Category Archives: Data Analytics

Maybe I’ve Been Wrong About Quality of Hire (QoH)

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I was at LinkedIn’s Talent Connect Summit this week, and I sat in a session on measuring the quality of hire delivered by Ana Recio, the VP of Talent at Uber. I’m a big fan of QoH, and I’m not alone. LinkedIn’s own annual recruitment data shows that QoH is the #1 priority for people leaders. I actually wrote quite a bit about QoH in my book, The Talent Fix, Vol. 2, but my take was a bit different from most people in our space, and although it pains me to say it, most people might be right, and I might be wrong!

My original belief is that QoH needs to have an industry standard measure to mean anything. If we can’t benchmark across industry, what are we really measuring? Or so I thought.

Ana at Uber and her team built a straightforward survey measure of QoH (You can download Uber’s QoH measure details here) that, after six months, asks the hiring manager simply, “Would you hire this person again, if given the chance?” They also ask the employee if this is the job they thought they would be getting. This is very similar to the approach CrossChq has taken in their QoH measure.

I like the simplicity. My struggle with QoH has always been it’s just too damn difficult to really measure it (in the way I thought it should be measured). I was stuck on the “quality” component and wanting data around quality. In my head, that meant performance data. How can we show this hire was better than another hire that previously worked in this job or many other hires that have worked in this job? That meant you had to wait a period of time to have real performance data. It all seemed like a lot.

Uber figured out, that “data” could just be a signal from the hiring manager. Simple, yet still valid.

Does this simplicity have issues?

Maybe.

I’m kind of stuck on us believing all of our hiring managers will have enough confidence to actually call our their own failure of selection, development, and performance management. That’s what we are asking them – “Would you make this same selection again if given the choice?” Meaning either you chose successfully, and this person has been great, or you failed in your selection, and this person sucks.

Also, if I’m confident, I come clean and say, “No, I would not choose this person again.” Will HR be coming down to put this person on a performance plan? Do I need to put them on a plan? I mean, if we are honest, and I don’t want to hire this person again, it’s probably time we move on and actually hire a person I would hire again, right?

This QoH measure and process are new to Uber, so Ana and her team haven’t really crossed that bridge yet. Since this is so new, maybe they haven’t run into this issue. I wasn’t able to ask her this question, but I plan on sending it to her as a follow-up to see how it’s going when they get some more data.

Still, I like what Uber is doing. Maybe we don’t need “one” measure of QoH to make it meaningful and impactful. Maybe each organization will figure out its own data and measure QoH in a way that makes sense to them. Maybe some organizations will have multiple QoH measures based on positions (Sales vs. Engineering, for example).

The data nerd in me would love one global QoH measure, but I also love that organizations are just trying to figure this out on their own and benchmarking against themselves. In the end, talent intelligence is about making your hiring better, period. Thanks to Ana and Uber team for sharing!!

2023 @LinkedIn Research Proves Compensation is Number 1 Priority for Employees! #GlobalTalentTrends

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LinkedIn Talent Solutions flat-out gets me! They recently released their 2023 Global Talent Trends report, and you all know I’m a nerd for talent data, and this report is always impressive. I encourage you to download and check out this report (2023 LinkedIn Global Talent Trends report).

Here are my takeaways:

  • Hiring is slowing down from its historic pace over the past few years.

While slowing, it doesn’t necessarily mean it’s equal across all industries and segments. Tech hiring has taken a huge hit, but hospitality, healthcare, and education remain challenging.

  • Internal mobility is taking a foothold in the consciousness of workers. We’ve always known that changing companies and jobs is very stressful. One of the most stressful things you’ll go through in your lifetime. So, finding ways to keep your workers by allowing them to move within the company is an excellent way to increase retention and job satisfaction. Interestingly enough, LinkedIn Talent Solutions found in this most recent report that older generations are actually finding more success with internal mobility than their younger counterparts, generationally. GenX experiencing the highest internal mobility rate of all the generations. Most likely, this is because the more experience you have and the deeper your professional network, the more desired you’ll be by other functions and departments within your own company.
  • We can finally erase the decades-old quote, “People don’t leave jobs. They leave managers”! I’ve always thought that quote was B.S., but people would show “academic” research to prove it. Well, now I can prove it’s wrong with this research!

SHOW. ME. THE. MONEY!

