Bad News: Initial Jobless Claims Rise by 46k
According to the U.S. Department of Labor, the number of new initial jobless claims for state unemployment benefits filed in the week ending Oct. 13 was a seasonally adjusted 388,000, a 46,000 increase from the previous week. The median forecast of 49 economists, surveyed by Bloomberg, predicted a rise in claims to 365,000. Continuing claims, or those that account for people already receiving...
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5 Reasons for Post-Acceptance Job Rejections
With last month's unemployment rate at 7.8 percent, it doesn't seem likely that anyone in this economy would turn down a job offer, especially after already accepting the position. Yet, that is not the case. I've encountered many professionals (including those in prominent media outlets and Fortune 500 companies) who have advised me 1) you do not have to take the first job offer you receive...
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Tough Hiring Decision? Sleep on It!
Many hiring decisions can be more straight forward: you have a batch of candidates and one candidate is head and shoulders above the rest, no matter which way you cut it or change the relative weightings of the selection criteria. But, many decisions are much stickier than that: you have two or three candidates who are quite evenly matched, with each one coming out on top if you cut the...
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What Makes a Successful Community Manager
For much of the time that Talent Communities have been part of the industry lexicon, lots of folks have been arguing about whether or not they're actually a recruiting solution, what problems they really solve and which platforms give the best ROI. Heck, people will argue about whether or not we're defining talent community properly, or if one can even exist. It's the Unicorn of Recruiting, very...
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Government Mandates Biggest Obstacles to Healthcare Cost Reductions
In a HealthLeaders Media report, over one-quarter of U.S. healthcare executives said that government mandates are the biggest barriers to reducing healthcare costs in their organizations. Almost 90 percent said that they lacked the necessary data to even identify the opportunities for cost savings. Entitled Cost Containment: Targeting Cuts, Enhancing Efficiency and Using IT, the report found that...
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Towers Watson: 70 Percent of Large Companies Offer Only 401(k) to New Salaried Employees
A Towers Watson analysis found the number of large U.S. companies offering new salaried employees only a defined contribution (DC) plan has increased in 2012, as just 30 percent of large companies were found to offer a defined benefit (DB) pension to new hired salaried workers. The increasing trend began in 2010 when 63 of the Fortune 100 companies offered only a DC to new hires, which then rose...
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PeopleAnswers Unveils Mobile Employee Assessment App
The pre-employment selection software from PeopleAnswers is now available on the go. The new mobile app brings the functionality of PeopleAnswers to smartphones and tablets running on iOS or Android operating systems. The software automatically detects and directs users to the appropriate assessment test depending on the mobile device. "With today's fluctuating economy and growing...
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Wordflirt Offers Social Recruiting Makeover with New Content Site
A new website from Wordflirt Social Media has been launched to help recruiters and staffing agencies improve social media outreach and connect them to a larger market of applicants. The website, SocialForRecruiters.com, is a content-rich, content-based membership site that is undiluted by the posts and reposts of traditional social media sites. The new site's approach provides pre-written...
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Insperity, Inc. Launches Robust Payroll SaaS
Houston-based Insperity, Inc. announced the release of its new SaaS payroll solution, Insperity Payroll Services. Insperity Payroll Services is fully integrable with existing payroll systems and provides three new solutions including Insperity NetSaver, HR Essentials, and a pay-as-you go workers compensation program. NetSaver is a web-based 401(k) solution aimed at small businesses and HR...
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The National Safety Council's Guide to Distracted-Driving Company Policy
The Facts about Distracted Driving When it comes to distracted driving, The National Safety Council (NSC) estimates: Cognitively distracted drivers can miss up to 50 percent of their driving environment, including stop signs, pedestrians and red lights; Nearly 25 percent of all crashes involve drivers distracted by cell phones; Drivers talking on cell phones –handheld or...
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Economists Predict Languid Economy in 2013 despite Growth
In their Q3 2012 survey, the National Association for Business Economics (NABE) predicts low growth throughout 2013 and an unemployment rate that will rise back above 8 percent for at least the first half of next year. However, the housing market is performing better than expected and should allow the economy to avoid falling off of a "fiscal cliff." The surveyed economists foresee a rise in...
