People Analytics and The Future of Competitiveness: Which Capabilities HR Departments Need to Succeed in the “Next Normal”

People analytics (PA) is the fastest-growing area of Human Resources Management today, driven significantly by the COVID-19 pandemic, and it will be more crucial when organizations have to decide how to proceed in the “next normal”. Some researches show that HR managers and professionals lack of the “must-have capabilities” (Angrave et al.,.Human Resource Management Journal 26:1–11, 2016), thus highlighting the importance of developing new skills related to the use and implementation of PA; simultaneously, an enrichment of related competencies, which would support the new frame of decision-making activities is requested (Mauro et al.,.Library Review 65:122–135, 2016). Interpreting the recent discussion on Big Data (BD) through the lenses of the resource-based theory, the concept of BD Analytics Capability is used to introduce a theoretical model that considers the HR Departments (HRDs) traditional capabilities required with new skills that consider different flows of information coming from the processing of BD.