PODCAST - #HRHappyHour 192 - DataNow

HR Happy Hour 192 - DataNow

Recorded Tuesday October 21, 2014

Hosts: Trish McFarlane, Steve Boese

Guests: Mollie Lombardi, Rachel Cooke

This week on the HR Happy Hour Show, Steve and Trish were joined by two of Trish's colleagues from Brandon Hall Group - Mollie Lombardi, VP and Principal Analyst of Workforce Management Practice; and Rachel Cooke, COO. On the show Mollie and Rachel shared details about DataNow, a new research-based and data-driven product that can enable HR leaders to have better and deeper insights into research data, organizational benchmarks, and relevant insights.

Additionally, the upcoming Brandon Hall Excellence Conference, set for January 2015 was previewed. This event is shaping up to be a great opportunity for HR leaders to learn from, network with, and engage with their peers as well as the experts at Brandon Hall.

Also, Steve shared his indifference towards household pets ('They are sort of houseguests that don't really help with anything and just get into trouble'), and his need to escape the dreary Western New York weather.

You can listen to the show on the show page here, or using the widget player below. And you can find and subscribe to the HR Happy Hour Show on iTunes or on your favorite podcast playing app. Just search for 'HR Happy Hour'.

Check Out Business Podcasts at Blog Talk Radio with Steve Boese Trish McFarlane on BlogTalkRadio

This was a fun and informative show about a innovative new approach to share HR and HCM research findings and insights and we want to thank Mollie and Rachel for joining us this week.

Lessons from an Ad Man #3 - On Judgment and Research

Note: Over the holidays I finished off an old book that had been on my 'I really should read that' list for ages - Confessions of an Advertising Man by ad industry legend David Ogilvy. The 'Confessions', first issued in 1963, provide a little bit of a glimpse into the Mad Men world of advertising in the 50s and 60s.

This will be the last submission I think in the 'Ad Man' series, not because there aren't plenty more nuggets of insight from Confessions of an Advertising Man, but more that if I haven't convinced you by now you should score a copy and read it for yourself you probably never will.

I pulled this last lesson for its increasing relevance today - this new age of information, metrics, and Big Data, where we seem to be continually told, pushed, and cajoled into taking a much more analytical view of the world. Data, statistics, relationships, algorithms - these for many are the new coin of the realm and should be used to inform all kinds of decisions we make as HR and Talent pros.

Data can tell us where we should post our job ads to generate the best candidates, which of these candidates 'match' the job requirement, who might be a culture fit, what questions we should ask them in the interview, and how we should score their answers.  Even more data can tells us how much (or little) we should compensate our employees, how much we need to reward out top performers to convince them to stay, and which ones are likely to progress in the organization - making increased attention and investment in them pay off. And still more data can tell us where we should expand - what locations and markets have the 'right' supply of talent that fits our talent success profiles - and where we need to consider contingent staff or outsourcing to fill in the gaps.

In 2013 and beyond you as an HR and Talent pro will simply have to get more comfortable with data, (big or otherwise), and taking a data-driven approach to workforce planning, staffing, performance management, and rewards. This reality seems clear, and few would dispute the impact and influence that data and analytics will have on HR.

There was plenty of data back in Mr. Ogilvy's day as well. Sure, maybe not the voluminous amounts that we capture today, but still lots of data, and with the more crude tools available back then to aggregate, analyze, and derive insights - it is quite likely than business leaders of that age might also have felt they had a 'Big Data' problem.  Back then Ogilvy sensed a growing tendency for many in his field to become over-reliant on data and research - at the expense of reasoned and experienced judgment. Here is Ogilvy's take on the matter, from a section of the book subtitled 'The Image and the Brand' -

How do you decide what kind of image to build? There is no short answer. Research cannot help you much here. You have actually got to use judgment. I notice increasing reluctance on the part of marketing executives to use judgment; they are coming to rely too much on research, and they use it as a drunkard uses a lamp post, for support rather than illumination. 

Nice shot from the Ad Man, and certainly one that will continue to resonate more and more as the available amount of data and information that will be available to us at almost every part of the talent management process will only increase.

The data, as Ogilvy suggests, has to illuminate, it has to lead us into making the best decisions and even into dreaming up brand new ideas. It can't only be a prop or a justification for a lack of imagination or of daring. If we let data and data alone drive our actions, well then we can easily be replaced by it, and by technology that can process it much faster and more efficiently than we ever could.

