HR leaders: Job descriptions are dead. Start with the data.

Every hire, review, and training course leaves a data trail. Most HR teams still look at it after the fact. For years, people decisions came down to managers’ judgment, with little data behind them. COVID-19 and rapid digitization exposed the limits of that approach. AI raises the stakes further.

Somaya El Sherbini, co-founder and CEO of Opus Talent Analytics, has watched that shift up close. She spent 19 years at Microsoft before co-founding Opus and now serves as a subject matter expert across the school’s Executive Education HR programs. Her point is simple: HR can no longer run on instinct alone.

Start with hiring. “Job descriptions are dead,” El Sherbini argues. Take a digital marketer: the skills change so fast that the job description can be out of date almost as soon as it’s posted. Recruiting software can check applicants against what the role needs and surface the strongest matches, so hiring managers start with the most relevant candidates, not whoever happened to land on top of the pile.

Then there’s the traffic light. One midsize bank she cites used a red-yellow-green scorecard for its people metrics. HR counted completed training courses, while the digital banking unit said those courses missed their strategic goals. Everyone had a number, and nobody had the picture. Connect those measures, and AI can flag risks early before the light turns red.

Fixing that is a C-suite job. In another case, HR said it was delivering candidates and training, while business units rejected applicants and left roles open for months. El Sherbini calls these execution gaps. Closing them requires executives to agree on shared objectives and tie people measures to business results.

And analytics can’t live in a corner of the HR department. It isn’t a job for a couple of specialists armed with R and Excel macros. As Gen Z and Gen Alpha enter the workforce and skills keep shifting, managers across the business need to know how to use the numbers.

That’s the practical problem AUC Onsi Sawiris School of Business Executive Education’s Advanced HR Certificate is designed to tackle. Over seven months of blended learning, participants work through competency frameworks, performance management, talent management, and people analytics, and learn to build the business case for people decisions and take it to the C-suite.