HR Gets Poor Performance Grade from Business Execs
According The Hackett Group's report, Cracks in the Foundation: Closing the Critical Skills Gap Undermining Business Capabilities, business leaders are only satisfied with the talent support they receive from HR only about one-third of the time. Respondents included around 150 large companies and reported to being either dissatisfied or very dissatisfied with HR business services support...
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Study: Young Workers and Voluntary Benefits
A recent study by MetLife has found that members of the small-business workforce, especially younger workers, have experienced a weakening in their personal finances and are looking to their employers to offer assistance. Half of 20- and 30-somethings polled said that they were looking to employee benefits to fill the financial gaps created by the slow economy. Fortunately, that help can be made...
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Managers and Office Workers Confused Over Company Safety Plans
HR managers who are responsible for health and safety - listen up. Staples is reporting a big gap in employee awareness of safety plans and preparedness, which could foretell a rise in accidents and injuries. Its survey found that managers were much better informed on such issues than office workers, in general. Most non-management employees were unsure about their company's safety plan and how...
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How to Select Remote Employees (Part 1)
We know that telecommuting is a growing phenomenon; in fact Forrester Research has predicted that by 2016, about half the workforce may be telecommuting or at least occasionally telecommuting, that is working from home between one and four days a week. This move towards telecommuting will bring benefits to both employers and employees, for example surveys show that employees can be 10-20% more...
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Knowledge Ain't What It Used to Be: Professionals as Guardians of 'Knowledge-Cool'
"Wow, you know a lot!" When was the last time you heard anyone say that? When was the last time you said it or thought it? Probably not since the astronomical growth of the Internet and of information storage capacity measured in terabytes. Now, even the tone of that praise sounds quaint, even archaic, like "Gosh, Mary, I think you're a swell gal!", stammered by a shy,...
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Are You Using a Job Description 2.0?
Now, we all know the basics about preparing a good external job description, e.g. job title, job description and person specification – and we must get these things right if a job description is going to stand even half a chance of achieving its objective, which is to entice quality candidates to make that job application. However, the candidate market has become so competitive for niche and...
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There's a Belief Gap about the Wage Gap, Part 3
Last week, we posted the first two parts of this series, titled There's a Belief Gap about the Wage Gap. In Part 1, we took a look at common misconceptions like different fields of study, motherhood as a cause and educational differences. In Part 2, we examined cultural confusions like negotiation tactics and the so-called "danger premium". We also referenced studies that controlled for all of...
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Data Released on How Employers are Using Wellness Programs
The 2012 Wellness Benefits Administration Benchmarking Study released by bswift and the Employee Benefit News has shown that employers in 2012 are seeking to change employee behavior through wellness programs to lower healthcare costs while benefiting from automation tools for cost savings thanks to improved operational efficiency. However, many companies, both large and small, have yet to fully...
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Human Patterns Assessment Website to Offer Information to Test Takers, Administrators
The sole licensee of the Human Patterns assessment, Hirease, Inc., has announced the launch of a revamped and more user-friendly version of its informational website. The information platform provides both test takers and administrators access to information on the 250-question Human Patterns assessment. The site offers administrators information regarding the application of the assessment within...
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Facebook Isn't the Worst Time Waster
A nationwide survey sponsored by TrackVia has determined that employers wishing to increase employee productivity should first focus on upgrading their computer systems before banning Facebook. The survey found that both computer glitches and idle chatting outpaced social media websites as the top time wasters in the workplace recording 11 percent, 14 percent, and 5 percent, respectively....
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There's a Belief Gap about the Wage Gap, Part 2
I've written a little bit here on Recruiter.com about the wage gap. After I wrote Women Are Saying Goodbye, I realized that there are many in the workforce who don't believe that a wage gap exists and if it does, many of these same people agree (quite respectfully and with some reliable reports) that it is, at least in part, due to women's own choices and inability to negotiate for more. This...
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There's a Belief Gap about the Wage Gap, Part 1
Well, I've written about this before and received quite a lot of feedback. You guessed it, the wage gap between men, women and now it seems there's an ever widening "belief gap" regarding the wage gap. And while there are lots of news outlets that would have you believe that it's just cavemen dwellers who don't believe in a wage gap (despite countless studies that prove it exists), it's not....