The data will consume us if we allow it to I think. 

Use your best judgment on this...

Buying a car, choosing your next job - more similar than you think

The good folks at Careerbuilder recently released their 2012 Candidate Behavior Study, conducted in partnership with Inavero, and while the big, catchy conclusion from the study was boiled down to essentially read as 'Passive Candidates Don't Exist', I found even a more interesting, (to me anyway), finding from the study's data.

According to the Careebuilder study, job candidates consult nearly 15 resources per job search, including company career sites, Facebook, online job boards, employer review sites (such as Glassdoor.com), professional and personal networks and staffing and recruiting firms – before they even decide to apply to a job. Below is a chart from the study showing how job search research stacks up against other, similarly important and complex purchasing decisions:

Job Searching is complex

While we have been talking for a while, (here just last Monday), about Human Resources and Recruiting looking and acting more like the classic Marketing function, but as I pointed out in my post last week, and the Careerbuilder study reinforces, Marketing is changing dramatically as well, making, especially for HR and Talent pros, the shift to more of a Marketing mindset even more challenging.

From the report on the study's findings:

It used to be that a consumer would go to the store and find something on the shelf for the first time and make the decision to purchase right then and there,” (Careerbuilder's) Barnes explains. “Today, however, thanks to technology that enables us to research and compare products – at any time of day, from anywhere – consumers are doing significant research on products before they even step into a store.

Job candidates, we’re finding, are using this same approach to their job search.” For employers, these findings underscore the need to put as much effort into “marketing” their job opportunities and employment brand as they do their products, services and consumer brand. Candidates are utilizing multiple platforms to interact with employers, search for opportunities and find out what it’s like to work at companies – and they’re doing so increasingly through social media and from their mobile devices.

That means employers need to explore and take advantage of the many and various opportunities to connect with candidates these platforms afford.

Some quick thoughts on what this all might mean for you - the HR and Talent pro that might feel themselves in a position not at all unlike our friends over at a Big Box retailer like Best Buy, who watch shopper after shopper wander around the store, viewing and touching the merch, then immediately pulling out their iPhones to price check all over the internet, read product reviews, and figure out if their might be a better deal out there.

1. You probably don't need to everywhere, but you need to be moving in that direction. If your candidates are hitting up as many as 15 sources of informaton to learn about your company and jobs, then having a wide (and deep) employer brand presence across multiple sources.

2. True source of hire will become almost impossible to pinpoint. The candidate you eventually hired saw your opening via a job alert from Indeed, talked to a friend who used to work at your company, read some reviews on Glassdoor, checked out your Career site, then found someone in their LinkedIn network willing to forward their resume to the hiring manager. So - what was the source of hire?

3. If HR and Recruiting is becoming the new Marketing, then HR pros are even more behind the game. The Careerbuilder report pulls pretty deeply from a Google-led marketing research project called the Zero Moment of Truth, (ZMOT). If you want to speak the language of the modern marketer and job seeker, then you probably need to know what the heck the ZMOT is and how it impacts your employment marketing efforts.

I don't post about too many research reports, (honestly, there are too many to post about anyway), but I did learn a few things from the Careerbuilder research, and I recommend you check it out if you want some new insights into how candidates are searching for jobs, and how you can best adopt and adapt to these changes.

Have a great Monday everyone!

Need better information for business decisions? It might not be a technology problem

Recently the MIT Sloan Management Review in partnership with the IBM Institute for Business Value released some preliminary results from a project called 'The New Intelligent Enterprise'. The MIT and IBM researchers conducted an inquiry into how organizations are using analytics for competitive business advantage. The study was comprised of a survey of more than 4,000 executives, managers and analysts from around the world and across a wide range of industries.

Understanding how peers and competitors are leveraging analytics and new tools and technologies to increase competitiveness and make better business decisions has long been a concern of leaders across the organization, certainly in process-heavy aspects of the business like supply chain management, but increasingly in the Human Capital Management space as well. And while there are lots of tools and solutions that are on the market that can help organizations in these efforts to better capture and assess analytical data, some of the MIT/IBM study results suggest focusing on the technology alone may be a mistake.

