“Flexibility doesn’t mean, ‘My personal life takes precedence over my work.’  It means, ‘I have the ability to make both work, but I’m going to make sacrifices in both arenas at times,’” says Delta Emerson, executive  vice president and chief of staff at Ryan, LLC.

If anyone can speak to the true meaning of workforce flexibility, it’s Emerson. At Ryan, a Dallas-based tax services firm with 900 employees worldwide, workforce flexibility is engrained in the culture, something she couldn’t say about the firm four years ago.

In 2007, voluntary turnover at Ryan had spiked and was hovering around 20 percent, and it didn’t take long for Emerson to figure out why: “The balance word kept coming up over and over again,” Emerson recalls from her conversations with employees both in the office and during exit interviews. “People would say, ‘This company expects me to give my entire self. I have no balance in my life.’”  But Emerson knew employee survey feedback and exit interview anecdotes wouldn’t be enough to convince CEO G. Brint Ryan (pictured above) that the company needed “a major paradigm shift.” She needed to talk money.

“We put a great deal of money into hiring the right people and training them.  If somebody leaves after only two or three years, it’s a huge cost to us,” Emerson says.  Add to that the costs associated with lost production from trying to replace and train new consultants, and the loss was even greater. “When Ryan started looking at metrics, those were numbers that spoke to him.”

The Tipping Point
Ultimately, however, it wasn’t Emerson who convinced Ryan to create more flexibility, but one of the company’s employees. “She said, ‘Brint, I love this job, but here’s my resignation.  I’m leaving,’” Emerson recalls. The manager was leaving for a job that offered flexibility – which just happened to be at a competitor.

That was the “tipping point” for Ryan, who finally realized everything he stood to lose. Not only did Ryan decide then and there to invest in a flexible work program, he even convinced the employee to stay and work with the committee in charge of creating it. Ryan tasked the workplace design team with creating an infrastructure focused on measuring individual and team results, as opposed to where, when and how long employees worked.

Ryan gave Emerson and her team six months to launch the program – an incredibly tight turnaround for the amount of details involved in the project. “We had to figure out how you make this happen to be compliant with State and Federal laws for benefits and employees who are exempt and nonexempt, and all that.   Let alone the training to get it rolled out,” Emerson says.

Despite the amount of work to be done, myRyan made its debut on August 1, 2008, right on schedule.

myRyan Reaps Rewards
Now, four years later, Emerson credits myRyan with helping the company “do a complete 180,” in terms of employee morale.  “People love the flexibility myRyan affords, and they’re not hesitant to say that,” Emerson says.  The positive response has had a domino effect on all aspects of the business. Not only has voluntary dropped by half, but company profits, client satisfaction scores and net promoter ratings are at an all-time high.

The program has also become the company’s “most powerful recruiting tool,” according to Emerson. She estimates that myRyan plays a role in about 85 percent of new hires’ decisions to accept an offer there. The program is even drawing former employees back to the company, as well as earning Ryan local and national recognition. The company has collected numerous  “best places to work” awards in recent years, and last year, Brint Ryan had the distinction of speaking  at a press conference on Capitol Hill, alongside Admiral Mike Mullen, on the value of workplace flexibility.

A Continuous Learning Process
While myRyan has been an enormous success, Emerson says the program is still a work in progress. Some people have a harder time getting used to the flexibility than others, creating the need to continuously re-evaluate the program. “You have to keep looking at it and figuring out what’s working, what’s not working.  Work with individuals who are struggling with it, but make sure you equip them with the knowledge and tools so that they can be ready.”

Implementing Change: Three Things to Know
For anyone hoping to implement a “major paradigm shift” at their own organizations, Emerson offers the following advice:

1. Find what works for you: “What worked for us won’t work for everyone. We’re happy to tell people our story and what we learned, but we can’t say, ‘Do exactly like we did, and you’ll be fine.’”
2. Involve your employees. “You have to have everybody involved so they have a piece of it. That way, when you encounter a pothole, they’re more likely to work with you than point at you and say, ‘Hey, you screwed up.’”
3. Anticipate growing pains. “Not everybody’s going to be thrilled with the concept of flexibility, and you’re going to have to manage to that and anticipate it.”
   

