SHRM HR Technology & Analytics 3 — Questions and Answers
Question 1: Which HR metric directly measures the return on investment of training programs?
- Training completion rate
- Net Promoter Score
- Training ROI (Kirkpatrick Level 4) (Correct answer)
- Learning hours per employee
Correct answer: Training ROI (Kirkpatrick Level 4)
Kirkpatrick's Level 4 evaluation measures business results attributable to training, enabling a true ROI calculation.
Question 2: An HR team notices that employees in one region have significantly higher absenteeism. Which analytics step should come NEXT?
- Immediately implement a new attendance policy
- Conduct diagnostic analytics to identify root causes (Correct answer)
- Switch to a new HRIS platform
- Report the finding to regulators
Correct answer: Conduct diagnostic analytics to identify root causes
After identifying a problem through descriptive analytics, diagnostic analytics investigates the underlying causes before taking corrective action.
Question 3: Which technology component is essential for ensuring single sign-on (SSO) across multiple HR software platforms?
- Data warehouse
- Identity and access management (IAM) system (Correct answer)
- Applicant tracking system
- Employee self-service portal
Correct answer: Identity and access management (IAM) system
An IAM system authenticates users once and grants access to all connected platforms, enabling SSO across HR tools.
Question 4: When implementing a new compensation benchmarking tool, HR should FIRST ensure:
- The tool has mobile capability
- Market data sources are validated and current (Correct answer)
- The CEO approves the vendor
- The tool is priced below budget
Correct answer: Market data sources are validated and current
The reliability of a benchmarking tool depends entirely on the accuracy and currency of its underlying market compensation data.
Question 5: Which HR analytics use case presents the highest privacy risk and requires the most rigorous ethical review?
- Tracking headcount by department
- Monitoring employee sentiment through email analysis (Correct answer)
- Calculating average tenure by role
- Reporting turnover rates by quarter
Correct answer: Monitoring employee sentiment through email analysis
Monitoring employee emails for sentiment analysis involves surveillance of private communications, raising significant privacy and trust concerns.
Question 6: A people analytics dashboard shows correlation between manager tenure and team engagement scores. The BEST next step is to:
- Immediately promote all long-tenured managers
- Investigate whether the correlation is causal before acting (Correct answer)
- Share the raw data with all employees
- Reduce manager tenure limits company-wide
Correct answer: Investigate whether the correlation is causal before acting
Correlation does not imply causation; HR must conduct further analysis to determine whether manager tenure actually drives engagement or if another factor is responsible.
Question 7: Which feature of an HR chatbot most directly reduces HR staff workload?
- Multilingual support
- Self-service answers to frequently asked policy questions (Correct answer)
- Integration with social media
- Automated performance reviews
Correct answer: Self-service answers to frequently asked policy questions
HR chatbots that handle routine policy questions deflect repetitive inquiries from HR staff, freeing them for higher-value work.
SHRM HR Technology & Analytics 3
Which HR metric directly measures the return on investment of training programs?