Saba Launches New Saba Workday Connector
Learning and talent management systems provider Saba just announced its latest software, Saba Workday Connector, which allows the company to leverage key workforce data from Workday Human Capital Management (HCM) providing more effective employee development and training monitoring. The two-way connector, which is built on Enterprise Service Bus (ESB), allows easy cloud-to-cloud integration...
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5 Ways to Spin Your Next Team Meeting
What is the number one thing any worker is bound to experience in his or her professional life? Meetings. And the higher up the 'pay grade' ladder you go, the more frequent they become. I don't know anyone who looks forward to their weekly team or department meeting, especially the ones held on the dreaded Monday morning. Let's be honest, most meetings can become boring and redundant,...
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4 Steps to Ensure Long-Term Workers
Every company wants employees who are committed. When a worker is committed to a job, it will show through his or her work. Committed workers care about the company overall, not just themselves or their paychecks. This could mean working longer hours or over the weekends to ensure a project is completed. Or taking on several tasks at once when other team members are absent to ensure the...
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Marketing Lessons for Hiring Managers from the Presidential Campaigns
Who knows marketing better than those who ran the presidential campaigns? During election season, it was hard to miss the candidates everywhere you went. When one wrong move can cost you the election, effective marketing becomes extremely important. Effective marketing strategies are no less important for companies looking to hire the best people, even if the whole country is not watching your...
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HR and Social Media [infographic]
By now we all know the value of social media for businesses, right? Well, according to an infographic from SilkRoad, HR Must Embrace Social Media, 75 percent of companies feel like they are behind the curve when it comes to using internal and external social networking technology. The infographic's data comes from the SilkRoad TalentTalk Report State of Social Technology and Talent...
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November Kronos Retail Labor Index Highest Reading Since August 2008
Leading workforce management provider Kronos Inc. just released the November Kronos® Retail Labor Index™, a family of metrics and indices that characterize the current state of the demand and supply sides of the labor market within the U.S. retail sector. The Labor Index rose three-tenths in October 2012 to 4.8 percent, the highest reading since August 2008. The November report contains...
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The Perfect Employee: Like a Chinese Truck?
If you had to imagine creating the perfect employee, in this age of advanced robotics, you might imagine a tireless, multitasking, uncomplaining, absolutely dependable, sleek stainless steel humanoid robot. But, a primitive truck that looks like a camping generator on wheels? The "Drag Pull Machine" as a Perfect Employee The impact on me of seeing one of these ungainly workhorse Chinese...
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Job Hunting for Culture Fit
What is corporate culture? Corporate culture describes the atmosphere and mix of people who work at a particular company. The corporate culture at a high achieving accounting firm may be strict and formal. Working hours might be longer than usual, the employees may comprise of mostly workaholics, and the atmosphere will probably feel intense. On the other hand, a start-up social media company may...
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Employee Engagement Tips with Deirdre Maloney
Your success or your failure rests in your employees, a statement Deirdre Maloney makes confidently. As a speaker, author and nonprofit business consultant, Maloney knows the true key to a company's success, and, for the past 11 years, she has witnessed the power of leadership and engaging employees. Maloney is the president of Momentum, a consulting firm that helps nonprofits with business...
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CFOs Pessimistic About Short-Term Economic Improvement
A survey by Grant Thornton LLP revealed that 54 percent of American CFOs believe that the country's economic health will not improve over the next six months. However, most CFOs are optimistic of maintaining (45 percent) or increasing their staff sizes (37 percent) within that period. According to survey respondents, the biggest obstacle to financial growth is the cost of employee benefits...
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Job Seekers: Criminal Records Easier Hires Than Extended Unemployment
A survey conducted by social media recruiting solution Bullhorn Reach found that workers with an extended period of unemployment (at least two years) have a more difficult time getting hired than people with criminal records. The study focused on identifying common barriers to employment and tasked recruiters with ranking the most prevalent causes of an inability to find employment. The results...
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Baby Boomer Retirement Woes Push Younger Workers to Save
In what could be considered a form of silver lining of the recent recession, a report by the Vanguard Group found that a growing population of young employees is joining a 401(k) plan. According to the report, of employees under 25 years of age in 2011, 44 percent participated in an employer-sponsored 401(k) plan compared to 27 percent in 2003. Workers aged 25 to 34 participated in 401(k) plans...
