Hey, build your super team with big Data!

What kind of chemistry does the "Scout" have when it encounters big data? The United States Oakland sports baseball team, who used mathematical models to predict the performance of players, the selection of players and large changes in the team's performance, creating the United States Baseball League history, the longest consecutive winning record. "HR encounters Big Data: They're staring at you," says Don Peck of Atlantic Monthly, describing the changes that data analysis brings to HR work in the workplace. Recommended as follows, compiled by Titanium Media:

Billy Bien (Billy Beane) was the general manager of the Oakland Sports baseball team. Mr. Bean became a star in 2003, thanks to Michael Lewis, American writer Michael Lewis, and his best-selling book Orb-the wisdom of winning in adversity (Moneyball:art of Winning an unfair Game).

As time went on for a year, in his routine selection of players for the club, Bean changed his reliance on "Scout" help, and he entrusted the decision to "mathematical models"--and so on, what kind of model? The model used by Bean was developed by a young statistical genius who graduated from Harvard University, devoted to Bean and his subordinates.

Not long after this, the Oakland sports team wrote the legend of the history of the baseball game. The small team swept the field with a paltry budget, creating the longest consecutive winning record in the history of the American Baseball League, with 103 victories in one season. Only the old-team Yankees can be so victorious, but the Yankees are three times times as well-paid as the Oakland.

Bean's team made a big success, and this led to a revolution in professional baseball. Since then, more and more teams have been using predictive models to assess the player's potential and market value, and the first-step teams have largely won significant competitive advantage over their more conservative peers.

On the surface, the book is about an unforgettable inspirational legend of a baseball team, but it actually confirms a trend: there is a way to study the job-hunting issue-predictive statistical analysis and large data applications will hopefully change the ways in which millions of of people are recruited and evaluated.

Have you ever thought about using big data to predict, analyze, and build a team you need? Yes, you can say that the word "big data" is almost boring by all kinds of industry and media, but we must mention it, in order to express the original pattern is about to disintegrate, it seems to be suitable.

Behavioral information that has formed a gold mine

The development of technology has made it possible to regularly obtain information about human behavior, which involves a broader and deeper range of information and a new type of analysis of the information. At present, more than 98% of the information in the world has been using digital storage mode. Since 2007, the overall volume of data has been doubled by four times times.

Ordinary people generate large amounts of such data at home and at work, such as sending e-mail, browsing the Internet, using social media, engaging in crowdsourcing projects, and more. In generating data, they are virtually helping to launch a new social project. Victor Maire-Schoenberg and Kenneth Couqueil, the two authors of the Great data Age: a big change in life, work and thinking, said

"We're in a terrific infrastructure project. In some ways, it can even rival the ancient Romans ' water ditches and renaissance encyclopedias. The project is ' data ' and, like other infrastructure improvements, it can make a fundamental difference in the society. ”

In our time, changes have taken place in various industries, and computer algorithms that predict stock prices have changed Wall Street, and the precise analysis of Internet browsing records has changed the traditional way of marketing. But there has been little belief that similar data-driven approaches could be widely used in the talent market.

This approach is really true has become the tool used by HR. John Hausknesit, a professor of industry and Labor relations at Cornell University in the United States, told the media that in recent years the demand for "job analysis jobs in the US has grown dramatically". To tie in with the latest situation in labour market supply and demand, Mr. Hausknesit has also revised his teaching course.

Today, not only can we find the HR department's dedicated analytics team in industry big-name companies like Google, Hewlett-Packard, Intel, General Motors and Procter and Gamble, but also find their presence in some new generation companies, such as McKee Foods, a Tennessee producer of the American dessert brand Little Debbie cake. Liambili Bien also caught up with the trend last year when he attended a meeting of corporate HR executives at Texas Austin, who published a "penalty-for-money operation for new Age talent Management" (the Moneyball approach to Talent Management), In this industry out of the limelight, his speech was slightly modified by the media, published in all the major journals on the HR industry.

Give your career to data analysis?

It may be more appropriate for the workplace to cite "predictive analysis" in the career analysis as an emerging area, calling it the "arranges analytics". Of course, applying the theory to practical work is a big challenge, let alone a moral controversy! Seems daunting. To achieve the goal of forecasting, we must create huge personal technical tables for "personal performance" (such as performance, work attitude, KPI, etc.), which is larger than all the forms we have seen on the sports Web page, and beyond all our previous imaginations.

To some extent, this kind of analysis and statistical application in practice, in essence, is in the exploration of the deepest secrets of human nature, even how we grow, whether we will reproduce, grow up what is the shape.

So most of the companies in the field are just beginning to explore the possibilities of application. In the next 5-10 years, the data analysis industry will be the birth of new models, and will carry out a very large number of new experiments. Is this a welcome development for the economy, for our career paths, our mental outlook and our sense of self-worth?

