Data Is Simply The Beginning

Let’s Get Academic About TA

After a year, I am glad to be back at the ERE Recruiting Conference here in Austin. It’s always great to connect with colleagues and friends in the real world, even if I am very much a homebody. I’m also a big fan of consuming massive amounts of BBQ and Tex-Mex, two things that are really tough to come by in the PNW.?

The energy from attendees seems to be as close to normal as possible. That’s not faint praise, either. Teams are lean, hiring is tough, and a wave of new technologies are trying to distract TA leaders from the very premise of their jobs: recruiting great talent. It’s a welcome retreat from the extreme highs and lows of the last few years, even if they aren’t over for everyone.?

While there have been a ton of great sessions, one of my favorites was the first-day panel on quality of hire, from Mary Faulkner , Melissa Thompson , and Kyle Lagunas . Their premise was simple: Is quality of hire a real metric? The answer to that is no, at least not in any traditional sense. Any sort of scoring of quality is going to be arbitrary and is going to look so incredibly different from role to role or organization to organization, it hardly makes sense to compare.

End of story, right?

The discussion about this was fascinating, though. The vast majority of people in the room weren’t measuring quality of hire at all, and less than half wanted to. You can tell TA leaders were largely uncomfortable with the idea that the quality of hire metric could reflect poorly on recruiting, especially when many of the factors (and indeed, the actual decision to hire) are out of their hands.?

I bristled at the idea, too — at least initially. But I don’t think that’s the right approach. In fact, I would say that responsibility, accountability, or blame shouldn’t even be on the minds of people looking at the quality of hire.?

Instead, I believe that organizations should take an academic approach to measuring the quality of hire because there are so many variables involved. For example, if you are hiring people in a location with a low availability in a certain skill set, who is to blame for the poor quality of hire? How much is external circumstance driving performance??

Taking an academic approach disconnects some of the emotion from it. You aren’t on a blame-finding journey. We simply need to know what factors are driving better (or worse) talent decisions. It’s rarely a TA person, hiring manager, employee, executive, or external circumstance alone driving poor outcomes. It’s usually a combination and usually also systemic (i.e., not just a poor performer). Quantitative data, like retention, performance, and attendance, can help discover challenges, but the data itself rarely has the answers.?

Another bristle came from using exit interviews as a sort of qualitative data set, which I agree can be problematic in some organizations. What is important, regardless of how you do it, is that you do need qualitative conversations — if not from the people leaving the organization, then with the people who are staying. I don’t believe you can improve quality of hire without qualitative data, though. You need to talk to people. Probably a lot, too.?

Finally, I will tell talent acquisition leaders what I tell everyone: Just because you aren’t collecting data, investigating, and explaining the quality of hire doesn’t mean people don’t already think they know what your quality of hire is.?

The absence of data doesn’t stop the story. But neither does data alone tell the story. It’s the beginning of knowledge that can be driven by cold hard facts and qualitative explanations.?

Quick hits from around the web

What else is happening??

What a Zoom Cashier 8,000 Miles Away Can Tell Us About the Future of Work, by Whizy K. for Vox . Offshoring will continue in the age of AI and automation, for better or worse.?

The New Workplace Power Symbols, by Michael Waters for The Atlantic . The new corner office is not another, slightly nicer corner office.?

Goodbye to Workplace by Meta, Hello to Workvivo by Zoom, by Josh Bersin . Workvivo by Zoom wins big from Meta 's shuttering of Workplace.?

Why Side Hustles and Portfolio Careers Are the Future of Work, by James Hudson for Forbes . Been hearing this for a while, but a transition to a skills-based workforce could actually accelerate this.

McDonald’s, Wendy’s Shareholders Demand Companies Tackle Child-labor Problems, by Lauren Kaori Gurley for The Washington Post . It’s nice to see shareholders do something for the greater good, even if it does directly benefit them.?

5 Strategies to Handle Global Talent Shortages, by Jill Barth HR Tech Editor for HR Executive . Great insights from Hung Lee , curator of the world-famous Recruiting Brainfood newsletter.

Despite Urgent Need to Adopt HR Tech, Your Peers Are Cautious About AI, by Brian Bingaman for HRMorning . Caution is good to a point.?

Less Than Half of Journalists Using Generative AI for Work: Survey, by Charlotte Tobitt for Press Gazette . You sure about that??

HR Snacks: Learning Market Trends

This week, Joel Stupka talks to Dani Johnson from RedThread Research about trends in the learning market. How is AI being used? What is an expert like Dani excited about? You don’t want to miss these insights.?

That's it for this week!?

Lance

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