Only Data Dinosaurs Promise “One Day” or “On the Spot” Hiring

In the ever quickening world of BPO companies in the Philippines, the latest recruitment slogans promise One Day or On the Spot Hiring. I even saw one today that promised a coaching session on how to pass the interview before the interview. Crazy. Like the last dinosaurs, these big companies are making a futile effort to avoid extinction.

Anyone ever involved in recruitment will tell you, that its hard enough to find good candidates, but trying to find rock stars with a one day, end to end, recruitment process is ludicrous. Not using more data and analytics in their process, will lead them to walk with the dinosaurs.

When it comes to trying to compress the recruitment process cutting edge companies look to technology and data analysis to help them narrow the field and make quicker hires. While dinosaurs just through more manpower at the problem. They ramp up with staffing staff and take shortcuts in skills assessment, candidate fit and potential success to meet the ever increasing demand for talent.

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When you see the headlines promising one day hires, you look at the companies and see they are doing things like its still the Jurassic Era. Resume screening in mass, scaled down skills tests and group final interviews. No demographic profiling, no analysis of the candidates distance to work or difficulty of commute, no predictive modeling based on candidate data to show likelihood of employee success. Its like watching a bad sci-fi movie about dinosaurs taking over the planet. It will not end well.

In today’s hyper competitive job market, only the companies who evolve to using more intelligent recruitment methods will prevail. The rest will someday take their place in a museum of failed BPO companies from the early 21st century.

And its not that expensive, not is it really that hard to invest in analytics solutions. The cost of ramping up and hiring more people to do hiring  is always more costly over time then a good business intelligence tool.

Instead of shortening your process to stave off eventual extinction, evolve your business to get with the times. Don’t end up like everyone else offering the promise of expedient hiring to fill seats, that in the end just need to be filled again and again. Hire a recruitment analytics expert, have them dig into your data and come up with a smarter solution.

I can show you how. I have helped dozens of BPO companies come up with analytics solutions that help them avoid the trap of one day hiring. Connect with me if you want to survive.

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.

Using Data Analytics to Assess Work Ethic

When you oversee the growth of a team from 6 to 100 employees in just over a year like I have, one of the biggest challenges you face is keeping up with recruitment requirements. When in rapid expansion mode, it is easy to lower standards and fall into a “just fill the seat” mentality. When this happens, high attrition generally follows.

One way to try and curb high attrition rates is to get better at measuring candidate work ethic. For most people assessing the work ethic of candidates is something that seems very subjective and not something that is east to apply metrics too. And in with that assumption, you are missing some very easy data points to capture and use in being more analytical in your recruitment process.  Let me highlight three data points to capture in the recruitment process that have a strong correlation to work ethic.

  • Timeliness
  • Resume Quality
  • Preparation for Interview

We all make note of these items during the process, and often include them in the overall evaluation of the candidate. But rarely is anyone capturing these items as data and using it to help measure work ethic and use it to predict work ethic once employed.

Timeliness is simple. Where they early, on-time, late, really late or a no show for any of the interviews in the process. If people are early or on-time it’s a positive and can show a general behavior once employed. On the other hand if a pattern of being late or not showing up is already evident before being hired, why would you expect that to change once they are part of your team?

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One thing that is common here in the Philippines is dramatic excuses for being late or missing interviews. If you are or ever have done recruiting here, I am sure you can rattle of a long list of excuses; family emergency, death of a loved one, getting sick, and stuck in traffic being the ones I hear the most. Its easy to dismiss the excuse as a valid reason to be late or not show, but time and time again when we hire people who started like this, they don’t stick around. Putting a weight behind timeliness is extremely important. Over time you can track the attendance patterns of people you hired with low timeliness scores and I guarantee you that you will see a strong correlation between the two.

Resume Quality is also something that generally has a direct reflection on the candidate’s level of professionalism. If you are expecting someone to treat your business with respect and hard work, yet their resume is out of date, incomplete and/or full of typos, once again you are fooling yourself. Im sure we all think at some point the resume is just a resume and bad candidates can have good resumes and vice versa. Well if you do think that, then don’t you owe it to yourself to start tracking data to validate that. When you find you are mistaken, and bad resumes general equal bad employees, you can thank me. Come up with simple scoring system. Like an English teacher would grade a paper. Grade the resume and add the data to both your decision-making and your data analysis.