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The Gap Between Student Education and Successful Employment
The hope for every college graduate is that they will find employment. Beyond that, they hope to find employment in their field of study in school. Their hope continues to expand to finding a sustainable job, with a company where they can stay and enjoy a career. These are students who are not going on the graduate school or some other type of additional education although even the graduate...
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Optimizing Your LinkedIn Profile For Recruiters (Part 2)
This is the second half of the article on making an effective LinkedIn profile. The first part, Optimizing Your LinkedIn Profile for Recruiters (Part 1) starts out by providing some tips on how to optimize your LinkedIn Profile for employment purposes. Used right, LinkedIn profiles can give you great visibility in your industry and afford terrific networking opportunities. 7. Make your public...
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Do You Know what your Telecommuting Employees are up to?
With the amount of money saved on physical plan and utilities costs, it makes sense for many employers to offer telecommuting opportunities to certain workers. But the number one downfall (from the employer's perspective) is that there is no direct supervision of what people are actually doing while on the clock. The following is a list of data obtained by a survey from OnlineDegrees.com and...
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HireRight Wins Award for Innovation, Introduces New Personalized Candidate Portal
On-demand background screening provider HireRight, has announced that its new candidate portal, Applicant Center Mobile, has won the award for best Internet/E-Commerce product in the TechAmerica High-Tech Innovation Awards. The Applicant Center Mobile platform is an industry-first personalized candidate portal that helps candidates progress smoothly through pre-employment screening. This is...
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BLR Survey Identifies Social Media as Biggest Policy Challenge for Employers
Business Legal Reports, Inc. (BLR) has released its HR report, 2012 Policy Survey, which has revealed that about 42 percent of respondents reported that social media policies would be the biggest challenge for their company in 2013. Social media policies were twice as likely to be reported as most challenging than the next most popular, cell phone use/distracted driving, which received 21.6...
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Mindflash Creates Social Training App for Yammer
Online training platform Mindflash has announced the launch of the first ever training app for enterprise social network provider Yammer. The app lets training employees become more social and accessible for Yammer users and allows employers to create, distribute, and track vital courses and incorporate them into internal communications. Key features of the integrated app include: • The...
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Resumes, Lies and Videotape: The Danger of Resume Fibs
August marks 3 months since activist investor and hedge fund manager Daniel Loeb confronted Yahoo's directors with the possibility that CEO Scott Thompson may have falsified his resume. Thompson's resume boasted a Stonehill College bachelor's degree in accounting and computer science when, in fact, he has a bachelor of science in business administration with a major in accounting. It...
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Explaining Employment Gaps On Your Resume
I know of very few people who have had a seamless professional career. Many people take time off to take care of their children and others take time off of work to further their education or to care for an ailing parent. At times, we are laid off and it takes us months to get back on the bandwagon again. Much can be said about the fact that many an HR department finds employment gaps...
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New Health Care Coverage Reporting Requirements from Reform Law
While many parts of the newly affirmed Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act has already taken effect, and employers are focusing on meeting the new Acts requirements, some of the major provisions will not start until 2013 or 2014. January 2013 will see the implementation of the requirement for all employers to report the value of health benefits on employee's W-2 forms. The amount...
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2012 Sees Marginal Rise in Salaries, Increased Focus on Performance Compensation
Aon Hewitt's newest survey has revealed that salaries in the U.S. continue to make small gains as doubts about the stability of the global economy remain fresh. However, data from the survey also show that employees can help to offset only marginally increasing salaries with performance-based awards. Salary increases reached an all-time low in 2009 with a rate of increase at 1.8 percent. Since...
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5 Reasons You Need Recruiting Software
These days you need software for everything. From accounting to document sharing, there is a solution for every small gap in your business operations. But, you may be wondering whether you actually need to invest in recruiting software or not. So, if you can't seem to decide, get five reasons to say yes. Collaboration between Departments Although the marketing department may be hiring a...
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Disruptive Recruiting
Yeah, yeah I know you've heard it all before. But there is some seriously cool stuff happening in recruiting and I am literally bursting to tell you about it. From Hackruiting to superhero sourcing to employment branding that's (literally) out of this world, check out the cool things employers are doing to impress candidates. And then... steal these ideas! Etsy recruits better than you. Well...
