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How to Use Big Data in HR and Management

Edited by Indeed Employer Content Team
Last updated March 14, 2025
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Indeed’s Employer Resource Library helps businesses grow and manage their workforce. With over 15,000 articles in 6 languages, we offer tactical advice, how-tos and best practices to help businesses hire and retain great employees.

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Big data refers to the large amounts of structured and unstructured information that people and machines generate daily. It includes information like customer sentiments on social media, purchasing transactions online and in-store, sensor data showing the status of machinery and financial transactions. It provides us with the ability to extract insights to help an organization become more efficient, innovate faster, enhance the employee experience and ultimately become more successful. 

This article explains what big data is, how it works, and how HR and management departments are using it to inform decision-making.

  • Big data are vast amounts of data collected daily through the internet, in stores and from apps in various formats for business analysis.
  • Big data varies from traditional data analytics due to the sheer volume and speed at which it is obtained and processed. It is evaluated based on its structure and integrity.
  • HR departments and management use big data analysis in numerous ways, from informing hiring decisions to succession planning and improving the bottom line.

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What is big data?

Big data consists of large, diverse amounts of data collected daily and used to learn more about customers and people. Big data analysis can help inform companies about employee productivity, help leadership make better customer predictions, and develop marketing strategies and business decisions. It is a powerful form of data analytics that executives can measure and manage more precisely than in the past. 

Big data provides the raw material used in data mining, which is the process of searching and analyzing a large batch of raw data to identify patterns and extract useful information about customers and employees.

How does big data work?

Big data is often categorized as structured (numeric spreadsheets and databases), unstructured (qualitative and unorganized) or semi-structured (numeric and qualitative) and can be obtained in several ways. For example, big data can be collected through questionnaires, product purchases on websites or at point-of-sale (POS) terminals, electronic check-ins, and personal electronics and apps. It is typically stored electronically in data warehouses or lakes and analyzed using software designed to handle large, complex data sets. 

Is big data just data analytics?

The differences between big data and analytics were initially based on what is known as the “Three Vs”: volume, velocity and variety. In recent years, two more “Vs” have been added: veracity and value. While data analytics refers to the process of analyzing data to inform business decisions, big data refers to the exceptional amount of data now available that requires specialized software to analyze. Big data is also available in real-time, making it possible for a company to examine more information quickly. Like analytics, big data extracts intelligence from data and translates it into smart business decisions, with five key differences between them:

Volume

More data crosses the internet every second today than was stored on the entire internet 20 years ago. Businesses also collect large quantities of data in near real-time through purchasing transactions. This volume allows companies to work with many petabytes of data in a single dataset. A petabyte is one quadrillion bytes or about 20 million filing cabinets’ worth of text.

Velocity

The speed of data creation is even more important than the volume. The faster a company can process data, the more agile it can be compared to its competitors. Real-time or near real-time information lets a company predict buying patterns and react quickly with promotions. It also allows management to analyze trends and make more accurate business decisions. 

Variety

Variety refers to the different types of data that are available. Big data comes in three types of data which can affect their processing time:

  • structured data: fits neatly in a relational database and can be processed quickly to provide analysis to decision-makers
  • unstructured data: lacks organization, is mainly qualitative and takes longer to process and analyze
  • semi-structured data: contains both numeric, organized data and quantitative data such as text, audio and video, and it takes time to organize and process for analysis

Veracity

The veracity of your data represents how reliable or truthful it is. Veracity is also tied to data quality and data integrity. The veracity of an organization’s data determines whether it is high-quality, accurate and reliable data to power insights and decisions.

Value

Data becomes valuable when it is available for analysis and can be applied internally, to operational processes or externally to marketing campaigns to maximize engagement.  

How are HR and management using big data?

The HR and management teams can use big data to help inform business decisions and plan for future hiring. The information big data provides can play a significant role in a few specific areas, which we discuss below:

Inform hiring

Big data has a vital role to play in the hiring process. When businesses look for new employees, they can use data from job sites and social media to find people with the qualifications they want for a particular position. Using big data analysis can also help you avoid hiring mistakes, saving your business significant amounts of money in the long run. Using analytics for hiring can help narrow down the search for management to conduct interviews and select the most qualified candidate for the job. 

Employee retention

One of the most challenging company goals today is to increase employee retention. Businesses with high turnover spend thousands of dollars on employees who leave the company, creating a waste of resources and time. With big data, HR professionals can more accurately analyze who is leaving, how often employees depart and if there are any patterns among those seeking employment elsewhere. The data can also be analyzed to identify patterns among people who stay with the company. The information can help leadership develop a model for employee retention.

Performance management

Big data can help business owners and HR leaders measure employee performance more accurately. Companies using employee performance tools might determine if an employee is unproductive and could use a performance improvement plan. The data could also identify employees who consistently exceed in their roles and may be worthy of a bonus or promotion. Analyzing big data can help ensure you treat workers fairly and provide the insight needed to create training programs, conduct more accurate performance reviews and determine if any employees require a performance improvement plan.

Career progression

Big data can help inform what type of workers are best suited for each job and help you make informed decisions about who deserves promotions and when you need additional resources. By analyzing your employees’ performance, you can also establish more accurate workforce planning and identify skill gaps to understand when to redistribute work tasks to avoid employee burnout.

Succession planning

Analyzing big data analytics enables HR professionals to accurately identify leadership potential, build succession planning strategies and provide personalized leadership development programs. Using predictive analytics, organizations can forecast leadership needs and track employees’ leadership paths over time. While traditional succession planning often contains managers’ bias, data analytics can provide a more accurate and unbiased assessment of employee performance. 

Eliminating bias

Eliminating bias in the workforce can be a challenge for any company. Using big data allows HR departments to rely on concrete data points, such as performance metrics, competency models and historical outcomes, rather than relying on subjective opinions of management. This strategy can help build equity in the company and avoid overlooking employees based on gender, race or orientation.

The uses and benefits of big data are unlimited for HR and leadership teams when planning a company’s growth and prosperity. Understanding what big data is and how it can be used helps leadership teams create a more competitive sales and marketing plan, while HR professionals can focus on attracting and retaining the right talent. 

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Indeed’s Employer Resource Library helps businesses grow and manage their workforce. With over 15,000 articles in 6 languages, we offer tactical advice, how-tos and best practices to help businesses hire and retain great employees.

Read our editorial guidelines