Five Tips For Writing About Analytics

I write a lot about analytics. Blogs Posts, Power Point Presentations, Books, Training Materials, Marketing Pieces, etc.

What I write is influenced by what I read.

I read a lot about analytics. Blogs, Books, White Papers, Research Findings, LinkedIn Posts and such.

What I read influences how I write.

All that said and done, I came up with some quick tips to make writing about analytics more engaging.

Tip #1 – Write with passion. Analytics is a pretty dry topic on the surface. Lots of data and reports and formulas and models. The topic is among the leading causes of nosebleed amount my audience. SO, to get past the dry and head spinning content, your have to get people excited about it.

Let your passion for data-driven decision-making and using data to solve real world business problems shine.

Tip #2 – Keep it as simple as possible. This is my biggest challenge. Not getting to techie and using too many analytics buzzwords. Analytics is harder to explain then it seems, even though we all use analytics everyday. Companies know they need it, but can’t articulate how to use it successfuly.

Keeping my writings accessible to the novice analyst, but still interesting the expert is a key reason for my success.

Tip #3 – One Subject at a Time. It’s easy to start down one path and get pulled into tangents. Data is everywhere. Analytics means something different to every business. Trying to keep your writing focused is super important. Review key concepts and allow for everyone to keep up.

With blogging its easy, stay with what is on the subject line. With books and training materials, as long as you stick to your outline you will be fine. However you write, always make sure every thing ties back to the beginning.

Tip #4 – Get the Audience to Ask Questions. With my writing, I ask a lot of questions without actually asking questions. If you need help with this, connect with me. A lot of companies struggle with this (implying like your company does). I am constantly getting my audience to ask their own questions as they read.

It is all about creating an environment that encourages reflection and analysis. One question leads to another until you have created a culture of curiosity and discovery.

Tip #5 – Share Your Opinion. Your audience is reading your work because you are the expert. They don’t have the experience and/or the confidence to use their data or conduct their analysis on there own. Be the subject matter expert for them and they will keep coming back.

In today’s information age, everyone can be an expert in their own little niche. To truly become a thought leader, you have to be always sharing your opinions not just to your followers, but to your future followers as well.

As the number of analysts and data scientists explodes across the global work place, the need for experts has never been greater. If you have some knowledge others will benefit from and not sure how to get started in telling you story… connect with me. I will show you how.

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Finding Meaningful Ways to Use HR Data

One of the biggest challenges people have with using more data in their talent management process is that many leaders just don’t know where to start. Most HR organizations have tons of data on end to end talent management from recruitment to training to operations, but it is not easy to see meaningful patterns within all the data.

HR data used to be something easily captured in spreadsheets. Some of us have evolved to using more robust applicant tracking systems and talent management tools. Cutting edge HR teams are able to use the Big Data in their business to fuel a mature analytics engine that leads to insightful reports and business dashboards. Recent leaps in technology have given data hungry HR professionals access to a wide range of employee information that can be used in ways unimaginable just a few years ago.

To really find meaningful ways to use HR Data, today’s HR professionals needs to have at least a working knowledge of the data they have in their business. To be successful they need to know how to access and analyze the data, provide it to decision-makers and incorporate the data into a living process of continuous improvement.

In the end, success with HR data all boils down to the culture of the business. Is the team, or at least a number of the team, tech savvy and analytical? Is curiosity encouraged when it comes to finding new data? Is proactively mitigating risks and eliminating waste in the talent management process encouraged? If yes, then you are doing better than most.

Finding meaningful ways to use HR Data is not just about the cool new technologies available, nor is it just about harnessing the power of Big Data. It is as much as, if not more important that the HR team share a culture that optimizes the use of HR Data in defining strategy, making decisions and improving the business.

If you are wondering how to find more meaningful ways to use your HR Data, connect with me. I have helped dozen of HR teams to find ways to up their game when it comes to growing a data-driven culture that can maximize the big data in their business.

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.

Whats Missing in Your Cost Per Hire Metric?

