13 Months in the Philippines – Lesson One – Finding the Right People

Lesson 1 – May 2012 – Finding the Right People

Makati, Metro Manila, Philippines

I took a couple of trips to the Philippines in early 2012 to lay the ground work before committing 100% to moving there lock, stock and barrel. When I was there, one of the things I did was set up some interviews for my first BPO Elite employee.

Now don’t get me wrong, I ended up with an amazing employee who would become one of my best friends. But the process itself had some serious flaws. Let me break them down. And even though I have extensive experience in recruitment and hiring, I made many of the same mistakes in the process that most managers make. They put it on themselves to do it all, they are the only ones in on the decision-making, and they don’t really look at the available data to help them.

When recruiting. I found out the true power of LinkedIn. I networked with a couple dozen candidates, and narrowed it down to six to interview based on e-mail conversations before I left the US. When I arrived, I set up phone screenings with the six and ended up then conducting two final interviews. Pretty standard stuff and thanks to LinkedIn, all the candidates where qualified to be my very first employee, a recruitment specialist. However, I did all this myself. And even though I have partners and an assistant back in the US, I took it on myself. That’s lesson #1, you cant always do everything yourself. It takes up a lot of time and it makes others think you don’t need or want your help. Next time I do this, I need to delegate and be more inclusive.

The next thing I did wrong was that I didn’t have one of my partners interview with me. I based my decisions on my gut. Now as an analyst, I am kicking myself about this, but as a first time business owner… its a very common mistake. There is tons of data that shows that candidates hired after interviews with more then one person as much as a 100% chance to stick around longer than those interviewed solely by one person.

The final lesson that comes to mind is that I didn’t do a very good job of understanding the data available when it comes up to the recruitment industry in the Philippines. After being there a while and gathering data and insights, I over paid, I over promised and I over recruited. I hired two, at way more than the market price and I gave them pretty favorable terms. All things that more research would have uncovered.

So In the end it worked out, I got a great candidate who stuck with me thru thick and thin. I just wish I would have hired me the analysts to do the prep work for me the business owner. Hehe!

Analytics Tool > LinkedIn > http://www.linkedin.com

Analytics Concept > Marketing Analytics > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marketing_analytics#Data_and_analytics

YouTube Resource > http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6jDjeNJrN14&feature=share&list=PL7EC252B253873D5D

My Analytics Story – My passion is solving problems by bringing together the best talent, cutting edge technology and tried and true methodologies. DMAIPH is all about empowering people towards better Decision-Making through the use Analytics and business Intelligence. This is what I do best. Contact DMAIPH now at analytics@dmaiph.com or connect with me directly for a free consultation about getting more analytics into your career and your business.

13 Months in the Philippines

Updated 12/10/16…

I wrote this 4.5 years ago. As my 5 year plan to become a name brand in analytics in the Philippines comes to a close, I thought it a good time to select on the lessons of my first year. So I will repost these lessons from what seems like a lifetime a goal to see what I have truly learned from my adventures.

After having a month of vacation, I been able to do a lot of reflecting on my 13 Months in the Philippines. My plan is to share with you some of the life lessons I learned from the experience. I had an amazing time, getting to live my professional dream and impacting hundreds of people. I also learned as many important lessons in my personal life as well. And since its an analytics blog, I will also include some analytics insights as well.

Introduction
Lesson 1 – May 2012 – Finding the Right People
Lesson 2 – June 2012 – Training is My Passion
Lesson 3 – July 2012 – Growing the Business
Lesson 4 – August 2012 – Mother Nature Strikes
Lesson 5 – September 2012 – Cracks in the Pavement
Lesson 6 – October 2012 – You Cant Go Home Again
Lesson 7 – November 2012 – Flying Solo
Lesson 8 – December 2012 – Holidays in the Philippines
Lesson 9 – January 2013 – New Beginnings
Lesson 10 – February 2013 – The Future is Bright
Lesson 11 – March 2013 – Missed Opportunities
Lesson 12 – April 2013 – The Wheels Come Off
Lesson 13 – May 2012 – Exit Plans
Epilogue

At the bottom of each blog post you will see links to various analytics tools, concepts and YouTube videos to help add more color to my experiences.

Hope you like it enough to follow along!

Back to Basics – Part 2: Analytics Lead To Data-Driven Decision Making

Of all the lessons I have learned this past year, one that definitely rings truest is that people who use data in their decision-making always come out on top. Having spent 15 years in an amazingly successful company, it became obvious to me that almost everything being done in the bank has a lot of planning and thought behind it. And much more often than not the planning was both strategically and tactically guided by mountains of data. When I left Wells, there are 30-40 analytics postings on any given day, I just looked recently and there were 120 job postings requiring analytics skills.

