
What Each Generation Wants from Employers
Unless you have been hiding out on the moon for the past few years you will be well aware that we now have a candidate marketplace that contains four generations all actively looking for work in one form or another. These are: Veterans, Baby Boomers, Generation X, and Millennials. And if organizations are to engage effectively with this multi-generational candidate marketplace, and have...

The Job Offer (dun, dun, dun, duuun)
The finish line is your sight. The calls, interviews, sourcing and scouting have resulted in this one great candidate and now it's time to reel in the person. Making the job offer is a lot more than the offer of benefits and a salary. A real job offer should give the candidate a full outline of what he or she can expect from the company if the individual wishes to accept. This is the point...

New Mass Notification Service Released for Delivery of Pre-recorded Voice Calls
As companies increasingly turn to mass notification systems for quickly handling communications to large volumes of people, Diatel Inc. has released a mass voice broadcasting service leveraging its existing network designed specifically for voice broadcasting with its current capability of making a half-million calls per hour. Diatel's Mass Notification Service allows organizations to prepare...

Senior Federal HR Execs Bracing for Downsizing amidst Staffing Cuts
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. More than one-third said that their agency is unprepared for the cuts and...

TEKsystems: Onboarding Programs Need to Focus on Job Expectations and Team Building
IT talent management experts TEKsystems has reported that its survey of 2,100 IT pros and over 1,5000 IT leaders found that most IT employees think that onboarding programs usually address HR information, job information, and company information. Most IT leaders say the primary focuses of onboarding programs are on learning about the role (57 percent) and HR information (54 percent). More than...

Get Closer to the Truth with Stealth Interviewing
We talk a lot about the importance of formal interview processes; e.g. structured interviews, assessment centers, psychometric tests, etc. While these processes have good levels of predictive validity, many of the best candidates know that they are coming and can see them a mile off and are, therefore, well prepared to handle your assessment process. This means that in many instances you will...

Workforce Health and Productivity Improvement Leads to Greater Use of Incentives
According to findings by Aon Hewitt, a global HR 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 2,000 participating employers, representing over 20 million employees, 84 percent now offer participation incentives to employees taking a health risk questionnaire while 64...

AsureSpace Touch Panels to Improve Functionality of Asure Software Suite
Workplace management firm Asure Software has announced the release of AsureSpace Touch Panels, digital touch displays designed to improve the company's software platforms, including Meeting Room Manager, Resource Scheduler, and Workspace Manager. "We are very excited to announce the rollout of AsureSpace Touch Panels," Pat Goepel, Asure's CEO, said. "The development of our Touch Panels...

Survey: 74 Percent of HR Pros Globally Desire More Innovative Methods
According to a recent global study by Futurestep—a Korn/Ferry company—74 percent of HR professionals worldwide admit their organization should be doing more to demonstrate innovation in recruitment and talent management. Yet, the study showed that specifically in the U.S., a lack of senior plus a shortage of financial investment and time are the main barriers to adopting more innovative...

Why you have an SLA, Even if you Don't
Hello, your snarky Maren Hogan is back from vacation and ready to take on some seriously messed up practices in the HR and Marketing world. First up, here's why your SLA totally stinks. What's that you say? You don't have a service level agreement? I beg to differ. I submit that if you are a service provider (and you are, even if you are an internal corporate service provider) you have an...

You Survived the Interview...Now What?
My younger brother is on the job hunt, so every few days I call (or text) and inquire about his progress. Recently, he had an interview with a well-known company. Of course (like any big sister would do), I hammered into him the do's and don't's for interview day. And come interview day, I asked, "How'd it go?" His response: "I think it went well and they said they'd call back...

'Dream' Jobs Have Nothing in Common That Makes Them Ideal?
Having recently asked "What makes an ideal recruiter?", I can't resist also asking what makes a job ideal. A recent U.S.A. Network poll queried workers about their "dream jobs"—the kinds of jobs most people dream of leaving their current jobs for. What were the reported dream jobs? The most desirable jobs Americans reported in the survey included pro athlete (11 percent),...

TalentKeepers Reports Rising Employee Engagement a Key Business Priority
TalentKeepers 8th annual Employee Engagement and Turnover Survey Reports 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...

