Show Your Customers What Good Looks Like With HR Benchmarking

To outpace competitors, retain high-performing employees, and meet key targets, organizations need to know what good looks like. HR benchmarking shows leaders the answers. By comparing similar characteristics within and across organizations, leaders can find out where they’re falling behind and make plans to improve. 

Your customers’ businesses don’t exist in a vacuum. They need accurate, reliable, and timely data to gauge the state of their industry and see how they stack up to peers. By adding HR benchmarks in your solution, you can give customers the data and insights they need to make timely, well-informed decisions. 

What is HR benchmarking, and why do your customers want it? 

HR benchmarking helps organizations place their data in a broader context by comparing it to similar or competitor organizations. This can illuminate areas for improvement—like a turnover rate that greatly exceeds that of peers—while providing momentum for change and allowing leaders to track progress. 

Internal benchmarking compares metrics within an organization, between segments and over time, to set standards for evaluations and track key performance indicators. Meanwhile, external benchmarking compares similar metrics to peer or competitor organizations to identify strengths and weaknesses in relation to the broader industry. 

Both are valuable and can help organizations access insights into their business operation and performance, identify industry trends, improve HR practices, and improve employee experience. Key areas of focus include recruitment, engagement, retention, training, compensation planning, budgeting, turnover, and diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI). 

This lets your customers answer crucial questions like:

• How does our turnover rate compare to the industry?

• Are our diversity goals ambitious enough?

• Is our talent acquisition and recruitment strategy efficient?

An organization looking to measure and improve DEI would first establish a baseline by looking at current diversity ratios across departments and roles then benchmark against other companies to identify areas that require more or less attention, like lagging representation of minorities in leadership positions or low female ratios across the organization. Next, the organization would prioritize particular areas of weakness for improvement, set goals and objectives for the near future, and measure progress. 

Benchmarking is a continual process that your customers can leverage to achieve their long-term goals, like greater productivity, more engaged and equitable workforces, and improved profitability.

Why is HR benchmarking so difficult?

To be truly useful and actionable, benchmarking needs to be timely. The most successful organizations will be those that can pivot quickly and react to changing market conditions, and stale data isn’t useful. This creates a hurdle for software vendors, who often struggle to get up-to-date and accessible data on sensitive, internal workforce information, like turnover, talent acquisition, and employee engagement. 

And with so many fundamental differences between organizations, it can be challenging to create like-for-like comparisons. Raw numbers don’t always give a complete picture with so many confounding factors at play. On top of this, not all terminology is used identically from one organization to another, so metrics can’t be compared one-to-one without significant work to parse the differences. 

Once that’s done, the technical upkeep of anonymizing and aggregating the data while ensuring accuracy and representativeness continues. HR benchmarks are most effective when they’re accessible and self-serve so everyone has the facts and insights to support their decision-making, which makes assigning access and ensuring anonymity of the data essential. For software vendors whose solution already demands significant focus and resources—and for organizations who lack the time and expertise—this can all be too much to manage alone. 

How can you make HR benchmarking easier for your customers with Visier?

Your customers need abundant, reliable, real-time data to benchmark against, and Visier can help. Visier HR Benchmarks API provides access to proprietary sources of data covering 18 million actual labor records from organizations of varying sizes and industries worldwide. The standardized, system-of-record data is more accurate and reliable than self-reported data, so your customers have access to dependable benchmarks to assess their performance and plan for the future. 

Visier’s data science team handles the quality control so you can focus on your core competency. Before the data is published, various quality control standards must be met, like sample size (over 500 employees), number of minimum organizations that comprise the total employee population, and confidence interval values. As of May 2023, there are over 228 million benchmark values available with over 18 million employees in the dataset. 

With APIs, your use cases are limitless. For example, these benchmarks can be supplied side-by-side with customers’ data or presented as a reference tool. Your customers can filter each metric by 10 key dimensions—including location, industry, manager, and job function—without any constraints so they can zero in on key insights with maximum flexibility. 

Visier’s benchmark data is updated quarterly, ensuring your customers constantly have access to accurate, relevant benchmarks to make timely decisions. 

Ready to learn more?

Visier’s HR Benchmarks API makes it easy for you to put your customers’ data into context with timely, accurate, and relevant comparisons. For more information, visit here.

On the Outsmart blog, we write about workforce-related topics like the top talent acquisition metrics your software should offer, how to add insights where they matter with contextual analytics, and how predictive people analytics helps businesses of all sizes thrive. We also report on trending topics like ESG and EU CSRD requirements and preparing for a recession, and advise on HR best practices like how to create a strategic compensation strategy, metrics every CHRO should track, and connecting people data to business data. But if you really want to know the bread and butter of Visier, read our post about the benefits of people analytics.