Now having spent close to two years working with a wide range of other businesses as a consultant, its clear to me that few businesses have the same will to use data in decision-making. It takes a lot of foresight, tons of planning, and huge amounts of discipline to really get a handle on the data in your business, and very few smaller business are able to develop an analytics culture.

That the 2nd reason behind founding BPO Elite. I identified that the talent gap growing quickly when it comes to analytics training (the first) and I also identified the lack of strong analytics cultures in most businesses (the second). So we set up BPO Elite to train and place talent with these companies in dire need to better analytics.

I am helping a friend prepare a new product he is going to launch for his consulting business. On the surface it seems like a great idea with a decent sized market that should fairly easily make a decent revenue stream. But what does the data say? How big is the market really? What is the ideal price to make the product profitable? How best to market it to the target demographic? Most business leaders take a few hours to conduct actual research and then dive in and start spending money on marketing and product development. And this is where so many go wrong. They never looked deep enough to find the data to answer these questions with a more scientific certainty. So that is where I come in.

Empowering small businesses to make more data-driven decisions is where it all started!

One Year Later, It’s time to Get Back to the Basics – Part 1

As most of you know, I moved here one year ago from the United States. I left behind a 15 year career as an analyst with Wells Fargo to set up a business here in the Philippines to train analysts. Over the past year, my path has diverged and expanded to encompass several different analytics solutions including social media outsourcing, recruitment analytics training for corporate HR professionals and speaking engagements at schools promoting analytics careers in the IT-BPO industry. I have trained close to 200 people from a large cross section of schools and companies.

This morning I started thinking though about why I came here in the first place. Are there more analyst jobs out there then their is talent available for them? When I first started looking at the demand side, I analyzed things like looking at postings in job street with the term analyst in them… I got back over 1000 postings. A year later I do the same thing, but am now getting back 1300 postings.

My analysis has always been that there are several factors which make a training program like I have developed not only necessary, but imperative.

First off there is not a lot of analytics related education being taught at the college level. You see it in some programs at some schools, but overall higher education is not producing analytics talent ready to fill the jobs.

Secondly, there is such a dichotomy of skills required for the job postings… soft or people skills like communication and cross-department project work combined with the technical skills in specific programming languages or experience with certain types of analytics tools. It is very hard to find people who can balance the art and science of analytics and no one here is training people on both… its all one or the other.

The third reason why a training program like mine is important is the job requirements are getting increasingly complex in both quantity and quality. Traditional methods of recruiting don’t work well for analyst positions because most recruiters are focused almost exclusively in the technical skills and not of the soft skills. It is very hard to assess someone for curiosity or the ability to conceptualize big data schemes in a way that can be explained both to techie developers and people skill focused managers. To make things more challenging, few companies are trying to retain and train up analytics talent within, they instead turn to recruiters to pirate or poach talent from somewhere else.

The need for training approaches that are innovative and effective is growing much, much faster than most people are able to grasp. The massively overwhelming amount of data we have to analyze in our businesses each and very day is mind numbing.

I Make Analytics Easy!

Sometimes you just have to keep it simple.

Did you know that businesses that have solid analytics are 33% more profitible and 10x more efficient?

Greetings!

Did you know that businesses that have solid analytics are 33% more profitible and 10x more efficient?

Per Wikipedia, the definition of analytics is simply the discovery and communication of meaningful patterns in data.

While most people have an idea of what Analytics is: data, analysis, metrics, and business intelligence are just the start… it is an abstract concept that is difficult to summarize in a sentence or two. Most business leaders know that they need more analytics based decision making in their operations, however few have figured out how to obtain it as analytics software or engaging high priced consultants doesn’t suffice.

This is where I come in. Having spent 15 years as an analyst with Wells Fargo Bank, I get analytics. I have combined that practical experience with my educational background; I have a Master’s Degree in Education, and developed an innovative approach to unlocking the power of analytics.

My company offers both analytics consulting and training packages. Our upcoming training batches:

• May 10th, 11th, Recruitment Analytics, Mandaluyong

• May 24th, 25th, Analytics for Analysts and IT, Mandaluyong

We also offer analytics solutions designed for small business owners and entrepreneurs as well conduct specialized corporate consulting and training packages.

I have found that being able to harness the power of analytics is as much an art as it is a science. In the end, analytics is about three things; finding data, analyzing it and communicating the results.

You can follow me on the following sites:

Facebook >>> https://www.facebook.com/dmaiph

YouTube >>> http://youtu.be/blx8IuHsmCA

LinkedIn >>> http://ph.linkedin.com/pub/dan-meyer/4/771/675

WordPress >>> https://dmaiph.wordpress.com/

Twitter >>> https://twitter.com/BPOElite1

Feel free to connect with me if you’d like more information.

