People analytics

What questions people analytics actually answers

For SMBs, the useful and answerable questions are practical:

• Where are we losing candidates in the funnel? Stage-by-stage conversion data points at the leak.
• Which sources produce the best hires? Source-of-hire cross-referenced with first-year retention.
• What’s the time-cost of our hiring process? Hours per hire by role, panel, and stage.
• Who’s leaving, and at what tenure? Attrition by year, by team, by hire-source.

These don’t need AI. They need clean data and a willingness to look at it.

Where people analytics breaks

Three failure patterns:

• Vanity dashboards: 20 charts, no decisions. The team builds and admires; nothing changes.
• Over-fitting to noise: an SMB with 30 hires/year does not have statistical power to draw most conclusions. Pattern-matching on small samples produces false signal.
• Privacy creep: employee monitoring (keystroke logs, productivity scores) marketed as “people analytics.” Different beast; high GDPR risk; demoralizing.

The honest SMB scope

For a 50-200-person company, people analytics is well-scoped at:

• Three or four hiring-funnel KPIs.
• One quarterly retention review.
• One annual deep-dive on a specific question (e.g., “why did sales hires turn over more this year?”).

More than that requires headcount the data doesn’t justify.

Where Join fits

Join’s analytics layer answers the funnel and source questions automatically — the data is in the system already; the dashboards show the patterns. See the features page.