One of the most common metrics used in recruitment is cost per hire. Generally used to bring together all the costs associated with filling an open position, cost per hire is probably the most widely used metrics across all types of recruitment. It is a close to a universal metric as we have. However, most of us are not using it correctly.

First make sure your calculation includes all factors related to filling the positon that have an external cost like marketing, advertising, job fairs, job board fees, travel time to events, remote interviewing, etc. Any and everything you can think of that happens outside the office that adds to your total cost.

Now do the same for factors that are internal to the business. Salaries, bonuses, reimbursement expenses, application tracking systems, copy and printing costs, etc. Make a list and notate the expense for any and everything you can think of that happens inside the office.

In both cases, also include data for shared costs from expenses that cover more then one opening. In many cases we don’t include things like rental expenses, association fees, government requirements, really anything that your organization spends money on that directly supports your recruitment efforts. In many cases, you can divide the total amount by open positions to come up with some kind of weighted amount assigned to each open req.

Now one more piece to your cost per hire metric, that most of us miss. Expenses related to not filling the position. How much is lost in productivity? What revenue forecasts come up short? How much is spent on overtime and other compensation for staff covering for the open position? When you factor these items in you can get a much deeper understanding of the cost per hire to the business.

If you are doing all of these things and feel you have a very solid cost per hire metric, then you are in the minority. In an ideal world, recruitment teams can better allocate resources based on what positions cost the most to fill. Better understanding all the data points that are added into the cost per hire calculation can also uncover opportunities for savings that you might not otherwise see.

On the other hand, if you are looking for some guidance on assessing your cost per hire metric to make sure its optimized to capture all of the relevant data points to your business then connect with me. I can help you get a true read on the cost per hire in your business.

Quick Analytics Survey: Reasons Why Analytics Projects Fail

I am in the process of sending out a quick analytics survey to my LinkedIn connections asking what is the most common reason analytics projects fail.

The survey will be extremely helpful as I am preparing a new book that focuses on why analytics projects fail. I want to list out the most common reasons and then add what can be done by analysts to prevent these causes of failure.

Here are the reasons I have come across in my career as an analyst and consultant.

Reasons Why Analytics Projects Fail:
#1 – Lack of Focus, no one makes the project a priority.
#2 – Lack of Vision, no clear idea of what the end product looks like.
#3 – Lack of Management Support, no support from above.
#4 – Lack of a Champion, no one to cheer team on to completion.
#5– Organizational Politics, gets killed by someone else.
#6 – Lack of Funding, not enough money to complete the project.
#7 – Lack of Talent, don’t have the experts need to be successful.
#8– Lack of Resources, not given all the tools you need to finish.
#9– Bad Data, you complete the project, but end up with bad data.
#10 – Key People Leave, someone leaves that can’t be replaced.
#11 – No End User Participation, not useful to those its built for.
#12 – New Technology, it becomes obsolete before it can be used.
#13– Over Reliance on External Help, slowed by waiting for others.

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If you have a reason, not covered by this list, please feel free to reply with that’s as well.

This future book will be a companion book to my recently completed Analytics Guidebook and my current book in process entitled Data-Driven Cultures.

If you are having problems in your organization with analytics projects faltering or failing to be the success you had hoped for, let me know. I can help you identify the cause, come up with a solution and help you ensure your analytics projects becomes a huge success to the organization.

Aligning Strategic Business Insights Through HR Analytics

I recently gave a talk about Aligning Strategic Business Insights Through HR Analytics to a group of HR and Recruitment Managers and Senior Professionals.

Learning Session Description
From sourcing, through hiring, beyond training and towards retention, the best HR teams know their data and use it to stay focused on the overall strategy of the organization. This learning session is designed for HR and Recruitment professionals to identify key data points and be exposed to analytic techniques that are paramount to successfully aligning HR to a strategic business plan.

Learning Session Objectives
The specific objectives of this unique fun-filled learning experience were;

Be exposed to cutting edge analytic techniques being used by successful HR and Recruitment Team in the Philippines and abroad.
Gain a deeper understanding of what key metrics and data points add value to HR teams as they use data to align business strategy.
Be empowered to produce actionable reports that give decision-makers the right data at the right time to ensure a more solid business strategy.

