Getting Zeroed In On Rising Stars in Your Talent Pool

April 19, 2017
Written by Chris Moore
Rising Stars in Your Talent Pool

A “Rising Star” is someone you recognize over time as you work with him or her – an employee who demonstrates excellent performance, earns the best assignments, and gets moved into higher roles and responsibilities faster than everyone else. But some rising stars who aren’t recognized and rewarded won’t stick around.

Wouldn’t it be a huge advantage for your organization if your HR department could identify rising stars early on? Then you could give them every opportunity to succeed and grow with the company, and stay for many years.

Predictive Metrics Are Real, Not Just Academic

ZeroedIn is doing groundbreaking work in predictive metrics for rising stars. This is uncharted territory in the business world; the only documented work on detecting rising stars through machine learning is in such fields as academic publishing and the sport of cricket. The basic approach in all fields is to isolate important characteristics of people who have made it to the top in their particular discipline.

Since we work in the field of HR analytics, ZeroedIn examines common factors among people who rose through the ranks and now hold top organizational management positions. Those factors become metrics in our algorithms for scoring and ranking early-career employees to identify potential rising stars.

How We Identify Characteristics Of Success

Our predictive equation is based on Time + Value = Rising Star. We’ve created a model that assigns numerical worth to factors indicating business success, in order of historical importance: performance, promotions, mobility within the company, etc. We train our algorithms to learn by working backwards through the company history of current management and leadership who made it through hard work and dedication, developing the “time” factor from historical milestones.

Existing models for this type of factor-sorting technique do exist, like Autoregressive-Moving-Average statistical models. This is a simpler approach than what we’re doing, but also less effective.

Our optimized rising star model produces a higher level of accuracy and creates better results than general statistical models. As a result, ZeroedIn is able to generate outcomes that exemplify the value in this type of predictive workforce analytics.

Why Predicting Future Success Is Good Business

Predicting rising stars helps companies identify successors for key roles and leadership positions. It lets Human Resources guide the grooming process early in their tenure, so that rising stars can be considered for special coaching, mentoring, or leadership programs. Knowing which candidates to focus on for the future helps companies better understand where to put their effort and money.

Predictive talent analytics is like having Doppler radar for your business – giving you insights to plan in advance for the changing climates in your workforce.

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