While the full report and analysis of the research findings are still to be released, several of the study's raw data points were shared by the researchers, and I think the most interesting results were the first and last chart from the piece on Sloan Review site:

Figure 1 - Access to Data Needs Improvement

Source - MIT/IBM

Nice. Most of your key players, the ones you are counting on to make the right decisions, and make them quickly, and often under pressure probably don't have easy access to all the information they need. and almost 20% claim limited or no access to the data they need to success. Ouch. But you know that right? And that's why you are trolling the web, attending webinars, talking to consultants, and hitting the trade shows to find a software solution to address this problem. Sounds simple, get the right tools in, get them in the hands of the right people, and bam! - problem solved.

Except it might not be that easy.

Figure 2 - Technology is not the problem

Source - MIT/IBM

This chart is a little busy, but essentially says that when considering the deployment of better analytics solutions in the enterprise, the survey respondents felt organizational and company culture issues were perceived to be twice as hard to resolve as technology issues. Or perhaps said differently, finding and purchasing a technology solution might only 'solve' about a third of the overall problem.

Perhaps not ground-breaking findings, but worth remembering no matter what workplace technology solutions we try to apply to help solve business problems. We can recognize we have a problem, buy a solution to address the problem, but until and only when the organization is committed to making the kinds of important changes that these projects often require, we will not realize the full potential of the technologies and more importantly, of our people.

Mind Reading for Fun and Profit

A recent post on the Venture Beat site, A Clockwork Orange? EmSense can monitor your emotional reactions to media, about new applications in marketing research of something called 'quantitative neurometrics', a process facilitated by a subject strapping on a slick brainwave-sensing device and allowing their reactions to various forms of media to be monitored and tracked.I predict you will be a '3' on your review...

The basic premise of quantitative neurometrics is that by measuring more precisely and accurately subjects' emotional responses to advertising, creative concepts, packaging and the shopping experience content and campaigns can be better aligned with the target demographic's true emotional responses, and be more accurate than traditional means. The approach plays off the conventional wisdom that people often say they like something or are likely to do something, when in reality what they really like and actually do are quite different indeed.

So naturally for marketers and designers of advertising campaigns, store layouts, product placement professionals, really anyone looking to sell something, (or at least incent a prospect to consider buying something), quantitative neurometrics seems to offer a level of detailed information that could be exploited for commercial benefit. This is of course putting aside the general creepiness factor of strapping a brainwave monitoring tool to a subject while flashing your latest ads for minivans, or detergent, or vacation property in Tennessee.

As I read the piece in Venture Beat naturally I began to think of ways that brainwave monitoring could help organizations solve some of their more pressing challenges (again suspending disbelief long enough to imagine a workplace where employees would agree to submit to this kind of monitoring), and what kinds of long-standing workplace assumptions that quantiative neurometrics could help test.

Off the top of my head here goes:

Company Off-site teambuilding events

You think: Fantastic opportunity to get the team together, to bond and grow as a creative, energized, and inspired collection of problem-solving dynamos as only 'trust-falls' can conjure. The team returns to the office the next day with a new sense of spirit and togetherness.

They Think : If I don't attend, do I have to take PTO? Is there an open-bar? Don from Shipping really needs to put his shirt back on.

The CEO's quarterly message to the troops

You think : The team loves to hear about the news and strategy of the company right from the top. It is great that Joe the CEO is so accessible and open.

They think : If I don't attend, do I have to take PTO? Is Joe wearing a monogrammed shirt? With cufflinks? I hope he doesn't announce another off-site teambuilding session.

The Annual Performance Review

You think : Our process for linking company goals down to individual employee objectives is perfect for achieving optimal aligment, shared vision, and progess towards strategic goals. It is a win-win.

They think: I work in the mail room. I am not really sure what the heck I can do to improve our market share in Europe. Will there be any merit increases at all this year? Can you please tell Don from Shipping to put his shirt back on?

Sure, mind-reading might have a better and more profitable future in the worlds of marketing and advertising, but who says the HR and Talent professionals can't get in on some of the fun?

If you could really, truly, know what your staff was thinking, and have more insight to their honest emotional reactions to your environment, workplace technologies, communications, and so on, wouldn't you want to find out?

Or maybe instead of investing in brainwave-reading technology we could work to create a workplace where we really could just ask people what they are feeling, and they really would be comfortable sharing.

For the record - at the moment I am think almost exclusively on having a donut. But you did not need quantitative neurometrics to sort that out.