This week's Three To See has a distinctive theme with posts on developing analytical skills and choosing the right metrics to measure.

My first pick comes from Mark Bennett at TalentedApps who asks HR: Why Improve Your Analytical Intelligence?

In the post Bennett makes the point that executives have accepted the need to develop measuring and analysing skills, especially for financial management, yet HR pro's are not using them to measure talent, suggesting that "HR labors under the false assumption that everybody else has “precise numbers”.”

My second pick, How To Find Unintended Consequences in Your Incentive & Reward Program, was posted by Paul Hebert at Incentive Intelligence. Hebert uses the Dilbert cartoon below to perfectly illustrate his point.

Hebert offers advice on how organisations can avoid "gaming the system" or inadvertently fostering an attitude where "the ends justify the means":

"Marry your outcome based goals with behavioral goals to keep the program in check.  The behaviors - the things the individual can control - should bear the weight of the program.

Putting too much of the award on the outcome communicates you don't care how they hit the goal - just that they hit it."

The final post that I'd like to share this week was by Lou Adler and appeared on ERE: Why Cost Per Hire is a Dumb Metric and Quality of Hire Is Not.

In the post Adler argues that "Quality of Hire" is a much more important measure than "Cost per Hire" because it takes account of the downstream impact of the individual on the organisation - an impact, whether negative or positive, that could far outweigh the costs associated with recruiting that individual.

So, what did I take from this week's Three To See?  When choosing what to measure, make sure that the implementation of the metrics has been thought through and that the value of the analysis is understood by those being measured and those using the data.

Tags: analytics, KPI, measurement, metrics

This entry was posted on Friday, November 6th, 2009 at 12:01 pm and is filed under Talent Acquisition, Talent Management, Three To See. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.