Avoiding Exit Wounds when Leaving your Job
Does this seems like a weird topic for an article? If so, then this is evidence that you may need to read on. The transition from job-to-job is a crucial part of your career process. Just think of sport stars who are great in one team and make a bad move to another environment/team/role that doesn't suit the person and his/her performance suffers. This can lead to a decline in the athlete's...

Perfect your Mobile Recruiting Strategy in 4 Easy Steps
We're living in a mobile world—you use your smartphone to find out the latest headlines; tablet to watch videos; and E-readers to learn a little more about your industry. It's hard to remember a time without a gadget in the palm of your hands, and why would you want to? Everything is done at your convenience, whenever, wherever. Life is simpler. So, if you're more prone to use your...

Three Department of Labor Regulations that Dictate use of Insurance Rebates
For those employers expecting a medical loss ratio rebate check from their providers, three DOL guidelines have been put into place that control precisely what can be done with the money. The rebates received for ERISA-covered plans are now considered plan assets so must be spent in one of only three ways: • Employers are allowed to keep the entire rebate should they had covered the entire...

Professional Animal Totemism—The Corporate Ladder as Totem Pole
Have you ever noticed how numerous animal icons are in branding and wondered why so many really big businesses are promoted with animal cartoons, decals, mascots, emblems and other images? They are so plentiful that it's a virtual certainty that either the company you work for or some of the businesses you patronize will have an animal icon of some sort. Take professional sports, for...

Would you Hire this Woman?
With the state of today's fluctuating job market, what drives employers to finally make that hiring decision? What truly defines talent? What does it really mean to go above and beyond? What must a candidate do to show potential employers he or she is the right choice for the job? Take Laura Doherty for example. Last week, this 27-year-old woman decided to stand on a street in a small county...

Truven Health Analytics: No Advantage in Dropping Group Health Insurance under PPACA
Truven Health Analytics has determined that there are no short or long-term advantages for eliminating group health benefits and opting for the new federal penalties involved with the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA). Modeled after real-world experiences of American employers, employees and their healthcare experiences, the report reveals the consequences of various healthcare...

Cloud BI Becoming More of a Priority on Enterprise Agendas
As businesses rush to cut the time and financial costs of software implementations, business intelligence (BI) is emerging as one of the greatest applications of interest around and the cloud is receiving an ever growing amount of buzz. But hype continues to rule the day over reality as demonstrated by a Saugatuck Technology research report which found that only 13 percent of global enterprises...

National Employee Confidence Index Accelerates ahead of Jobs Report
Following a consecutive three-month downturn, Randstad's Employee Confidence Index has increased by 1.1 points, climbing to 52.2 to reflect continued positive confidence (threshold of 50). The number is 4.4 points higher than the comparable period last year and show that, despite sluggish Q2 employment growth, employees remain fairly optimistic about their employment situation. "Similarly to...

The Language of Appreciation
Motivation is a tough nut to crack. Study after study has been done to try and get a grasp on what exactly motivates humans. Everyone it is different, but there are some universal motivators. Clarity produced an infographic on employee motivation, and the research from it shows that 64 percent of respondents stated that praise and commendation from a manager was their leading motivational factor....

5 Reasons Flexible Workers Rock [Infographic]
Have you heard the latest news? Flexible workers are the new rockstars of the workforce! That is according to an infographic from Hourly.com, "Top 5 Reasons Why Flex Workers Rock." The new data offers five reasons not only why this select group of workers rock, but why companies should hire them: 1. They're Expanding 47 percent of full-time workers with flexible schedules...

TantaComm Launches Quality Monitoring Tool to Improve BPO Performance Management
Quality-management solutions provider TantaComm has launched its TantaComm Evaluate tool to help business process outsourcing (BPO) firms gauge call center effectiveness and other business processes. Key functionality offered by the new tool includes: • The ability to create, modify, or re-use customized quality monitoring evaluation forms without third-party administration. • Improved...

Federal Government Adds PPACA Website for Small-business Education
The Small Business Administration, working in tandem with the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and the U.S. Treasury Department, has set up a new educational website to act as an interactive "wizard" for small businesses, helping them quickly understand need-to-know information about PPACA insurance options. Small business owners who access the site first provide information about...

