Big data help the team singles talent

When "scouts" encounter big data will hit what kind of spark? The baseball team of athletes in the city of Oakland, United States, used mathematical models to predict players' performance and scored players through scores to change the team's performance on a large scale, creating the longest continuous winning record in U.S. baseball.

Billy Beane was the general manager of the Oakland City Athletic Baseball team. Just in 2003, Mr. Bienne instantly gave all of the news to Michael Lewis, the American writer, and his best-selling book Ballball: Art of Winning an Unfair Game Well known.

As time progressed a year earlier, Bill changed his past reliance on "scout" assistance when he selected the players in the action club, and he entrusted the decision to collect players to the "mathematical model" - and so on Model The model used by Bien was developed by a young statistician who graduated from Harvard and was used exclusively by Bien and his subordinates.

Shortly thereafter, the Oakland Athletics Team wrote a legend in the history of baseball. The small team swept through the track with a modest budget, creating the longest continuous winning record in U.S. baseball and gaining 103 victories in a season. Only winners of this veteran Yankees team will be able to stand shoulder to shoulder with each other, but Yankees' paychecks are three times as much as those of the Oakland Athletic Team players.

Bien team's impressive performance, which set off a revolution in professional baseball. Since then, more and more teams have begun to use predictive models to assess the player's potential and market value, and those on the move have generally gained a significant competitive advantage over their more conservative counterparts.

On the surface, this book is nothing more than a memorable inspirational legend for a baseball team, but it actually confirms a trend: there is already a new road to research on job hiring - predictive The statistical analysis and big data applications are expected to change the way recruits and appraisals of millions of workers.

Have you ever wondered, like this, using big data to predict, analyze and build a team you need? Yes, you would say that the term big data is getting boring by industries and the media, but We still have to mention it inevitably, in order to express the original pattern is about to collapse, it seems appropriate.

Behavior information, has formed a gold mine

Technological advances have made it possible to regularly obtain information about the behavior of human beings. Such information covers a broader and deeper range and enables a new type of analysis of the information. At present, more than 98% of the world's information has been digitally stored. Since 2007, the overall amount of data has quadrupled.

The average person generates such a large amount of data, whether at home or at work, such as sending email, browsing the Internet, using social media, engaging in crowdsourcing projects, and more. When generating data, they virtually helped launch a whole new social project. Viktor Meyer-Schoenberg and Kenneth Cooke, both authors of The Big Data Era: Great Changes in Life, Work, and Mindset,

"We are in a great infrastructure project, and in some ways it can rival even the ancient Roman waterways and encyclopedia of the Renaissance. The project is 'data-based', and other infrastructure As it progresses, it will also make an essential change in this society. "

In our time, changes in industries have taken place, and computer algorithms that predict price movements have changed Wall Street, and algorithms that precisely analyze Internet browsing history have changed the traditional way of marketing. But few people believe that a similar data-driven approach may be widely used in the talent market.

This approach is true but has become a tool used by HR. John Hessknecht, a professor at the College of Industrial and Labor Relations at Cornell University in the United States, once told the media that in recent years the "domestic workers have seen a sharp rise in job demand." In response to the latest situation of supply and demand in the labor market, Mr. Hussenett also modified his coursework in his own subject.

Today we can find HR-based analytics teams in big industry players like Google, Hewlett-Packard, Intel, General Motors and Procter & Gamble, as well as discoveries at new generation companies like Tennessee, the American dessert brand Little Debbie Cake State producer McKee Foods. Even Billy Bean has caught up with the trend last year when he attended a corporate human resources executive conference in Austin, Texas, where he published an article titled "The Penalty of the Talent Management in the New Era" (The Moneyball Approach to Talent Management), which made the limelight in the industry, his speech was slightly modified by the media, published in all major publications on the HR industry.

Give your career to data analysis?

It is perhaps more appropriate for business people to cite "predictive analytics" in their career analysis as an emerging field, calling it "people analytics." Of course, it is a challenge to apply the theory to practical work, let alone ethical controversy! It seems daunting. For predictive purposes, you must create a large personal technical inventory of "individual performance" (such as performance, work attitude, KPIs) that is larger than the size of all the tables we've seen on the sports website, It is also beyond all our imagination.

To some extent, the application of such analysis and statistics in practice is essentially a secret hidden in the deepest exploration of human nature and even relates to how we grow, whether we can breed our offspring and look after us when we grow up.

So, most companies in related fields are just starting to explore the possibilities of applications. In the next five to 10 years, the data analytics industry will create new models and conduct very large new experiments. Is this not a welcome development for the economy, for our career path, mental outlook and self-worth?

The Historical Change of "Talent Selection" Mode

From the birth of the concept of "company," there is a figure called "manager" in the world. Every day, people devote themselves to discerning who is best suited to be their employer, and the skills of selecting talents vary widely.

