Analytics and recruitment of employees

Analytics- or crunching of data on a large scale-is being widely used for a variety of purposes. The Economist has an interesting report on the use of analytics for hiring employees.

Some of the findings on employee performance, which helps in taking decisions on recruitment, are interesting:

• ....people who fill out online job applications using browsers that did not come with the computer (such as Microsoft’s Internet Explorer on a Windows PC) but had to be deliberately installed (like Firefox or Google’s Chrome) perform better and change jobs less often.
•  ....one of the best predictors that a customer-service employee will stick with a job is that he lives nearby and can get to work easily. These and other findings helped Xerox cut attrition by a fifth in a pilot programme that has since been extended. It also found that workers who had joined one or two social networks tended to stay in a job for longer. Those who belonged to four or more social networks did not.
• A study of 20,000 workers showed that more honest people tend to perform better and stay at the job longer. For some reason, however, they make less effective salespeople.

I don't suppose such findings can be a substitute for going through applications and interviewing candidates. But they can be an aid to good hiring, especially when backed by firm-specific data.