Boomeranging at Work

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I wrote a LinkedIn post last week saying that Bloomberg doesn’t tend to rehire people.

Jason Saltzman wondered: Is that true?

What I love most about the Internet is people like Jason.

Jason never worked at Bloomberg. He doesn’t know anyone who works there. He doesn’t have particular knowledge about the company. He lives 2,889 miles away in Santa Barbara.

He’s just a curious guy who happens to be sitting on a mountain of employment data.

A former professional cyclist who now works as the director of growth at Live Data Technologies, a startup that monitors 90 million white collar workers in America, he searched for people who worked at Bloomberg, left and then returned.

It turns out that during the past three decades about 110 people out of the 28,000 former and current Bloomberg employees that Live Data Technologies tracks met that criteria. (That cohort may miss a few, but it's a large sample.)

Unsolicited, Jason sent me a chart with the cheeky title: “Can You be a Bloomber(an)g Employee?”

I cannot tell you how much joy it brought me when it arrived unnanounced.

There is a difference between knowing a thing that you believe to be true and knowing a thing that is backed up by hard data.

So, on the one hand, the couple of Bloomberg employees who sent me DMs last week saying I was wrong and that Bloomberg DOES in fact rehire people. You are right!

On the other hand, that number is pretty small, especially considering some people returned when Bloomberg made acquisitions, such as Business Week.

And the detail is extraordinary. Jason can tell you who all those people are and where they worked in between leaving and coming back.

A close examination of Jason’s scatter plot shows that something did change about 2014, the year Mike Bloomberg returned to run the company after spending a dozen years as the mayor of New York.

The lesson here isn’t really about Bloomberg.

It’s about the growing availability of data, especially information that can be derived from other sources without the consent or involvement of a company.

One of the big secular trends we are seeing in the world is that companies are losing control of the ability to dictate a narrative about their business.

That’s because data about their rates of growth or headcount or practically any other metric can increasingly be derived by companies such as Live Data Technologies.

Live Data Technologies sells its data to investors such as VCs, private equity firms and quant funds. It also provides information to CRMs, talent platforms and HR teams.

Jason calls the data they collect “digital exhaust.”

It’s a wonderfully evocative term.

And it’s one that we are going to hear about more and more often.

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BRIEF OBSERVATIONS

BE BOLD: Grafitti in Soho proclaiming that New York is the place.

CREATING YOUR OWN REALITY: Become what you say you are.

NOT WHAT IT USED TO BE: Hot wheels are still with us, but evidently not the same.

GOOGLE MAPS: I remember the first time I used it. Hard to believe it’s been this long and hard to believe how much impact it has had.

NEW YORK CITY: Balthazar, at 2:3 p.m. in the afternoon today, was absolutely jammed. Beautiful people were eating amazing food. It was extraordinary to be a part of it.

ALSO NEW YORK CITY: In this nook in front of a midtown office, one hour before I took this photo, a couple spent the night. They had laid down cardboard on the cold tile and taped a white sheet over the railing, creating a sleeping pod. At 8 am they broke down camp, packed everything into a duffle and within minutes were gone.