To make a funny history: At the beginning of the last century, a Philadelphia-based manufacturer in the United States came up with a weird decision to hire a foreman to stand in front of a factory and throw apples to job seekers around the foreman. If someone Action fast, can receive an apple, and can grow strong, can hold the apple received, the factory hired.

The notion of that era is indeed quite different from what is now - a Darwinian evolutionary process that has become the dominant guiding ideology in the minds of some elite governors (which, of course, is less bloody than the evolution of nature). At that time, giants such as U.S. Steel Corp, DuPont and General Electric, which were rising, were in the process of integrating and affected the entire industry. The integration of big fish with small fish destroyed small competitors and spawned even more powerful ones, whose founders usually get the favor of industry giants and get top positions in those companies. This method works very smoothly. As Wharton Whampoa professor Peter Cappelli wrote in his treatise, "There is no way that the influence of the science in the field of prediction and selection can be compared with the actual performance of people."

However, by the end of World War II, there was a serious shortage of qualified personnel in the U.S. market for talent supply and demand. The top management of enterprises grew older, and from the Great Depression of the 1930s until World War II, the lack of a well-recruited job market had led to a shortage of trained and competent managers. It is imperative for the U.S. business community to look for "uncut jade" among ordinary staff members who have the potential to rapidly grow.

As a result, businesses began to engage with a formal recruitment and management system based in part on new research from human behavior and partly from military techniques developed during the two wars. Because of the need to massively mobilize the armed forces in the outbreak of world wars and the massive casualties, it is necessary to employ people as efficiently as possible to try their best to achieve their full potential. As of the 1950s, it was not uncommon for young people who applied for professional jobs to take part in a series of tests among American companies that aspired to find potential candidates for promotion in the future Potential stock. A 1950 Business Week noted: "Procter & Gamble will select executive talent directly from tertiary institutions."

Undoubtedly, it was an era of blindness that could be accompanied by technical bureaucracy. From IQ tests, math tests, vocabulary tests, professional attitude tests, occupational interests tests, Rorschach personality tests to a host of other personality tests, and even physical exams (after all, none of the companies want to invest in a It was only before the staff learned that the employee might soon be dead and who would like to hire such a person? These tests are the tests that large companies require candidates to accept and are often used by companies to choose the right person.

The assessment process is not over even when employees start work. William Whyte, a business reporter, revealed in his own classic culture criticism The Organization Man, published in 1956, that about a quarter of U.S. companies are using similar test evaluation managers and beginners Managers, often used to assess whether these managers are ready for higher positions. White wrote in his book: "Should Jones be promoted or not used? In the past, the executives of the employee had to discuss the issue with each other in the past, and now they can investigate with psychologists to see the results of psychological tests How to say."

However, the midst of this century, the way in the business all the rage, almost disappeared in 1990. Peter Caplylli told me: "I think it would be shocked for human resources practitioners in the late 1970s to witness how casual recruitment is now being done." The remarks are that businesses in the 1990s were no longer using A few days time to do the test, but to do a few interim interviews, just casual to ask questions questions candidates. Capri said there are many reasons why this change can be explained.

He cited a lot, such as the phenomenon of job-hopping so that enterprises do not need to do a thorough test, so the test also does not seem economical enough; companies pay more attention to short-term financial profitability, thus undermining the long-term development of enterprises only to breed internal functions; The Civil Rights Act introduced by the United States in the United States in the coming years imposes legal liability on some companies that engage in discrimination-prone recruitment. This also causes the enterprise's human resources department to fear that extensive adoption of any well-defined tests may reveal the system in the future Sexual preferences. It is precisely because of various factors, companies began to favor less formal quantitative recruitment methods. This practice is still very market.

But there's one more reason why companies are abandoning their original hard-line approach: many of the assessments they used later proved less scientific. Some approaches are based on psychology theories that have never been tested. Others were originally designed to assess mental illness and were sometimes tested on a relatively small number of underrepresented groups such as freshmen, so those tests showed only that the test subjects responded "normally" . William White hosted a series of tests for corporate CEOs and found none of the CEO's ratings belonged to the "acceptable" hiring category.

White concludes that such assessments do not assess their potential and can only be used to simply assess whether they have flowed. Some of these tests also do not focus on privacy, such as asking the test subjects 'personal habits or their parents' feelings. It is not surprising, therefore, that testers are offensive to such inhuman explorations and stimuli (and sometimes naked to the other party).

For the above reasons and other factors, "hiring is a science" has been left out. Today, its position is losing ground, thanks to the new technologies and methods of analysis that have made our past analysis less costly, faster and more widely available. Whether good or bad, science and technology to create a new era has begun.

【Editor's Choice】

How to protect personal information security in the era of big data Three sets of passwords to separate the use of big data to consumer behavior from high expectations slow down? --HDS Perspectives Asia Pacific Big Data Compuware: New APM Solutions Meet the Big Data Challenge 【Editor: Wang Chengcheng TEL: (010) 68476606】