As your company grows, make sure it doesn’t leave behind the culture that makes it so great.

Organizational culture is one of those things that you don’t really notice – or appreciate – until it’s gone. Unfortunately, losing sight of one’s organizational culture is a common side effect of growth: You get so busy growing your business, you tend to forget about working to maintain the unique workplace culture you established as a smaller business.

Maintaining culture through growth is a difficult – but necessary – effort. Recognizing this, CareerBuilder and Inc. recently created “Geared to Growth: Building an Infrastructure for the Long Haul,” a new report designed to help companies deal with the common challenges that accompany organizational growth.

The following excerpt from “Geared to Growth” offers three tips to ensure that as your business grows, your culture doesn’t get left behind.

Dealing with the Cultural Issues Growth Brings
Although it’s nearly every company’s goal, growth doesn’t always bring with it positive change. Unless your company is prepared for the accompanying cultural shifts, growth can spark serious disruptions in your organization. Here are some tips for dealing with the changes growth can bring:

Account for emotion. Businesses often encounter particular emotional resistance to changes in the decision-making process, not only in the C-suite but throughout the organization. “In my experience, it hasn’t been as hard for the CEOs as it has been for the next level down,” says Barbara L. Davidson, Ph.D., a change management consultant and faculty member at Villanova University.

Prepare the entire organization for change. For that reason, it’s essential to prepare everyone in the organization for change and solicit staff input on growth plans before they’re put in motion. “It doesn’t guarantee failure, but it’s a set-up for failure if you don’t involve representatives from all functional areas and all levels of the organization in actually helping to design the change as well as execute it,” Davidson says.

Communicate the vision. Communicate the company’s organizational objectives and the impact those goals will have on employees’ responsibilities, job performance expectations, and prospects for advancement or new opportunities. Make sure they understand their roles in upcoming changes and are motivated to meet the challenges growth brings. That’s a critical strategy for maintaining their sense of investment in the company’s growth.

What does your organization do to foster culture?

Want to know more? View previous excerpts from “Geared to Growth” here, here and here, or simply download the entire report here.

In CareerBuilder’s recent webinar, Future of Recruiting, hosted by Beth Prunier and Chuck Loeher, area vice presidents at CareerBuilder, it became clear just how much recruitment has changed since — well, since shows like M.A.S.H. (you ‘ll just have to listen to know what I mean).

The way we consume our information is more fragmented, because we have so many places to get it.  And with each technological innovation that comes along, adoption of that technology gets quicker and expands into other areas of our lives. Radio took 38 years to reach 50 million users, for example, yet Facebook reached 50 million users in nine months. With these rapid market changes, we’ve seen an evolution in recruitment — perhaps more quickly than we ever imagined. Here are some highlights of what Beth and Chuck discussed; scroll down to listen to the full webinar or to check out the slideshow.

Future of Recruiting Highlights:

• You’ve got to fish where the fish are: Job seekers are already spending time on social media sites, search engines, and mobile devices, so it’s important to reach them in these places.
• The job search is now like buying a car — job seekers are consumers, and they’re accustomed to the process of making decisions and engaging with a brand.
• According to a Q2 Inavero study, 98 percent of candidates reported using search engines at the beginning of their research phase (when they’re searching on a more broad level, and not yet researching specific companies).
• Only 14 percent of candidates believe what a company says about themselves, yet 78 percent of candidates believe what users or employees say about a company.
• 58 percent of candidates say they complete all research before they ever apply to an organization.
• Retention today doesn’t begin when a candidate is hired into a job; it actually starts when a candidates learns about your organization, researches your company, finds interesting opportunities, and begins the application and interview process (can start 3-6 months before a candidate applies to a job at your company).
• The No. 1 reason employees leave their organization, according to a Deloitte study, is due to their relationship with their direct manager.
• Prospective candidates can research your company completely anonymously.
• It’s vital to survey and find out things like: “What do prospective candidates want in an opportunity?”, “Why did current employees join my organization?”, and “Why did former employees leave my organization, and in hindsight, do they believe it was the right decision?”

