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| Volume 8, Issue 1 |
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In This Issue:
 Recruiting to ensure hiring employees successfully
Which traits predict job performance?
Interview thank you letters
 Nontraditional benefits: How to hook the best talent
 Terms of engagement
 Commuting tax benefits help employers recruit, retain talent
 Communications, wellness prove challenging for HR
 How far should employers go to reduce workplace obesity?
 Do your employees consider your corporate policies racist?
The new HR organization
What are HR certifications worth?
Firing the jerk: Things I wish for HR pros in 2008
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Recruiting to ensure hiring employees successfully
If you've read this site for any time at all, you know that I am a big fan of identifying the characteristics, traits, skills, and experience necessary to perform the job before the hiring process begins.
With this information identified, you can do a much better job of:
- posting the opening with the most important requirements;
- reviewing resumes for the appropriate skills, traits, and experience;
- developing the appropriate interview questions; and
- selecting your best candidate.
With the short list of characteristics, traits, and experience, and a behavioral interview, you can zero right in on what you believe you most need from the employee you hire for your open job...
Read the article. Back to top
Which traits predict job performance?
Today, while out looking for research about whether a college degree is predictive of later work success, I came across an article that looks at some psychological factors about who succeeds at work.
Conscientiousness rules for most occupations unless you need a creative person for whom conscientiousness may be a liability. Michael Mount, PhD, a psychologist at the University of Iowa, with:
"his colleagues analyzed more than 117 studies of personality and job performance. Conscientiousness consistently predicted performance for all jobs from managerial and sales positions to skilled and semiskilled work. Conscientiousness is the only
personality trait fundamental to all jobs and job¬related criteria, said Mount. Other traits are valid predictors for only some criteria or occupations."
According to Psychologist Joyce Hogan, PhD, of the University of Tulsa: interpersonal skills have recently gained attention as predictors of job performance.
"'They are the icing on the personality cake,' she said. 'Interpersonal skills can energize or inhibit natural personality tendencies.' For example, a naturally introverted person with good interpersonal skills can muster enough extraversion to
make a public speech, she said. Likewise, a naturally hostile and aggressive person can appear sweet and charming, she added.
"As the workplace moves toward teamwork and service¬oriented jobs, evaluating interpersonal skills becomes increasingly important, said Hogan. But it's difficult to study these skills because no classification system exists. She is working on a
model classification system that would include sensitivity to others, trust and confidence, responsibility, accountability, leadership and consistency." Take a look at
Which Traits Predict Job Performance? for some interesting thoughts on that topic...
Read the article. Back to top
Interview thank you letters
In the day-to-day busy, it's easy to quickly glance at an interview thank you letter from a candidate, smile, and move on to your next task.
When you do this, however, you are by-passing a little goldmine of information in the interview thank you letter about the candidate. What's important about an interview thank you letter or email from each candidate you interview? Lots.
Especially if you use each interaction with the candidate to assess his or her cultural fit within your organization, these interview thank you letters add one more piece to the puzzle...
Read the article. Back to top
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Nontraditional benefits: How to hook the best talent
Much has been written about the talent war and the efforts companies must make to attract and retain the best and brightest employees. There's really no argument — at
the baseline, companies must offer pay and standard benefits commensurate with their industry.
Yet, to be truly competitive, many organizations are offering nontraditional benefits to catch candidates interest and to keep them feeling appreciated once on the job. Employers today are getting creative in order to attract and retain
workers, offering perks once reserved for the C-suite. Some employers — including leading companies such as Peoplesoft, Pixar and Fox/Newscorp — are offering pet care services, recognizing that 63 percent of households own at least one pet. They also
recognize related services — such as overnight sitting and daily visits, boarding and day care, even pet taxiing and group dog outings — decrease their owners' absenteeism and improve productivity. Such benefits are also competitive advantages
in markets suffering the full effects of the talent shortage, such as technology. Leading companies such as Google are decidedly less affected by the waning pool of talented employees, receiving tens of thousands of resumes monthly. Yet, its
self-described benefits go "beyond the basics," including advantages such as...
Read the article. Back to top
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Terms of engagement
Employee engagement is becoming top of mind for CEOs and boards at the nation's largest companies, but just what it is -- and how best to measure it has many HR executives scratching their heads.
For an HR executive, getting a handle on employee engagement can be like trying to catch a greased pig at a country fair. Just when you think you've got it, it slides right out of your hands. Despite a burgeoning industry devoted to measuring
engagement, there's no established definition of what it actually means. And among consulting firms, business groups, academics and other experts, there's widespread disagreement over nearly everything else about engagement: whether it's really a new
concept, how it should be measured, whether it can be tied to the bottom line -- even whether employee engagement surveys, in the end, are truly valuable. Everyone, it seems, takes a different approach, though no one knows for sure which one is
best. "When you do a search on the Internet of employee engagement, you get 2 million hits, but there's only a handful of articles in the academic literature," says Alan Saks, a University of Toronto professor who studies engagement. "That kind
of tells you something." All this makes it tough for the HR executive to be an informed consumer of employee engagement surveys, says John Gibbons, a senior research adviser for The Conference Board, a New York-based business think tank.