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U.S. Workers Not Confident in Ability to Choose Their Own Benefits Wisely
MetLife's Benefits Election Poll found that many workers either fail to change their choices or actively enroll during their annual benefits enrollment period as just 56 percent of eligible participants were found to feel very confident in their benefits choices. The poll also found that about 20 percent of workers who could have participated in enrollment during 2011 failed to and thus relied...
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New Customer Experience Management Solution Launched by PeriscopeIQ
A next generation customer experience management system has been unveiled by web-based customer and employee experience solutions provider PeriscopeIQ. PeriscopeCX helps drive sales through capturing customer feedback and transitioning it into actionable metrics. Its state of the art data analysis processes either eliminate or flag data points that are identified as suspicious in order to supply...
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Amazon, Wal-Mart and Target to Hire More than 50K Seasonal Workers
Mega online-retail giant Amazon.com plans to hire more than 50,000 seasonal workers at its fulfillment centers across the country in anticipation for the winter holiday season. The hiring numbers are slightly increased from how many seasonal employees the retailer hired in 2011. "Temporary associates play a critical role in meeting increased customer demand during the holiday season, and we...
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Recruiter Job Demand Remains Strong
According to a new survey by WANTED Analytics, there were over 14,000 jobs posted online in September for recruiters and other staffing professionals. The number represents a 12 percent growth over September 2011, but a substantially slower rate than the 29 percent rate measured in 2010. Despite the slowed growth, job ads for recruiters and staffing specialists are still stronger than...
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Senior Execs Expect Revolution in HR Metrics within Three Years
In its report, Rethinking Human Resources in a Changing World, professional services company KPMG found that more than 50 percent of polled senior executives said metrics that define HR success will be fundamentally altered within the next three years. The finding comes as HR has shown signs of difficulty in adapting to the challenges of flexible and global workforces. The report recommended...
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Four Largest US Manufacturers to Train Military Vets
Four of the country's largest manufacturers announced Monday that they would train military veterans to work in the manufacturing sector. General Electric Co., Alcoa Inc., Boeing Co. and Lockheed-Martin Corp all agreed to provide financial support for the "Get Skills to Work Coalition." The new program initially aims to train 15,000 veterans; the vets will either be hired by the four companies...
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Infographic: Social Media Used Extensively by Employers and Job Seekers
Social media use in the HR field has skyrocketed over the past few years. Not only are more employers using the technology, but many job seekers look to social networking sites when sending out resumes and applications. I applied for numerous positions as a senior in college and, to my surprise, the majority of companies had an "apply with LinkedIn" feature. I saw this so much I began moving...
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Your Talent Database: A Coal Mine or a Gold Mine?
Would you consider your candidate database a coal mine or a gold mine? Are you missing out on candidates when you search your database? Have you lost a placement to a competitor because the candidate did not appear in your search results? Have you learned the hard way by spending way too much time creating and then deleting a record after you've found it to be a duplicate record? The...
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What Happens to Your Online Application?
Let's say you just found a great job online that fits your skill set. You follow the website's instructions, and you submit your application and resume online. After you click the final "Submit," button, you sit and wait for something to happen. So what really happens to your online job application? Your profile enters a website portal or applicant tracking system such as iCIMS, where...
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Target-Date Funds Misused by Half of Plan Sponsors
A survey by AllianceBernstein L.P. shows that only about half of plan sponsors are using Target-Date Funds (TDFs) as their default even though over half offer them in their contribution plans. This ineffective use of TDFs comes at a time when usage and satisfaction with TDFs continues to grow despite unimpressive stock market performance. "Even in the wake of a continuing decline of Social...
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Candidates Use of Mobile for Job Search Increases
As reported in an interview between leading online recruitment marketing firm Web Based Recruitment and Google's Head of Industry for Recruitment Emma Frazer, Google has found that about 20 percent of job seekers have switched their search habits to a mobile device. "Job seekers want to be able to search for a job anytime, anyplace, anywhere and not just via a desktop anymore" said Mike...
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A Very Chinese Career Goal
In the three years I lived in mainland China, I never met even one Chinese college or university student who didn't say that chief (indeed, usually first) among career ambitions was the desire and the duty to repay parents for their devotion and sacrifices (which were considerable for the impoverished rural families many of these students came from). Duty and desire to repay parents? When...
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Feedback? Get some.
The things that drive change across an organization are myriad and can practically be recited in rote form, but one thing that slips to the bottom of the list (and sometimes gets left off altogether) is feedback. There are good reasons for this as talent management, as a discipline, is growing accountable for more items almost daily and feedback, while a nice idea, can't really be tied to...
