I am reminded of the HR department of a group that shall remain nameless that had a metric for "# of days between job requisition opening and hire". Hovering around 60, they had a goal to reduce that # to 45 the next year. Method of success: closing all job requisitions after 45 days and reopening them.
Way to go, guys! 
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>> At Goodwill, I used to question why we were so focused on job placement numbers and lousy on retention. If the mission is to change lives, then getting someone a job is an output or milestone, but not a full measure of the mission's effectiveness. I hope you'll rise up a bit from the data level and have some discussion simply about the all too frequent danger of letting what data you can track, or have traditionally tracked, define your organizational metrics. The metric set should flow directly from the mission statement down. Too often, we let our data systems have the first cut at telling us what it is that we should track.>>
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