Vizualize.me – Hey, someone finally got the “let’s kill all the resumes” thing right

For at least 15 years, I’ve not taken seriously the idea that a resume could be replaced. Why? Not because I didn’t think it could be done, but because every time someone set me up for a “resume killer” conversation, what they came back with was… well, it was lame. (And look, I take my share of the blame for ugliness of resumes in the early days of the Internet, we could have done better.)

Vizualize.me  - you guys did a great job. Combine the data quality of LinkedIn with a decent attempt at improving the user interface, and you come out with a really nice looking visualization. I assume they are not stopping with LinkedIn – reskinning data through interfaces and treating the UI seriously has lots of legs.

Here’s my test 

Cost of Hire Metric Standard With Lee Webster, Jeremy Shapiro, and Gerry Crispin

A nice interview on the public review of the Cost Per Hire standard we’re working on…

 

http://www.totalpicture.com/shows/leadership/podcast-what-is-the-cost-of-hire.html

Under Reported: Gains in Minority Graduate Business School Enrollment

The news last week that more women graduated with PhD’s than men did in the last academic year was remarkable, and made me very curious to read the report from the Council of Graduate Schools to see what other trends weren’t reported on in the Washington Post piece.  And, behold, under reported news…

The report doesn’t only discuss the 50% milestone of women, but has some extremely interesting things to say about minority enrollment in Masters and PhD studies in the US.  I became interested in this topic when I did some work for the PhDProject in its inaugural 1994 year.  The best way I’ve heard the PhDProject described is by supporter and Dean at North Carolina A&T State Univ, Dr. Quiester Craig ”If you have diversity in front of the classroom, you’ll have diversity in the classroom.” Consider this: there were only 300 minority business school professors in 1994. Today, through the PhDProject alone there are 1,434 faculty and doctoral members.

Now let’s jump back to the College of Graduate Schools report.  The largest % gain in graduate business school enrollment from 1999 – 2009 were from African-Americans – an astonishing 18.4% annually.

The story for first time graduate school enrollees in business is equally as strong: Hispanics/Latinos increased their enrollment by 15.3% annually. And the African American first time enrollment pattern averaged a 9.8% annual increase, without the same dramatic demographic shift seen in the Census data.

Something new and positive  is happening, with graduate business education.  Now,  I’ve not seen data, nor claims, that the work of the PhDProject and similar institutions are the primary driver of the change. However, at the minimum, I’m certain a few percentage points are related to efforts to diversify the front of the business classroom.

16 years is not a great deal of time to create fundamental change in the business school landscape – but the data clearly proves, it is occurring.

Innovation in the aging workforce, WSJ got this one wrong

The WSJ Heard on the Street section printed an article today, “Older US Workforce Has an Ugly Wrinkle” sparked a few thoughts for my post this morning.  

• First, was a statistic. 40% of the US population over 55 is working or looking to work, the highest ratio since JFK was president. Demographically I found this interesting mainly because the ratio of 55+ Americans to the population has increased since the 1960s. The open question to me is, does the 40% go up from here, as baby boomers reinvent what retirement means? Or does it go down as the pain of the recession begins to wane and nest eggs are more confidently restored?
• Next, “on the positive side, the declining share of manufacturing in the economic mix… Should make it easier for many to continue working”.  Let’s stop right here and google the age of the author writing this piece. Innovation will come to manufacturing too. BMW prooved it in this HBR article a few months ago. where the workforce mix of the future was artificially created in one of the most heavily labor intensive lines, and the team innovated around the effects of an older workforce. (a 7% productivity gain to boot thank you very much).
• And lastly, a comment on higher savings rates. Yes, the WSJ is probably correct that savings rates will increase (that used to be a problem we bemoaned, remember that?) However, depending on your outlook on health care costs, it’s certainly likely that more income is directed to health care, and less to savings.

Now those are just my thoughts, someone who has not yet made it to the 55+ demographic… Please chime in and put me in my place Boomers!

 

Why Does Making a Rational Argument to Power, Fail?

