People analytics spent a decade proving it belonged in the business. Cole Napper thinks that argument is over, and not in the way most practitioners expected.
Cole is the author of People Analytics: Using Data-Driven HR and Gen AI as a Business Asset, host of the Directionally Correct podcast, founder of the Data Driven HR Academy, and Chief People Intelligence Officer at HRBench.
In this episode of Joey's HR Lounge, he and Joey Price work through why people analytics has become a commodity, what replaces it, and what happens to the HR function when the talent you analyze is no longer entirely human.
Cole walks through the Tree of Value model from his book, which maps people analytics, workforce planning, talent intelligence, and behavioral science as four branches feeding off the same root system of human capital data. His newer argument is that those branches are collapsing into a single intelligence layer he calls people intelligence.
Joey pushes back with a question that reframes the discipline. What happens when the talent you are analyzing is not only human? If agents and autonomous software are doing meaningful work, the people function becomes a work function, and nobody has built the measurement system that would let a leader compare a human lever to a technology lever. Cole agrees the command center does not exist, then raises the harder problem underneath it. Getting equivalent measurement across humans and technology may require the kind of surveillance he wrote about in his short fiction piece, The Camera.
They also get into why small and mid-sized organizations are the most underserved market in this shift. HR needs are roughly equivalent at every company size. Staffing behind those needs is not.
In this episode:
- Why people analytics moved from a value-add function to a commodity, and what people intelligence means as its successor
- The Tree of Value model and why four disciplines with different origin stories struggle to collaborate
- Why SMBs and startups are the most important vertical in the next phase of HR technology
- The measurement gap between human work and technology work
- Whether indexing and quantifying skills is quietly making it easier to build the agents that replace them
- What The Camera reveals about the ethics of optimizing people the way we optimize machines
- What intelligence actually means when you borrow the term from the intelligence community instead of from business intelligence
Chapters:
00:00 Welcome to the Lounge 02:31 Is people analytics a luxury we can't afford? 06:00 The SMB reality: a one-person analytics function 07:18 Three hundred person analytics teams and the reckoning 08:10 If AI delivers, every large company becomes a medium company 10:35 The Tree of Value 11:32 Why the branches are collapsing into people intelligence 13:00 What if the talent you analyze isn't only human? 14:28 The missing command center for humans and technology 17:12 Does quantifying skills make it easier to build agents? 19:36 The Camera: optimizing people like machines 21:55 What business intelligence gets wrong about intelligence 23:41 Why Cole is optimistic anyway 26:08 Where to find Cole and the Data Driven HR Academy
Connect with Cole Napper:
Website: https://www.colenapper.com Book, People Analytics: https://www.amazon.com/People-Analytics-Using-data-driven-business/dp/1398622168 Data Driven HR Academy: https://www.colenapper.com/online-learning-academy Directionally Correct podcast: https://directionallycorrect.podbean.com Directionally Correct newsletter: https://directionallycorrectnews.substack.com People Intelligence Manifesto: https://directionallycorrectnews.substack.com/p/people-intelligence-manifesto HRBench: https://www.hrbench.com
From Joey Price and Jumpstart HR:
Jumpstart HR, fractional HR outsourcing: https://jumpstart-hr.com/
Jumpstart HR Research: https://jumpstart-hr.com/research The Power of HR: How to Make an Organizational Impact as a People Professional: https://jumpstart-hr.com/the-power-of-hr/ Get the book: https://amzn.to/4zCTTXv More episodes: https://jumpstart-hr.com/joeys-hr-lounge/
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