One of my old psychology professors was fond of saying “If something exists, it exists in some amount and can thus be measured.” It’s not a bad axiom for a Human Resources professional to adopt, whether they have a background in psychology or not. This book by Jac Fitz-enz and Barbara Davidson takes the idea to heart that HR isn’t just a function built around transaction and enforcing compliance. If the benefits of typical activities of HR can be measured –even roughly– then the function can have an increasingly important role to play at the higher, strategic levels of business.
After some introductory material and naval gazing, the meat of the book is split into sections on the familiar facets of HR: staffing, compensation, training, and employee relations. Each section talks a bit about the function and why it’s important, then stamps out a series of equations for measuring things related to that function. For example, here’s the formula for “Sourcing Cost Per Hire:”
SCPH = Advertising + Agency Fees + Referral Bonuses + Free Hires / Total # of Hires
That’s it. And that’s one of the more complicated equations. See, the issue I have with this book is that it’s extremely cursory and only gives things a surface treatment. The equations are given, sure, but there’s little to no discussion about how to go about collecting and organizing the data. There’s also not nearly enough about how to use the data to influence and steer strategy. It’s all just very basic. And some of the stuff, like measuring quality of job performance, is embarrassingly superficial and wouldn’t stand up to much scrutiny by anyone with a bias towards scientific vigor.
What the book does an okay job of doing, I suppose is giving you some starting points if you’re trying to start a HR metrics program from scratch. That’s a task that can be so huge so as to be paralyzing, but with this book in hand you can pretty easily flip to a chapter and say “Okay, I’m going to calculate our Time to Fill.” Or the cost of benefits. Or the cost of training. Or whatever. You can worry about being more sophisticated and more encompassing later, because doing any of these simple things that will be a start that you can build on.
Still, for anyone with a background in research methods or just looking for something with more meat on it, I’d recommend Cascio and Boudreau’s Investing in People way above this one.
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