Follow Up to Q17: HR Analytics Trends

As a follow up to my last blog, I wanted to share a few more points about HR and Recruitment analytics then time allowed for. So here’s what I left out.

First we are seeing a massive replacement of licensed, traditional HRMS systems taking place. Many large companies either have, our or are looking into replacing the core HR applications. Most where built internally, just store structured data, are difficult to pull data from unless you can write code and are not integrated with other data structures.

The replacements are often vendor managed, cloud based, data storage solutions with end user interfaces that simply finding and analyzing data and often automate much of the reporting. And they can be updated in hours versus minutes, versus the old platforms that could take weeks if not months to update.

These new platforms are able to provide almost limitless data points, have built in business dashboards and are starting to offer powerful predictive analytics models. The days of many of the old school CRMs and ATSs we are using to manage people data are truly numbered.

Another trend worth mentioning is the efforts cutting edge teams are putting into both candidate and employee engagement. Attempts to “gamify” various part of the employee lifecycle to make data gathering, analysis and sharing more eventful is increasingly common. Its common knowledge that ways to attract and keep the attention of millennials is significantly different then it is for baby boomers or Gen Xers.

Dr. Sullivan mentioned that “we are seeing the traditional annual engagement survey is going the way of the dinosaur (slowly however) and a new breed of pulse tools, feedback apps, and anonymous social networking tools has arrived.” It has never been more important to look at not just the enterprise wide health of a company, but that of small communities within the enterprise.

Metrics that measure how engaged an employee once a year is are no longer enough. We can use things like sentiment analysis, text analytics and social media data scrapping to uncover things we would never see in a survey where everyone is pressured to give top scores.

And we really have to get beyond historical data and descriptive analytics to look at current and predictive metrics. We need to quickly know when and why metrics are headed in the wrong direction and measure the impact of our solutions. And this goes for not just current employees, but future ones as well. Candidate satisfaction with the hiring process is often an over looked metric.

We also now have the data and the tools to run predictive models on how, when and why someone may be looking to leave the company. This creates another whole area of HR analytics to look at.

Dr. Sullivan added that “we are seeing tools to predict flight risk, assess high potential job candidates, even find toxic employee behavior – are all in the market today. While many are not highly proven yet, they all work to a degree, providing great value to any company.”

Now we have, three more trends to consider when it comes to analytics in HR & Recruitment:

Replacement of old internal HR systems with new vendor managed tools
The evolution of employee engagement tools
Predictive analytics modeling

If you are curious about how to get more than just the most basic descriptive analytics out of your business data, then let us sit down and talk about. Finding solutions to replace your old HR systems with more employee engagement options and predictive analytics is not as hard or as expensive as it was a few years ago. Let me show you how getting back on the cutting edge with your data can be done.

HR & Recruitment Analytics – The recruitment and retention of top talent is the biggest challenge facing just about every organization. DMAIPH is a leading expert in empowering HR & Recruitment teams with analytics techniques to optimize their talent acquisition and management processes. Contact DMAIPH now at analytics@dmaiph.com or connect with me directly to learn how to get more analytics in your HR & Recruitment process so you can rise to the top in the ever quickening demand for top talent.

Q17: What are some best practices and technologies used in HR & Recruitment Analytics?

HR and Recruiting Professionals have embraced analytics. It took a while, but the increased need for data and analytics tools –The ability to collect, process and analyze “big data” has become paramount to the people side of the business. In order to gain a competitive edge in the increasingly chaotic global workplace, those who use analytics to gain data-driven insights into recruitment, compensation and other performance centric trends are the ones on the cutting edge.

“In my opinion, 95% of all the work that is done on recruiting metrics ends up being a waste of time, because the work focuses on creating historical tactical metrics never actually used to improve recruiting performance,” says Dr. John Sullivan, an ERE blogger and recruiting metrics expert. He says there are 3 reasons why there are failures and wasted time when it comes to metrics:

Recruiting metrics omit any “big-picture” business impacts
Current recruiting metrics are 100% descriptive and only offer guesses on what is and what will happen.
Once collected, the metrics are reported to “barley interested eyes” who then assign things to a committee whose time spent results in very little measurable impact.

If you are still focused on time to fill and cost per hire, you really are quickly becoming a dinosaur. In addition, the idea of trying bringing in new people while working towards retaining top talent are generally not assigned to the same people. The disconnect between recruiting good people and retaining the good people who have been recruited is a killer to many companies. Both the material and cultural cost of replacing a bad hire isn’t generally looked at.

There are lots of blind spots to what is happening not just internally, but also externally. Knowing who you are competing against for the same talent and what makes your offer to sign or stay stand out from the crows. None of these points can be analyzed with old school metrics terms and methods.

