Mar 13, 2013

I have an argument with my wife every few years.  I tend to like cars with a bit more horsepower.  I mean, that 1 time a year when there is a really stupid driver about to crash into you, a few extra horses comes in handy when you really need to speed away.  The problem is that 99.99% of the time, that extra horsepower is a luxury you really don’t need. ...

Feb 27, 2013

As per my last post,at the end of 2012, I was doing a family vacation in Taiwan.  Being with family for 2 weeks is quite an expose into mannerisms that each of us have.  I was particularly intrigued by my brother’s questioning of my mother.  My brother would constantly ask my mother things like “why are we going to [city_name]?” instead of...

Feb 20, 2013

At the end of 2012, I was doing a family vacation in Taiwan.  When I say family vacation, I mean not just my wife and me, but my brother’s family along with my parents, visiting all of the senior members of the family (an important thing in Asian cultures).  There is an incredible exposure of habits and an interesting (but sometimes undesirable) analysis...

Nov 14, 2012

So I have to admit it’s hard to come off the election and not write about this.  This election was defined by some pretty deep population analysis, incredible forecasting and pretty significant actions to try to address the most important populations.  All of this went right along with a prioritization model that was pretty strong.  If we look at...

Nov 7, 2012

There are everyday annoyances, and then there are just things that piss you off.  Usually the things that make me really angry are when something should have been fixed, but it hasn’t been.  Or something is happening too slowly where I should have just done something myself and been done with it.  Personally, I think I’m a pretty patient guy, but every...

Oct 12, 2012

I’ve always thought I was pretty good at analytics.Not being a practitioner who is sitting in the middle of data all the time, I get more time to just think about the type of analytics that it takes to really run the business.  It’s been a really long time since I discounted the usefulness of things like time to hire preferring things like quality of hire...

Jun 13, 2011

I have some favorite phrases that I’ve been picking up for years. “Eh, voila!” universal for “eh, voila!” “Ah, asodeska” Japanese for “I understand”  (sp?) “Bo ko dien” is Taiwanese for highly unlikely or that’s ridiculous. (sp?) “Oh shiitake” (shitzu is also appropriate), is...

Mar 14, 2011

Would I be where I am today if I had all the facts every time?  I’m actually confident that if it were up to me, I would be digging ditches for a living somewhere (not to demean ditch diggers).  Let’s face it, I started off all on the wrong foot.  Being an Asian American kid with a prodigy brother, I was definitely the stupid one (I’ll assume you’ve...

Feb 9, 2011

I came across this quite a few years ago as we started to tinker around with core HR systems needing to integrate with more systems than just payroll and benefits, and as analytics engines started to take off en masse.  Back in the first part of the millenium as talent applications started to get a serious look from the industry, the idea was that core HR...

Nov 10, 2010

Last post I wrote about recruiting efficiency measures.  From the effectiveness side, we’re all used to things like first year turnover rates and performance rates.  Once again, we’ve been using these metrics forever, but they don’t necessarily measure actual effectiveness.  You’d like to think that quality of hire metrics tells us about...