Gibbons, who has been analyzing the various types and brands of engagement surveys, searching for common ground, says that, too often, HR jumps on the employee-engagement bandwagon without looking at it with a critical eye. "They
think, 'engagement good, puppies good,' " he says with a laugh. But what many HR leaders don't realize, says Gibbons, is that Employee engagement is becoming top of mind for CEOs and boards at the nation's largest companies, but just what it is --
and how best to measure it has many HR executives scratching their heads...
Read the article. Back to top
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Commuting tax benefits help employers recruit, retain talent
More employers in cities around the country are offering tax-free commuter benefits to recruit and retain talent.
According to a survey of 245 human-resources professionals released in September, 31% of employers nationwide offer commuter benefits this year, compared with 19% in 2006. These benefits typically enable employees to reduce their taxable income and
cut their commuting costs by an average of 30%. The survey, conducted by TransitCenter Inc., a New York nonprofit that promotes the use of mass transit, shows that...
Read the article. Back to top
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Communications, wellness prove challenging for HR
As demographic shifts transform the nature of the U.S. workforce, and the benefits industry continues to adapt and innovate, employee communications and wellness have arrived front and center as top HR challenges. Participants and speakers at EBN's 20th Annual Benefits Management Forum & Expo in Dallas testified
to the power of effective communications and wellness programs to bring a return-on-investment and improve retention.
Helping workers get healthier while containing benefit costs is no easy task, especially in the age of long workdays, sprawling commutes and 24/7 access to work via e-mails, cell phones and BlackBerries. Gene Lanzoni, vice president of global
market research for Prudential Financial, told conference attendees, "More companies are trying to take a more holistic approach to how they view benefits. The benefits balancing act is getting tougher."
Communication challenges
Even though companies consider employee communications a priority, research shows that communication efforts "are falling short in helping employees make the best decisions for themselves and their families," Lanzoni said. Only 35% of employees
and 21% of employers rate benefits communications as "highly effective," according to a recent Prudential survey. Lanzoni recommends targeted and relevant messages, based on life stage, age and income, because that's what employees want. About 70%
of surveyed employees showed a high interest in tailored benefits information. [Advice for HR pros to improve retention and job satisfaction, Phillip Adkins, director of benefits for the law firm Arnold & Porter, advised...]
Read the article. Back to top
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From incentives to penalties: How far should employers go to reduce workplace obesity?
This month, more than half of Americans probably made health-related New Year's resolutions, judging from past data, but few are likely to stick to them. Employees
at CFI Westgate Resorts, an Orlando, Fla.-based vacation properties company, might consider themselves lucky: They have an incentive to get healthy.
If they join in the company-wide weight-loss contest this month and succeed in reaching their goals, they could win cash prizes or a luxury vacation. Inspiration for the contest, now in its second year, came from CEO David Siegel, who himself
recently lost more than 20 pounds. "He put it on the radar," says Mark Waltrip, chief operating officer at Westgate, adding that in the contest's first year, some employees lost up to 60 pounds. Employers like Westgate are trying to push employees
into healthy lifestyles, including reducing obesity, a condition estimated to cost U.S companies $13 billion per year, according to the Washington D.C.-based National Business Group on Health. But using incentives, and in some cases penalties, to
change employee behavior raises a host of legal, moral and practical questions, according to Wharton experts and others. "Any company moving into this area has to consider what employees think is unreasonable or an invasion of privacy," says
Janice Bellace, a professor of legal studies and business ethics at Wharton. "It's a ticklish issue, particularly when so many Americans are overweight." Two-thirds of American adults are either overweight or obese, according to the National Center for
Health Statistics, part of the Atlanta-based Centers for Disease Control (CDC). It's more than coincidence that Westgate was one of the first companies to take a hard line on smoking several years ago. According to Peter Cappelli, director of the
Center for Human Resources at Wharton, crack-downs on employees who smoke, on or off the job, were the "thin end of a wedge.... It has become socially acceptable to attack smoking and smokers. Will we see the same thing around obesity? The time is
probably ripe for that."...
Read the article. Back to top
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Do your employees consider your corporate policies racist?
Reactions to recent (and not so recent) news events show that black and white Americans see things very differently. As businesspeople we must ask ourselves a very difficult and important question: Is it possible that a company’s policies are
being viewed differently by different minority groups within its overall employee base?
To begin to fathom the breadth and depth of the cultural and racial divide in America, you need look no further than three major news events involving athletes;
two of them recent, and one which dominated the headlines just over a decade ago:
- The 1995 murder trial of football star O.J. Simpson.
- Atlanta Falcons quarterback Michael Vick’s guilty plea to dogfighting conspiracy charges
- San Francisco Giants outfielder Barry Bonds’ breaking of Hank Aaron’s home-run record, amidst allegations of steroid use.
