People Analytics – What can you expect?

When an audience hears the term big data they think about optimizing retail website suggestions to best convert a customer, or using historical weather trends to determine Sunday’s chance of rain.  They often do not think of data about themselves used by their HR Department or Manager driven evaluation, but they should.

People analytics at work is the application of big data techniques against all the things that employees do on a given day and even what they have done prior to joining their firm.  All this data is analyzed and trends are found, and more importantly traits leading to success and failure emerge which can drive business decisions.

The most popular example of people analytics is from Billy Beane who’s story was detailed in the movie Moneyball where he used the stats of players to turn around the Oakland A’s from a losing franchise to a winning one without breaking the bank with player contracts.  Employers want to do the same but it can feel creepy.  Don Peck from The Atlantic captured this best in a recent article[1] “The application of predictive analytics to people’s careers—an emerging field sometimes called “people analytics”—is enormously challenging, not to mention ethically fraught. And it can’t help but feel a little creepy. It requires the creation of a vastly larger box score of human performance than one would ever encounter in the sports pages, or that has ever been dreamed up before.”

Here are a few decisions where people analytics are starting to guide decision makers:

Hiring – Jen Hubley Luckwaldt blogged [2] about A startup company called Knack that develops simple games called Dungeon Scrawl and Wasabi Waiter that are designed to collect hundreds of data points as a potential hire plays them.  This helps determine creativity, judgment, and their ability to rebound after mistakes which ultimately lead to an assessment on fit and capability for success.

Mentoring employees – Theodore Kinni – [3] recently wrote about the book the Decoded Company where many of the authors work at the same digital marketing agency called Klick.  At Klick they created a system called Genome which analyzes all the data they collect on their employees and it gives them warnings on when they need to intervene in someone’s career or in a project before it is too late.

Determining future needs – Michael Rafter from Workforce.com [4] recently detailed how the Black Hills power company now uses big data to plan their future workforce needs and more importantly they can predict skill gaps before they materialize.

These are just a few example applications of people analytics and if you are not seeing these yet where you work they may just be a few success stories away or your next task for a consultant agency may be to implement these at your work place as this is a buzz worthy topic as demonstrated by this video from Deloitte.

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[1] http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2013/12/theyre-watching-you-at-work/354681/
[2]  http://www.payscale.com/career-news/2013/11/your-company-is-probably-starting-to-analyze-you-in-unbelievable-ways
[3]  http://www.strategy-business.com/blog/Employee-Management-in-the-Big-Data-Era?gko=48116
[4] http://www.workforce.com/articles/big-data-bigger-deal

We’re Hiring! Digital Analytics for Human Resources

An increasingly prevalent topic in business intelligence is HR analytics, the practice of building predictive models to find the most suitable employees. There are a number of tools involved in the process, from video games to brainteasers, to obscure psychological questioning. [1] But before companies can predict whether candidates will be successful, they need to receive the applications. How does the job application process even get started? Online, of course!

Metric for Success

There are different ways to look for a job online. Which one works best? It probably depends on the websites’ key business requirements, and how they measure success. Is a job search website’s KBR to fill open positions? What are their outcomes for calculating conversion? These questions are addressed in the following categories:

First Party Job Listing

Companies advertising their own open positions offer the most direct way for an applicant to reach a prospective employer. The KBR for the job boards on a single company’s website is probably to obtain a high number of qualified applications. While the upside for the job seeker is firsthand contact with a company, the downside is obvious. It is hardly feasible to have knowledge of all companies with relevant open positions. A typical conversion process might be:

Third Party Job Listing

There are many websites available for browsing job listings. They can generally be described as “large”, “niche”, and “don’t bother”, the last of which are loaded with ads and serve no useful purpose. While niche websites have proven to be more successful for particular industries [2], the large websites, such as Monster.com and CareerBuilder.com, seem to have KBRs that are not necessarily about meeting the customers’ needs. Increase revenue through advertising certainly isn’t. Increase revenue through charging employers at least provides a service. [3] But do they care if jobs are matched? When success means achieving the highest number of people searching for jobs, it can only mean failure for all but a few of those job seekers. A typical conversion process might be:

Social Media - LinkedIn

Many have questioned whether LinkedIn is too similar to the large job boards, while trying to distinguish itself as something more. [4] Considering that LinkedIn charges not only recruiters for listing jobs, but also job seekers for the best resume positioning, their KBRs probably include increasing revenue through premium accounts. At some point the high number of premium accounts will diminish the benefit of being “premium”. The best aspect of LinkedIn could be building connections for networking. [5] Which might say more for old-fashioned networking than LinkedIn.

Who is Customer Centric?

As digital analytics has evolved, it has become apparent that the success of a website depends increasingly on customer satisfaction. [6] Perhaps the niche job boards are helping to fill that role in the job search industry. Perhaps there’s an approach that hasn’t been developed yet. Until that time, job seekers would be wise to explore and understand their options. For many professions, the best exposure could be a personal website, in addition to the application and resume. [7] Of course, if the company happens to be hiring digital analysts, the website had better be optimized using all possible means. And that’s only the beginning of the inevitable HR analytics process.

References:

[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/26/magazine/your-next-job-application-could-involve-a-video-game.html
[2] http://money.usnews.com/money/careers/articles/2011/04/19/when-using-job-boards-it-pays-to-go-niche
[3] http://www.ehow.com/how-does_4688832_monstercom-work.html
[4] http://www.pbs.org/newshour/making-sense/ask-the-headhunter-is-linkedin/
[5] http://www.forbes.com/sites/haydnshaughnessy/2012/03/29/how-to-power-your-professional-networking-through-linkedin/
[6] http://www.kaushik.net/avinash/rethink-web-analytics-introducing-web-analytics-20/
[7] http://www.forbes.com/sites/jacquelynsmith/2013/04/26/why-every-job-seeker-should-have-a-personal-website-and-what-it-should-include/