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Study: Political Discussion at Work Strengthens Employee Satisfaction
According to a recent study of couples on the work-and-home-life impact of political discussions in the office, talking politics at work can actually strengthen a worker's job satisfaction and his or her commitment to the organization. These benefits are only if the discussion is "an exchange of perspectives" with "give and take," as opposed to "political pressuring" to agree with a...
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Job Loyalty Is Dying; Is It Time to Embrace Labor Flexibility?
In a stimulating thought leadership infographic by Jobvite, they explored the idea of a new job relationship dynamic which is beginning to permeate the work-place and candidate market-place. They suggest that employees are becoming more like entrepreneurs than employees, who are ready and willing to change companies or roles in order to achieve career growth. They cite some compelling supporting...
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Four Steps to Enhance your Employer Brand with Job Seekers
When it comes to an organization's employment brand, companies typically fall into one of 4 categories: 1.) The known: Employees understand and embrace the company culture, and job seekers are also familiar with that culture. 2.) The undiscovered: Employees understand and embrace the company culture but job seekers are unfamiliar with that culture. 3.) The market-defined: Job seekers...
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KPMG Finds HR Losing Ability to Show Value to Their Business
New research from tax and advisory firm KPMG LLP found a heightening skepticism among C-suite executives toward the effectiveness of the current HR function. Of the 400+ senior executives surveyed for the report, just 17 percent said HR does a good job demonstrating its own value. Only 15 percent said their HR departments offered insightful and predictive workforce analytics. "Data analytics...
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Small Business Hiring and Wages Stay Down
SurePayroll Inc., a leading nationwide online payroll provider to small businesses, has released the results of its SurePayroll Small Business Scorecard, which revealed that hiring was down 0.1 percent and the average paycheck was down 0.2 percent from August to September 2012. However, the level of optimism of small business owners rose to 68 percent, where it has been most of the...
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Brosix Releases Instant Messenger with Push Notification for iPhone
All-in-one enterprise instant messenger application Brosix has been released for the Apple iDevices. The newest iteration of the program, version 1.6, also includes push notifications which alert Brosix Instant Messenger users of content updates, messages, and other custom events. The app also saves battery life by sending push notifications without the need for the program to run in the...
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Should Company Outings be Mandatory?
Company culture is one of the most important aspects of any organization, especially when it comes to its employees. The atmosphere of the workplace can positively or negatively affect a worker's performance. If managers and supervisors are approachable, make employees feel valuable and like they belong, workers will be happier in the office. Disgruntled managers, harshness and cold or...
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Passive, Active... Pactive? Let's Call the Whole Thing Recruiting
It's an easy debate to have, the passive vs active candidate debate. It goes a little something like this: Experienced recruiter patiently explains that the reason a candidate is passive is because they already have a job and aren't really looking for another one. This makes them attractive to recruiters and hiring managers in several ways: 1. They are employed therefore they are...
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The Fear Factor: The Fascination with Scary News (Even after Halloween)
Which mainstream news headlines grab your attention first: Scary, alarmist news, or inspiring/neutral stories? What about recruitment related headlines? In mass-media news reporting, frightening and depressing news seems to grab our attention—and more of it, along with more space, than uplifting news. Is that because of some human instinct, the Zeitgeist of our age of anxiety, a ruling-elite...
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1, 2, 3... Great Job Reports!
Statistics are like mirrors in a high end boutique. They can sometimes be tilted to trick the observer into believing what they'd like to believe. However, in the past few weeks, I've been hearing from staffing agencies, HR Technology vendors and analysts alike that hiring is up. Pairing anecdotal evidence from across the country and the globe with verified statistics, while not foolproof, does...
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4 More Ways To Future Proof Your HR Career
In my recent article: 4 Easy Ways To Future Proof Your HR Career, I outlined how the HR landscape was set to change and that HR professionals needed to, amongst other things, become Career Agile and Technology Fluent as these are and will be two crucial personal differentiators in the HR candidate marketplace. In this article, I outline four more important, but slightly more challenging ways...
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Nearly All Large Cities Experience Dropping Unemployment Rates in September
Job gains appear to be widespread as 95 percent of large U.S. cities saw jobless rates fall in September. All told, the U.S. Labor Department reported declining unemployment rates in 355 of 372 major metropolitan areas, the most since April. Almost half of these areas also have unemployment rates below 7 percent while those with rates above 10 percent fell to 35, down from 84 in September...