LinkedIn actually measured 15 priorities that employees value. Where did “Management” and “Leadership” fall in those 15? 9 and 11, respectively!

Also, another huge takeaway we’ve been trying to sell as thought leadership for the last two decades is great talent wants to work with other great talent. Actually, “Talent” as a priority, meaning, it’s important to you and your career that you work with other highly talented people, actually came in at 15 out of 15! We don’t care about that at all, in comparison.

“Security” will continue to raise up the chart as the economy slows and finding and keeping a job gets harder. It’s currently seventh on the list, but it was much higher in industries like Tech, which has been hit hard by job losses.

The report is jammed packed with amazing data and insights. Go check out the full 2023 LinkedIn Global Talent Trends report.

Inbox Zero as a Measure of Performance for Talent Acquisition!

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I have a new #1 question I get asked by Talent Acquisition Leaders! My old number one question was, “Which ATS should we be using?” That stood the test of time for almost a decade! But I now have a new number one.

“How should we be measuring success in Talent Acquisition?”

That question comes in a lot of versions:

  • What is the best metric in recruiting?
  • What do you use to measure the productivity of your recruiters?
  • How do you show your organization that TA is doing its job?
  • What are the metrics you use to measure TA?

I like using “Measures of Success” terminology primarily because of how I want to live my life. I never want our metrics, analytics, and data to be used as a hammer to obtain performance. I want to hire people who want to be successful in what they decide to do in life. Once they make that decision, I want to treat them like adults and help them obtain that success. I use data to help them track outcomes and measures of success to lead them on this journey.

Does that sound like a load of B.S. hustle culture or what?! LOL!

But, honestly, I genuinely believe in this philosophy, even though it’s sometimes hard to follow.

If a recruiter wants to be successful, I know there is a specific set of measures that will help them be successful if they follow the process, use the technology, and are diligent in their follow-up. They don’t have to work over 40 hours per week. They just have to work the 40 hours they work.

Every company could have a varied set of metrics that will make them successful. Most will have some similarities, but the actual numbers within the measures will be uniquely yours.

Inbox Zero is a measure a few TA Teams are using as a measure of success.

First off, I don’t necessarily believe that “Inbox Zero” has a high correlation to TA Team or Individual success, but herein lies the problem with measuring the success of TA teams today. The measures most of us use, suck! Time to fill = awful, zero correlation, you should be fired as a leader. (Editor’s note: Okay, Tim, breathe in, we know you’ll die on this hill.)

I find about 90% of TA Leaders work to build measures of success that look good without really having any real impact on actual recruiting success in their organization. That hurts, I know, but it’s true. Inbox Zero is just another sexy attempt at measuring sh*t with little accountability to success, but you can actually measure it, so it must be important. (sarcasm alert)

Just because you “can” measure it, doesn’t mean you “should” measure it.

Okay, what the hell is “Inbox Zero”?

It’s basically what it sounds like.

As a recruiting measure, some brilliant TA lead believes if every recruiter ended their day with zero emails in their inbox, they must be more successful than someone who didn’t end their day with email in their inbox.

There is some science behind inbox zero, although not a measure of recruiting success, just life success. It was developed in 2006, and here are the tenets of this email management strategy:

  • Some messages are more equal than others. On any given day, only a handful of emails are important and timely. Stop treating every email “like a Christmas present that must be savored.”
  • Your time is priceless and wildly limited. Few people have time to respond to every email they receive or even read them in detail. Accept that your workload exceeds your resources and slavishly guard your time.
  • Less can be so much more. Quit thinking that one-line email responses are rude — you’re not helping anyone by sending wordy responses. When it comes to email, economy is key, at least for most messages.
  • Lose the guilt. Out-of-control email is bad enough. Don’t make it worse by beating yourself up because of your overflowing inbox. Forget the guilt and just get busy cleaning up the mess.
  • Lying to yourself doesn’t empty an inbox. Learn to be honest and realistic about your true priorities and time expectations, while developing a “baseline gut check on what you really intend to do about any given message.”

The reality is we are addicted to data that we can measure that is clean. We love “time to fill” because we can accurately measure it. We like things like Inbox Zero because we can accurately measure it. We can show the business the black-and-white numbers we are confident in. No matter if they actually matter or not!

