People analytics
86% confidence rate. Previously, finding candidates who had both the skills and the cultural fit at Google could take up to six months and had demanded between 15 and 25 interviews for each potential recruit. The results of the analysis saw Google reduce its time to hire to 47 days.
Bock also talks about how Google had previously favoured Ivy League graduates, with SAT scores and college transcripts used to shortlist candidates. The company later concluded that such statistics only helped to predict job performance for a few years following graduation, prompting it to stop recruiting in this way.
Lisa Donchak
Finding top talent Lisa Donchak is an MBA Candidate at the University of Pennsylvania’s business school, the Wharton School, studying Behavioural Analytics. She previously worked at Google in management and analytics, and also founded the first annual People Analytics Conference, which was held in the US in 2014. Donchak believes that people analytics can enable organisations to recruit top talent in a more efficient way. “Traditionally, organisations have often relied on ‘gut instinct’ when making hiring decisions, often extending offers based on whether or not they would ‘want to have a beer’ with the candidate. While emphasis on culture fit is definitely important, this heuristic often leads to friends hiring friends, or unconscious systematic discrimination, and many talented individuals could get overlooked.”
She believes that, as organisations have started to use more data-driven key performance metrics, looking at the metrics that matter in a job will help identify candidates who would, objectively, be good at a particular role. “Employing people analytics techniques can help identify talent that may have originally been overlooked. Additionally, because people analytics is often a more scientific, objective method of helping to make these decisions, using it can
remove unconscious bias in the hiring or recruiting process.”
Donchak hired and managed a team of ten people while she was at Google, and this gave her some insight into the company’s data-driven approach. “The most impressive part of Google’s hiring and retention processes is the fact that they’re constantly evolving. Unlike many more traditional organisations, Google employs the scientific method whenever possible, focusing on inquiry and experiments, then using the results to help inform subsequent decisions.”
Today Bock says that Google spends twice as much on its people hiring as the average company, writing in Work Rules! that, “Making sure our people are developing is not a luxury. It’s essential for our survival.” In the long term it makes sense: getting the initial hire right
means less money and time has to be spent on training, or replacing employees who fail to perform.
Levelling the playing field As more organisations follow Google’s lead, applying more sophisticated data analysis techniques to the recruitment and development of employees is not only having positive implications for employers. It is also enabling social mobility, allowing candidates who haven’t necessarily been through conventional educational channels to showcase their potential, opening up greater access to opportunity. Donchak cites a study by Wharton professor Katherine L. Milkman in 2013¹, which illustrates this premise. Milkman and her team sent emails to several graduate-level faculty members. The emails purported to be from prospective students, who differed not in their experience or their abilities, but in their name, which were changed to
Employer view: Iskrena Bliznakova, EMEA University Hiring Lead, Global Talent Acquisition, HP
“Within HP, we believe that diversity and inclusion are key drivers of creativity, innovation and invention and it is therefore important to have strategy regarding university recruitment to meet these requirements. HP has been using data and analytics to inform its university hiring strategy for a number of years on a global level. We use the analysis to help us make the right decisions about when and where to invest our resources for our graduate recruitment programme.
We use a number of different data sources – from our HP internal data sources we look at our existing graduate population and look at their performance and career progression within HP. We assess which graduates are performing well and look at their past universities and courses and roles. We also look at the executives and their respective university backgrounds. In parallel, we look at the demographics of the targeted universities, we look at the courses being run, the numbers of students studying on the specific target courses, and the profile and diversity of the undergraduates who are currently studying at the university, and country university rankings by segment.
We also use the data and the analysis to define our talent development frameworks and development opportunities for our existing employees and create role-specific training courses based on identified development opportunities.”
www.hp.com
www.agr.org.uk | Graduate Recruiter 9
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