Changing the Game

Lets just jump right in to opening day since #MarchMadness has become a huge disappointment for me…

How the Oakland A’s perfected the Applicant Tracking System…Remember the 02 season for the Oakland A’s? They finished 1st in the American League West with 103 wins and 59 losses. They were essentially a Cinderella team. Beane was able to produce an unexpected record with an unexpected team on an impossible budget. Often times you hear that necessity is the mother of all invention and that is probably the case here as well. Beane’s predecessor was forced with the task of fielding a competitive roster on a limited budget and turned to sabermetrics for help. He used sabermetrics to measure on-base percentages and target undervalued players. He eventually taught this system to Beane and he continued using it and tweaking it (and still uses it) to maximize a minimal budget and put together teams worthy of winning. The incredible thing about this is that someone had to step out and say “let’s try something different… no more recruiting the way we have just because it’s the way we have always done it…”. Other teams began utilizing this system and it began to change the recruiting of the entire league, not just one team. And hey, a good movie was born through the process somehow too 😉

The point isn’t really that the Oakland A’s decided to use evidence based metrics when assessing players, well.. yeah, that is part of the point. The other part is that someone was willing to change the way of doing things. They were willing to change the way they recruited in hopes to change their organizations output of a finished product. It’s kind of like our ATS that we turn to in HR. A one stop shop that shows us work history, education, skills and all other good to know evidence based info about candidates and employees. At one point, that wasn’t the norm (note: I am too young to know a time when that was not the norm in case you were curious). I did however work for a company that chose to utilize the paper way instead of maximizing the abilities of their ATS many years ago and it was foolish. I can only imagine the fights that sabermetrics brought in comparison to the pushback I got from charging forward on the oh so obvious one stop shop ATS that was being underutilized. What did we find when we started using all the bells and whistles on the ATS? We could suddenly work far more efficiently than we ever imagined. We could get lots of great things done, everything was in one place, everything was easy to get to, easy to measure and easy to assess…Ultimately, we could change the game. We improved our efficiency and overcame the fear of not holding a handwritten application in our hands when assessing candidates.

There will always be room for improvement, but if we aren’t open to change and improvement we will eventually get left behind. If HR professionals allow their organizations to fear change or fear it themselves I can promise you the organization will eventually be outperformed by competitors. What are some changes you are fearing in your organization? What are some changes you are heading in your organization?

" much you don't know..."
“…how much you don’t know…”

Author: Kristina H. Minyard, SHRM-CP, PHR


One thought on “Changing the Game”

  1. Hi Kristina, I read your post with interest. Adding to the lessons from Moneyball that you’ve documented well here, I’d like to add this one: Best practice is rarely questioned. Those who are prepared to do so can get a competitive advantage. To use workforce analytics effectively (and when you think about it, Moneyball is all about workforce analytics), you need a clear definition of success, what you need to get there, measure that, and align your actions to improving the metric – always keeping your eye on the context. Many organisations track metrics because they’re the flavour of the month, not because they’re supporting a strategy. What gets measured gets managed, as the saying goes – the flipside is that if you’re managing a metric that isn’t supporting a strategy, then your efforts would be better spent elsewhere. You then need to use the evidence that the data gives you to question whether assumed knowledge and “best practice” (which is often just common practice) is right for your organisation. In Moneyball, this is well illustrated in the meeting with the scouts, who think Beane is crazy for wanting to hire players who don’t “look good”. Beane points out that to win, they need to get on base – and looks have nothing to do with that.

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