Dive Brief:
- At a recent Wharton People Analytics Conference, panelists from business and academia talked about innovative new ways to apply data analytics to predict employee performance, according to an article at HREonline.
- They tackled issues including deciding whether or not to hire someone, predicting how successful they would be, knowing whether or not they'll stay, and knowing how useful data in human resources would be as opposed to "trusting your gut."
- Those issues pose questions a lot of companies would like better answers to, considering the critical importance of people to a business's success and the high costs associated with recruiting, onboarding, hiring and firing, according to the article.
Dive Insight:
At the panel discussion, two panelists from JetBlue -- Andrew Biga, the director of talent acquisition and assessment, and Ryan Dullaghan, manager of people assessment and analytics -- described how they apply people analytics to hiring flight attendants.
Calling flight attendants the "face of our company," the two executives' customer data analysis, performed in conjunction with the Wharton School, yielded unexpected results in the search for the best candidates.
"Being helpful trumps being nice. Being helpful even balances out the effect of somebody who is not so nice." Dullaghan observed, "People will tell you they know the right kind of person for a given job. But what we think isn't always what is best."
The article then goes on to discuss other examples from panelists on whether instinct or data is the best way to find the best employee match, with some interesting results.
