Call centers, you now have huge amounts of data about things like what people's
average handle time is absenteeism, their availability.
We also have quality assurance.
We have customer satisfaction service.
And so, in some organizations you have a great deal of information
about each individual on a more kind of objective basis.
There are other things we also might want to be able to predict about people,
so attrition, for example, is a fairly hard measure.
It tells you something about who fit and who didn't.
It can be important in its own right.
So there are some organizations that spend a lot of money training people.
If that's the case,
one of the important things you want to think about in your hiring is,
is this person going to stay long enough for us to get a return on our investment?
You may also be interested in understanding who of the people
are promotable.
So the idea is we say, okay, we want to know who's going to do well
on these various measures and we want to figure out,
among the people who are applying, which are going to be the best bet.
So what you do is you use those as kind of your variables that you're trying to
predict.
And then on the other side you put a series of characteristics of
the individual that you know at the time they're applying.
So which of these actually predicts performance?
So, one of these you might look at is the resume, their background,
their characteristics and so on.
So one of the things that Google has been a pioneer in this area found out when they
did this was that they had been famously for years asking for college
transcripts for everybody from junior to senior people and looking at their GPAs.
When they actually sat down and looked at what predicted performance,
they found that once people have been out of college for
more than a couple of years, GPA had no value whatsoever as a predictor.
And so they said, okay, this is not something we should be screening on.
Interestingly, apparently, another investment bank did this recently and
actually they found in their case, GPA was predictive of performers,
which speaks in part to the value of doing this in different ways and
different organizations.
Because what predicts performance is going to depend in part
on the nature of the role.
Another thing that you might look at is test scores.
So, if you run a series of intelligence tests, personality tests,
job knowledge tests and
so on, which of those are going to predict, who's performs well in the job.
And then you can also look at interviews.
So, in a structured interview, like I say, rather than just sitting down,
getting to know somebody, what you're really trying to do
is figure out where they score on various different attributes.
And so you should have a series of questions that are aimed to tap into those
attributes where you can read them kind of high, medium, low on that attribute.
There's then the possibility to go back after a year or two and say okay,
which of these questions and types of questions actually seems to predict
whether or not they're going to do well on the job and which day.