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 maxwell demon on Saturday November 08 2014, @11:32AM
So employees who are found to fulfil the criteria of that algorithm will get more money? Well, it's time to find out those criteria and tailor your behaviour to it.
Unless the criterion is "employee is excellent at his job", I doubt this will work well for the company.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 2) by edIII on Saturday November 08 2014, @11:06PM
I had to go all the way to the bottom to find the other Soylentil that immediately was thinking to game that algorithm like Internet marketers do to Google :)
"Hey Ed! Step in my office please"
"Yes?"
"We want to offer you a raise and some paid vacation days"
"Well, gee thanks. That was quite unexpected and entirely unpredictable"
Technically, lunchtime is at any moment. It's just a wave function.