Quentin Hardy reports at the NYT that a leading maker of cloud-based software for running corporate human resources and financial operations has announced new products that provide the kind of data analysis that Netflix uses to recommend movies, LinkedIn has to suggest people you might know, or Facebook needs to put a likely ad in front of you. One version of the software, called Insight Applications, predicts which high-performing employees are likely to leave a company in the next year; it then offers possible actions (more money, new job) that might make them stay. "We’re surprised how accurately we can predict someone will leave a job," says Mohammad Sabah, director of data science at Workday. The goal is to predict future business outcomes to take advantage of opportunities and cut risk levels. One future product may be the ability to predict who will and won’t make their sales quotas, and suggest who should be hired to improve the outcome. "Making an employee happy, improving the efficiency of a company these are hard problems that affect corporations."
(Score: 2) by pnkwarhall on Friday November 07 2014, @11:54PM
What signals/data/metrics do they use to make these determinations?
It can't be just Internet usage monitoring, can it? I can think of one everyday metric that might be used -- clock-in/clock-out time trends -- and this wouldn't seem to be available for many "high-performing" job positions. What other signals/metrics are available to the software?
I RTFA, and can't find mention of what signals the company uses to make these determinations. I can't think of another datasource rich enough to draw any conclusions from (except for Internet-usage), and the use case of an employee following company policy and, you know, NOT surfing the Internet for another job leads me to believe there **has** to be some other source of data than just on-the-job/on-the-company-machine Internet usage. Can you think of another source of metrics rich enough to make successful predictions?
Maybe they use data bought from 3rd-party tracking companies to fill out the behavior profile.
Lift Yr Skinny Fists Like Antennas to Heaven
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 08 2014, @04:32AM
I get the idea its something much simpler. Possibly knowing when a company pulls in a bunch of management consultants to "optimize" the workflow, the creative types aren't apt to bode well in an environment where costs are the prime concern.
Or just watching management moves and correlating how many people lose drive when a certain person in placed over them.
This is something pretty obvious when you see the ass end of the thing, but its quite hard to see when you see the end of the thing that is smiling and offering his hand for a shake.