The historical change of the mode of "selecting talents"

Since the concept of "company" was born, there is a world of people called "managers" who are working on a daily basis to identify who is best suited to their hands, and the skill of selecting talent is also very different.

Say an interesting history: at the beginning of the last century, a Philadelphia manufacturer has come up with a strange decision to hire: command the foreman to stand at the factory gate, throw the apple at the job seekers around the foreman, if someone moves fast enough to get an apple, and if they are strong and able to keep the apples they receive, the factory will hire them.

The idea of that era is indeed quite different from what it is now-a Darwinian process that has become the guiding ideology of some elite managers (of course not as bloody as the natural theory of evolution). At that time, the rising giants of American Steel, DuPont and General Electric were consolidating and affecting the industry. Fish-style consolidation has destroyed weaker rivals and spawned more powerful companies, whose founders typically gain the favor of industry giants and get top jobs in those companies. It works very well. As Peter Cappelli, a professor at the Wharton School of Business, wrote in his Peter Capley, "There is no way of influencing the scientific field of prediction and selection to see how people actually behave." ”

By the end of the Second World War, however, there was a serious shortage of talent in the US market. Corporate executives are getting older, and from the Great Depression of the 30 to the Second World War, a weak job market has led to shortages of well-trained and competent managers. To find the potential for rapid growth in the general staff of the "Jade", it becomes the most urgent business in the United States.

As a result, companies began to involve a formal recruitment and management system based partly on new research from human behavior, partly from military skills developed during the two World War. Because the outbreak of the World War requires a large number of troop mobilization, and a large number of casualties, the need to be as efficient as possible to use, as far as possible. As of the late 50, it was not uncommon for young people who applied for professional jobs to spend days taking a series of tests, which were expected to tap into potential stocks of candidates to be promoted to management in the future. A 1950 issue of Business Week said: "The company will select senior executives directly from tertiary institutions."

There is no doubt that it is an era that may be blind with technocratic habits. From IQ tests, math testing, vocabulary testing, professional attitude testing, career interest testing, Rorschach (Rorschach) Personality tests to a range of personality evaluations, and even physical exams (after all, which company does not want to have to invest money to train an employee to thoroughly understand that the employee may soon die, Who wants to hire someone like that? , these tests are the test that big companies ask candidates to accept, and companies often use them to choose the right person.

Even if the employee starts working, the evaluation process is not over. William Whyte, a business reporter, William White in his 1956 masterpiece "The From Man" of classic cultural criticism that about One-fourth of U.S. companies are using similar test-evaluation managers and junior managers, Often used to assess whether these managers are ready for a higher position. "Should we promote Jones or shelve it?" he wrote in the book. In the past, the employee's executives had to discuss the issue with each other in order to make up their minds, and now they can work with psychologists to see what the results of the psychological tests say. ”

However, the way the rage in the corporate world in the middle of the last century almost disappeared in 1990 years. Peter Capley told me: "I think the human-resource practitioners of the late 70 would be shocked to witness the casual recruitment of companies." "This means that the 90 's enterprises no longer in a few days to do the test, but to do a few temporary interviews, but the sex to think about some questions to ask candidates." Kaplice says there are many reasons to explain the change.

He listed a lot, such as the increase in job-hopping so that enterprises do not need to do a thorough test, so that the test is not enough economic and practical; enterprises pay more attention to short-term financial profitability, thus weakening the enterprise only for long-term development of the inherent function of talent; The 1964 United States Human Rights Act (libertarians Rights) ACT) has allowed some companies with discriminatory tendencies to take legal responsibility, which has also worried the company's human resources department that a wide range of tests with any definite results may reveal systemic preferences. It is precisely because of various factors, enterprises began to favor less formal quantitative recruitment methods. The practice is still very much in the market today.

But there is another reason for companies to give up their own sharp ways: many of the methods they use have later proved less scientific. Some methods are based on psychological theories that have never been tested. Others were originally designed to assess mental illness, sometimes with relatively small numbers of unrepresentative people, such as college freshmen, so those tests only showed that the response of the subjects was "normal". William White presided over a number of tests for corporate presidents, and found that none of the president's ratings belonged to recruiting "acceptable" categories.

White's conclusion is that such assessments do not assess potential and can only be evaluated simply from a large stream. Some of these tests also do not pay attention to privacy, such as asking the subject's personal habits or parental feelings. It is therefore not surprising that the tester is disgusted with such impersonal inquiry and stimulation, sometimes naked tenderness.

For these reasons and other factors, the idea of "recruiting is a science" has been neglected. Today, its status is being regained, thanks to the analysis of new technologies and methods that have made our past analytical tools less costly, faster and more widely covered. For better or worse, the new era of technological creativity has begun.

(Responsible editor: The good of the Legacy)