Dr. Sullivan also recommends six strategic categories of metrics that will help your in not just recruitment but in many other HR initiatives like retention and employee engagement:

The positive performance increase added by more productive hires
The failure rate of new hires and the damage done by weak hires
The losses created by a weak hiring process
The opportunity costs of “missed” landable top talent
The cost of using excessive hiring manager hours

If you are looking at metrics like these, and sharing your findings not just with the recruitment team, but the boarder HR team, you can come up with big picture strategies to deal challenges much more effectively. In my own experience, a few other noteworthy trends in HR and Recruitment Analytics to consider include:

Disruptive Technology. Giving tools and information to managers and employees directly allows action to happen much quicker and be much more localized in impact. Success means giving the power to the end users so that HR can do more to oversee and manage big picture metrics.
Once A Year Is Not Enough. Annual reviews and employee surveys are too old school. Using analytics to gain insights can now be done 24/7. This can really have positive changes on employee engagement without the drawn out and too formal process made uniform to all.
Outsource Stuff. In successful companies, many tasks are outsourced to vendors who can do a lot more specialized things then in house generalist staff can do. Its just to much to ask a few people to stay on top of all the things important to the people you rely on. You have to pick and choose what you can keep and what you can outsource.
Mobile Apps. Designing apps for mobile first use is the way to go. We too often rely on old school thinking and take web-only or web-first tools and repurpose them for mobile. Times have changed. Mobile first is the way to connect with todays candidates and employees.
Look For It On YouTube. Video based learning, recorded by localized subject matter experts is on the cutting edge. The bonuses of learning from someone who is doing it versus traditional corporate trainers and enterprise world eLearning modules is another key to success.
Out Of The Box Analytics Tools. Behind the fire wall HR applications are being replaced or augmented by vendor based analytics tools that are more dynamic and expandable. Many can set on top of or replace current tools that are being used to gather, store, analyze and report data. The days when everything has to be designed, developed and maintained by an internal IT team is also going the way of the dodo bird.

So there you have it… becoming an HR and Recruitment Analytics ninja is going to take a lot of new thinking and a lot of letting go of how it worked in the past. Everyone agrees recruiting has never been harder, retention is getting more challenging and the future of finding and retaining talent is looking like a nightmare on the horizon.

If you need some guidance with how to being your HR and/or Recruitment team into the information age, I’m happy to help. One of my favorite things to do is get in a room with HR and Recruitment staff and talk about how to bring the team form the past to the future when it comes to analytics. Just ask me how.

Q4: Can you please describe the current state of analytics in the Philippines? – Part 2

So the last blog post gave us the history. Now let’s cast an eye on the future.

Over the past year or so I have started to see a significant effort from data science and analytics professionals come together to address some of the challenges outlined in my last blog post.

In short, the way higher education and the government has approached the need for analytics talent is simply to little to late to meet the needs of many businesses.

Everything they are doing helps, but in the end the world is desperately looking at the Philippines to do with analytics what it did with customer service. To become a center of capable, long-term and affordable talent.

With taking customer service calls, it was a natural fit given that most Filipino college graduates have a foundation in English. With analytics and data science it has not been so easy. While many Filipino have the underlying course work in coding, database management, computer science, etc… they are not getting enough exposure to data-driven decision making, business intelligence tools, and more advanced things like machine learning, prescriptive analytics and blending big data from diverse data sources.

I don’t want to sound too pessimistic, things are moving quickly but it is generally the multinationals driving things forward. They have the clients, they have the need and so they go out and find people and train them. That’s why 3 years ago hardly anyone in the private sector was offering analytics training, now you see more and more options all the time. They are generally expensive and narrow in focus, but they are opening up huge opportunities for data loving Filipinos to get into upwardly mobile and financially rewarding careers.

I belong to a couple of newly founded organizations of data scientists and analysts who meet on a regular basis to share knowledge, support each other’s ideas and build a community with the goal of using data to helping both the Filipino to fill these open jobs and for the Philippines to begin to use more data in decision-making so we can solve the big issue problems important to all of us.

It’s a pretty exciting time.

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So where next?

Given that the Philippines is one of the youngest countries in terms of average age on the plant and the youth are incredibly communal and very tech savvy, I have found great success in training batch of Filipino fresh graduates in basic analytics. Of the 200 or so trainees I have personally trained, most of them now have jobs with analyst in their title.

I have also seen a lot of talent quickly go from novice to expert using applications and doing coding in relatively short periods of training. In many respects the approach to analytics is more vocational then academic allowing for quicker training.