Have you ever found a surprising insight through analysis about your business, prepared a set of slides with a solid argument, presented to the senior leadership, which dismissed it immediately?  I heard some head nods out there. You’re not alone… Sometimes that scenario is legitimate (“The leader knows that while your insight is likely true, they are about to change their business model and exit the business you’ve analyzed.”) But more often than not – especially regarding insights about people, they are following this golden rule:

“If your data matches my gut, then I am brilliant. Thank you for validating me. But if your data does not match my gut, your data is wrong, I’m right, and go away.”

I’ve been struggling  with ways to overcome that golden rule for a while – it’s an intractable, very human, and understandable reaction to things we can’t accept yet.  (There is a clinical name for this btw – it’s called Confirmation Bias.) I’m a big fan of Jonah Lehrer’s work on decision making.  and Dan Ariely (Predictably Irrational and the Upside of Irrationality.) This weekend, Jonah wrote a piece for the Wall Street Journal that strikes at the heart of the golden rule problem, particularly within power.  He writes about a set of experiments where one person is granted unthrottled power:

“This [study] suggests that even fleeting feelings of power can dramatically change the way people respond to information. Instead of analyzing the strength of the argument, those with authority focus on whether or not the argument confirms what they already believe. If it doesn’t, then the facts are conveniently ignored.”

Interestingly, those without unthrottled power can accept the rational argument – power can accept it less.  For those of us who analyze human capital data, I think this problem is harder – it’s about people- a topic that most in power have a strong opinion about.  I know I’m not ready to share a short, neat list of how to overcome this type of thorny problem (and open to your comments on how you’ve overcome it), but I know that good practices exist – we just need to come up with the list of “to dos” to help us all make our data more palatable to the people that need to act on it!

New SHRM/ANSI HR Metrics Work Group is Starting!

Many of you know that I’m a work group leader for a relatively new SHRM initiative to create standards in HR, which will be submitted to the American National Standards Institute. It’s been a worthwhile effort so far. There are several initiatives, however, I’m most knowledgeable about the Cost Per Hire group  - 40 thought leaders on the subject are working on building a definition for cost per hire that the industry can use.

We’re looking to add new work groups and new members who are passionate about human capital metrics to participate.

Some of us (including me) on the list already are participating in the first SHRM/ANSI standards project for metrics (Cost Per Hire). It’s a great way to meet others in the community and make a real difference in HR.

You’ll need a passion for HC metrics (which I suspect you do if you read this blog) about 1 hour per month for a conference call, and time to write when needed for the standard.

Please join us to help the industry! Details below.

http://www.shrm.org/about/pressroom/PressReleases/Pages/TwoTaskforcesHRStandards.aspx

Employee Engagement As Brand Building Project

A sister company, Interbrand, has just released some new research and a holding a webinar on June 7 on an interesting look at employee engagement as a brand exercise flowing Internal Brand Management into Customer Experience, Loyalty, to Financials.  The work is influenced by the Service-Profit Chain, which is embraced across Omnicom (where I work and where Interbrand also rolls up) like this:

We’re all looking for ways to link engagement work directly to the business operation. I liked the tie in of external brand to internal brand – this is not frequently used in HR engagement work, and I think we should consider thinking along these lines more…

How Well Do Facts Travel?

I did not coin this phrase. There is an effort by a professor @ the London School of Economics to explore this topic. Jon Adams has several papers on his research, using historic precedent on the rise of scientific advances, and how the new “facts” are disseminated, believed (or not believed) by a population.

It’s cool stuff, and highlight various behavioral psych books that I like, but what does this have to do with analytics?  I’m playing with this professor’s ideas in relation to new insights that an analytic may have, and whether the end user population would believe the insight enough to act on it (those of you who know me, know I like this topic).  So, I guess it’s a microcosm of the larger scale behavior Dr. Adams is describing.  Here’s a link to a brief PPT I thought was illustrative from his writing:

http://www3.imperial.ac.uk/pls/portallive/docs/1/15951696.
PPT

There’s bias on both sides (the purveyor of a new belief and the user who has a “gut” understanding) in this slide in particular. Who wants to budget from their own position anyway? People hate that. The trick are teh techniques we can use to make them move from their current point of view.