Dr John Sullivan Talent Management Thought Leadership
The idea that you can create a template that will work forever doesn’t happen in any business … There’s some really, really bright people in this business. You can’t do the same thing the same way and be successful for a long period of time. — Billy Beane
I am a strong advocate of what I call “parallel benchmarking,” which is borrowing the proven best practices from completely different industries and functions. This article advocates the borrowing and the adaptation to talent management of what are known as “proprietary metrics” from the baseball industry.
Proprietary metrics get their name because they cover metrics that are so powerful that they are “owned” and their components are therefore not shared. In baseball, there are dozens of proprietary metrics, while in the corporate world of talent management, they are surprisingly rare. Corporate examples of these proprietary metrics include Google’s “retention metric” for predicting which employees are about to quit and its “hiring success algorithm” for predicting the characteristics that lead to new hire success on the job.
Baseball Has the Most Advanced Metric Model to Learn From
You might not know it, but baseball metrics (which are known as Sabermetrics) are literally years ahead of the metric practices in talent management. Most talent metrics are calculated but once a year and they merely inform the user about last year’s results. In direct contrast, most baseball metrics are provided in real time on the scoreboard for all players and managers to see precisely when they need right as they are making a decision. Many baseball metrics are also “predictive talent decision metrics” that accurately guide executives in important talent decisions including who to hire, how much to pay, and how long a player will continue to add value. Even “old-school” baseball managers now realize that the use of metrics for talent decisions can result in more productive hires, increased revenue, and significantly more wins. Read More »
