HR Analytics

Capstone Project 7: HR Analytics

C7.1 Project Overview

This project analyzes company-wide workforce data to understand headcount distribution and the relationship between job satisfaction and attrition risk.

C7.2 Business Problem

The HR leadership team wants a clear picture of where employees are concentrated across departments, and whether job satisfaction meaningfully predicts who is likely to leave.

C7.3 Dataset Description

Column	Description
employee_id	Unique employee identifier
department	Department name
satisfaction_score	Job satisfaction score (1-10)
attrition	Whether the employee left (1) or stayed (0)
salary_band	Salary band (Low, Medium, High)

Sample scope: 200 employees across 5 departments.

C7.4 Objectives

Understand headcount distribution across departments
Analyze the relationship between satisfaction score and attrition
Identify satisfaction score thresholds linked to higher attrition risk
Recommend HR interventions to reduce attrition

C7.5 Step-by-Step Solution

Step 1: Load the HR dataset into Pandas
Step 2: Clean missing values and verify data types
Step 3: Visualize headcount by department using a pie chart
Step 4: Create a scatter plot of satisfaction score vs attrition
Step 5: Calculate average satisfaction for attrited vs retained employees
Step 6: Summarize insights and HR recommendations

C7.6 Complete Python Code

► hr_analytics.py

import pandas as pd
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt

df = pd.read_csv("hr_workforce.csv")
df = df.dropna(subset=['satisfaction_score'])

headcount = df['department'].value_counts()
print("Headcount by Department:\n", headcount)

avg_satisfaction = df.groupby('attrition')['satisfaction_score'].mean()
print("Avg Satisfaction (0=Stayed, 1=Left):\n", avg_satisfaction.round(2))

plt.scatter(df["satisfaction_score"], df["attrition"], alpha=0.5)
plt.title("Satisfaction vs Attrition")
plt.savefig("satisfaction_scatter.png")

C7.7 Expected Output

Output

Avg Satisfaction (0=Stayed, 1=Left):
0 7.4
1 4.8

C7.8 Visualizations

Figure C7.1 — Headcount distribution across departments.

Figure C7.2 — Relationship between job satisfaction and attrition.

C7.9 Key Insights

Sales is the largest department (120 employees, ~30% of headcount), making it the highest-leverage area for any company-wide HR initiative.
Employees who left the company had a noticeably lower average satisfaction score (4.8) compared to those who stayed (7.4).
Attrition risk rises sharply below a satisfaction score of ~5.5, suggesting a practical early-warning threshold for HR monitoring.

C7.10 Business Recommendations

Implement a quarterly satisfaction pulse survey, with automatic flags for any employee scoring below 5.5, to enable proactive retention conversations.
Since Sales is the largest department, prioritize manager training and engagement initiatives there first for maximum company-wide impact.
Build a simple satisfaction-monitoring dashboard (reusing this project's code) that HR can re-run monthly on refreshed data.