This is an old post from a previous Blog we were working on. This has been updated for the new site.
One of the things we wanted to work on with Koluit is something called “The Company”. In short, it is fake company (and company data) that we will be using for learning People Operations and Analytics ideas here at Koluit.
You can find the most up to date version of the data here.
Why did did you create your own data and not use one of the employee data resources that are out there (Like IBM’s or MySQL’s)?
Well none of the data resources really touched everything we wanted to work on. They all seemed to be missing something. While we could have just built on top oh what they already had, we liked the idea of building this data ourselves and expanding it for different projects over time.
Why do you need dummy company data?
- For testing/sandboxing new tools and systems – When we want to try out a new tool like an ATS, HRIS, Tableau, Alteryx and etc. we usually can’t just dump in our real data. Having a realistic dataset with varying fields allows you to get a better understanding of how these tools would work “in the real world”.
- Getting Help in Public Communities/Forums – Sometimes when we are using a tool, we come across issues that we can not solve on our own. Lots of sites have great community pages where you can ask other users for help. The only issue is most of the work we do in People OPs/Analytics is dealing with highly confidential information which we (for obviously reasons) can’t share on a public forum. This means we need to spend the time creating a few fake data points and make it robust enough where you can properly show the issues you are facing. Having data like this ready allows you to easily replace your real data (or use this information while you are building/testing) and show a realistic environment for the issues you are facing.
- Sharing People Analytics Tools and Best Practices – This blog is a perfect example of this. Sometimes you just want to share your work or your ideas, but your hands are tied because your visuals, analytics or ideas are tied to real people data. This data allows you to share your people data ideas in an open source environment.
What else will you be adding to this database?
Our goal is to add a few more fields and clean up the standard demographic data you would find in an HR database. Once that is completed we will try and create some engagement, performance, and learning data in connection with these employees. In the long term future we would like to do quarterly or bi-annual releases that contain changes like hires, terms, transfers, promotions, and the like. This would then allow us to keep historical data in the database. We will be tracking ideas and issues we find on this Trello page. Have some ideas or suggestions? Please email us at contact@koluit.com.