Bio and photo

Dirk Jonker is founder and CEO of Crunchr. Since 2006 he has argued that HR should be able to prove what it is worth.

Dirk Jonker is founder and CEO of Crunchr, a people insights and analytics platform. He came to the field in 2006 in New York, an actuary who had moved into strategy consulting. When the financial crisis hit, companies were forced into workforce decisions they could not evidence. He thought HR should be leading those decisions. HR wasn’t. That argument has occupied him since, and earned him the nickname DataDirk. He previously founded Focus Orange, an HR strategy firm acquired by PwC. He has given more than a hundred international keynotes and has lectured at universities across Europe and North America for over a decade. He lives in Boston.

I run Crunchr, which builds the software HR uses to answer questions about its own workforce. I started it because of an argument I could not let go of.

In 2006 I was an actuary in New York who had moved into strategy consulting. Two years later the financial crisis had companies making decisions about people they had no evidence for. Which roles to cut. What a reorganisation would cost eighteen months out. Whether the pay round was affordable. HR was in the room for those conversations and could not answer them. I thought HR should be leading them. It wasn’t.

Twenty years later I am still making that argument, and I have built two companies out of it. The first was Focus Orange, an HR strategy firm working on total rewards, which PwC acquired. The second is Crunchr, which I run today.

Somewhere along the way people started calling me DataDirk. That is how this site got its name.

I have given more than a hundred keynotes at international conferences. For over a decade I have been a guest lecturer at universities and business schools in Europe and North America, which is the part I enjoy most, and I am a founding member of the Education Committee at the Society for People Analytics. My work has been written about in The Economist, and predictive workforce modelling once made me Actuary of the Year.

I live in Boston.