Bloomberg BNA's Economic Outlook Predicts Economic Pickup in 2013
According to Bloomberg BNA's Midyear Economic Outlook, the U.S. economy would expand throughout the remainder of 2012 and over the next year despite the spectacle of the European debt crisis. Of the 16 economists surveyed for the report, the overall consensus was of a declining unemployment rate (down to an average of 7.8 percent in 2013). Inflation is also forecast to remain low (1.8 percent...

Don't Mind the Gap: Tips for Finding a Job after Unemployment Gaps
Getting back into the workforce after an absence is a lot like going back to school after summer vacation. You have to get up early in the morning, follow other people's rules even if they don't make sense, and do lots (and lots!) of homework. There are many reasons why you might have a gap in your resume. Perhaps you've been caring for children or elderly parents. Maybe you've...

The Time Wasters of Your Hiring Process
We've been warned about the cost of a bad hire so many times it's engrained in us. Infographs, articles and tweets about smart hiring are everywhere, but have recruiters taken "being thorough" too far? When is the last time you took a step back and examined your process? What started off as good practice might night now be a time waster. Taking time to ensure that your hiring process is...

Is It Necessary to Search the Whole Haystack to Find the Needle?
Should government intel-agency hunts for "the needle in the haystack", currently a red-hot hot-button topic, be more like a recruiter's search for talent, or should it be the reverse? Or should either be searching whole haystacks? Recently, many news commentators, policy wonks, government officials and private citizens have been insisting that "to find a needle in a haystack, you have to...

How to Get the Truth from Reference Checking
Research from CareerBuilder has revealed that 66 percent of U.S. companies experienced losses in business last year due to bad hires, a trend which is reflected throughout the world to a greater or lesser extent. This suggests that employers throughout the world are likely to be focusing on increasing the quality of hire and predictive validity of their selection processes. While behavioral...

Was this a Job Seeker Mistake or Masterpiece?
Have you ever felt desperate in your search to find a job? I know I have. I remember spending hours upon hours applying for jobs and waiting anxiously for my phone to ring. And this occurred for months. Many job seekers will find themselves in this state, especially during an extended job search and especially during this economic time. And it's easy to allow desperation to turn into...

10 Tips to Speed Up your Hiring Process – Without Reducing Quality (Part 2)
In a recent article, I wrote about five tactics you can adopt to speed up your hiring process without reducing quality. In this article, I present the last five of ten tactics that you can use to help speed up your hiring process while maintaining quality. 1. Higher quality job descriptions Research tells us that although compensation is of central importance to job seekers, the average job...

What Kelso Knows about Work
In case you haven't heard, Ashton Kutcher recently wowed the world by appearing super mature, extremely articulate, and in general, a grown-up. During the MTV music awards, he dropped some knowledge on a bunch of screaming teens and the rest of the world went a little nuts, marveling that the same guy who headlined "Dude, where's my car?" was espousing values that sounded decidedly more Gen X...

Talygen Turns to Android OS for Newest Advanced HR App
Talygen, a global leader in business management automation, has introduced an Android app that is fully integrated into the company's SaaS application. This integrated solution allows employers and employees to manage most common HR functions from their mobile Android devices. All of Talygen's advanced functionality can now be used via the Web, tablets, and smartphones to apply for leaves,...

CBIZ Reports Second Monthly Decline in Small Business Employment Index
The CBIZ Small Business Employment Index, a premier barometer for small-business hiring tends, has reported a .57 percent decline in hiring during July 2013. The fall follows a previous drop in June of .21 percent. The results of the Index are in contrast to ADP's July survey which found that the private sector hired more workers than was initially predicted adding over 200,000 new jobs. June...

Prudential: Companies Using Technology and Mobile Devices to Manage Benefits
According to Tapping the Potential of Technology, the fourth in a series of research briefs from The Prudential Insurance Company of America's (Prudential's) Seventh Annual Study of Employee Benefits: Today Beyond, three-fifths of employers – primarily those with more than 500 employees – report using an administrative platform to manage their benefits programs. And the majority...

