Happiness as a Metric

Ten years ago economic data in China consisted of statements like ’the number of tractors produced in Shandong province this year has increased 22% to 5,455,321’. Amazing how they knew about those last 321 tractors.

As a result most people approach statistics in China with a degree of scepticism. But maybe not any more.

Xinhua just reported that the Chinese government have come up with a new economic index called the ’happiness index’. It tries to put a numerical value on the happiness level of the people in China.

I can hear the groans already.

But wait, hang on, hang on. This index may have value because it is based on firms indicators. These are access to medical care, improved housing conditions, quality of the environment, employment opportunities and public security.

Now, just think of a time in the future when these indexes are completed. You are a HR Manager for a small city in Western China. The index for your city is 92 while the index for the city next to you is 64. Where are you going to hire from? Will it be easy? Or at least easier.

Assuming you live in a city with a high index, when you are hiring new staff you can use the index as part of your branding. You can sell both your company as a place to work and your city as a place to live. If you live in a city with an index of 34 maybe you might consider changing jobs.

Either way you have more real information to work with. You could even consider capturing the location of all applicants in your Applicant Tracking System(ATS) or online hiring system, and then comparing the success rates for each city.

The metrics that this would produce would guide your hiring efforts like a laser, and hopefully would produce some hidden sources of candidates who would be attracted to opportunities in your company. Your ATS may already have the functionality to capture the city location for all your applicants, so all you need to do is pull out the data into a spreadsheet, add in the happiness index data, and chart them.

Useful hiring metrics from the government, who’d have thought!?

Comments to: frank.mulligan@recruit-china.com