Nigerian HR Teams Have More Data Than They Know, Okeseeyin Says

The irony of HR’s relationship with data is not lost on the practitioners who navigate it daily. The profession that manages the organisation’s most complex and consequential asset, its people, has historically been among the last functions to develop genuine analytical capability. Finance has had dashboards for decades. Operations has real-time performance data. HR has […]

The irony of HR’s relationship with data is not lost on the practitioners who navigate it daily. The profession that manages the organisation’s most complex and consequential asset, its people, has historically been among the last functions to develop genuine analytical capability.

Finance has had dashboards for decades. Operations has real-time performance data. HR has had spreadsheets and annual reports.

This is changing.

Modern HRIS platforms generate continuous data on headcount, attrition, absenteeism, performance review completion, and compensation equity. Applicant tracking systems generate pipeline conversion data at every stage of the hiring process. Engagement survey tools generate sentiment data across teams and demographics on whatever frequency the organisation chooses to survey.

The data is available. The analytical capacity to interpret it is not.

SHRM research published in 2025 found that while most HR professionals acknowledge the importance of data-driven decision-making, the majority do not feel confident extracting, analysing, or presenting HR data in formats that influence organisational decisions.

The data is there. The fluency to use it is not.

Temitope Okeseeyin has described this as the most consequential competency gap in contemporary HR practice, more consequential, in her view, than any specific tool knowledge, because it is the gap that determines whether HR contributes to organisational strategy or merely reports on it.

An HR function that can present attrition data is doing administration. An HR function that can present attrition risk, segmented by role type, tenure, and manager effectiveness, with recommendations for targeted retention interventions, is doing strategy.

Building people analytics capability among Nigerian HR professionals is the work of several actors simultaneously. SeamlessHR has invested in reporting functionality that makes basic HR data visible without analytical expertise. Independent consultants are building practices around HR data interpretation for organisations that lack internal capability.

And platforms including Google Looker Studio have made dashboard construction accessible to people with no prior data visualisation experience. The gap is large enough that all of these efforts are necessary.