Beyond these strength, you can expect more partnerships between the government, higher education and big business to offer training and career pathing. The success of the BPO industry is really the driving force to add employees who can do the tasks of an analyst. The huge surge in job postings demonstrates this quickening trend.

Finally, the reason I see a bright future for analysts and data scientists in the Philippines is the simple fact that Filipinos gravitate to under filled career paths, they push themselves to get the skills to fill those jobs. You see it in the Middle East oil fields, in sailors and seamen in just about every ship at sea, you see it with overseas workers across the planet, and you saw it happen with call centers.

And that is exactly why I set up my business in the Philippines. Here are some of the analytics solutions we offer:

HR & Recruitment Analytics – The recruitment and retention of top talent is the biggest challenge facing just about every organization. You really have to Think Through The Box to come up with winning solutions to effectively attract, retain and manage talent in the Philippines today. DMAIPH is a leading expert in empowering HR & Recruitment teams with analytics techniques to optimize their talent acquisition and management processes.

Contact DMAIPH now at analytics@dmaiph.com or connect with me directly to learn how to get more analytics in your Business or your HR & Recruitment process so you can rise to the top in the ever quickening demand for top talent.

Probing For Curiosity

Finding a good assessment to measure curiosity is something I am always looking for. Lots of ways to try and find it, but a true penchent towards curiosity can still be elusive during the hiring process.

Lot’s of probing questions like, asking candidates to explain how they solve problems and what they do when they come across something unexpected is a good start.

Taking personality tests like the MBTI and its ilk is another way.

Giving them a quick research assignment with fairly vague directions and open ended results can also help too.

Reading for fun is also another good indicator.

Whatever it is you do, make sure its something you are probing for.

Of all the data points in HR & Recruitment Analytics, that is the one I care most about.

Infusing HR Analytics into Organizational Behavior and Human Resource Management Classes

One of the things I have been working on is helping a top school here in the Philippines develop a strategy to infuse more HR Analytics into their Organizational Behavior and Human Resource Management Classes.

This effort is a precursor to a class specifically on HR Analytics, which is to the best of my knowledge, the first ever here in the Philippines.

So as I put more thought into the syllabus of each class, it occurred to me that a good way to approach analytics is to introduce it slowly over the length of the 3 classes, which follow in a natural progression.

Starting with the OB class, we can focus on how to identify data in an organization that will be useful to a HR team to measure things over time. To help really get at causality of human behavior on a wide scale, you need to have the data to understand context.

In the HR Management class, we will spend more time working on the inventory part of analytics, which is to bring the data into an analysis and reporting structure that helps us discover patterns and trends based on that data.

Then the HR Analytics class, we will then proceed on how to integrate the data and the analysis into tool like a business dashboard.

At a high level, the students will gain an appreciation for the wealth of data HR can access in an organization and how the analysis and reporting of this data can lead to more data-driven decision making.

Its great to have an understanding of why people leave a job, and to have good reporting on attrition patterns, but you also need to have the ability to enable strategic action based on data and not just observation or simple metrics.

That is what our students will be able to do that will separate them from other Psychology grads entering the workforce. They will be ready day one to be HR Analysts who can bring a much needed data centric skills set to a very people driven discipline.

If you are a school administrator or professor and need to get more analytics in your course work so your students are better prepared for the analytics centric jobs, connect with me. I can show you how. I even have a textbook you can use. My new book Putting Your Data to Work is ideal for the nascent analytics learner.

Analytics Education – Facilitating a mastery of the fundamentals of analytics is what DMAIPH does best.

All across the world, companies are scrambling to hire analytics talent to optimize the big data they have in their businesses. We can empower students and their instructors with the knowledge they need to prepare for careers in analytics.

Contact DMAIPH now at analytics@dmaiph.com or connect with me directly so we can set a guest lecturer date, On-the-Job Training experience or other analytics education solution specifically tailored to your needs.

The Average Keeps Getting Lower And I Refuse To Tolerate This – Updated

Updated on 10/27/16

http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2015/08/the-average.html

The average

Everything you do is either going to raise your average or lower it.

The next hire.

The quality of the chickpeas you serve.

The service experience on register 4.

Each interaction is a choice. A choice to raise your average or lower it.

Progress is almost always a series of choices, an inexorable move toward mediocrity, or its opposite.

I can totally relate to this. We are a society more and more inclined to settling for the average, and are even ok with it when the average trends lower.

One place I see it happening more than most is in talent management. The demand so far outweighs the supply of good talent; we keep lowering the bar.

Frist it was 4 year degree required. Then it was some college. Now its high school grad.

In just a few years we have gone from a high bar to also most no bar.