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Optimizing Your LinkedIn Profile For Recruiters (Part 1)
I have written recently about the declining importance of the resume in the recruiting process relative to the rapidly increasing importance of a LinkedIn profile. So, as power shifts from the resume to LinkedIn in terms of its effectiveness as a job seeking tool, I thought it a good time to provide some tips on how to optimize your LinkedIn Profile for employment purposes. 1. Fully complete...
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ADP: Non-compliance Penalties Mount for American Mid-sized Companies
In a May 2012 study on mid-sized business owners and executives, ADP Research Institute found that 33 percent of mid-sized companies in the U.S. had incurred federal penalties for non-compliance with government regulations over the past year. Of those 33 percent, the average number of penalties sat at 6.4. The study also found that businesses with in-house payroll processing received almost three...
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Study: Conflict Management Skills in High Demand
An international survey by talent specialists Futurestep has revealed that conflict management skills are in high demand in industries consisting of a mixed labor force, where one-fifth of polled organizations said that skills in conflict resolution were in short supply. Due to the high rates of talent migration and the cultural diversity of the workforces, skills in conflict management are...
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Job Openings on the Rise as New Training Initiatives Appear
Medzilla.com's Employment report for August 2012 shows that over 163,000 jobs were added to the job market in July, well outpacing employment predictions for the month. But though the number of available jobs rose sharply, the number of persons unemployed remained virtually unchanged from prior months. Expected layoffs for July were also down for the second consecutive month while the number of...
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House Bill would make it Illegal to Run Criminal Background Checks
A bill recently introduced into the U.S. House of Representatives by Rep. Hansen Clarke (D-MI) would ban employers from asking candidates about their criminal past. The so-called "Ban the Box Act," otherwise known as H.R. 6220, would forbid employers from asking these specific types of questions from "an applicant for employment or otherwise seek information about such an applicant...
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What To Do When Good Hires Go Bad
Research from Leadership IQ tells us that 46% of new hires will fail within the first 18 months. The research shows that many of these failures were overlooked during the interview process, which brings the topic of new hire failures right up to the door of the HR and recruitment professional. Increasing levels of new hire failure can indicate that there may be shortcomings in the interview...
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Employees Taking Intermittent FMLA Leave more likely to File for Short-term Disability
New research out of the Reed Group has found that employees taking intermittent family leave under the Family and Medical Leave Act are almost three times more likely to file for short-term disability within six months of their initial leave time. However, the findings also suggest that outsourcing and software can be successful strategies for decreasing lost time due to intermittent absences and...
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The Work Ethic of Millenials and How To Recruit Them
Millennials and work ethic. While the debate rages on between the generations one thing remains certain. This generation, set to be the most educated in history, is moving into the workforce and even as we study how they work, why they work, and the best way to make use of their considerable skills, we need to learn what all this means to those recruiting and hiring them. Recruiters, hiring...
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A 'Peter Peril' in Promotions for Exceptional Performance?
Promoting an employee on the basis of exceptional performance seems to be a smart move, even a no-brainer. But, on one analysis of what has come to be known as the "Peter Principle", it may not be such a smart move. Worse, if that analysis by a former presidential economic adviser is right, there are scenarios in which such an unwise promotion is also the likeliest. What follows explains...
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Employee Engagement is a Key Business Priority for 2012
TalentKeepers 8th annual Employee Engagement and Turnover Survey has found that 81 percent of companies are looking to impact performance by prioritizing employee engagement, as the country slowly returns to pre-recession economic production. Now that the majority of cost-cutting measures are behind U.S. businesses, they are turning their focus on retaining talent and ensuring that it remains...
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Employers Increasingly use Incentives to Drive Health Program Engagement
According to findings by Aon Hewitt, a global HR and human capital solutions business, U.S. employers have begun to rely increasingly on incentives to motivate employee participation in employer-sponsored health and wellness programs. Of the 2000 participating employers, representing over 20 million employees, 84 percent now offer participation incentives to employees taking a health risk...
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Survey: Onboarding Programs Need to Focus on Job Expectations and Team Building
IT staffing and talent management experts TEKsystems has reported that its most recent survey of 2,100 IT pros and over 1,5000 IT leaders in May 2012 has found that most IT employees think that onboarding programs usually address HR information, job information, and company information. Most IT leaders say the primary focus of onboarding programs are on learning about the role (57 percent) and HR...
