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...

Jul 6, 2011

Not only am I a geek, I’m a workout geek.  The latest geeky gadget I’m lusting over is a Withings E-Scale.  For just $165, I can get up in the morning, weigh myself, stand on the scale for a few seconds, have the scale measure my body fat, lean body mass, hydration level, and a few other things, and then have all of this uploaded through the home wi-fi to...

Jun 23, 2011

Is it Gallup that has the “Do you have a best friend at work” question?  We’re so into doing employee surveys to measure employee engagement.  They provide us with a statistically validated measurement of our workforce once or twice a year.  We can look at the engagement studies, and if we have any luck at all, capture some high level data about the...

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 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...

Apr 14, 2010

For those of you who have read Dan Brown’s new book “The Lost Symbol” there is an interesting concept of measuring the temperature of a population. I’ll provide a quick couple of paragraphs, noting that it’s really not critical in any way to the plot of the story: Trish laughed. “Yeah, sounds crazy, I know. What I mean is that it quantified the...