Three factors critical for successful recruiting in 2012 and beyond:

• Engaging with your candidates like consumers
• Building your recruitment strategies by position and geography
• Evaluating how — and when — your organization retains candidates

Last week, recruiters were treated to a webinar that delved into the inner workings of the staffing experience from the perspectives of the client, the job seeker, and internal staff. In Opportunities in Staffing: The Client, Job Seeker and Internal Staff Perspective, presented by Leah McKelvey, Director of Corporate Marketing for CareerBuilder and Eric Gregg, CEO of Inavero, talked about not only how job seekers and clients, but also your own employees, perceive your firm, based on the more than 14,000 respondents in the 2011 Opportunities in Staffing Guide (yep, it’s the most comprehensive study of its kind in the staffing industry).

Potentially scary, right? Considering stats like “38 percent of U.S. clients surveyed indicated they have also worked with a staffing firm as a job seeker,” it can be — but reports like these are a great opportunity to find out where your firm is falling short and work to make positive changes.

REMEMBER: You can also get your complimentary copy of the 2011 Opportunities in Staffing Guide, view the slides, or listen to the recorded session yourself.

2011 Opportunities in Staffing Webinar Highlights:

Did you know?

• Your brand is more personal and transparent than ever, as evidenced by the recent death of Apple CEO Steve Jobs and the very personal ways in which he was remembered, not only by customers, but by his own staff. How your brand communicates with its clients, job seekers and staff can make a huge difference in how your firm is perceived.
• Nearly half of your employees have worked for one of your competitors.
• Nearly half of your employees have had an interaction with a staffing firm prior to becoming an employee of your firm (either as an internal employee, as part of their job search, or as a client.)

The Employee Experience

How happy are your employees?

On a more alarming note, temporary and contract recruiters and sales/account executives had the lowest scores (27 and 32, respectively); staffing firms should be paying careful attention to this, as these are the two audiences carrying your brand message and talking to staff — and they’re the least engaged.

Driving loyalty and retention with your staff

When it comes to the factors that best predict retention in staffing, survey results found the following six values to be most vital:

• Optimism: “I believe my staffing firm will change for the better next year.”
• Pride: “Our firm’s client satisfaction is significantly higher than our competitor’s.”
• Community: “I enjoy working with my colleagues.”
• Valued: “I am completely satisfied with my current salary.”
• Appreciated: “I receive recognition when I do my job well.”
• Growth: “I am given the training opportunities I need to improve and grow professionally.”

So, where are staffing firms excelling — and faltering?

Staffing firms were found to be doing a great job of making employees feel proud of their firm and their job. On the other hand, they scored much lower when it came to making employees feel valued and appreciated. The lowest rating employees gave on the “feeling undervalued and unappreciated” scale involved them feeling overwhelmed by the amount of work they have to complete in most weeks. How can your firm help alleviate this?  Keep in mind that your staff probably won’t take action on feeling overwhelmed if they know they won’t continue to feel that way in the future. As an employer, then, you can improve morale by reassuring your staff that the tough times will pass, letting them know why things will get better, and reinforcing that message on a continuous basis.

During the webinar, Gregg talked about how Tony Hsieh, the founder of Zappos, helps employees progress without feeling completely in over their heads. Hsieh. Gregg said, has found that employees are more successful when the company gives them a path with shorter-term goals, and gives smaller advancements but more often so employees know they’re progressing toward something and growing in ways they can be proud of.

Something to consider for your own business?

What do staffing employees love/hate most about their job?

Love: Co-workers
Hate: Politics within the organization; management causing any barriers to the job seekers they serve

Love: Talent –- they love the mission of finding jobs for talent. Management must continue to pull people back to that mission.
Hate:  A lack of acknowledgment from candidates on how hard they’re working on their behalf can be frustrating.

The Job Seeker Experience

Building job seeker awareness

The top resource for job seekers when searching for jobs is national or local online job boards (57%), followed by local newspaper online classifieds (33 percent) and Craigslist (33 percent). Only 22 percent of job seekers use a staffing or recruiting firm in their search, and only 2 percent start their search with a staffing or recruiting firm. How, then, can staffing firms become more talent centric in working with those looking for jobs?

