Coworking with Yuan Hou

On Wednesdays, we schedule our weekly 1:1 with HR Brew’s readers. Want to be featured in an upcoming edition? Click here to introduce yourself.

Yuan Hou joined customer management software company HubSpot as a senior manager of people analytics earlier this year. He received a PhD in organizational behavior nearly a decade ago, and recently told HR Brew about how the role of people analytics has shifted in recent years.

How would you describe your specific job to someone who doesn’t work in HR? I would describe people analytics as a team of detectives that sleuth through workforce data to discover insights that drive optimal strategy decisions. We answer questions like, “Are we seeing high attrition rates? If so, why? Who is the ideal candidate we’d like to recruit, and why? How can we use data to understand the behavior of people at HubSpot, and how can we use that understanding to make every employee’s experience better?”

How has people analytics evolved since you started your career? Because data and analytics have gained greater prominence across industries, across different functions, and especially in people, it’s gotten proximity to the strategic leadership within people ops or HR, compared to 2015.

What’s the biggest misconception people might have about your job? When most people think of people analytics, they think of us as “numbers people” who can pull data and create dashboards. What we struggle with is finding a seat early in the strategy discussion. Measurement and data need to be woven into the strategy for people analytics to be truly effective.

What’s the most fulfilling aspect of your job? The ability to use data and analytics to drive equity in opportunity is tremendously rewarding. Being able to do right requires a commitment to opening up novel data sources on employee behavior so that we can truly drive change. Having an organization like HubSpot with the combination of a leadership team that is fully committed to supporting our DI&B work and having a team that is agile enough to drive new ways of thinking is tremendously rewarding.

What trend in HR are you most optimistic about? Why? The embrace of human capital data as a strategic asset. When I first started in people analytics, the most informative data point I had to work with was an employee’s tenure. It is very difficult to understand behavior with no behavioral data.

The access to data on engagement, communications, and performance has expanded by leaps and bounds since I started. Parenthetically, I believe organizations that lean slightly away from machine learning and AI and more into behavioral science in their people analytics teams will also gain a competitive advantage.

What trend in HR are you least optimistic about? Why? With all the advances in data literacy and HR technology, the candidate experience is still uniformly terrible. We went from mailing in resumes to submitting them online, but other than the ability to spam your resume to more places, the fundamental action in job applications has not changed. I would have expected that we would currently have a candidate experience more akin to the experience on a dating app—a much more interactive and continuous relationship between candidates and employers. I think there is still great opportunity for innovation in the candidate experience.

Tell us one new or old HR tech product or platform that’s made your life easier, and why. I can’t think of one. HR technology is a barrier to people analytics. HR technology is built as a walled garden that puts up arbitrary barriers to data access at nearly every turn. It has made analytics more difficult because HR tech tools are designed without data integrity, data access, and data quality in mind. I much prefer open-source tools and cloud-based technologies, and a substantive portion of my day is spent thinking about ways and investing in tools to get around HR technology constraints.

Want to be featured in an upcoming edition of Coworking? Click here to introduce yourself.