Inbox Zero is a time management strategy. The hope is if you can manage your inbox well, you’ll be a better recruiter. It’s a hope. That is all it is. It’s not a measure of success for talent acquisition. That being said, I need to manage my inbox better!

The US has Relatively Low Rates of Hiring Discrimination. But you don’t believe it!

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Do we have hiring issues in the US? Yes. Are many of those issues really bad? Yes. Is the US worse than most other countries? Hmmm…

There was a meta-field study done with over 200,000 job applicants (that’s a massive data sample) in 9 counties in Europe and North America. The study found there is hiring discrimination in every country, but some countries are worse than others:

What did the study find?

– The USA has one of the lower rates of discrimination while France and perhaps also Sweden have very high levels.

– If you travel the world, the findings are very surprising. If you have just sat your butt in the US, this is hard for you to comprehend with the US’s history of slavery, and you probably find this surprising. Turns out, many other parts of the world still act like discrimination isn’t happening and ignore they have a problem.

– Capitalism, in fact, is likely to predict less discrimination in hiring. Again, competitive hiring practices actually help decrease discrimination in the labor market.

The authors of this study are Lincoln Quillian, Anthony Heath, Devah Pager, Arnfinn H. Midtbøen, Fenella Fleischmann, and Ole Hexel. A very diverse group of academics from some of the top educational institutions in the world. Here is what they had to say about the study:

“National histories of slavery and colonialism are neither necessary nor sufficient conditions for a country to have relatively high levels of labor market discrimination. Some countries with colonial pasts demonstrate high rates of hiring discrimination, but several countries without extensive colonial pasts (outside Europe), such as Sweden, demonstrate similar levels. Likewise, the lower rates of discrimination against minorities in the United States than we find for many European countries seem contrary to expectations that emphasize the primacy of connection to slavery in shaping the contemporary level of national discrimination. These results do not suggest that slavery and colonialism do not matter for levels of discrimination, rather they indicate that they matter in more complex ways than suggested by theories that posit simple, direct influences of the past on current discrimination.”

And

“Low discrimination in Germany could be a result of distinctive hiring practices in Germany: Employees typically submit far more extensive background information at initial application than in most other countries—including, for instance, high school transcripts and reports from apprenticeships (Weichselbaumer 2016). This may reduce the tendency of employers to assume lower skills and qualifications among nonwhite applicants, which is one potential source of discrimination. If so, this suggests the importance of high levels of individual information about applicants as a method to mitigate discrimination (c.f., Wozniac 2015; Auspurg et al. 2018).”

So, France and Sweden are the most Discriminatory Countries in HIring?!

Well, not exactly. They are the most of this study of nine countries.

I would bet you would see higher rates of hiring discrimination in places like Japan, China, South Africa, etc. Why? How many non-Japanese do you see on the Japanese national team? How many non-Chinese? One non-Chinese, an American snowboarder, was in the winter Olympics, and that was the first one in their history. Now take a look at the US and the other European countries. All of them have multiple people from other countries on their national teams. Is that hiring? Nope, but it shows a willingness to welcome and evolve people from other countries in a very transparent way.

Just because other similar Capitalist countries tend to be more discriminatory in their hiring practices than the US also doesn’t make us better. There are still massive improvements that need to be made. I point all of this out because you will never see this type of study highlighted by the mainstream media most HR and TA leaders and pros read. This won’t be on CNN and Forbes. We love to act like every other country is so much better. They aren’t, and we aren’t. We are all struggling with getting better and closer to the same than most of us realize.

What is your measure of success? #HRTechConf

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I’m out at the world’s largest HR Technology Conference this week, learning a ton and having some amazing conversations with peers and practitioners. One, in particular, is sticking with me about how we measure success in HR and Talent Acquisition.

With the increase in the capture of data across our technology stacks, we have more information than ever to give us insights and really give us better robust measures of success. But we tend to hang on to old measures that have little correlation to actual success.

There are a bunch of things getting in the way of us successfully determining what should be the measures of success in our functions:

  • We need to measure things that are challenging but not too challenging.
  • We tie our success metrics to annual bonus potential.
  • We don’t really know what success should look like from a benchmarking standpoint.
  • We have legacy measures that everyone is just kind of used to, and the majority of the industry still uses them. So, we should follow the pack.
  • We need measures that we can quickly manipulate of having excuses if things go sideways.

