Matt Ferguson - The Talent Equation: Big Data Lessons for Navigating the Skills Gap and Building a Competitive Workforce

Copyright 2014 by CareerBuilder, Lorin Hitt, and Prasanna Tambe. All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the United States Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced or distributed in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

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Numerous individuals were indispensable in the production of this book. We especially thank the CareerBuilder executives and product managers whose work underlies much of the data and content seen throughout the text, including: Brent Rasmussen, president of Career-Builder North America; Rosemary Haefner, vice president of human resources; Hope Gurion, chief development officer; Jennifer Seith, managing director of Talent Network; Abdel Tefridji, vice president of workforce analytics; Sanja Licina, senior director of workforce analytics; and Eric Presley, chief technology officer, and Roger Fugett, senior vice president of IT, who along with Dan Cosey and Rob Wittes, were instrumental in implementing CareerBuilders Re-employment Initiative.

We owe our gratitude to the many talented sales executives and representatives whose work with clients made the interviews for this book possible, including: John Smith, president, Enterprise Sales; Jason Lovelace, president, CareerBuilder Healthcare; Eric Gilpin, president, Staffing and Recruiting Group; as well as, Brian Donahue, William Emmons, Andrew Streiter, Beth Prunier, Jon Ralph, Steve Million, Laura Lynn, Jason Stewart, Brian Johnson, and Matt Laurinas.

We appreciate the support given by the professionals and economists at Economic Modeling Specialists International (EMSI)CEO Andrew Crapuchettes, Hank Robison, Tim Nadreau, Josh Wright, and Rob Sentz. Additionally, we are grateful for the insightful comments offered by Puneet Manchanda, chair of marketing and professor of marketing at the Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan.

Special thanks are in order to Anthony Balderrama, Debra Auerbach, Susan Ricker, Matt Tarpey, and Amy McDonnell for reviewing the text and lending a wonderful editing eye. For her work organizing the books many tables and figures, we also thank Susan Moye. We are also grateful for the ideas and support offered by other members of CareerBuilders marketing team: Jamie Womack, Stephanie Gaspary, Leah Mckelvey, Mike Erwin, Keith Hadley, Mary Lorenz, Justin Thompson, and Jenny Weigle. Finally, we thank CareerBuilders Ellen Silva, Jonathan Seaver, and Brianna Greene for their help acquiring key information for this project.

Big data is a big differentiator. Every day, according to IBM, the world creates 2.5 quintillion bytes of data. For the record, quintillion has 18 zeros. IBM contends that 90 percent of the data published today has been created in the last two years alone. Much of that data can be used to make smarter, faster and higher-yielding business decisions.

Large companies are undoubtedly familiar with the applications of big data, but until recently the focus has been primarily on the consumer end. Every click of our mouse and swipe of our credit card leaves behind a trail of data, and companies are racing to collect it, store it, and learn from it. As a result, segmenting consumer behavior first through sales receipts and later through web analytics has revolutionized sales and marketing. It continues to evolve today. The predictive behavior models that the best consumer goods companies use are essentially able to determine what their customers want before they even know they want it. The ability to process and learn from these datasets is as important as the product or service itself to overall market performance.

Seeing this obvious success, executives around the country are now asking: What can big data do for human resources? Think about the massive amount of information a company keeps on their employeeswork histories, demographic profiles, education levels, skills competencies, compensation and benefit figures, performance and productivity measurestheres practically no end to the information residing within the typical HR department. As is the case with most data stored on servers or in file cabinets, however, human capital data is widely untouched, due to an inability or lack of initiative to steamline, process, store, and, most importantly, analyze it.

The Talent Equation is about using an incredible quantity of human capital data to create achievable solutions for leaders in the C-suite and HR. Emphasis on this topic was in part refueled by the success of the 2011 film (and 2003 Michael Lewis book of the same name)