How job seekers currently become aware of staffing firms:

• Referral (25%)
• Online Ad (22%)
• I was called by a recruiter (13%)
• Traditional Media Ad (11%)
• Industry event or career fair (7%)

To get job seekers talking about you (in a positive way), consider how you’re treating job seekers:

1. Identify those who love you – help them tell their story
2. Do something surprising – worth talking about. What about a handwritten letter?
3. Give them a reason to be proud of being in the community
4. Make it valuable for the person referring and the person receiving

Responsiveness of Recruiters: Good news/bad news

The good news: Candidates think recruiters will be more responsive than organizations. But on a scale of 1 to 10 (from extremely dissatisfied to extremely satisfied), staffing firm 3.6 responsiveness rating only slightly edges out organization responsiveness’s dismal 2.3 rating, meaning there’s still much work to be done.

The job seeker experience is more important now than ever

Candidates are usually working with at least one or two firms once they engage with the industry. The biggest factors to choosing a staffing firm largely stem from economic concerns: The potential to become permanent (59 percent); the salary of the assignment (55% percent); the job’s proximity to their house (35 percent). It’s clear from the survey that candidates would rather receive bad news from a recruiter than no news at all: The NPS of those who were interviewed and turned away is -1 percent, while the NPS of those who were interviewed and never heard back from a recruiter with news is -29 percent.

Why should you care about detractors to your firm? Well, compared to promoters, detractors are twice as likely to quit an assignment before completion, four times less likely to refer you to other job seekers or hiring managers, and nearly three times less likely to accept a future assignment from your firm.

The Client Experience

Though the staffing market includes most organizations in the U.S., the penetration of staffing firms is equivalent to that of the original 13 colonies. Yikes! Between 70 percent and 80 percent of all U.S. organizations don’t use a staffing firm. Why? Many haven’t been educated as to value of staffing firms, or may have been told things that aren’t accurate.

Though 73 percent of clients said they were aware of a firm like Kelly Services, no staffing firm brand is top of mind with more than 9 percent of clients.

How can you improve this statistic?

• Be likeable.
• Do something surprising and worth talking about.
• Identify the right people – they’re not always your largest clients.
• Ask!
• Encourage referrals by making it valuable for the person referring AND the person receiving.
• Take advantage of mobile — 72 percent of clients now own a smartphone. 9 of 10 respond to email on their smartphone, and 4 of 10 use it to review applicants, and 3 of 10 use it to view your website.

What clients say will get your firm in the door: The inside scoop

• Getting a recommendation (49%)
• Sharing hiring trends for their region or industry (32%)
• Provide useful salary information (26%)
• Recognition of staffing firm/have heard of it (25%)
• In market — the rep calls when I need to hire  (18%)
• Building a relationship at an industry conference (18%)

Better client, job seeker and staff experiences

As we start to reset the expectations of what it’s like to work with a staffing firm, Gregg noted, people will want to work with us, and we will be re-setting the bar. Some companies are doing unexpected things to set themselves apart and delight, like the firm that offered unemployed job seekers the opportunity to get an outfit for an interview cleaned for free.

You must also understand, as a staffing firm, the culture of your client. Can you go to different events they’re hosting or see them speak at conferences? The more you start to hear their messages and understand their mission and culture, the more in demand your services will be.

Download your FREE copy of the 2011 Opportunities in Staffing Guide, listen to the webinar again, or check out the whole slideshow here for the full scoop.

What surprised you most about 2011′s Opportunities in Staffing Guide results?

Want to recruit top candidates? Start imitating them.

A recent study conducted by CareerBuilder and Inavero indicates that over the past several years, job seekers have developed a highly complex, multi-faceted approach to the job search, in which they utilize today’s sophisticated technology to their advantage.

According to the study, job seekers today now utilize five specific methods to ultimately find their next job:

• Search engines to find company, industry and job-specific information.
• Vertical sites (such as job boards and aggregators) for jobs that fit their qualifications and have a great company behind them.
• Social media sites like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn to post and share content.
• Corporate and career sites to find relevant news and information about specific companies.
• User-generated content sites such as Glassdoor.com to get a better sense of what it’s really like to work for a company.