All tell us in no uncertain terms that we are, in many ways, a divided nation when it comes to how we view and perceive certain occurrences. Despite facts which have proved to be incontrovertible, blacks and whites viewed each of these events
differently and hold vastly dissimilar opinions about the relative guilt and innocence of the individuals involved:
- Following Simpson’s acquittal, while the majority of African Americans rejoiced, most whites felt shock and anger. U.S. News & World Report found in a survey taken immediately after the trial that 55 percent of all blacks felt
Simpson was not guilty, while 62 percent of whites felt he committed the murders.
- An ESPN/ABC News poll found that 74 percent of African Americans wanted Bonds to break Aaron’s record, compared with only 29 percent of whites. Forty-six percent of African Americans felt Bonds was treated unfairly by the media,
compared with just 25 percent of whites. An overwhelming 85 percent of African Americans feel Bonds belongs in the Hall of Fame, compared with just over half of all whites.
- In a recent poll conducted on the Web site YourBlackWorld.com, 46 percent of African Americans responding said they believe that the Michael Vick case involves race, while only 14 percent of whites believe it does.
Most important, could your own company’s policies being deemed as racist and/or sexist by one or more of these groups?
The high cost of being viewed as a racist organization Having read to this point, it would be very easy to click to another Web page and go on believing that our companies are, as we’ve always believed them to be, racially neutral and culturally
sensitive. And to some degree, with some companies, this may indeed be the case. But what the polling data above tells us is that any two groups of people can look at the same set of facts, the same combination of circumstances, and perceive them
entirely differently. And for a major corporation, that can be a dangerous and costly thing. Consider, over the past few years there have been dozens of class-action suits alleging corporate and institutional racism brought against
American companies, and the settlements in these cases have totaled hundreds of millions of dollars. Among the most noteworthy and recent...
Read the article. Back to top
The new HR organization
Increasingly diversified businesses require more complex human resources operations, Dave Ulrich contends. Here, the author and consultant breaks down the roles today’s HR departments must fulfill to deliver value. Dave Ulrich is a
professor of business at the University of Michigan and co-founder of the RBI Group. His articles will appear quarterly in Workforce Management.
Governance is a hot topic. At times, it refers to government regulation of corporate affairs (e.g., Sarbanes-Oxley). More frequently, it refers to how an organization governs, or organizes, to make decisions. HR governance is about how the HR function
is structured to deliver value. An HR structure must match the business structure. A holding company business structure would lead to a decentralized and dispersed HR organization. A single-business company would have an HR department organized by
functions (staffing, training, rewards, organization design, etc.). But, since most large organizations diversify and operate with a multiple-business-unit structure, most HR departments are governed by more complex organization structures. Most large
HR departments are emerging into five distinct roles and responsibilities, each with unique contributions...
Read the article. Back to top
What are HR certifications worth?
If you’ve wondered whether the PHR or SPHR certifications are worth the paper they’re printed on, read on. Kris Dunn breaks it all down for you, focusing on the
exclusivity of the certification, the effort required to pass the exams and—of course—the critical question of ROI.
s part of my drive to get more involved in the local HR community, I just completed teaching my part of the Professional in Human Resources/Senior Professional in Human Resources certification prep class put on by the Birmingham, Alabama, branch of SHRM
(aptly named BSHRM by the locals). I taught the employee and labor relations module. Do you know what TIPS/FOE is when it comes to dealing with union drives? If you were with us during the certification course, you would—unless you were on the back row
sleeping. Have you no shame? This, of course, begs the question of whether the Professional in Human Resources or the Senior Professional in Human Resources certifications are worth the paper they’re printed on. I got the PHR certification
back in the day (1998), picked up the SPHR four years after that and recertified for the SPHR designation in 2005 with four days worth of webcasts. Through it all, though, I have never had the feeling that the certification was responsible for
upward mobility in my career. Let’s break this down, focusing on scarcity of the certification, the effort required to pass and the ever-popular ROI question. First: the rarer the certification, the more it’s potentially worth.
SHRM’s HR Certification Institute Web site shows that there are more than 89,000 certified professionals, including:
- 50,174 Professionals in Human Resources
- 38,531 Senior Professionals in Human Resources
- 826 Global Professionals in Human Resources
With that fact in hand, we next need a total number of HR professionals in the U.S. to determine how special the certifications make you. Here are the two numbers I considered...
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Firing the jerk: Things I wish for HR pros in 2008
I was going to fire up a column to start 2008 with my New Year’s resolutions as a U.S. HR manager, but let’s face it: By February, I’ll be in survival mode and most
of the resolutions will be toast.
So I’ll take a pass on making that list and just download some self-improvement audio on my iPod instead. That doesn’t mean that we HR pros don’t deserve a great 2008. To the contrary, we’re due for a great year, kind of like the Red Sox in 2004
before they nixed the curse and won the World Series. With that in mind, I’m REALLY hoping this is your breakout year. So much so, I’m channeling a little Tony Robbins your way with the following heartfelt wishes...
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