Big Data A Big Trend In Staffing

Think of it as Moneyball, for the workplace: As the economy recovers jobs, employers are finding new, more lengthy and more complicated methods to find just the right employee. The average length of the job interview period has nearly doubled in the last four years, from 12 days in 2009 to 23 days in 2013, according to employee-rating site Glassdoor, and more of that time is devoted to putting potential employees through various creative data collection processes to determine if they’ll be a good fit. A “human-capital-allocation market” has been recognized and a cottage industry of big-data HR firms has grown up to fill it, using a variety of data-gathering methods, even video games, to facilitate the selection process. But can metrics really solve the sometimes intangible problem of finding a great new hire?