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HR Lack of Engagement Strategies Harm Customer Experience Management
According to a study by the Temkin Group, most HR departments are not helping their companies with customer experience management (CEM), indicating a lack of employee engagement strategies which heavily contribute to outstanding customer experiences. The survey found that while most HR pros acknowledge the importance of customer experience management and that employee engagement is a key...
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SkyPrep Offers SaaS Learning Management System
SkyPrep has announced the launch of its online training and LMS system for small-to-medium sized businesses designed to help train and certify employees via a SaaS platform. Users can add, index, and organize their content, design custom tests, and develop course material unique to their individual needs. Added reporting tools helps track progress by individual, group, or course. "This a...
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Employers Experience Slow-Hire Fatigue while Presenteeism Skyrockets
The latest StressPulse survey by ComPsych Corp. has shown that presenteeism, the phenomenon of employees working while sick leading to decreased productivity, has risen to 22 percent. Other findings uncovered in the survey include: • Workers who find being present at work their top priority (presenteeism) rose 3 percentage points in 2012 to 22 percent. • Over one-third of employees lost...
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Retirement Security of Millions Imperiled by 401(k) Plan Fees
According to The Week Magazine, participants in 401(k) plans pay approximately $164 in daily fees to the financial services industry, and most don't even know what they are paying for. But the new Department of Labor regulations requiring the disclosure of all fees and expenses for 401(k) plans can potentially save millions of dollars for 401(k) investors. "The mutual fund industry has...
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First Day Jitters? Here's What Your Company Expects From You on Your First Day
The first day of a new job can engender a multitude of emotions ranging from excitement to nerve-wracking anxiety. One of the big sources of anxiety comes from the lack of control over the unknown. What will your boss expect from you on your first day on the job? The fortunate answer to this question is "not much." That's right, Day 1 expectations are pretty low, but you will be expected to...
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Health Companies International Offer North American Bosses' Scorecard
New research from consulting firm Healthy Companies International presented a range of scores for bosses around North America. In its report card of sorts, supervisors were rated highly regarding ethics but only average on issues of employee motivation and even handedness. Approximately 2,700 employees were surveyed and asked "How do you rate your boss's performance?" The rundown of the...
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Q4 Employee Confidence Index Starts High
In its October Employee Confidence Index, Randstad reports that the confidence level of employees has increased by 1.9 points over September to 54.3 percent. The Index has risen for two consecutive months indicating more positive feelings toward the state of the economy, job market, and future employ-ability. "We're seeing a positive increase in employee attitudes about the economy and their...
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American Opinion on Health Reform Shaped Along Party Lines
A poll of more than 2,500 adults from Harris Interactive/HealthDay found that views on the Affordable Care Act fall along political party lines. Coming about a week before Election Day, 31 percent of poll respondents said that they want the law repealed in its entirety, 27 percent want to keep the reform law in its entirety, and 22 percent want only parts of it to remain in force. Unsurprisingly,...
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People Management Finds Widespread HR Bias against Men and Overweight Women
According to a survey released by People Management, about half of HR professionals are biased against overweight women while nearly 40 percent are biased against men. The specialty bias tests conducted on survey participants assessed associations of gender and competence and found that 37 percent of respondents revealed a negative male bias where only 1 percent showed a prejudice against women....
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Employers to Create Free, Branded Career Sites with Zao
Employee referral management platform Zao.com has announced the availability of a new product that allows companies to create free career websites with a built-in rewards component. Zao offers free website hosting and the ability for employers to brand their website with logos, images, and videos that can be uploaded from video-sharing platforms like YouTube. Jobs can be added and referral...
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4 Easy Ways To Future Proof Your HR Career
A survey by Mintel of over 2,000 workers found that one third of workers stay in a job for less than two years, which cements the idea that a job for life is now a thing of the past. The survey found that people were prepared to change jobs more often these days to further their careers while many were being made redundant, which is unsurprising in the current climate. Another more recent...
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Does it Really Take Two? Reasons for a Second Job
For most people, finances are an everyday concern. The need for money is everywhere: groceries, rent, child care, utilities, taxes. Everything has a price (expect the best things in life) meaning your life will always consist of you paying for something. And with the rough economy and high costs of living, it's becoming harder and harder for most Americans to make ends meet and/or to...
