The Capability Within is a new study of Chief Human Resource Officers (CHROs) around the world done by IBM. Inside are a couple of interesting findings.

The top 3 initiatives for CHROs in response to CEO priorities are: organization transformation, people development, and talent management.

Turnover of staff is about twice as high in the US versus Europe. Nothing surprising there. But turnover of middle managers or specialists is a bit higher in Europe!

Companies that are devoting more learning time to employees are demonstrating higher profits per employees. In contrast, less than 30% of firms are tracking the ROI of their human capital investment. But close to 80% are monitoring employee satisfaction!

Maybe its because tracking ROI is very difficult. At Taleo Research, we have spent the last four years monitoring the ROI of optimized talent acquisition practices and delivered some pretty strong cases. We analyzed data and published reports to show where the true economics of talent acquisition lie and why quality is the paramount metric to monitor.

So when we see IBM report that quality of hire is the #1 metric with close to 70% of CHROs using it to assess their effectiveness, we hope our research helped everyone move from the cost per hire (#2) and time to fill (#3) to the #1 metric with the most economic impact.

The only last change we would like to see is the standard answer to the question, Which people metric does HR report most often to the business? Unfortunately, its headcount.

We would like you to get more strategic and lose the responsibility for headcount and trade it for the responsibilities of performance and productivity!

Leave the headcount counting to administration. Closely monitor and report on what really matters: performance!