Sincerely,

Dan Meyer

President & Founder

danmeyer@dmaiph.com

DMAI – Decision Making, Analytics & Intelligence (a subsidiary of BPO Elite)

Managing Big Data: The 3 V’s

I came across this infographic earlier today and loved on of the visuals illustrating the challenges marketing managers have with Big Data. Big Data is all the data you have in your business… customer, product, social media, marketing spend, etc. Its considered big if you have more of it then you know what to do with.

According to the data gathered, the challenges are:

Variety = The diverse sources of data, the different places is stored and the various applications needed to access it. 49% of the respondents cited this as the biggest challenge. For me variety challenges can be mitigated if you have a good data warehouse approach and have a data master to keep it all inventoried.
Volume = The amount of data in your business that you have to analyze to be able to make decisions. In the underlying survey, 29% of respondents indicated the sheer amount of data they had to work with is the biggest challenge. The best way to deal with this challenge is to have cutting edge, analytics tools that allow you to mine data quickly. Tableau is my favorite!
Velocity = The speed in which you receive data. It can either be too fast to properly analyze or it can be to slow to be used in your decision-making process. 26% of the respondents indicated that the speed in which they are fed actionable data is their biggest challenge. If you have a way to control the variety and a tool to analyze volumes, then velocity shouldn’t be an issue.

Contact DMAI via this blog or you can e-mail me directly at danmeyer@dmaiph,com to set up an analytics assessment to help you figure out a strategy to control for the variety, volume and velocity in which you use your business data to drive decision-making.

Analytics is the answer for the Top Recruitment Trends for 2013

Based on some of the recruiting blogs I follow, here are the most common headlines:

1.Social Media will continue to transform the recruitment process

2.Global complexity in workforce planning

3.Strong Job Growth for Health Care

4.The Right Metrics are hard to find

5.Quality of Hire is the hardest to qualify

6.Never been more pressure to demonstrate ROI of recruitment efforts.

Analytics is a solution to helping HR and Recruitment professionals to address each of the challenges of presented by these headlines. Let’s look at each one.

1. Social media continues to be looked at as the silver bullet that everyone hopes will get them ahead. However, everyone else also has the same belief and in the end, your job postings can get lost at sea. Using analytics to help you determine what kind of posts, when and where to post them and with what message. A good ATS that feeds into social media is also important. The best ATS software packages post directly to social media sites. Also you can learn to take advantage of the built-in analytics that sites like Facebook and LinkedIn have for free. Also using an analytics approach to knowing your competition is a key way to stay ahead.

2. The complexity of recruiting here in the Philippines continues to be quickened by the diverse needs of various clients across industries and geographies. The global shift in services from massive to niche and from standard practice to personalized delivery is making it more and more challenging to find the right talent for the job. Analytics can be a powerful equalizer in knowing the demographics in your talent pool and of the clients.

3. The growth in healthcare outsourcing was something I talked about in depth a few blogs ago. Its an area that will continue to see hyper competiveness for top talent.

4. Knowing which metrics to use when and how to track and repot them is a big challenge. There is so much data and most of it is unstructured. Its incredibly hard to know how to keep a pulse on a your business. But an analytics driven business dashboard is one way to go about it.

5. Quality is hire is so often an afterthought. With so many open reqs and an increasingly thin talent pool, we often just worry about putting butts in the seats and letting the clients/business sort them out. This is so short sighted and counterproductive. Analytics can be used to measure quality of hire and should be something that everyone can easily tie their own personal successes to their efforts.

6. To truly measure return on investment you need good data, good analysis and good reporting to make sure pesos are well spent. Of all the headlines, this is on that analytics is used the most, but also used in ways that don’t really help all that much.

Upcoming Training Batches:

• April 13^th, Social Media Analytics, Mandaluyong

• April 19^th-20^th, Analytics for HR Professionals, Makati

• April 26^th-27^th, Recruitment Analytics, Mandaluyong

• April 29^th-30^th, An Introduction to Analytics for Fresh Grads, Pasay

• May 10th, Analytics for Analysts and IT, Makati

• May 18^th, Recruitment Analytics, Makati

• May 20^th-21^st, An Introduction to Analytics for Fresh Grads, Pasay

• May 24^th-25^th, Analytics for Analysts and IT, Mandaluyong

This approach is more about empowering analytical thinking then it is teaching a technological skill. I have found that being able to harness the power of analytics is as much an art as it is a science. In the end, analytics is about three things; finding data, analyzing it and communicating the results.

To learn more about my approach to empowering data-driven decision making, feel free to contact me directly@ 09157759578 or danmeyer@dmaiph.com or you can view our YouTube video to see more >>> http://youtu.be/yEg9plU7pwA

Data-Driven Decision-Making

DMAIPH Analytics Consulting was founded in the United States as a consulting firm with the goal of empowering small business to make intelligent, data driven decisions as business owners try to survive in the challenging economic times of today.

DMAI Philippines is our Philippines based business partner. DMAIPH is an analytics training, consulting and outsourcing service provider for clients based in both the Philippines and the United States.

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