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Federal HR Execs Brace for Downsizing
Top HR officials in the U.S. government are facing impending downsizing as government-wide workforces begin to decline due to budget cuts. A survey by the Partnership for Public Service shows that 72 percent of senior federal HR executives anticipate staffing cuts in their agencies' workforces; especially in larger agencies. Over one-third said that their agency is unprepared for the cuts and...
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Study Shows Trends in the Executive Job Market
The results of ExecuNet's Executive Recruiter Confidence survey have shown that July saw an increase of 163,000 new payroll jobs for executives which were mostly consolidated within the top five growth industries for the month. The list of top industries for executive hiring within the next six months include: Healthcare, high tech, life sciences (e.g. pharmaceuticals, medical, and...
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Just Landed Your Dream Job? Now Keep It.
You spotted a great opportunity that few others knew about, you got a great application in early, you nailed your interview, impressed the manager and landed the perfect job with a salary and benefits package to die for. On top of it, it seems like you have the best manager, in the world. Job done? Not a chance. Once the honeymoon period is over, you will come back to reality and remember...
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Your Job Ads Suck
Imagine you're a candidate. You're doing the job seeking that we, as recruiters, think we understand so well. Candidate you types search terms into Google, Indeed, Monster or Bing (just kidding, no one uses Bing) and off you go... to sort through job ads like the one below. I challenge you to read it, but most of you probably won't. Why? Because it's boring and it stinks and I will bet you...
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New Employment Platform to Offer Intuitive Job Matching Functionality
Globemploy has announced the release of its new employment solutions platform that attempts to automate the hiring manager or recruiter's responsibility of sorting through countless resumes supplied by online job applicants. Through the automation of the resume screening process, Globemploy removes the uncertain nature of matching jobs and job seekers by identifying the relevant skills and...
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Big Data Helping Companies Grow Sales
Big data-for-sales pioneer, Lattice Engines, has announced the results of its survey on Big Data in sales and has shown it to be of significant importance for driving sales. Key findings from the survey include: About sales representatives experiencing difficulty accessing information necessary for closing deals: • 82 percent of respondents felt sales reps are handicapped by the time it...
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Productivity Decline Frequently Driven by Poor Employee Health
Findings from a new study out of Brigham Young University, the Health Enhancement Research Organization, and the Center for Health Research at Healthways, has found that unhealthy lifestyle choices often result in high levels of lost production at work. The study concluded that employees with unhealthy diets were two-thirds more likely to experience a loss in productivity than those eating a...
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New ArchiOffice App to Offer Anytime, Anywhere Access to Project Management Software
The newest release of ArchiOffice from BQE Software has been reengineered to take advantage of HTML5 and CSS in order to provide improvements in speed, enhanced platform portability, and a solid foundation for future tools to give professional services firms a competitive advantage. The software is a leading office and project management software service specialized for architects and...
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5 Cool Social Recruiting Software Tools That Have Just Hit the Market
Many experts have predicted that 2012 was to be the year when social recruiting went mainstream and in support of this change, a whole host of social recruiting tools are entering the market place. Below, I have outlined five of the most interesting social recruiting tools that have hit the employment market recently and caught my attention. 1. Gild Source This is an exciting new developer...
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Heat Maps Chart the Easiest Places to Find Candidates
Real-time business intelligence provider WANTED Technologies is adding a new feature to its Analytics BI platform: so-called interactive heat maps. The new map tool provides insight into the demand and supply of candidates and information such as average salary ranges, average time-to-fill, and the difficulty of filling a position all around the country. Each state and metro area displays...
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Gen Y Lives Disrupted by Unemployment
Former Chief of Staff of the U.S. Office of Personnel Management and President of Generation Opportunity, Paul Conway, has released the results of a poll commissioned by the non-profit that highlights employment results for Americans between the ages of 18 and 29. The poll showed that, due to the continual high unemployment rate (currently up to 8.3 percent): • 77 percent of 18 to 29 year...
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Wall Street's Biggest Customers: Public Employee Pensions?
The total tally for pension funds of all 50 states rose to $2 trillion in 2011 with the majority of assets being publicly traded stocks and bonds. Nearly $8 billion was spent on Wall Street money management fees, as pension funds jumped to the top of the list to become some of Wall Street's biggest customers. Though during 2011, 84 percent of actively managed U.S. equity funds underperformed...
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