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Introduction 19 shortsighted definitions surrounding expatriate success and failure (e.g., Harzing, 1995; Forster, 1997; Harzing, 2002). Hence, scholars and practitioners acknowledge the challenges in conceptualizing and measuring the return on investment of expatriation (Collings & Scullion, 2009; McNulty & Tharenou, 2004; McNulty, De Cieri, & Hutchings, 2009). Moreover, due to the nature of expatriation, scholars have to work with small samples. Here, a people analytics project can help to explore the impact of expatriation by combining practical insights, organizational data (volumes), and scientific rigor. Overall, expatriate management appears to be an interesting HRM topic to approach through the lens of people analytics, both from a scientific and from a practical perspective. Chapters 4 and 5 explore the ways in which expatriate employees can be assisted on their costly, strategic international assignments. Such an exploration of previous scientific findings on a HRM topic, is often one of the early steps in any people analytics project. Chapter 4 was a first exploration on what constitutes successful international assignment and how organizational agents contribute to this process. Next, meta-analytical findings are often consulted in practice, in order to estimate what kind of effects one might expect. In Chapter 5, I apply meta-analytical techniques to synthesize the results of nearly a hundred scientific studies on expatriate success. Here, I aimed to establish a basis of evidence for the practices that organizations could focus their efforts on if they seek to influence certain outcomes of expatriation. Finally, Chapter 6 represents an operational application of people analytics within two large multinationals. I applied complex transformations and analysis to the HRIS data of over 9000 employees. This allowed a quantification of the strategic impact of three HRM practices on employee retention, taking into account the organizational context. In conclusion, Chapters 2 and 3 of this dissertation elaborate on the past and future of analytical applications within the HRM domain whereas Chapters 4 and 5 focus on evidence-based insights for an applied HRM case: expatriate management. These two themes intersect in Chapter 6, where we use people analytics to quantify the impact of, among others, short-term expatriation. Throughout this dissertation, I underline the lagging development of – and barriers to – people analytics while also demonstrating how people analytics applications can provide valuable input for HRM decision-making. An overview of the chapters, their methodology, and the discussed research questions (RQs) is presented in Table 1.1.