Lalith is the founder of TalenTeck and a Professor of Economics at Barnard College and the School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University in New York City. He has spent his twenty years in academia focused on the theoretical and practical foundations of human capital theory and matching in labor markets. His primary questions are: “How do various human capital attributes – such as experience, training, mobility, expectations, networks, time preference, and gender – and search theory affect the dynamics of productivity, compensation and turnover?” His published papers on these questions have appeared in the Journal of Labor Economics, Labour Economics, and Eastern Economic Journal. He has also extended his research beyond labor economics to technological progress and climate change, publishing papers in the Journal of Political Economy, Climatic Change, and Journal of Climate.
Lalith has put his labor research into practice, throughout a long career in industry. He worked on several consulting projects in human capital strategy with Mitchell Madison Inc., William M. Mercer Inc., IntelliRisk Management Corp., and the World Bank, and wrote several white papers, successfully transforming his academic interests into viable industry applications. At Barnard, he led an in-depth analysis of the gender gap in faculty tenure rates, and quantified the drivers of college applicant outcomes – who applies, who is admitted, who accepts, and who becomes top academic performers – as a part of a redesign of the financial aid program.
He was also the head of analytics at iQor Inc., a financial services company, where he extended his human capital expertise further, constructing and implementing a suite of human capital products related to turnover, performance, compensation, recruiting, and staffing. He also expanded his work in general analytics, synthesizing theories from labor economics, industrial engineering/operations, machine learning, mathematical queuing theory, among others, to develop and implement consumer matching algorithms, consumer contact and liquidity models, worker scheduling, and call-center dialer algorithms.
In 2014, Lalith founded a boutique human capital analytics firm, TalenTeck, which provides data-driven, analytic solutions to a variety of talent management challenges, including employee retention, optimal team composition, compensation alignment, recruitment, and selection. In many ways a culminating project, Lalith has assembled a team of former students, coworkers, and co-authors, grounding TalenTeck’s work in robust research and its business applications. In turn, this cross-disciplinary environment drives cutting edge academic research on today’s challenges in the workplace. Synthesizing Lalith’s experience in academia and industry, TalenTeck provides at-scale analytic tools that form the foundation of a strategic HR.
Lalith received a B.A. in Philosophy from Princeton University, M.A in Economics from Cambridge University, and a Ph.D. in Economics from Columbia University.
Kate leads product development at TalenTeck, alongside a team of top academic researchers and technologists. She has several years’ experience working with clients to lead projects, providing data-driven solutions to their workforce management challenges, including analyses focused on employee retention and productivity, interviews, and quantifying financial impact of changing workforce dynamics.
She integrates experience from client projects and labor economic theories to continue expanding the suite of TalenTeck’s HR analytic products, always with the goal to design and build scalable analytic tools that address concrete business problems.
She graduated summa cum laude and as a member of Phi Beta Kappa with a B.A. in Mathematics from Barnard College, Columbia University, with advanced coursework in economics and machine learning.
