What your mouse clicks tell your boss

Each mouse click leaves behind a digital footprint, and those trails increasingly are being tracked by employers to help make hiring and other employment decisions.

How often do you visit LinkedIn or Facebook? More often than you used to? That could be a sign you’re thinking of quitting.

How many minutes did you take to handle that incoming phone call? You may be great at mollifying angry customers, but the company might be losing money from long conversations.

That pre-employment online personality assessment you took? Your answers, when compared with others who are successful in this job, may indicate you’re not a good fit.

Such is the world of “talent analytics,” a way to use data to evaluate job candidates, monitor in-house performance and even discern attitudes.

“Today, every email, instant message, phone call, line of written code and mouse click leaves a digital signal,” attorney Tedrick Housh told a Kansas City ballroom full of human resource practitioners and other clients at a recent employment law seminar.

That data “can now be inexpensively collected and mined for insights into how people work and communicate,” the Lathrop & Gage attorney said.

Housh said 14 per cent of America’s largest public companies are known to use talent analytics, and its use promises to mushroom.

Some Silicon Valley firms have developed sophisticated talent analytics. Hiring managers don’t have to rely on what applicants list on their resumés to make decisions. Rather, they mine data.