canadian headhunter

What Gets Measured....

Here is some very good food for thought from Heather's "Marketing at Microsoft" Blog:

"So while many companies spend their time analyzing their hire data to inform their sourcing strategies, they don't take the necessary next step and ask themselves, 'where do our strongest hires come from?'. Really, who cares where your mediocre hires come from? If you have that data, toss it; unless you want to perpetuate more mediocre hiring. And while you are at it, measure your recruiters on quality of hire. If you don't have a measure, find one.

What we are currently working on in my team is an analysis of our best performing hires over the last 5 years. Similar to how we created profiles that tell us who our target candidates are: management consultants, inbound product managers, outbound product marketing, strategic alliance folks, partner management people, inbound and outbound consumer marketers; we want to understand some of the other attributes that make those folks identifyable...we want to know how to market to them and how to source them."

It sounds like basic stuff but very few companies are doing this kind of work to truly create sourcing profiles for their desired candidates. At the end of the project, we hope to be able to draw correlations between desired attributes and skills and the sources we can use to find them (not just the sources we did use). Then we can cut the data a bunch of different ways to do some planning around things like diversity (where do our top diversity hires come from?) and job posting.

I really like the sound of this. Of course success depends on how well you measure your employees. In sales it is quite easy. Who made quota and who didn't? Who was the top rep and who was on the bottom? However some positions are more subjective and depend on the opinion (and biases) of the manager.

How do you know that the metrics are fair and accurate for positions that aren't so easily measured?

I hope Heather keeps us posted on this project.

You can read her entire post here.