We will never admit the truth above.

From the HR Technology standpoint, your technology vendors assume you are much more sophisticated than we really are. I don’t mean that in a way that is meant to slight our expertise and knowledge. If I had HR and TA leaders rate their own skill competencies, almost always, technology would come in dead last. Most of us have this as an area of massive improvement.

Why does this matter?

Our technology will drive our success measures. Our technology vendors believe we know what success looks like. So, they build our measures, even when they know there are actually better measures of success that they can pull and put together. True, black and white measures that are not subjective and can’t be manipulated.

The first thing that would help with creating real HR measures of success would be to decouple our bonus compensation and measures. Having a person design their own measures of success and tying it to a compensation outcome is a recipe for failure and underperformance. If anything, HR and TA should have their bonus tied to business success outcomes and measure functional success separately. In the long run, a highly successful function should help the business achieve better outcomes.

This one practice frees us up to really dig into our data and our technology and redefine what success looks like around the HR umbrella of functions. To really use our data and our insights to reach new levels and better understand how we can make an impact and improve. We should feel like we can build measures of success and fail at those measures without killing our livelihood. That’s the only way we can hope for true change and worthwhile long-term measures that help us succeed.

What I’m finding is the HR technology community is ready to help us do this. We just have to ask them! We have to ask them to define our success using a data analytics approach and understand the outcomes and insights we can gain from these new measures. This also takes a big of courage because we’ll be leading not following and that’s always a vulnerable spot. But, one I think separates great leaders from average leaders.

Here is the Average Time to Fill a job for most employers in the U.S.!

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I gathered data from around 13,000 sources to get the most accurate Days to Fill metric that I could. It is one of the most asked questions I get from the audience!

So, what’s the number? 37*.

Cool, now can we stop asking? Did that just solve all of your hiring problems?

No, it didn’t. Why?

Because Time to Fill is a worthless recruiting metric for the most part. There is zero correlation between how fast you fill a job to how well your talent acquisition function is performing.

37 days is meaningless out of context, as a comparison, every job is different, every organization is different, and every market is different.

So, if you are currently at 37 days time to fill a job, and in 2022 you magically get to 36.2 days to fill, are you better at recruiting? Are you? Maybe you hired too fast and now your turnover is increased. Maybe the economy went south for a bit and increased the labor pool and now you have more candidates applying. Zero. Correlation. To. Talent. Acquisition. Success.

So, why do we use it? Frankly, and this hurts because you know I love talent acquisition and the pros that work in it every single day, we’re lazy. We’re too lazy to measure what really matters. That hurts. That should make you mad. We are better than this.

Can your Time to Fill matter at all? Yes, as a health metric of your TA function. If your industry average is 37 days, and you’re at 54, your function might have cancer! That being said, you have to support that with other stuff. Your 54-day hiring process might have reduced your turnover to 15% in an industry that has 50%, then your 54 days is understandable. But, what I usually find in most industries and jobs are fairly close to the mean on time to fill. So, it can be used as a universal health TA metric.

But, once you start trying to reduce by .4 days or .3 days, you’ve lost your way.

*For those wanting to now use “37” days as the average time to fill in the world, I totally made that metric up! Stop it! Be Better!

Top Speed is Overrated in Recruiting!

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I have this tendency to get up on a soapbox and tell HR and TA leaders that measuring “Days to Fill” (Time to Fill, Time to Hire, Applicant to Hire, etc.) is a complete waste of time! I do this knowing that this is primarily the main recruiting metric used by the vast majority of organizations. So, I’m kind of calling them dumb, and I don’t like that, because that’s not what I believe!

I find the majority of HR & TA leaders to be hardworking, caring folks who want to do the right thing, but no one is showing them the “right” thing. I mean, I did in my book, but no one wants to read a full book!

Why is speed overrated in recruiting?

First, there is absolutely no correlation between how fast you got someone hired to how good of an employee they will be. Zero! Nil! Naught! None! So, you are measuring something, and telling people is massively important, but it has zero correlation to whether or not you hired someone that will be good for your company.

Awesome! Wow! Let’s hire faster! The faster we can get these walking zombies in here the faster we can fail! Yay! Fail faster! #WinkyFace

Second, I’ll give you that some sort of speed of recruiting metric as correlated to your industry benchmarks might be a good indicator to let you know how well your function is running or not running. Meaning, if your average days to fill is 40 and the industry benchmark is 30, you probably have some work to do. But, if you are at 29 and the benchmark is at 30, it doesn’t necessarily mean you are better at recruiting, just a bit faster.

