HR professionals should learn from e-commerce in that sometimes click rates do not really show the whole picture or the accurate one. For instance, if you only look at click rates for a new training and career management portal you have launched, you will be lulled into a false sense of success.

Your click rates might show that 9 out of every 10 employees have accessed the new portal in its first two weeks. And you might think that it is reason to celebrate. But what you do not see is that a lot of those who did access the portal did not go beyond the splash page and left. Some tried to sign up or log in but were not successful. And then there are some who simply did nothing after accessing the portal. At this point, you would not think that the new portal is too much the success you first thought it was, would you?

Relying on just click rates is dangerous, because here you are thinking that your new initiative is a success when in fact, it is rarely used. There may be problems that you could have fixed easily, such as making the log-in process easier, or communicating the value of the new portal in helping your employees succeed.

So what should you be looking at? The short answer is: more data.

You should be looking at data coming from different sources to see what the employees think and say about your new initiatives and how you could influence a chance in their behavior and how this behavior affects the organization. Online retailers often use clickstream analysis in their business. This would show you who went to the site and what pages they accessed. This will give you a more accurate insight into what your employees are thinking about the new program, even though the information you get here is anonymized and you get no information about individuals using the system.

Then you would need to take a closer look at individual profiles. You would not be looking at how one person uses the portal, that would be unethical and a waste of time. Instead, you would be looking at aggregated profiles. For instance, a group of supervisors, middle management and even lower ranking employees. Or those groups that you think should benefit more from the portal. This way, you would know how these different groups are using the portal, or see if they are not using the portal at al.

Lastly, you would need to use analytics to gain insights into employee sentiments about your new portal. These insights are very important and could help you retain your top employees in the process. For instance, if you see that only a small percentage of the target group are using the portal, you should intervene. This is most important for those who are in their jobs for around three to five years, the time when most people look for greener pastures. If that group is not looking at your portal and learning how to manage their careers, they are more at risk of leaving.

The good news is that this process is easy to do if you use Oracle systems. Most importantly, Oracle’s single sign on feature allows you to get more than just traditional clickstream data and do more analytics. Even better, Four Cornerstone offers Oracle consulting in Dallas, so you could implement these strategies for your HR initiatives. Contact us today.

Photo by Dominic Smith.