One of the deal breakers for me when I interview is how prepared is the candidate. When I ask them how did the hear about the job, and they say a friend told me to apply I get concerned. My follow up being did you research the company before coming here. When they say I didn’t. Its pretty close to an automatic fail. If a friend told them about the job, but they didn’t do anything to learn about the company it’s a clear sign they are not taking this serious. So why would I expect them to take their job serious once they start. Again come up with a simple scoring system to indicate how did they hear about the job, what kind of research did they do about the company and how much knowledge do they come in with about the job they are applying for.

So there, you go. That’s how you can add some powerful analytics to your recruitment process. Come up with you own measurements for timeliness, resume quality and interview preparation. Use them along side the tests and assessments and interviews, to build a more complete candidate profile. All track these data points over time to compare to data once they are an employee like schedule adherence, productivity and quality of work. I promise you, you will see strong correlations between the pre hire and post hire data.

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.

 

Key Analytics Essentials For HR Success

A few months back, I had the pleasure to be one of the resources speakers at the HR Congress. Put on my good friends at Ariva Events Management, the event was at the SMX Convention Center, Mall of Asia Complex, Pasay City, Philippines.

This HR Congress aimed to provide Industry Updates, Expert Insights, Good Practices and Experiences, and Practical Knowledge; generate thought-provoking and challenging discussions; and encourage professional networking and strategic partnership among stakeholders, if only to further the HR Agenda supportive of the organizational targets.

A primary goal was to cross-examine the major HR Trends quickly moving forward and impinging on the business in developing an effective ‘Employer of Choice’ branding. The Congress also shared how to develop employees to optimize their potentials; and build an emotionally-committed multi-generational team.

The Two-Day Event covered Six Essential Cores in People Management, each one with a tie into my favorite topic… analytics.

1. Strategic Human Resource Management (SHRM)
Overview of the business environment vis-à-vis the changing roles and functions of Human Resources in general. With so much data now available, its much easier for HR times to decide where to spend their time and focus. Without good HR analytics you might as well be fumbling around in the dark

2. Human Resources Information System (HRIS)
Overview of tools and appropriate support structures for administering HR-related information. This aims to impart knowledge and skills in managing information resources to support basic records management and people administration. A reality is that most of us are still using MS Excel to manage talent pipelines and HR data. So learning how to use more cutting edge technology is key to being successful in the Information Age.

3. Employee Selection
Methods of employee selection and concepts in forecasting and identifying competencies; an Interview Guide may be developed that will assist in spotting competencies to match people needs. There is so much competition out there right now. The supply is far outweighed when it comes to top talent. You need to turn lose your business data to help you attract, hire and retain while others deal with massive turnover and low employee engagement.

4. Performance and Rewards Management
Case studies and exercises, concepts in managing employee performance; pay and benefits Learners will be able to hone skills in performance planning, performance assessment, coaching and giving performance feedback. All this generates massive amounts of data that can be turned into valuable insights.

5. Employee Development
Skills in determining employee development needs; different training and development interventions; participants are expected to come up with an employee development plan. It is getting harder and harder to keep good people around. SO, you need to use your data and a good HR analytics solution to make sure you are giving your employees the exact opportunities they demand, before they jump ship.

6. Employee Relations and Well-Being
Equipping participants with the know-how in employee relations including basic labor laws and managing employee organizations. Employee well-being issues such as employee stress and burnout, smoking, and work-life balance will also be covered. This area is often very manual and rarely included in a good analytics solution. That doesn’t have to be the case.

SO, as you can see their in an analytics solution to just about any issue facing HR. In fact, 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.

You can also reach out to my key business partner, Ariva Events Management to request an in-house training featuring me as your resource speaker.

What ever you do, make sure you optimize your use of data and analytics in your HR decision-making processes. If you don’t your organization will face a much more challenging path then ones who do.