Third, you can hire too fast. We tend to never think about all the false-positive hiring we do by moving too quickly. If we are rushing our process, we open the door to letting bad hires into the organization. We also open the door to filling roles before we can truly see what’s available in the market. Oh, Timmy is interested, let’s hire him quickly! And then the day after, Mary, applies and she’s much better, but you already hired Timmy.

Fourth, a large portion of the time in a day’s-to-fill metric isn’t even owned and controlled by recruiting. Hiring managers and the candidates themselves, control upwards of 50% of a time metric in any recruiting process.

Why do we focus so much on speed in recruiting?

Because “speed” is something c-suite executives get all excited about. If we are doing it faster, we must be doing it better. Plus, most c-suites think it takes too long to hire, so slower recruiting validates their belief that recruiting is broken. But, 99.99% of c-suites never recruited, so they are stupid. I mean, they are stupid about recruiting!

Because this is the metric we’ve always used to measure recruiting success in our organizations. Throughout the history of recruiting this is the metric that was measured, so this is the one we use. Kind of like how sports used metrics like points per game, and then advanced analytics came out, like plus/minus and now we look at older metrics as rudimentary in describing the performance of athletes.

Because we don’t know a better way to measure how or if we are successful in recruiting in our organizations. This is a tough one because we don’t know what we don’t know. I wish our ATS and recruiting technology vendors would do a better job of measuring and teaching advanced metrics to TA leaders. (Shoutout to vendors like SmartRecruiters, Greenhouse, Gem, and Predictive Hire – they all have some good stuff if you choose to use it.) The reality is, you would make your technology stickier if you did this.

What should recruiting focus on, rather than speed?

You know what’s coming. The funnel dummy!

We have certain actions that lead directly to recruiting success in our organizations if we analyze our recruiting funnels. The recruiting funnel will show you directly individual and team performance. But, let’s set that aside for a second. The funnel will ultimately give your organization the first truth about recruiting it’s ever had, the actual capacity it can rely on in recruiting. Your c-suite is dying to know this, and all you can tell them is, “we’ll work faster and longer and harder”.

Knowing your actual recruiting capacity will set you free and make you look like a genius as compared to every other TA leader that has become before you in your organization.

Cost of hire by source. Source effectiveness. Quality of applicant by Source (No, not the quality of hire, that’s not a TA metric), candidate experience metrics, recruiter experience metrics, etc.

Most shops run a classic 6-3-1 funnel. Meaning, it takes six screened candidates passed onto a hiring manager, who will then choose three of those candidates to interview, and then make an offer to one. If you take the billions of hires done at all organizations each year, it will almost always, on average, fall into a 6-3-1 model. Top of funnel, I.E., how many applicants to find six screened candidates, is a different story. That is dependent on a number of variables.

So, should you stop focusing on speed?

Yes. And, No.

Yes, you should stop focusing on speed if you are in a cycle where this year’s recruiting speed goal was to reduce your days to fill from 37.1 days to 36.8 days. At that point, your speed goal is worthless. You are only incrementally getting faster and you’ll see no real positive outcome from such a small time savings, even at enterprise and a million hires. Yes, I know the math says different at scale, but you are also forgetting the most important part. THERE. IS. NO. CORRELATION. BETWEEN. SPEED. AND. QUALITY. IN. RECRUITING!

No, you should not stop if you know your recruiting is flat-out broken and you are not even in the ballpark from a speed perspective. If it’s taking you 50 days to fill a position that your competition is doing in 25 days, you’re broken, and while speed isn’t the cure to your ills, you’ve got to catch up on the process side of things.

Okay TA Peeps! Tell me I’m wrong in the comments!

Finally! Elon Musk Weighs In on America’s Birth Rate Crisis!

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Say what you want about Elon Musk, he tends to be years ahead of the curve around what the world will want and need. I get it, he’s a polarizing figure, people either love him or hate him. I don’t own a Tesla, and I don’t really have the pull to want one, but I get the fascination. I get the fascination with building a company around private space travel, and he just recently said he could care less about electric cars because he now wants to build “real” robots like the ones Will Smith fought in iRobot!