As evidenced in the Inavero study, job seekers today are accelerating their efforts, using the opportunities they find on job boards as the starting-off point of a more in-depth search to find the opportunities – and the companies – that are right for them. It’s time for employers to do the same. By taking a cue from job seekers and applying this efficient, proactive approach to their candidate searches, employers can create a more efficient, effective recruiting process.

Five things today’s job seekers can teach employers:

1. Go mobile: The fact that over 300 million Americans use mobile phones today – and that mobile searches are up 130 percent over the past year – indicates a significant shift in the way people search for information. Not only are job seekers utilizing multiple channels to search for jobs (as shown above), but they’re also using doing so – increasingly – from their mobile devices. This shift in behavior opens up a huge opportunity for companies to reach job seekers anywhere, at any time of day. One of the smartest things you can do now to prepare your organization for long-term success in capturing talent is to mobilize your careers website.
2. Clean up your online reputation: Well aware that companies now check social media to screen candidates, the smartest job seekers proactively make an effort to clean up their social presence. Companies need to do the same. Thanks to the information available through social media and search engines, companies are more transparent than they’ve ever been. Job seekers can easily get information about a company’s organizational culture, the experience of working there, and what other employees think about the brand. Thanks to the vast reach of social media, companies also have the opportunity – and the need – to see what people are saying about them (on Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn, for example), become more robust in their employment branding efforts, and reach job seekers at every touch point.
3. Take ownership of the skills gap: : A CareerBuilder survey from earlier this year shows that many job seekers have begun going back to school to learn the in-demand skills that make them more desirable job candidates – and several have even switched careers. But the burden of closing the widening skills gap shouldn’t fall solely on job seekers. Companies have to take it upon themselves to reskill workers – and there are a number of (cost-effective) ways to do so. Consider just a few of the following options:  
• Create a mentorship program within the organization
• Partner with local colleges to offer training and recruit interns
• Set up a tuition reimbursement program or development program
• Promote from within the company
4. Focus on culture: The vast majority of job seekers (roughly 70 percent, according to the Inavero survey) say they would accept a lower salary to work for a company with a strong employment brand. Just as it influences a candidate’s decisions to accept an offer, culture should also play just as much of a role in an employer’s decision to hire. Author and business strategist Amber Naslund advises employers to “hire for culture, train for skills,” which means, hire people who truly believe in the mission of the organization and are passionate about its success. You can’t train for attitude, but you can train for skills. And what’s more valuable to the organization in the long run? (The added benefit is that these employees will likely end up being strong brand advocates.)
5. Do your research: The most in-demand candidates choose their employers wisely. As noted earlier, they not only have access to more information than ever, but they take advantage of it, too – by utilizing multiple channels to research the companies to which they apply. Whether they realize it or not, employers also have access to in-depth, accurate intelligence on job seekers as well. Data intelligence – if applied well – provides employers the insight they need to create a smarter, more efficient recruitment strategy. For instance, employers can utilize marketplace intelligence to pinpoint exactly where the supply and demand for people with their desired skill sets and experience levels are highest. In effect, they can find answers to such crucial questions such as, “Are we seeking talent in the right places? Is the talent we need even available? Who are we competing with for talent and what are they offering that we aren’t?” Without this valuable intelligence, employers simply can’t make the most informed recruitment decisions.

Bottom line: If what you’re doing now to bring in the talent you need isn’t working, you need to change what you’re doing. It’s as simple as that. In order to truly meet the demand for talent, today’s employers need a change in strategy. Perhaps Peter Capelli said it best in a recent Wall Street Journal article in which he calls for “a fundamental change in business as usual.” Because when it comes to recruiting in today’s job market, recruitment as usual just won’t cut it anymore.

Chuck Loeher is an Area Vice President at CareerBuilder, LLC, where he is responsible for sales strategies and revenue growth for companies ranging from Fortune 1000 to midsized businesses throughout the U.S.

Exclusive webcast: Join CareerBuilder’s Area Vice Presidents Chuck Loeher and Beth Prunier on Tuesday, December 6 at 11 am CST for Future of Recruiting: Are You Prepared for What’s Ahead? In this complimentary webcast, recruitment experts Loeher and Prunier will discuss the changing recruiting environment, how employers are responding and what you can do now to position your own firm for long-term, sustainable growth. Learn more or register here.

