ADP on Closing the Pay Gap with Data

Episode Overview

Every month, millions of people start jobs, end jobs, and receive pay for their work, resulting in billions of rows of workforce data. As a leader in HR management services, ADP is not only capturing this data for customers, it’s empowering them to turn their data-driven insights into action. In today’s episode, Chief Data Officer, Jack Berkowitz, shares how the pandemic disproportionately impacted certain industries and workers, findings from the company’s most recent National Employment Report, how the company is helping customers close the pay gap by billions of dollars, and his take on the metrics layer as the new battleground for business.

Key Moments:

Managing high data volumes and maintaining data reliability at ADP (03:05)
Real-time employment data about equity in the workforce (05:33)
Monetizing data and how that has changed (09:35)
The end of FTP? (12:06)
The role of payroll data in combatting DEI vanity metrics (19:45)
Jack’s personal career shift from the vendor to end-user (27:08)

Key Quotes

So ADP, several years ago formed up a nonprofit, ADP Research Institute, and we actually provide data in the public interest. And a lot of that is around payroll data. And so every month we issue a thing called the National Employment Report, which looks at private payrolls in the United States. We also have one now in Canada and one in France. It tries to project what's happening, not just in employment, but even in wage levels. So we released one a couple of days ago and it showed us that for people that stayed in their jobs over the past year, their wages have risen about 7%. And so it's indications that companies can use to run their business.

We offer the data in a few packages. If you're in [an] HR department, you can get it through a SaaS application with some preset ways of browsing it, like an interactive map….We have fast food restaurants do[ing] demand planning. What do they stock in that restaurant based on income or based on the commute patterns of people? So we have all that type of information, lots of different distribution methods for people to consume.

At ADP, one of the strengths of the company is the fact that we pride ourselves in the diversity of the company itself.

There's this new job title, data product. It's a product owner that knows data. We better put that person really, really close to the business. Our challenge as an industry is we wanna put it in the hands of the business, but it really, it's still an analyst doing it.

Mentions:

Bio:

Jack Berkowitz joined ADP in August 2018 as the Senior Vice President of Product Development for DataCloud, ADP's People Analytics and Compensation benchmarking solution. In addition, as the leader for the DataCloud team, Jack is responsible for ADP's vision and approach to Artificial Intelligence, and the development of Cloud-native machine learning solutions that span across ADP's HCM product suites. Jack came to ADP from Oracle, where he was Vice President, Products and Data Science for Oracle's Adaptive Intelligence program. Prior to Oracle, Jack spent 20 years in both product development and implementation of intelligent information systems, most recently involved in Web-scale search and recommendation systems, data driven applications, and the Semantic Web. Jack has a master's degree in industrial engineering and operations research from Virginia Tech, and a bachelor's degree in psychology from the College of William and Mary.

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