BTW, I totally want my own Tesla Robot. The friend that will always be there for you and I would get the algorithm where they never try to give me life advice, just support my craziness! Also, my “Tesbot” will have an English accent, because I’m a dumb American and I really like that accent.

Elon’s robot idea came partly because of a real-world problem he faces, and truly all of us are facing at this moment, around talent shortages. He needs workers to build EVs and Rocketships. For a dude that doesn’t put limits on what is possible, it seems almost impossible to hire great, productive workers, who enjoy that type of work. So, let’s build robots!

Elon came out recently to clarify the real problem we have in America, really most industrialized countrys’, in that our birth rate is a major economic problem no one is paying attention to:

He went on to talk about world population estimates, etc., and the trends we are on are not positive when we truly look way out into the future. The problem is, in almost every country, our political systems are not built to address the future, they are built to address the next election cycle.

If you voted for Trump in the last election, you probably believe we have a “major” problem at our border to the south with immigrants flooding into our country. Honestly, we should be hoping immigrants are flooding into this country because we need them to work in all the jobs that Americans are refusing to work in!

We do have an immigration problem! The problem is, we don’t allow enough immigrants to come into our country and work legally, pay taxes, and be a part of this great experiment we call America. I’m not a liberal. I’m a raging moderate who sees what is really going on in businesses across America! We need more workers! Or, as Elon believes, more robots…

What are potential solutions for our birth rate crisis?

1. Pay people to have more babies.

You know, stuff like paid family leave and tax incentives to have more children, great education and paid daycare, etc. Let’s make it easy for families to have great families. Right now, in America, having kids is a wealth deterrent for people.

2. Massively expand immigration.

This is not a scarcity problem. Immigrants are not taking jobs away from Americans. We have way more jobs than we have Americans! Plus, immigrants now have more options than coming to America, since there are about 20 other countries with worse birth rate issues than we have. We are now in competition for immigrant talent, skilled and unskilled, and we have half our population who still are being told by politicians that immigrants are bad.

3. Help Elon build his robots!

Honestly, because of our birth rate crisis, if Elon doesn’t get there first, someone else will. We have already seen so many jobs get eaten up by automation and robotics and it’s not stopping, it’s accelerating. Self-driving semi-trucks. Touch screens to order your Big Mac. Self-checkout lanes at the grocery store. Etc. The problem is, robots are only good at certain things, and we still need humans for a lot. Unless Elon figures out my Tesbot and then look out! Timmy is going on vacation!

Be Careful with Employer Online Reviews!

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Some recent data out analyzing online reviews on sites like Amazon and Yelp show that half of all reviews give the highest possible rating possible. So, ask yourself, of all the stuff you bought on Amazon and all the restaurants you tried on from Yelp, would you give the highest rating possible?

Human nature would tell us of course not! This phenomenon is known as a “Positivity Problem“. It’s like when I asked you all to give me a 5-star review on my book “The Talent Fix” and you all did! (Well, all except like two of you, and the next time I see my Dad I’m really going to give him hell over that 3-star review!).

Basically, “star” ratings are unreliable rating mechanisms. 

The big problem is when we measure things like employee experience, candidate experience, etc., we use star rating measurements. Glassdoor, the employer review site, turned job board, gained millions of followers and giant traffic by using anonymous star reviews from employees which were almost immediately problematic, but we all ignored it and took it as the word of God. OMG! Amazon is a 5-star employer and Walmart is a 2.5-star employer. Both of which are most likely wrong.

What should we be doing to find an accurate measure? 

Like any great leader, we should be looking less at a number rating and more at the verbatim comments. If you have a giant sample size and can use AI to gain further insights, you can really gain some understanding of what candidates and employees are thinking, or which employers truly are the best or worse to work for.

The study mentioned above found that the comments using the most emotionally charged wording, both positive and negative, were greater predictors of measuring success. Comments become a great predictor of what’s really going on.

What can go wrong with this? I’ll call this the “Business Insider” Dilemma! 

The BI Dilemma is a phenomenon I’ve noticed recently with writers at Business Insider. I’ve been a long-time reader of BI and they produce some really good content, but over the past 12-24 months they tend to make some extremely bold conclusions based on comments from only a handful of employee’s comments.

