How HR sees a resume; how a programmer sees a resume

Cute comic on how programmers really review resumes – and it’s pretty much on the money from where I’m sitting!  BUT, there’s a more serious message going on here, and it’s that often we ignore – how close is HR”s profile match to the one the business really thinks is right?

Often in workforce planning projects we come across organizations who are stuck in a “skills, skills, skills” focus on workforce planning – as though every person with those skills are the same as the others, and nothing else changes the attraction/retention/performance issues.  OK, so we might not want to be planning on Facebook pictures, but this illustration is a good one to show what the people in the business might be interested in in their “ideal” employees.

How well do you think your HR profile matches the profile the people who do the work have?  And which is more important?

 

del.icio.us Tags: workforce planning

DOL Data: a lesson in “lost in the averages”

Jeremy Piven has a great blog today on why the latest Department of Labor unemployment data is misleading us – Simpson’s Paradox:

Simpson’s paradox (or the Yule-Simpson effect) is an apparent paradox in which the successes of groups seem reversed when the groups are combined. This result is often encountered in social and medical science statistics, and occurs when frequency data are hastily given causal interpretation; the paradox disappears when causal relations are derived systematically, through formal analysis.

The paradox example in the DOL data (which Jeremy clearly explains) shows that even though the total unemployment rate is lower than it was in 1983, the rate for some very key groups (including “college grads”) is in fact worse.

This is a great example of why we need to be very careful accepting high level metrics for any critical data, and why segmenting the workforce is critical – if we don’t, we risk losing vital information in the averages.  Segmentation is critical to all workforce planning and analysis…are you doing a good job of it, or losing important information to Simpson’s Paradox?

del.icio.us Tags: workforce planning,metrics,analytics