The Shockingly Complex Example of Tenure

If you are an HR leader, you likely have access to both your current and former employees’ data records. Suppose you simply want to measure the tenure of both. In the case of current employees, you can simply create an attribute that counts the number of months or years the person has been employed. This is easily done by subtracting the original date of hire from today’s date.

But what about the former employees? You can probably do this pretty easily too, by subtracting their original date of hire from their date of termination. By doing so, you now would know both the tenure of your current employees, as well as your former employees.

This seems rather straightforward, but the section title suggests this may not be as simple as it sounds. For example, what if the employee has left and come back - is his tenure based on the original hire date or his most recent hire date?

What if the data has some sort of weird anomaly...