Things like, Amazon is an awful employer for women, just come and read about twelve women we spoke to who are former Amazon employees, out of 300,000 Amazon employees who are female! Come on!

To be fair, BI isn’t the only media outlet to do this, it’s become common place in cancel culture. Find a minority opinion and run with it as a majority opinion. This is a problem when it comes to using employee and candidate comments as a measure of success or failure.

That number has to be pretty substantial to gain real insight. At a minimum, I would think you would need about 5-10% of all to comment to be comfortable in making any real decisions based on comment data. So, if you have one thousand employees, I want to see about 100 comments to get a true feel for what’s really going on.

We focus so heavily right now on “data” on the number and the movement of the number. But if we know that star ratings alone are unreliable, do we truly feel like we are getting the full picture of what’s really needs to improve or change?

What is the Perfect Diversity Mix for your Organization?

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This is a question I think many executives and HR and TA leaders struggle with. SHRM hasn’t come out and given guidance. ATAP has not told us at what levels we should be at with our diversity mix. So, how do we come up with this answer?

Seems like we should probably be roughly 50/50 when it comes to male and female employees. Again, that’s a broad figure, because your customer base probably makes a difference. If you’re selling products and services mostly women buy, you probably want more women on your team.

The more difficult mix to figure is when it comes to race. Should we be 50/50 when it comes to race in our hiring? Apple has taken it on the chin the last few years because of their demographic employee mix, and even as of this week, are still catching criticism for having only 1/3 of their leadership team is female, and only 17% of their entire team being black and Hispanic. 55% of Apple’s tech employees are white, 77% are male.

So, what should your diversity mix be?

The most recent demographics of race in America show this:

  • 61.3% are white
  • 17.8% are Hispanic/Latino
  • 13.3 are black
  • 4.8% Asian

Some other interesting facts about American race demographics:

  • 55% of black Americans live in the south
  • White Americans are the majority in every region
  • 79% of the Midwest is white Americans
  • The West is the most overall diverse part of America (where 46% of the American Asian population live, 42% of Hispanic/Latino, 48% of American Indian, 37% of multi-race)

So, what does this all mean when it comes to hiring a more diverse workforce? 

If 61.3% of the American population is white, is it realistic for Apple to hire a 50/50 mix of diversity across its workforce? I go back to my master’s research project when looking at female hiring in leadership. What you find in most service-oriented, retail, restaurants, etc. organizations are more male leaders than female leaders, but more female employees than male employees.

What I found was as organizations with a higher population of female employees hired a higher density of male employees as leaders, they were actually pulling from a smaller and smaller pool of talent. Meaning, organizations that don’t match the overall demographics of their employee base have the tendency to hire weaker leadership talent when they hire from a minority of their employee base, once those ratios are met.

In this case, if you have 70% female employees and 30% male, but you have 70% male leaders and only 30% female leaders, every single additional male you hire is statistically more likely to be a weaker leader than hiring from your female employee population for that position.

Makes sense, right!

If this example of females in leadership is true, it gives you a guide for your entire organization in what your mixes should be across your organization. If you have 60% of white employees and 50%, female. Your leadership team should be 60% of female leaders.

But!

What about special skill sets and demographics?

These throws are demographics off. What if your employee population is 18% black, but you can’t find 18% of the black employees you need in a certain skill set? This happened in a large health system I worked for when it came to nurse hiring. Within our market, we only had 7% of the nursing population that was black, and we struggled to get above that percentage in our overall population.

Apple runs into this same concept when it comes to hiring technical employees because more of the Asian and Indian population have the skill sets they need, so they can’t meet the overall demographics of their employee population, without incurring great cost in attracting the population they would need from other parts of the country to California.

Also, many organization’s leaders will say instead of looking at the employee base we have, let’s match the demographic makeup of the markets where our organizations work. At that point, you are looking at market demographics to match your employee demographics. Again, this can be difficult based on the skill sets you need to hire.

If I’m Apple, I think the one demographic that is way out of whack for them is female hiring. 50% of their customers are female. 77% of its employees are male, but only 33% of their leadership is female. It would seem to make demographic sense that 50% of Apple’s leadership team should be female.

Thoughts? This is a really difficult problem for so many organizations, and I see organizations attempting to get more ‘diverse’ in skin color without really knowing what that means in terms of raw numbers and percentages.

What are you using in your own shops?