Data & Metrics
-
HR Technology Conference Reactions: Talent Management Panel
.
The talent management panel at The HR Technology Conference was all about diversity. Not diversity in terms of workforce, but the diversity in terms of approaches in deploying talent processes and technologies that different companies take in pursuit of their goals. With Jason Averbook hosting, we had Walmart (2+ million employees), Motorola Solutions (called themselves…
-
Annual HR Technology Survey
.
There are some things that inform all of us in HR about what is going on with our industry and where things are headed. Of all these useful tools, the annual CedarCrestone HR Technology Survey is one of the top at making us all smarter. Therefore, if I’m going to come out of sabbatical for…
-
Real Time Activity Analysis
.
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…
-
Annual Plug for the HR Technology Survey
.
Here’s the link – just go take it. www.cedarcrestone.com/survey/systematicHR.html For those of you who are actually going to read this, there are several surveys out there that the industry counts on for trending year over year. How much are people spending, what systems are being bought, what functions are getting the most focus, and how…
-
Deception and Selling Your Data
.
US President Obama is a Muslim, right? Raised in Kenya, he’s a Mau Mau sympathizer, and actually not even a US citizen (masterfully covered up I must add). Apparently in a new poll, fully 50% of the US population registered with the Republican party believe this ((Joe Klein, “Huckabucking.” Time Magazine, March 11, 2011. Page…
-
Better Measures for Engagement
.
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…
-
Commonizing Meaning
.
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 an imperfectly polite way of saying “oh &#!+” Basically, these are…
-
Decision effectiveness
.
A few years ago, i had a custom set of wheels made for my bike. I had the rims specifically weighed and picked out of a set of about 10 rims. I had the spokes weighed and balanced to make sure they were the lightest ones. The spoke nipples (the threaded parts that are basically…
-
Perspective and Benchmarking
.
In my eyes, there are three components of being from California. First, you must always be on a diet. Second, you must always bee too fat. Third, you must have a therapist (shrink for those of you in New York), who tells you that you have an eying disorder (if you are from Orange County,…
-
Back to Basics
.
It seems to me that there has been a renewed focus on core HR. Now I need to tell the truth, I really thought core HR was dead. I mean, it will always be around, but with the whole industry moving on to cooler things like analytics and talent management, who cares about core HR…
-
Serendipity versus Decision Support
.
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…
-
Trend, Drill, Slice
.
I love talking about and manipulating data. One of my favorite moments of the month is when I get together with one of the premier data people in HR and we just talk data for 30 minutes just for kicks. It’s fun talking data with someone who gets data, but often, we’re not really doing…
-
How to Read a Newspaper
.
So, when I get on a plane, I often have a newspaper with me. Whether you are on a plane, train, or anywhere with close quarters with other people, there is a bit of etiquette involved, and a standard trick that frequent travellers are supposed to know about. Adherence with this trick is unfortunately minimal…
-
Core HR is not a Hub
.
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…
-
Recruiting Effectiveness Measurement
.
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 effectiveness, but I’m…
-
HRs Correlation to Business
.
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…
-
Recruiting Efficiency Measurement
.
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…
-
Misinterpreting Apple and Microsoft
.
As a global community, we all hate Bill Gates. Actually we all hate Microsoft. While we might depend on things like Microsoft Outlook and the MS Office suite of products, most of us probably believe that they have a bit too much of a monopoly and probably have bullied around other companies to ensure that…
-
The Art of Story
.
Whether you are at a conference watching a videographer recording the event, or witnessing a $100M film getting made, the process of recording to final editing is always the same. Actually seeing how stories unfold is rather amazing – it’s the real life is nowhere near as linear as the resultant film that everyone sees. …
-
Dynamical Systems
.
Forget for a moment that I’m talking about a mathematical theory. At the core of this post is how we apply some quantitative reasoning to our ability to look at data and predict the future. Personally, I don’t think we do enough to extend and create meaning from our data. If we looked at data…