It's 6:30 a.m. one chilly morning in Williamsburg, VA. As usual, I have made my way to my favorite coffee shoppe....AhhhhRomas. I'm the only customer in the shoppe, but soon Geri the owner joins me for light conversation. The topic turns to the difficulty in finding good baristas to handle the brisk morning coffee traffic. Geri explains that she has interviewed 10 prospective baristas and is very disappointed with the lack of customer focus that the baristas have displayed. She has 3 Human Resource attributes that she considers important in any new hire: technically fit, customer fit, and worker fit. Of the 10 baristas interviewed 8 were technically fit or exceptionally fit. On the other hand, only 2 were marginally customer fit or above. The third attribute was worker fit, and 6 were marginally fit or better. Geri uses a 5 point categorical scale for "fitness" to rank baristas on the 3 attributes:

1. Totally unfit
2. Mildly unfit
3. Marginally fit
4. Fit
5. Exceptionally fit

Geri requires that new hires score a minimum Average, for all equally weighted categories, of 3.3 before being considered for hiring.

Before turning to coffee, Geri was a highly regarded HR professional with a Wall Street investment bank. There she learned the importance of statistical metrics, data, and well conceived processes. Below is the data and analysis that Geri shared with me during our discussion:

Barista # Technical Customer Worker Average Acceptable? WORKS IN CUSTOMER 2 4 2.3 No SERVICE POSITION 4 3 2 3.0 No 5 2 2.7 No 5 4 3 4.0 Yes 4 1 4 3.0 No 4 2 2 2.7 No 3 2 3 2.7 No 5 2 3 3.3 No 9 4 1 2.0 No "WHAT DO YOU 10 4 2 4 3.3 No WANT?" Average => 4 2 2.7 2.9