June 28. 2010 NECN interview with Kronos CEO Aron Ain

Commentary by Timothy Horrigan; July 2, 2010

This is a three part interview with Aron Ain, CEO of Kronos. He started with the company when it was a small family-owned maker of automated time clocks, and he led it through its emergence as a public company which was recently taken private again. (He says Wall Street undervalued the company's shares.)

Part 2 is probably of most interest to you, assuming you came here from my Unicru test answer-key page. The Unicru test is part of a suite of recruitment products. Since the Unicru test is mostly used by retail customers, Kronos was able not long ago to roll out a Kronos Retail Labor Index. This uses data from Unicru applications to estimate retail hiring (and hence the overall strength of the retail sector.) In the mid-oughties about 7% of all retail job applications resulted in a hire: today less than half that many applicants are hired. (Ain apparently gets the number wrong in this interview by an order of magnitude: he says 7 out of 1000 used to get hired, while the actual report says that 7%— 7 out of 100— getting hired.)

Each section is courtesy of New England Cable News (NECN) and will be preceded by a 15 second commercial. These three videos were the June 28, 2010 edition of CEO Corner , hosted by Peter Howe.

Part 1:

Original URL:

"In this segment, Ain explains what work force optimization and management are, and how it has evolved over the years."



Part 2:

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"In this segment, Ain explains the Kronos Retail Labor Index, and what can learned about the economy from Kronos products." (e.g., the Unicru personality test.)



Part 3:

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"In this segment, Ain talks about how he worked his way up become CEO of Kronos."

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