The Importance of Talent Measurement in Hard Economic Times

“Stay the Course, Metrics Indicate Human Capital is a Competitive, Smart and Long-Term Investment.” A Message from KnowledgeAdvisors’ CEO Kent Barnett

Chicago, IL [November 4, 2008] – The consequences of emotion-based human capital decisions during economic uncertainty have long-lasting effects on organizations that go beyond the crisis of the day. Today’s smart organizations are leaning heavily on metrics that provide fact-based evidence of the historic value of their people and provide a glimpse at future competitive advantage as economists and public sector leaders appeal to all organizations to invest wisely for the long term.

These smart organizations are also seeing better stock price performance than their non-measuring peers as a result of taking the emotion out of human capital decision-making. KnowledgeAdvisors earlier this year released results collected over a multi-year period illustrating that publicly traded organizations with a greater dedication to measuring workforce development outperformed the S&P 500 by 15.18%. The data is telling us that measuring investments in people pays off in higher returns.

KnowledgeAdvisors has collected millions of data points over many years that reveal a business case supporting how leading organizations that invest in the creation and maintenance of a high-performing workforce experience a competitive advantage despite marketplace volatility.

Examples:

• Three years of evaluation results showed that a typical employee improved workforce performance by 4.80% as a result of learning and development programs. This translates into $2,820 per employee in improved workforce outcomes (based on over 600,000 evaluations measured 2 months after training)
• A major healthcare insurer retained 93% of its top talent who were flight risks after investing in measurement to improve their on-boarding process.
• A telecom equipment company attributed a 12% reduction in call center support calls and a 10% reduction in errors to a skills-based program created to provide their customer’s engineers with skills to self-diagnose network problems.
• A major tele-floral company saved 15,000 hours of lost productivity by providing technology training to tele-floral agents translating into a $276,000 cost savings to bottom-line profits.
• A leading ERP company returned 18.2% in productivity gains by training end-users to better use its software.
• A consumer packaged goods company attributed $74,000 in increased sales per person directly to a sales force effectiveness investment of $5,000 per person.

These examples only scratch the surface of how many great organizations are positioning themselves for competitive advantage.

KnowledgeAdvisors will perform a webcast on Monday, November 24, 2008 (view recording) to further illustrate how a dedicated human capital measurement practice can influence competitive advantage in the marketplace, reduce waste in human capital processes and drive stock price performance over the long term. KnowledgeAdvisors encourages all C-Level leaders, HR and L&D executives to participate in this important webcast. To view more on the webcast, please visit that page on the KnowledgeAdvisors website

About KnowledgeAdvisors

KnowledgeAdvisors is the world’s largest provider of learning and talent measurement solutions. Leading organizations access its measurement expertise and on-demand software to ensure a high-performing workforce. As thought leader in Human Capital Analytics, KnowledgeAdvisors provides the most comprehensive analytics solutions on the market. By combining measurement expertise, on-demand evaluation software, and integrated analytics solutions with benchmarking, organizations gain the necessary insights on how to best develop their workforce. For more about KnowledgeAdvisors, visit: www.knowledgeadvisors.com

For inquiries related to this news release, contact:

Eric Bush, KnowledgeAdvisors
marketing@knowledgeadvisors.com
312 676-4434 (phone)
312 606-4401 (fax)