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Avoiding a "One Size Fits All' Resume
We've all seen them: shirts, pants, dresses and hats boasting the promise that "one size fits all." The more people a product relates to, the more who will be inclined to buy it, right? Yet, I wonder how true this concept is in the job world. Various resume templates exist and most people use them as a starting point. Your resume's setup or layout may be similar to the next...
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One-Fifth of Workers Do Not Expect to Benefit from Economic Recovery
A new labor market analysis from research company GfK suggests that, while almost half of American adults expect the economy to continue to improve over the next year, over one-fifth of them do not expect to benefit from the increase economic prosperity. Of this group of economic pessimists, 76 percent are of working age with 34 percent within the 30 to 49 year old sector. The group is aware...
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UMB Healthcare Launches HSA Management Tool
UMB Healthcare Services has announced the launch of its UMB Business Partner Portal as an online tool for brokers, agents, and consultants in serving their clients. The portal includes a dashboard view of account information, data analysis, and reporting functionality that allows business partners to customize each employer's HAS program. "The portal has an intuitive design that provides...
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Three New Apps Introduced for Oracle's PeopleSoft Suite
Oracle has unveiled three new mobile applications as part of its popular HR platform and financial management suite, PeopleSoft. The new PeopleSoft applications, called Mobile Expenses, Mobile Approvals, and Mobile Company Directory, grant access to data on desktops and all mobile platforms. The solutions do not require additional downloads as they are all based on HTML5 and CSS3, allowing...
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Would You Hire Big Bird?
Could Big Bird soon be joining the unemployment line? After the first presidential debate, the name on everyone's lips didn't belong to either candidate but to a giant yellow bird who has spent his career teaching children. After Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney vowed to cut funding for Sesame Street home PBS, while name-dropping Big Bird, America's favorite giant bird seems...
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Five Questions To Prime Your Candidate Before Extending an Offer
The offer process can be a make or break part of the hiring process. It can certainly be a nervy part of the process, particularly for the candidates, but especially for the employer. Of course the candidate is in nervous anticipation of an offer, but the employer is in the process of trying to close the deal and, ironically, will soon have to transfer some of their power in the hiring process to...
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Infographic: 10 Things We Love (and Hate) About HR
Netbase, social media and web-based analysis company, and SAP, business management software, solutions, services provider, just released an infographic, "10 Things We Love (and Hate) About HR," detailing the more than 315,000 online conversations about HR over the past year. Most of the collected data came from blogs, forums, Twitter and Facebook. The most conversations came from the following...
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Job Dissatisfaction, Not Bad Management, is Main Cause for Resignations
A survey of more than 11,000 respondents from 40 organizations found that the idea that most employee resign due to poor management may be a myth. The real culprit appears to be job dissatisfaction resulting from a lack of training, motivation, and sufficient challenge. The survey, released by Insync, also found that businesses can save nearly $300,000 per year by reducing turnover to 5 percent...
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Objectiveli Releases Automated Goals and Objectives Management System for SMBs
Targeting small and medium-sized business, who compose over half of the American workforce, Objectiveli's new enterprise performance management application promises management of both employee and company goals and objectives to improve productivity and add value. The application aids users to set company-wide goals using an integrated goals and object management system making it possible to...
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PSCA Reports Company Retirement Contributions Returning to Higher Levels
In its 55th Annual Survey of Profit Sharing and 401(k) Plans, the Plan Sponsor Council of America (PSCA) found that more companies are contributing to their plans and at higher rates than at any point over the past several years. The survey found that the number of companies making matching contributions rose from 91 percent in 2010 to 95.5 percent in 2011. Of particular note is that small...
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How Recruiters can Change the World With $1,500
I read a blog post a couple of years ago that was the most interesting blog post idea I've ever read. Two years later still no one has seriously made it happen. What was it? Well it was a pretty simple idea: create a website where any employer can post their vacancies and any job seeker could post their career history for an employer to find ........... free. No one pays anything. It's...
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How to Hire Engaged Employees
Employee engagement seems to be the buzz phrase these days. But what is employee engagement and how recruiters and hiring managers identify it in the hiring process? There are many definitions of what employee engagement is, but I think the most workable definition is the following: the emotional commitment of an employee to a company's goals as evidenced by the employee's contributions...