Key Benefits from Attending this Learning Session
In this session, your organization was able to:

Define the most important data points to the organization’s strategic plan.
Develop an analytics strategy around how to better use data in decision-makin
Deliver new analytics techniques to the rest of their team to better align HR and Recruitment with the core business strategy.

In this session, your participants were able to:

Identify key data points within their HR and Recruitment business data.
Learn how to bring these data points into an inventory that allows quicker and more powerful analysis.
Integrate these data points and analysis into management reports full of actionable insights.

Who Should Attend

This session is suitable to a wide range of professionals but will greatly benefit:

Executives, Managers and Business Leaders who are looking to empower their HR and Recruitment teams to use more data analysis in their strategic planning.
HR and Recruitment Managers who use data and analytics as well as employee analysts to help in strategic planning and business optimization.
HR and Recruitment Supervisors and Team Leaders who use data and analysis to manage their teams and implement strategy.
Analysts working with HR and recruitment data who add value to the overall HR strategy though their reporting and analysis.

Learning Session Outline

This session was broken into 4 key areas:

Cutting Edge HR Analytics
Finding the Right Data
Key Analytic Techniques
Actionable Reporting

Teams that are successful in each of these 4 areas, will be ahead of the game when it comes to keeping HR at the forefront of defining, aligning and implementing business strategy.

Learning Session Process

This session utilized a variety of proven adult learning techniques to ensure maximum understanding, comprehension and retention of the information presented. This includes thought provoking discussions and analytics solutions presentations.

I can do the same thing for an in-house training for your business. You can either connect with me directly or get in touch with Ariva Events Management for a free consultation on how to get started.

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.

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.

Change Has Come > I am DMAI

About 4 years ago I attended a conference on Business Process Outsourcing where the keynote speaker was former President Aquino.

When he entered the room, I was sitting on the edge of the middle row and as he walked to the stage he walked right by me. I’m not much for being impressed by that kind of thing, but in this case it was pretty cool. I mean how often does someone get to be a few feet away from a president of any country.

In the four years since my brush with political celebrity, I am looking forward to getting another chance to be in the same room with a president. On August 17th, I will speaking at this event where current President Duterte will be giving the opening speech.

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So from being in the audience 4 years ago, to now being on the same stage 4 years later. It is a very satisfying feeling to think how far I have come in 4 years. From a “fresh of the plane” foreigner with just a handful of connections to being one of the more in demand public speakers. All because I love analytics and have a passion for sharing my key essentials for data-driven decision-making with my beloved Philippines.

Change has come!

Living the dream!

#IamDMAI

The Four Corners of Me – Provincial Edition

As I sit here looking out my window at the beautiful city Cagayaon de Oro, I am taking stock of what it means to be me.

CDO

It not even a beautiful picture as much as it is the fact that its not full of stuff.

When I am in Manila I try and balance what I call the Four Corners of Me, which are looking for new business opportunities, leading my current business ventures, creating analytics content and sharing my analytics expertise. At times it can be a lot to balance with the challenges that come with doing business in one of the most chaotic megalopolises on the planet.

At the intersection of the four corners are my mind, body, health and spirit. When those 4 corners effortlessly intersect, then then I can manage the four corners of my professional life. Given how the negative forces of Metro Manila like poverty, pollution, congestion, and corruption can sometimes sap my 4 inner corners, it can end up leaving my four outer corners out of whack.

Which makes this trip to CDO so well timed.

The conventional wisdom is that to set up a successful business in the Philippines you need to be in Manila. That’s where most of the players are, where the government is centralized and where most of the perceived best things are located. However, when you get out to the provinces, pretty much anywhere you will find expats who have bucked that trend and set up their own little business empires far away from the capital.

I have long thought I’d much more likely enjoy life if most of my time was spent in a provincial city close to the beach. I thought that in Iloilo, and in Bacolod. Now I can add CDO to that list of places I see myself in for a big part of the rest of my life. Business development can be done anywhere if you have your inner four corners lined up.

