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...

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...

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...

Nov 8, 2010

When we talk about the impact of HR activities on our business’s operational production, we don’t usually think that there is a direct correlation.  In fact, some of our activities probably do have a relatively high correlation effect on business outcomes that we might be surprised about.  In defining correlation, we usually think about it on a –1 to +1...

Nov 3, 2010

If you look through Saratoga, there are all sorts of metrics around measuring our HR operations.  For recruiting, these include all the standard metrics like cost/hire, cost/requisition, time to fill, fills per recruiter, etc.   Unfortunately, I’m not a fan of most of these metrics.  They give us a lot of data, but they don’t tell us how effective or...

Aug 11, 2010

I’m sitting (almost) next to a guy who works for Yelp.  He just did a pretty interesting tutorial to the person in the middle seat1 about some interesting features in Yelp.  I at least didn’t know about some of these, but the most interesting of which is a little click box above the Google map that displays the location of the search results.  What it...

Jul 26, 2010

Not all of us have fancy business intelligence tools and cool dashboards with great graphs prepared for us in our business environments yet.  If we’re lucky, we belong to organizations that have spent millions of dollars figuring out how to get us analytics when we log into self service environments.  Or perhaps we have bought into a cool talent application...