Same day hiring. No interview required. No test or assessment. Just how up and get a job.

I hate this.

This new reality taking hold across the Philippines is deeply concerning to me.

It is unacceptable to me to be involved with anything that is just average, and I just get crazy when I see people doing things to lower the average on purpose.

There is another way.

If you have good analytics, you can be better at setting a realistic bar and not just going lower to meet requirements.

No more mediocrity. No more playing to the average and definitely purposely lowering the average.

I just refuse to tolerate it anymore!

Let me show you how to use the data in your business to turn things around.

Stop the insanity of fueling high turnover and low employee engagement that is lowering the quality of service to a dangerous place.

Who is with me?

If you are, the you will might enjoy reading my new book, Putting Your Data to Work. I can help you use your data.

The Challenge Ahead

How do we get better? That’s what is on my mind every day. Most people get up every day and go to work. They have family obligations to meet so they take a job that helps them meet these obligations. However, most people don’t find job that add much more value to their lives then a pay check.

Sometimes we get lucky and find a good place to work. Where we are valued as not just a worker, but a person. Where we are allowed to have more work/life balance then we might have in other places of employment. This is a special place to be. Its not what 90% of the global workforce face every day.

So what happens when we find that awesome company to be a part of? In some cases we are empowered to be innovative and to help be part of the success of the company as keep it moving forward. For people who feel this sense of positive energy, work is actually pretty fun most days.
However, in some cases we find that even though the company is good to us and we like working there, we find things start to feel routine. We have challenges every day that are either not fun to fix or when we fix it, no one seems to notice. This eats away at our positive feelings about our company.
And then we have a third group of people who for whatever reason are in the wrong place at the wrong time. They have challenges in their lives that prevent them from being at work every day. And often when they are at work they don’t feel very engaged. They have a low sense of satisfaction that makes each day on the job more work than its seems worth.

So as DMAIPH grows from a company of a half dozen to one of several dozen, how do we keep people trained? How do we make sure we keep as many team members as possible in the first category of engaged and empowered workers?

These is no simple answer. For some more money, for others more responsibility and for others more job variety. There is no magic solution. It takes a lot of effort from not just the leaders but also from the employees who want to keep enjoying their work and like to work every day for the same company.

The answer of course is analytics. We need to know exactly what they need to stay engaged and to stay with us.

That is what I think about every day. That is THE big challenge ahead. And so should you.

Join us on Feb 21, 2017 in Ortigas to find out what metrics you need to interpret and access the data you have in your business that will tell you exactly what to do to keep attrition low and satisfaction high.

Analytics Leadership – DMAIPH specializes in arming the Data-Driven Leader with the tools and techniques they need to build and empower an analytics centric organization. Analytics leadership requires a mastery of not just analytics skill, but also of nurturing an analytics culture. We have guided thousands of Filipino professionals to become better analytics leaders. Contact DMAIPH now at analytics@dmaiph.com or connect with me directly to discuss a uniquely tailored strategy to ensure you are the top of your game when it comes to Analytics Leadership.

One Step Ahead In The Talent War Across Call Centers In Manila

https://www.recruiter.com/i/5-tips-on-cultivating-your-talent-pipeline/

Came across this interesting article on LinkedIn. I’m always curious about that people are saying about how to have success with recruiting, because its perhaps the top challenges in my industry.

Recruiting good call center agents in Manila has got to be one of the hardest requirements to fill anywhere on the globe right now. Awhile back I came up with a formula for what makes up a good call center agent, and not the just the surface skills, but he core competencies. Here is what I see:

Conversational English (20%) – Conversations follow rules of etiquette because conversations are social interactions, and therefore depend on social convention.
Customer Service (20%) – Customer service is a series of activities designed to enhance the level of customer satisfaction – that is, the feeling that a product or service has met the customer expectation.
Technical Training (20%) – Instruction to help agents use the systems and personal computers on which they are dependent to get their daily work done.
Product Knowledge (20%) – An understanding of a good or service that might include having acquired information about its application, function, features, use and support requirements.
Work Ethics (20%) – A strong work ethic is vital to a company achieving its goals. An example of someone with work ethic is a person who gets to work on time every day and always works long days to get the job done.

Of these, the hardest to teach is the fifth one, work ethic. So to me 5 ways to look for strong work ethic in a candidate are similar to the ones listed in the LinkedIn article. They are:

Recruiting at events is more the just showing our brand, but our story out there. It’s a crowded field and we are just one, small voice. But it’s a enchanting story that get people excited about working with us.
We too lean on Referrals for a high % of our new hires. There is nothing better than an endorsement for the job from someone doing the job.
Internships/OJT/Trainees let us see how they work and letting them see what its like to work with my team. Great way to make sure it’s a good fit from both ends.
Looking locally at schools and outside the industry places like retail and service jobs to attract new talent to the industry. The industry is full of job hoppers and money chasers, so going for them is not a good option.
Staying in touch by sending newsletters, inviting to trainings, text blasts is important to us. Staying top of mind and keep telling our story.

