Hudson is a talent management consultancy, helping companies understand employee strengths and improve hiring processes. Consultants use Tableau Cloud to showcase projects in the office and on the go. Instead of long reports, consultants create beautiful dashboards. Clients can now quickly understand the data and explore unanswered questions. Within a year of using Tableau, Hudson noticed improved communication with clients across the world, transforming the way they see and understand data.
Tableau: How do your consultants use Tableau at Hudson? Viren Thakrar, Regional Research Development & Innovation Manager: We are a consulting firm. So our clients don't necessarily sit in the same physical building as us. Our consultants will often need to go out to clients to showcase, “okay, we've done this people project with you. Here's a dashboard that we've built.” Tableau: What are some benefits that you’ve experienced? Viren: We can grab a coffee, we can have the iPad open, and they can start firing questions at us and we can use the dashboard on a tablet to answer the customer questions. So the ability to be really mobile and present data kind of anywhere is really essential. We're a global company, but this particular solution really relates to our Asia-Pacific region. So we, again, need to be able to deploy dashboards across China, Singapore, New Zealand, Australia, Hong Kong really easily. So [Tableau] Online really enables us to do that.
The ability to be really mobile and present data kind of anywhere is really essential. We need to be able to deploy dashboards across China, Singapore, New Zealand, Australia, Hong Kong really easily. So [Tableau] Online really enables us to do that.
Tableau: How has Tableau changed your relationship with clients? Viren: The best thing is the time we now have and the format the data comes in. It means we have really cool conversations with our clients now. So instead of them going, "oh, what does that mean over there and what does this mean over there?" you skip all of that and you actually start going on to really interesting conversations like, “ah, that person that's sitting in the bottom-left-hand corner there, tell us about why that is. What can we do with this individual? Oh, that person that's sitting in the top-right-hand quadrant over there, what can we do with them?” So the conversation progresses much further and much better and adds much more value to the client as well. Tableau: Has your workflow changed? Viren: As a talent organization, we've got a whole range of techniques we can use to understand an individual's strengths and development areas. The key, then, is bringing all that data together in a really easy-to-use fashion for the client. So whereas traditionally we might give them a 30-40 page report saying, these are all your different cohorts, this is where their strengths are, this is where their development areas are. What we can do now is just build a beautiful story and a beautiful dashboard to walk them through what are our strengths? What are our development areas? Where are my stars? And where can I invest my training and development budget to build for the future? And as I say, the next part of that is I can pick this up again in a year and that data's still got a lot of utility by being able to use filters and things like that, say, look our environment has changed, our context changed, and the data kind of magically changes in front of their eyes as well, which is really cool.
I think from an engagement perspective, it's fantastic. I love the ability to create that wow factor. If I'm going on a visit with a client to talk to them about their people data, if I'm talking to consultants about data that we've got internally, to just be able to see the reaction when people say, “wow, that's really cool.”
Tableau: How do clients generally react to Hudson’s Tableau dashboards? Viren: I think from an engagement perspective, it's fantastic. I love the ability to create that wow factor. If I'm going on a visit with a client to talk them about their people data, if I'm talking to consultants about data that we've got internally, to just be able to see the reaction when people say, “wow, that's really cool.” Just completely being able to transform what we did with data a year—in just a space of a year—to what we're able to do with it now is really awesome.