"You are the 13th most valued employee at the company."
Would this statement make you feel better about your job? Traditionally, employers have been ranking employee value based on already measurable metrics like quotas or sales goals. But at a large company, it may not always be easy to pin down a benchmark for workers.
Meet the Saba People Cloud. According to Wired, HR software company Saba will be unveiling a new application that helps businesses build a database of scores that can help assess the most valuable employees based on social networking. It's similar to services like Reppify and BranchOut, which help analyze activity on outside websites. But this service will monitor similar data from an intracompany network.
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The catch to this is that employee scores are based on their Saba People Cloud activity, and each worker is given a People Quotient (pQ). It's a move that's going to register as controversial to employers who believe they have a low segment of digital-savvy employees, or ones who aren't exactly comfortable trying to move up the social ladder.
According to Wired, "The engine looks across an organization to compare your performance against other managers with similar positions and goals, and it determines the 'quality' of your social interactions and contributions across the company…It's like a corporate Klout score—a controversial score that rates your social networking impact on the public internet. The more you accrue followers, engage with others, and post stuff that people reference in their own posts, the better your pQ score."
While the system may not appeal to non-social network users, it may turn into a safer platform to help steer HR managers away from digging into online personal profiles, like Facebook or Twitter. According to Eurocom Worldwide, a global PR agency that did a study on the technology market, almost one in five technology industry executives say that a candidate's social media profile has caused them not to hire that person.
"The 21st century human is learning that every action leaves an indelible digital trail. In the years ahead many of us will be challenged by what we are making public in various social forums today," says Mads Christensen, network director at Eurocom Worldwide. "The fact that one in five applicants disqualify themselves from an interview because of content in the social media sphere is a warning to job seekers and a true indicator of the digital reality we now live in."
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