So there you, go that’s how we are helping companies stay ahead of the game when it comes to the talent war going on in the call center industry in the Philippines right now.

I am currently working on a book dedicated to helping HR & Recruitment professionals in the Philippines. The book should be ready by early 2017. In the meantime, you can check out my latest work, Putting Your Data to Work, for an overview of how to get started with analytics in your business. Connect with me and I will show you how to get a copy of my fast selling analytics guidebook.

IBM’s Six Ways To Use Analytics To Manage A Workforce

http://www.forbes.com/sites/ibm/2015/04/06/6-ways-to-use-analytics-to-better-manage-a-workforce/

Interesting article about how to use more analytics in areas that are traditionally data rich, but not a focus of most enterprise analytics solutions.

Right now in the BPO industry in the Philippines, two of the bullet points really got me thinking.

Using analytics in HR to predict if and when employees might leave is a pretty cool concept. Their is plenty of historical data to look at resignation and termination patterns and segment the data in various buckets to see if any meaningful patterns jump out.

This goes hand in hand with higher employee expectations for work life balance and having a strong sense of community within the work place.

Both are things that might require a lot of unstructured analytics as well… although it blurs employee privacy issues, Facebook and Twitter can be an excellent place to glean insights into employee mood and their intentions.

I am curious to see how deep analytics can go into looking at data and trying to predict employee loyalty and stickiness.

The recruitment and retention of top talent is the biggest challenge facing just about every organization. DMAIPH is a leading expert in empowering HR & Recruitment teams with analytics techniques to optimize their talent acquisition and management processes.

DMAIPH also specializes in arming the Data-Driven Leader with the tools and techniques they need to build and empower an analytics centric organization. Analytics leadership requires a mastery of not just analytics skill, but also of nurturing an analytics culture. We have guided thousands of Filipino professionals to become better analytics leaders. Contact DMAIPH now at analytics@dmaiph.com or connect with me directly to discuss a uniquely tailored strategy to ensure you are the top of your game when it comes to Analytics Leadership.

What Kind Of Analyst Do You Want To Be?

“The main part of intellectual education is not the acquisition of facts but learning how to make facts live.” – Oliver Wendell Holmes

An ANALYST is a person who analyzes and is skilled in analysis. Business Analysts (BA) are required to find, analyze and report business data to support business optimization.

The job functions of an analyst very greatly from business to business and even within each business job functions can vary from analyst to analyst. However at their core, you will find that just about anyone with analyst in the title has several things in common.

Based on the book, the Accidental Analyst, four character traits that most analysts have are:

PASSION for helping people solve real problems
KNOWLEDGE of the business being analyzed
EXPOSURE to thinking analytically and problem solving tools
EXPERIENCE using data to solve problems

In addition most analysts have certain personality types:

reflective
intuitive
deep-thinkers
and able to make quick judgments

These findings show a consistency across analysts no matter if their focus in on reporting, analysis and/or research, if they are working with small structured data sets or volumes of unstructured big data or if they are actively working to optimize the business or just providing information.

Per CHED some of the analytics jobs graduates of the program should be ready for:

Jr. Business Analyst
Operations Assistant
(Web) Site Analyst
Marketing Officer
Jr. Operations Analyst
Financial Analyst
Supply Chain Analyst
Human Resources Associate
Training Associate
Administrative Associate
Accounting Analyst
Quality Assurance Analyst
Facilities Associate
Planning/Budget Analyst
Insurance Analyst
Social Media Analyst
Virtual Assistant
Customer Service Rep
Finance Analyst
Accounts Payable Analyst
Travel Analyst
Expense Analyst
General Accounting Analyst

This list is hardly exhaustive. On a typical day on jobstreet.com you will see hundreds of job titles that includes analyst in the title.

So I guess the next question to ask is, “What kind of analytics and analyst jobs interest you the most? ”

The Fundamental of Business Analytics – Business Analytics is the application of talent, technology and technique on business data for the purpose of extracting insights and discovering opportunities. DMAIPH specializes in empowering organizations, schools, and businesses with a mastery of the fundamentals of business analytics. Contact DMAIPH now at analytics@dmaiph.com or connect with me directly to find out how you can strengthen your business analytics fundamentals.

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