Say what you will about reality TV: there are quality programs out there that are not only entertaining, but that truly enrich people’s lives. Just ask Shelly Sun, CEO and co-founder of BrightStar Care, one of the nation’s fastest growing private healthcare companies. Last week, Sun, along with her husband, JD, appeared on the CBS hit reality show Undercover Boss, which follows different bosses each week as they go incognito to learn more about the inner workings of their companies.

Asked if she would do it all over again, she doesn’t need to think twice: “Absolutely,” she told me in a recent phone interview, going on to describe the experience as “really impactful.”

Shelly Sun had the itch to go undercover as a boss long before her episode ever aired.  A fan of the show since its premiere in 2010, Sun recalls watching the episode featuring 7-Eleven CEO Joe DePinto and thinking, “What a great opportunity to really see what goes on the front lines.”

So it’s not surprising that when Undercover Boss producers approached Sun about appearing on the show last year, she jumped at the opportunity.  “It was a no-brainer,” Sun says about her decision to go undercover.  Before Shelly and her husband appeared on the show, “they hadn’t featured a woman, they’d never had a minority…no one who’d ever started actually put their money on the line and risked it all to have a business.” Shelly and her husband started BrightStar Care in 2002 after they couldn’t find quality and reliable home healthcare for her husband’s grandmother.  So she was excited by the opportunity to help make that happen and represent a new face of the CEO.

More than anything, however, Sun was eager to witness and pay tribute to the dedication of her caregivers and hard work of her franchisees.

“I had every confidence in the world that my franchisees were doing a great job and I have the most amazing caregivers in the country. When you believe in your product, you believe in your service, going behind the scenes didn’t seem like a scary adventure at all, but one that would be a lot of fun and that would highlight and recognize those that make more possible in our brand every day.”

Sun was hardly disappointed. Her experience working on the frontlines with her employees surpassed her expectations.  She says she had “moments of surprise” by getting to witness firsthand just how much of a difference her workers were making in the lives of their patients and customers.

Asked if she was afraid the employees featured on the show would feel betrayed or fooled, Sun says the thought never crossed her mind. Instead, she was focusing on “the opportunity to impact their life, like they’d impacted mine and impact our clients every day” by offering them such rewards as a free vacation, tuition reimbursement, and money to start a franchise.

The experience has given her a laundry list of ideas for ways to improve her employees’ professional and personal lives. For instance, she has begun looking into ways to extend the company’s new interactive communications tool, care-together.com, to help active duty workers and their families stay connected, as well as resources for helping families that have been affected by autism.

Sun also plans to create more opportunities for corporate staff members to visit and spend time with franchisees and caregivers. She wants to enable them the opportunity to “see the care these workers provide, how special they are and the risks these franchisees are taking every day to make more possible and to build and strengthen our business…I think that could strengthen our DNA and deepen our commitment across our corporate team that’s enabling so much on the front lines, behind the scenes.”

Another positive outcome of the show? The opportunity to send the message that BrightStar is a great place to work, one that takes care of its employees, and one where employees truly take pride in their work. Sun was delighted to see the pride her employees took in “working for a company where we push it to that higher standard of quality.”

So does she have any advice for other CEOs after going through this experience? “I would encourage every CEO to do this, regardless of whether you’re part of a televised event or not,” Sun told me.

“There’s only so much you can do from the corner office. I made so many more improvements to my business model by getting out there and rolling up my sleeves. Don’t wait for the TV show. Make your own undercover boss event happen.”

Related Content: “What Working on ‘Undercover Boss’ Has Taught Me”: An Interview with ‘Boss’ Creator Eli Holzman

Last month, Jim Welch brought his 25 years of management and leadership expertise to CareerBuilder, hosting a special webinar, Real World Employment Branding: A Blueprint for Success. Welch discussed his experience as Chief Marketing Offier of Hallmark, where he played a leading role in the creation and implementation of the company’s successful employment brand strategy. Below are some of the major takeaways.

