How do you know you are using the right data to drive the outcomes your company needs?
I was in a meeting recently where we were discussing performing a task to track a significant amount of user behavioral data in our application. We started posting all kinds of information we could get about our customers and how we could transform that information. Within minutes it was clear that we had a new problem ahead of us: It would take years to realize the ideas from our brief conversation, even if we had to increase our resources tenfold HR managers who have the same problem. Investments in digital transformation and new technologies have resulted in an overwhelming amount of data. But just accessing more data does not improve business results. Figuring out what can help you make better decisions and get better results is an expensive guessing game.
The most effective HR leaders use outcomes to choose which data to leverage.
The right dates to make the right decision depend entirely on the outcome you want. Working with many HR leaders in successful companies, I’ve mapped three common HR-related outcomes to the types of data needed to make the right decisions to improve these results.
Hiring the right candidate
Hiring the right candidate is one of the most common, but important, outcomes that contribute to the success of any business. The hiring process is simply a data collection process that helps decision makers find the right hiring process. One of the most common mistakes in making this decision. The process uses data points that don’t really correlate with job performance. To isolate which data points actually correlate with better job performance, take the top performers and the low performers and create two sets of data by analyzing their job applications, resumes, and pre-job evaluation results. Analyze the data sets to see which data points actually differ between the two groups. This sheds light on the data points that you can use in future hires to bring more candidates on board to represent your top performers.
Reducing recruiting costs
Once you’ve tweaked your hiring process to increase your chances of each hiring leading to a Rockstar performance, you can focus on identifying those candidates more quickly, which results in more time and resources being devoted to eventually hiring the candidates . And less so for those who don’t, which reduces your waste and overall hiring costs. Similar to the previous step, create two simple records of candidates who have been hired and those who have not. Other than those hired will help you make decisions about where to invest your recruiting efforts and how to create more effective messages for future opportunities. For example, when hiring software engineering positions, we found that the majority of those hired vs those who did not participate regularly in local or online developer communities. This helped us develop a strategy to focus on sponsoring and speaking in these developer communities while reducing spending in other areas that weren’t as successful. This has significantly reduced our overall hiring costs for finding Rockstar developer talent.
Improving customer satisfaction
A great customer experience and high customer satisfaction have a direct and positive effect on the overall growth and success of a company. Because of this, customer satisfaction scores are often one of the most important performance metrics for customer-facing roles. Isolate the skills that predict top performers and rely heavily on them in the hiring process. To take it a step further, many companies have already identified a short list of skills that lead to greater customer satisfaction for non-native speaker candidates), empathy and clear communication skills. Some of these skills are easier to obtain than others. But focusing on measuring these skills in the hiring process (through developing in-house tools or leveraging third-party reviews) will result in improved overall customer satisfaction.
These are just a few of the common outcomes that HR leaders are working towards. Whichever outcomes are most pressing for you, you will be more successful in your decision making by starting with the outcomes you need to achieve and working backward to identify the most relevant data.