Managing my current businesses sure seems easier when my condo is two blocks from my office. But given I spent so much of my time outside Ortigas, and since I have a good management team in place, running things from the Visayans or Mindanao is not as farfetched as it used to be. We dabbled with having a team in Cebu and it worked well. So this is any easy one.

One of the beauties to what I do with most of my time, writing and blogging about analytics can be done from anywhere. Access to virtual resources and discussions about analytics in limitless. When I first set up shop in the Philippines in 2012, access to in person conversations about analytics pretty much required being in Manila. But not so much anymore. Having worked with schools in several provinces, the demand for good analytics contact is driving people to be much more open minded to where they find their solutions.

And finally, the training aspect. In many ways, the schools and businesses outside Metro Manila are more hungry for subject matter experts. The pressure to not only keep up, but show up things in the capital is quickening.

So, the dream of where the four corners of me is based in a province and not Manila is once again at the forefront. Thanks to the view outside my window for the inspiration to bring the dream back.

Q4: Can you please describe the current state of analytics in the Philippines? – Part 1

Let me tackle this question in two parts. The history major in me demands we look at how we got to where we are now before we talk too much about where we are going.

To start, both the appreciation for and the use of analytics has grown tremendously over the past few years. When I first started thinking about setting up a business in the Philippines back in 2011, hardly anyone knew much about analytics. Big banks, large call centers, multinational corporations and only the top schools were even talking the concept.

It was a challenge to fill my initial training classes due to lack of general awareness. Even at industry events and conferences it was rare to hear much about the idea of using data to drive business decisions.

Doing a search on the top job board in the Philippines back in 2012 for the jobs with analyst in the title netted about 1,000 job postings on any given day. The average salary was some here around 30,000 PHP a month. It was a challenge to find good talent and those who could do analytics were all gainfully employed.

It wasn’t until 2013 that I stated seeing other analytics training options and those were just ones being done by IBM to meet the CHED (Commission on Higher Education) requiring the implementation of a six class elective tract in business analytics. The was accompanied by the launching of Analytica, and IBM backed effort to push the Philippines towards being more a viable option for analytics outsourcing.

At this time a job search for analyst would bring back about 1,500 jobs. Salaries were starting to rise for analysts as well with the market average getting closer to 50,000 PHP. Still not a lot of public training or analytics centric organizations around then.

About the same time I started getting invited to schools on a regular basis to lecture about analytics to IT, CompSci and Management students. For the most part they had no idea of the career opportunities out there for those with analytics talent. I consulted with several schools on how to implement the CHED memo and how to prepare their students for analytics careers.

In 2014, an analyst job search was yielding closer 2,000 open jobs. The average salary climbed north of 50,000 Pesos for an experience analyst. I did a lot more trainings, being able to routinely fill a class of people hungry to learn more about analytics and how it could help them in their jobs.

The most in demand analytics skills up to this point where many centered on management reporting, production analysis and workforce management. Most analysts used some kind on proprietary database to store data and did just about all their analysis in Excel.

By 2015, analytics was finally in the mainstream. Job posting now routinely called for specific skills sets in programming languages and business intelligence tools. Multiple organizations made up of analytics professionals started coming together. The number of jobs open hit 2,500 on any given day and salaries for really good analysts hit 70,000 PHP a year. By this time, many outsourcing companies focused on setting up team of analysts to offer analytics as an outsourcing option. Big data jobs and even data scientist positions started showing up in large numbers.

So here, we are now in early 2016. The sky is the limit when it comes to Filipinos with analytics talent being able to enjoy good career growth and make substantial salaries. The schools are now starting to churn out talent with analytics careers in mind. Things look great on the supply side of analytics talent and the market growth opportunity for businesses offering analytics is huge.

An additional complexity in the analytics world is the vast number of tools out there to gather, store, analyze and present data. Although IBM is by far the biggest player in training people, they are not the universal solution when it comes to the methodologies and technologies people use every day.

The biggest challenge today is that the demand for analytic talent dwarves the actual current and near term talent supply. The global need for not just analysts, but also data scientists has quickened to a point where catching up for the Philippines seems almost impossible.

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HR & Recruitment 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.

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.

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.

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