The Challenge
A 2,800-person SaaS company was experiencing 14.3% annual attrition — nearly $8M in replacement costs. HR leadership had no early warning system for flight risk, DEI reporting was a quarterly manual exercise, and headcount planning was disconnected from business growth targets.
Key Business Questions
- What is our real-time attrition rate by department, level, and tenure band?
- Which employees are at highest flight risk, and what are the leading indicators?
- How are we progressing against DEI targets across gender and ethnicity?
- How do hires vs. exits trend quarterly, and are we net-positive on talent?
The Solution
We designed a People Analytics Platform connecting Workday HRIS, engagement survey data, and performance management systems:
👥 Headcount Intelligence
Treemap view of 2,847 employees: Engineering (894/31%), Sales (641/23%), Operations (512/18%), Marketing (378/13%), Finance (222/8%).
📉 Attrition Analytics
Waterfall chart tracking hires vs. exits quarterly — Q1: +120/-95, Q2: +110/-102, Q3: +135/-110, Q4: +120/-91. YTD net: +2,847.
🎯 DEI Scorecard
Gender diversity at 47% female (target: 50%), ethnic diversity at 38% (target: 42%) with progress tracking by department and level.
🔮 Flight Risk Model
ML-powered attrition risk scoring using engagement scores, comp ratio, promotion velocity, and manager change as leading indicators.
Dashboard Views
Technical Implementation
Data Architecture
Workday API integration with daily delta syncs. Python ML pipeline for flight risk scoring. Azure SQL for secure PII storage with encryption at rest.
Key Metrics
- Voluntary Attrition Rate
- Employee Net Promoter Score
- Time-to-Fill (Open Positions)
- DEI Representation %
ML Models
- Gradient Boosted Flight Risk
- Engagement Score Prediction
- Hiring Pipeline Forecasting
- Compensation Regression
Compliance
GDPR & CCPA compliant with data anonymization for aggregate views, role-based access (HRBP vs. C-suite), and audit logging for all PII queries.
The Results
"The flight risk model flagged 23 high-value engineers before they started interviewing. Our HRBPs intervened with career development plans, and we retained 19 of them. At $150K replacement cost each, that's nearly $3M saved."