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List of Top Recruiter Turnoffs Shows Reasons Candidates are Rejected
In a new survey from leading online recruiting and staffing software provider Bullhorn has identified the top five reasons recruiters turn away job candidates. The number one turnoff, reported by 30 percent of recruiters, were those candidates applying for jobs for which they are obviously not qualified; over 40 percent of these recruiters indicated that they would blacklist these candidates,...
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An Overlooked Ingredient: Discovering Corporate Culture Before Accepting the Job
A job interview may be about the employer and what that company wants, but that doesn't mean you, as an interviewee, can't do some probing of your own in order to make the best decision when choosing among job offers. No matter how attractive a position may appear on paper, if your values and personality don't mesh with the corporate culture, you'll either go for years working in a job...
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Economic Growth Still Remains Modest
In Q3 2012, the U.S. economy grew at a faster, but still modest, annual rate of 2 percent spurred by improved consumer spending and the federal government. Despite the 0.7 percent increase over Q2, the economy remains too weak to create the jobs necessary to lower the unemployment rate. The annual growth rate of 1.74 percent over the first nine months of 2012 is slightly lower than the 1.8...
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HR Departments Become More Strategic
A survey by the Institute for Corporate Productivity found that the role of HR departments is becoming more strategic with two-thirds of companies expecting to centralize administrative processes in order for HR to focus more time on increasing corporate productivity. "The future of HR is all about making the organization better," said Jay Jamrog, senior vice president at I4CP. "If you're...
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New Tool Helps Plan Sponsors Offer Better Service Provider Support
A new tool for financial professionals to help retirement plan sponsors develop an optimal mix of service provider support was announced by The Guardian Insurance Annuity Company, Inc. Dubbed The Resource Optimizer, the tool aids in the determination of plan risks, employer needs, and the opportunity costs of each retirement plan. "Fee disclosure, a changing regulatory landscape and...
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Unemployment Apps Fall during October's Third Week Signifying Modest Hiring
The Department of Labor reported that applications for unemployment benefits fell by 23,000 last week, bringing the four-week average down to 368,000. The updated statistics seem to have become more stable after problems with seasonal adjustments over the prior two weeks. For reference, when jobless claims fall below 375,000 it suggests that hiring is strong enough to lower the rate of...
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Workplace Tensions Rise as Political Discussions Propagate Through Offices Nationwide
A new survey by Fierce, Inc., has found that over 78 percent of employees think that political discussions in the workplace are detrimental to professional relationships, leading to increased tension among coworkers. Over one-quarter of these respondents feel that these conversations can either temporarily or even permanently harm work relationships. However, about 80.4 percent of survey...
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Employer-Sponsored Healthcare not Currently Impacted by Reform Law
At least for the next few years, employer-sponsored health plans are not expected to disappear. According to a survey from the Midwest Business Group on Health, employers are expecting business as usual despite the passage of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA). Though there is much debate over the impact of the law in the medium and long terms. "Employers still believe...
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Workers' Biggest Workplace Fear: Making a Job-Related Mistake
The most common fear expressed by employees in an Accountemps survey was making a mistake in the workplace, reported by 28 percent of respondents. When answering the question, "Which one of the following is your greatest workplace fear?" the survey revealed the following breakdown: • Errors on the job – 28 percent • Dealing with difficult customers or clients – 18 percent •...
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How to Turn Rejected Candidates into a Valuable Future Talent Stream
We all know in our hearts that it is important to treat candidates well; they invest their time and energy into applying to our businesses and they can quite reasonably expect a high quality and responsive candidate experience in return. But as well as the niceties, there are also sound business reasons that employers should manage the candidate experience well, that is that your business may...
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When You Want to Quit Your Job
Who hasn't thought about quitting your job at some point? Maybe you've realized the position just isn't you. Or perhaps you're growing bored with doing the same tasks over and over each day. According to a survey from the U.S. Department of Labor, the 2012 quits rate, a government term for workers who leave a job on their own, rose to 2.1 million. That is 300,000 above the 1.8 million...
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Score.org Partners With Paychex to Educate Small Businesses
Expert business counseling company SCORE recently partnered with Paychex, leader in payroll, HR and benefits outsourcing. Together the two will educate small business owners about the payroll and HR mistakes that may cost small businesses money. SCORE and Paychex plan to kick off their partnership with a "How to Avoid 10 Payroll Mistakes That Cost Businesses Money" webinar on Nov. 7. Topics...
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