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Why Mobile Recruiting is Actually a Thing
When mobile recruiting started being something people blogged about, it seemed like a long shot. Networks were slow and spotty, applications were tedious and long and online profiles had little to no standardization. Responsive Design as a web development standard wasn't even part of the lexicon. Mobile Recruiting was something that only die-hards believed in and only large companies and vendors...
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Discussing Politics at Work: 6 Do's and Don'ts
The presidential debate was last week; the vice presidential debate is this Thursday; and the presidential election is next month. Most often, anything presidential equals politics, especially when it comes to our nation. On TV, in the magazines, even on street signs in your neighbor's yard: The discussion of politics is everywhere. Yet, what about in the workplace? Politics can be touchy,...
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Recruitment Training: The "Big Biller" Recruiting Summit
In two weeks, recruiting personnel will have the opportunity to hear from 15 different leading recruiting professionals from all over the world—and it's all for free. The Big Biller Summit will take place Oct. 23-26 where people can listen remotely to 15 industry experts via Internet or over the phone free of charge. The Summit joins some of the best known speakers from all over the globe,...
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Boomers Share Pessimism of the Future, Despite Partisan Differences
In Allianz Life's 2012 Retirement and Politics Survey, two-thirds of the so-called transition boomers (pre-retiree Baby Boomers) said that they expect their retirement costs to be most affected by rising health care expenses. Broken down by political party affiliation, 64 percent of Republicans, 69 percent of Democrats, and 66 percent of Independents said the ever increasing cost of healthcare...
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Workplace Use of Social Media Becoming Increasingly Difficult to Stop
The new Social Media and Workplace 2012 Report released by SilkRoad found that approximately 75 percent of all employees are accessing social media from their personal devices at least once per day while 60 percent admit to checking their social media profiles multiple times every day. However, just 43 percent of the same respondents were employed by companies that even allow social media...
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Are We All Perpetual Job Hunters?
A new study by CareerBuilder and Inavero shows that access to the wealth of digital job-seeking resources has transformed workers into perpetual job hunters. Nearly 70 percent of full-time workers reported that their regular routine includes seeking out new job opportunities. About 30 percent of respondents said searching for jobs was a weekly activity. In what may be an indication as to why so...
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Number of August Job Openings Takes a Dive
The U.S. Department of Labor has said that job openings dropped in August from 3.88 million in July to 3.56 million. Employers also advertised few jobs over the month but filled the highest number of positions in the past three months. Since the recession officially ended in 2009, available jobs have risen more than 60 percent, but continues to trail job numbers seen before the recession, which...
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New HR Tech Trends
Every year, HR Professionals, marketers, recruiters, vendors, analysts and media professionals converge on one building, filled to the brim with everything HR technology. This year the HR Technology Conference was in Chicago and was the largest conference yet. So what were the hot HR software and tech trends of 2012? Personalized Automation- Sounds like an oxymoron right? Actually, it's the...
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Is your Interview Process Way Too Long?
Landing a job can sometimes be a long process. You have to apply and sometimes take 30-45 minute assessments or writing tests before even receiving a phone call. Then, if you are called, you may have to go through multiple interviews. One or two over the phone, then face-to-face, then wait a week and meet with hiring managers again. Exactly how many are too many interviews? Most companies...
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Small Business Hiring Falls
According to September's CBIZ Small Business Employment Index, hiring for small businesses fell by 2.55 percent in the last month following a 1.15 percent uptick in August. The fall, which more than doubles the previous month's gain, is the third largest in the history of the report. The CBIZ Index keeps track of hiring trends for companies with no more than 300 employees. "The CBIZ...
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New Social Business App Augments Corporate Social Learning
A new offering from NewsGator supports the creation of a corporate learning culture through social learning. Offered for NewsGator's Social Sites solution, the new tool, called Enrich, helps companies to create adaptive workforces using a more natural approach to learning in a social environment. Enrich focuses on "in-the-moment" social learning between coworkers that has been shown to...
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WorkSimple Offers Visual Social Performance Management Review System
WorkSimple announced the release of Results-Driven Reviews, a first-of-its-kind tool that automates the performance-review creation process while combining social recognition and feedback with actionable insights to help improve employee performance levels. The system relies on the Social Performance suite of business apps that helps improve employee engagement through feedback and recognition....
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