Chapter 11. Human Resource Discovery

Just like the previous chapter, this chapter will show you how to apply Qlik Sense to the challenges of analyzing real data. This chapter's example and many others are available for you to explore on http://sense-demo.qlik.com. Again, make sure you bookmark this link, as more demonstrations and examples are constantly being added and updated.

This chapter is about the analysis of human resources data, and it covers the following topics:

• General information about common KPIs

• What a typical data model would look like

• An example of how to use the global selector

• Examples of dimensions and measures

The business problem

The term Human Resources analysis covers a wide area of KPIs that use data from a number of different data sources.

It could be that you want to analyze in-house data, for example, the efficiency of the recruitment process and the costs tied to it. It could just as well be analysis of external data, for example, different employee surveys or sentiment analysis on social media.

Just to give you an idea, we have compiled a list of some of the most common areas to investigate when preparing a Human Resources analysis:

• Recruitment: This measures the efficiency of the recruitment process, for example, what is the recruitment cost per employee? What is the average lead time to recruit?

• Employee satisfaction and retention: This measures employee loyalty, for example, what is the average satisfaction (as measured by a survey)? What is the employee turnover?

• Training: This covers the following questions as examples: What is the total expenditure on training? What percentage of...

Application features

On our demo site, we have a human resource app. You can find it on http://sense-demo.qlik.com, by clicking on the Human Capital Management link. In it, you will find a subset of what you can analyze in HR data. Mainly, it analyzes training investments and employee satisfaction.

When you open the app, you will first see the app overview, with a small description of the app and a thumbnail in the form of a small bar chart, as shown in the following screenshot:

The overview of the Human Capital Management application

The following is this overview; you will see a number of sheets. These are created according to the dashboard analysis report principles described in Chapter 5, Authoring Engaging Applications. This means the leftmost sheet is an overview, very much like a dashboard, whereas the other sheets are prepared for analysis and detailed information.

If you click on the Stories button, you will see that the app also contains a story—a story that can be used to present...

How the application was developed

The data model for the Human Capital Management application looks similar to what is shown in the following diagram:

There are six tables in this application:

• Employees: This is the main table, which has one record per employee and month. It contains all the relevant information about the employee such as country, position, salary, and so on. It would probably be a cleaner data model if this table were split into one table containing employee information that doesn't change over time and another table with the time-dependent information.

  However, since the QIX engine analyzes the data just as efficiently either way, we don't see any great benefit in spending time structuring the data more.

  

  Preview of the Employees table

• Hierarchy: This table contains information about the hierarchy of the employee, such as who the manager of the employee is, and who the VP of the employee is.

• Survey: This table contains the results from an external survey made on employee satisfaction...

Summary

In summary, the analysis of human resource data is easy when you use Qlik Sense's unique capabilities. Such an analysis can otherwise be difficult due to multiple and disparate data sources holding human resource data. Qlik's associative indexing engine powers this exploration and analysis is made easy for the user.

In the next chapter, we will look at how Qlik Sense can be used to analyze costs, or more specifically, travel expenses.