisciplinary approach that integrates methodologies to improve the quality of decisions (Mishra et al., 2016) and that takes responsibility for identifying and quantifying relevant data about people and their impact on business results (Heuvel & Bondarouk, 2016). HR Analytics is not a new profession, but a technological advance that promotes the improvement of an organization's effectiveness and efficiency (Stone et al., 2018).

In the academic context, there are conflicting views on the potential of HR Analytics for HRM. Angrave et al. (2016) state that HR analytics may have a set of negative consequences for the HRM profession, workers and organizations because there is a risk that the data will further incorporate the perspective of finance and engineering in HR decisions, particularly in the strategic dimension. Authors add that there is little evidence that HR Analytics can become the future of HRM as a strategic management function.

In this literature review we intend to use the bibliometric analysis method because it is the most frequently used content analysis method, it allows the manipulation of large amounts of data effectively and it is well rooted in solid and well-defined theories (Zhu and Wang, 2018). The database we used to search for academic papers was the Web of Science’s Core Collection. We identified 44 publications using the Web of Science search engine.
Studies on HR Analytics are still recent, and maturity is low, which requires further reflection on the associated dimensions, such as what represents the HR Analytics to HRM? What is the use of HR analytics? And what is the best way to fit (or not) into the HRM practices?

Keywords:

HRM, Digital, HR Analytics, People Analytics.