 

The Five Stages of HR & Recruitment Analytics

I’ve seen a couple of articles recently espousing a set number of stages  in HR and/or Recruitment Analytics. Based on my knowledge, the 5 stages of analytics a people-centric department can experience are the following:

Stage 1 – The Data Dark Age – No analytics at all. Pipelines are either in MS Excel, a very old proprietary data based or maybe even on paper. Nothing is really analyzed, data quality is bad, and reports are pretty useless. Not collaboration exists between HR, Recruitment and other business lines.

Stage 2 – Living in Data Castles – Only a few people use analytics and most key management decisions are not made based on data, but on experience. Every department has data stored within its own data base. Its nearly impossible to share data due to poor data architecture. HR data is incomplete and the recruitment process does not have any dynamic reporting.

Stage 3 – The Flat Data Organization – Some people use some analytics to make some decisions, but its generally inconsistent across the organization. Data is generally historical and used tactically to understand simple patterns and effects. Some of the data castles have evolved to data explorers, venturing out to find and use new data sources, but many castles still remain in the organization. Generally HR and Recrutiment are using a people management and/or recruitment management software. Reports are useful and drive some decisions by management, but there is major room for improvement. Some data leads to buried treasure, but some leads you off the map… data quality is inconsistent.

Stage 4 – Civilized Data Flow – Most decision makers have access and generally use analytics. Several key team members have strong analyst backgrounds. Data is easily shared between teams. Most managers look at data before making a decision, and analysts have a say in business strategy based on their analysis. People are empowered to do their own discovery and analysis. The organization has answers  to questions about recruitment efforts and HR trends. Waste is controlled with effective people and recruitment management software.  Business dashboards are being used to convey a lot of information.

Stage 5 – Data Nirvana – Every team member from top down knows analytics, has access to the data they need and are empowered to take action on it. There are minimal hindrances to sharing data. It is hard to find a place like this but, when you do recruitment works like a well-oiled machine,  HR analytics are predictive and driving recruitment efforts. There is never a question management asks, that there is not a data driven explanation to answer with. Business dashboards are interactive and real time. Surprises are minimal and solutions come quick and founded on business data and insight. Open posts are filled quickly and people stick around because there needs are proactively being addressed.

So what phase is your organization in? Where do you want it to be? I can help you assess where you are and we can design steps to get your where you want to go.

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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.

HR Analytics – Curiosity Trumps Technique

I came across an advertisement for an upcoming HR Analytics training a few days ago.

It’s a three-day class that goes pretty heavy into the technical side of HR Analytics. Like most analytics training classes being offered in the market right now there is a lot of emphasis how to gather data and report it. I am starting to see a little more emphasis in data visualization and building more dynamic reports, which is encouraging.

However, no matter what analytics tool you have, and how well your HR analysts are in using the technology, if your HR analysts aren’t empowered to really ask questions and unleash their curiosity on the people data they have access to, then you really won’t see a significant success when it comes to using data.

In addition, if your business is not ready to have an ongoing discussion about how to use the data to improve decision-making at all levels of the organization then you are not going to be successful either. You need an analytics centric culture to really benefit from all the amazing tools and techniques now available to HR teams.

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When you look over the agenda of an HR Analytics training class and you don’t see anything about culture, empowerment, data-driven decision-making, or dynamic reporting using interactive tools… then it is highly unlikely you will benefit much from sending anyone to these types of trainings.

If you would prefer to send your team to a training where your HR analysts and managers will not just learn a few techniques and demo a few tools, but really get into what it means to be an HR analyst and how HR can be at the forefront of building an analytics centric culture, then I would be happy to include them in my next HR analytics training class.

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.

Explosive Growth In People Analytics

https://www.jibe.com/ddr/telling-the-story-of-a-data-driven-future-for-talent-acquisition/

Came across this really interesting table about the explosive growth in HR Analytics.

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(Source:  Deloitte Human Capital Trends 2015 and 2016, 3,300 and 7,100 respondents, respectively) 

The blogger who shared this, Mike Roberts, stated “With advancements in technology, as well as more awareness of the power of data, this is starting to change. Since 2014, we’ve seen an incredible transformation in the way talent acquisition professionals view data. And research from leading analyst firms has been backing that up.”

This is exactly why I have been doing HR & Recruitment Analytics training classess. There is a growing number of options out there, so make sure you get the bang for you buck you are hoping for.