New Social Business Platform to Manage Employee Mobility Enterprise-wide
Leading HCM SaaS provider Avature has announced the release of Avature SIM, a configurable corporate social intranet for large global companies. With Avature SIM, HR departments can develop internal talent pools, expedite employee mobility, and support a more visible workforce. The new tool addition allows HR professionals to create customized on-boarding and off-boarding processes that are both...

Where are all the Good Sales Candidates Hiding?
There's an apparent surge in the number of available sales jobs—and yet many of those jobs remain unfilled. So, why is it so hard to fill sales openings? According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the number of jobs in sales and related occupations jumped a hefty 445,000 to a four-year high of 15.8 million. That's great news, right? Except for the fact that many of those jobs will...

Sexual Harassment: What your Company can Learn from the Mayor Bob Filner Scandal
This is really disconcerting. Here we have yet another case of a male in a position of power disrespecting and harassing women, even some under his direction. For those who are unfamiliar, San Diego Mayor Bob Filner has been accused by 16 different women of various incidents of sexual harassment. The acts range from him touching the women inappropriately, making inappropriate sexual comments...

10 Tips to Speed up your Hiring Process – Without Reducing Quality (Part 1)
Our research tells us that companies are beginning to place an increasing emphasis on hiring metrics, such as quality of hire (that is how well employees perform and how long they stay for) and are reducing their emphasis on more traditional hiring metrics, such as cost of hire and speed of hire. But, while the emphasis on cost per hire and time to hire has been reduced, these traditional...

Get Some Sense Around your Benefits!
I'm often asked about how to get a job, which is kind of silly when you think about the fact that I'm a consultant who hasn't had a genuine 8a.m.-5p.m. corporate position in about 7 years. In fact, while the economy was tanking, I was quickly turning full-time opportunities into part-time ones, creating consulting offers from full-time work and building a firm to encapsulate it all. Do you...

Hiring Contingent Workers? Try IQNavigator
Do you have a contingent workforce? With much of the market still saturated with worry and fear over job availability and budgetary restrictions, many companies have turned toward employing staff members on a non-permanent basis. Freelancers, contractors and consultants are all categorized as non-permanent and, until now, managing them has always been a bit of a challenge. While it used to...

The Performance Review: Making the Best of the Situation Before, During, and After
Performance reviews are like a corporate Judgment Day: you may think you're doing just fine by the powers that be but there is always the chance that they may see things a bit different. And woe unto those found lacking (no raise for you!). And while no one can control the time or outcome of the review, you can take steps to use the evaluation to help your career and make you more certain that...

Recognition Programs and Wellness Programs Intersect as Behavior becomes Focus
The Trends in Employee Recognition 2013 survey from WorldatWork and ITA Group has shown, for the first time ever, that programs intended to motivate specific behaviors have become top-tier goals. Indeed, 41 percent of organizations are utilizing such programs in 2013 compared to 25 percent in 2008. "Employers are increasingly focusing their recognition programs on employee behaviors — for...

Was AOL CEO Tim Armstrong's Public Firing a Harmful Business Practice?
How the leaders within companies conduct their business will always affect the overall success of a company—whether positively or negatively. If management is unorganized, unprepared and doesn't clearly define the companies' goals, mission statement and values and how these areas are to be achieved, this will inevitably trickle down to employees, which means a lack (or absence) of...

What Makes an Ideal Recruiter?
It's not difficult to list the skills and traits of an ideal recruiter. But, more challenging is identifying how and when possessing these desirable, but not ultra-rare characteristics almost certainly spells "r-e-c-r-u-i-t-e-r" and only that. In other words, why do these traits that are also found in other occupations—singly or in combination—create or predispose someone to becoming a...

Personalized Benchmarking Tool Launched By ING
Retirement and investment firm ING has announced the launch of its new online retirement tool My Savings Score, a personalized savings benchmarking tool that lets users score their retirement preparedness. The tool allows users to compare their personal savings with that of a recommended target based on age and annual income. The savings score represents the amount of their retirement savings as...

EmLogis Gives 30-day Free Trial of Online Employee Scheduling Software
EmLogis' online alternative to traditional spreadsheets, designed to be adaptable within the current technological landscape, is now being offered free for a 30 day trial period. The state-of-the-art online employee scheduling system offers revisable spreadsheets making the scheduling process more efficient. EmLogis comes in three versions—Team, Professional, and Enterprise...