Surveys in People Analytics models

There have been a number of opinions that suggest that survey data isn't useful to the People Analyst, especially when developing predictive models. These opinions go against our experience. In a recent attrition project with a major client we were able to increase the accuracy of our models by around 10% at a relatively early stage by including survey data. Anyone who is doing Machine Learning knows that a 10% improvement isn't easy to achieve. A NY Times article written by two experienced data scientists from Google & Facebook, shows how these firms combine survey and system data to reveal what is really going on.