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Connect with me if you want to know more about my approach to using data to drive decision-making in HR and Recruitment. I have recently published a book, Putting Your Data to Work, that can be your guidebook to how to get more people analytics in your HR and Recruitment processes.

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 HR & Recruitment process so you can rise to the top in the ever quickening demand for top talent.

 

HR Recruitment Analytic Techniques

Every recruiting organization is looking for a way to better understand what’s working and what’s not working in their recruiting strategy. By using meaningful HR Recruitment Analytics techniques, your recruitment efforts can be greatly enhanced.

With real-time recruitment metrics & reporting, we can finally know what’s happening in our pipelines and what channels provide us with most qualified candidates.

New technologies like social networks, applicant tracking systems and business intelligence applications are fundamentally changing the entire recruitment process from sourcing to placement.

The pressure to deliver results has never been greater. HR and Recruitment managers are now more than ever required to demonstrate the return on investment their efforts are contributing to the bottom line.

Building analytics centric teams and using techniques taught in this training session will empower more data-driven decision making. This will result in both process efficiency and better return in investment in the recruitment process.

A few months ago, I facilitated a training class on HR Recruitment Analytic Techniques.

The Learning Session Objectives from the training were:

1. To learn analytics techniques that will allow quicker, deeper and more impactful analysis of HR Recruitment Big Data.
2. To be exposed to cutting edge technology being used in other companies to build HR Recruitment business dashboards and design more powerful reports.
3. To assess the current state of analytics in your HR Recruitment process and build a strategy to empower the greater use of analytics in your organization.

The Key Benefits from Attending this Learning Session were:

1.Develop analytic techniques that you can use to improve decision-making and improve the bottom line.
2. Explore analytics tools like business dashboards and data visualization to improve reporting.
3. Build a strategy to move your organization from current state to ideal state when it comes to the use of analytics.

Topics covered in the training included:

  • What is Recruitment Analytics?
  • Self-Assessment of your Recruitment Analytics
  • Analytic Techniques for Finding the Right Data at the Right Time
  • Applicant Tracking Systems & Social Media
  • Big Data and Recruiting Analytic Strategies
  • Business Intelligence, Data Visualization & Business Dashboards Technologies
  • Building Meaningful HR Recruitment Techniques

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Overall it was a great training class with lots of great discussion. Given that the recruitment and retention of top talent is the biggest challenge facing just about every organization. more conversations are needed.

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.

 

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.

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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:

  1. Replacement of old internal HR systems with new vendor managed tools
  2. The evolution of employee engagement tools
  3. 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:

  1. Recruiting metrics omit any “big-picture” business impacts
  2. Current recruiting metrics are 100% descriptive and only offer guesses on what is and what will happen.
  3. 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

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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.

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.

Q8: Here’s something a lot of us are wondering, what exactly is big data?

Think about some of the things you do in your daily life. You get up, you eat, go to work/school, shop, do something for entertainment, bank, go online and do things on social media. Everything you do generates data. That data is captured in countless ways. And then its stored in countless places. And analyzed by countless numbers of people. And then used in countless ways by businesses to market, design, advertise, build, sell, and so on.

Every time you check your phone to see if there are any updates on Facebook you generate a lot of data for your phone manufacturer, your service provider and Facebook itself. Everything you like or comment on can be turned into a data point. The time, place and length of your connection all provide useful data. Get the point? Its endless.

That’s big data.

In general, big data is thought of as all the data businesses capture and store in a database that they can use for business decision-making.

When you think of data collections that have millions and millions of rows of data like big bank transaction data, or traffic data for major cities, or all the statistics captured everyday across professional sports. Way too much for man to analyze without help from technology. That’s all big data.

Every business defines its big data a little differently. There is no one way to look at how best to manage big data because big data is such a living, evolving, never ending flow of information. It’s like lakes of water that are too big to swim across and too deep to dive to the bottom of without help. And no two lakes are alike.

Data analysts and data s2.5.2cientists are the ones who know the lake and guide you across or build you a submarine to explore the bottom.

As I have mentioned in previous posts, knowing the data environment is key to your success. And big data just adds weight to that statement. If you don’t know where all the data is coming from, can’t be sure if its clean, then you will get lost in the deluge of big data.

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.