Major League Baseball is back, which means I now have something to do each night until November! Yeah me, I’m winning!
More importantly, MLB gives us some great things to write about throughout the season.
I don’t know of a sport where more there is more of a correlation to HR than Major League Baseball. Think about what MLB does as compared to our daily jobs as HR Pros across the country:
You get the picture; MLB is like one giant HR laboratory, but with an unending budget and a heck of lot more Dominicans than your average U.S. workplace.
The one thing I wonder is how long we (HR/talent professionals) would have our job if we had the same success rates in selection as our MLB counterparts?
There are up to 50 rounds each year in the Major League draft – and a MLB team can sign as many free agents (those who didn’t get drafted or no longer have their rights held by another team) as they want. In the end the failure rate of selection is astronomically high. From a Sports Illustrated article in 2010:
Major league teams selected 436 high school players after the 13th round. Only nine of those kids signed a contract that year and eventually made it to the big leagues — a 98 percent failure rate. After Round 26, teams selected 213 high school players, only one of whom, Victor Diaz, an outfielder who appeared in 147 games for the Mets and Rangers, played even a day in the big leagues — a 99.5 percent failure rate…
Can you imagine a 99.5 percent failure rate in hiring in your organization? You would have your job for about 26 minutes!
If you think you have a hard time assessing talent, the folks working for MLB teams, it would seem, could use some help from some HR Pros and assessment vendors in revamping their selection process, because something isn’t working right – and you thought the athletes weren’t held accountable!
There are good lessons to learn from their failure of MLB’s selection science (or should I say lack of selection science):
This was originally published on Tim Sackett’s blog, The Tim Sackett Project.