“What I’ve Learned…” Employment Branding Lessons from Industry Expert Jim Welch

1. Size doesn’t matter. “You can implement a successful employment brand strategy, regardless of your size and also regardless of your budget,” Welch emphasizes from the start. To cap his point, he later offers the following tips to help you develop your employment brand:
   • Ask your employees first.  Employee surveys are critical for understanding your employment brand as other see it (i.e., as it truly is). Asking questions like, “What single thing do you value most about your company?” and “Would you recommend our company to your friends as a place to work? Why or why not?” will help you find your organization’s critical points of difference.
   • Create multiple messages for multiple audiences.  The wants and needs of Gen Y workers and Gen X workers differ; therefore, so should your employment branding messages.
   • Be a storyteller. “Great employment brands have great stories,” says Welch. Find a way to tell a story about your brand. Gather employee testimonials to post on your careers site and social media pages, for example.  Find way out to spread your brand message that is personal and emphasizes that emotional connection (see #2 below).
   • Celebrate your brand with your employees. Some ways to do this include hosting employee workshops, during which employees can share stories that they believe represent your company’s employment brand; or hosting  a ‘brand week’ with activities that emphasize your organization’s culture and values. In fact…
   • Have a year-round calendar of employment branding events and touch points. “Think of it as a marketing calendar you use for clients and customers – but toward both current and employees,” says Welch. Not only will it ensure employment branding remains a priority, it will also help you identify any employment branding gaps. 
2. Emotions trump logic. “We need to move from a transactional decision to an emotional decision,” says Welch, pointing out that some of life’s biggest decisions – including whether to join or leave a company, are emotion-based decisions.  Employers need to appeal to that emotional connection in employees. “We don’t just need every brain in the game, we need every brain and heart in the game.”
3. Your employees are your customers. “Employment branding is really about your total employment experience. It’s also your reputation as an employer.” For many employers, thinking about their employment brand means adopting different mindset – that of employee as customer. Employee loyalty is just as crucial to nurture as customer loyalty.
4. Your employment brand is your company brand. Your employment brand doesn’t just help you retain and attract employees, but customers and clients as well: “Your employment brand makes you more attractive to as a strategic partner to other companies, because it creates an environment of innovation and growth – an environment that people want to be a part of.  It also impacts customer or client loyalty.” As the face of your organization, your employees – and how they feel about you as an employer – influence how customers and clients feel about your organization as well.

 “Employment branding is easy to put off, but there’s a window now to position yourself to come out ahead in the economy,” Welch says at one point during his presentation. With the down economy where it is – and the job market on its way to recovery – it no longer makes sense to say, “People are just happy to have a job right now.” The best people are always the ones to leave first after a recession, so the time is now to focus on your employment brand, and position your organization to come out ahead as the economy recovers.

Want to know more? Check out my earlier interview with Jim Welch, or feel free to download the complete employment branding webinar.

“There’s an evolution going on,” says Jennifer Prosek, author of the new book Army of Entrepreneurs: Create an Engaged and Empowered Workforce for Exceptional Business Growth, in reference to today’s workforce. “If you look at what new entrants into the workforce are looking for in terms of jobs, lives, careers and what we’re taught about the world of work have changed.” 

As the CEO of public relations and financial communications consultancy CJP Communications, Prosek has noticed that today’s workers want more responsibility, and today’s employers should be receptive to that desire.

Her philosophy is that deciding who to hire is less about finding a great employee and more about finding a great business partner – or, rather, a fellow entrepreneur. “The new generation of workers expects more responsibility early on,” Prosek told me. “They’re fearless and aren’t as willing to stick things out and do things just because their bosses say they should.”

While Prosek drew on her own experiences to write Army of Entrepreneurs, her observations are not limited to what she sees going on at her organization: a recently released Career Advisory Board study indicates that there’s an overall discrepancy between what hiring managers think Millennials value most as they enter the workforce (higher pay) and what Millennials actually say they value most (meaningful work).

It is crucial that hiring managers today understand the shift that has taken place in workers’ attitudes, especially if they expect to build their army of entrepreneurs.

Recruit now. Hire later.
While “any employee can be entrepreneurial,” Prosek says hiring managers should keep an eye out for “people who exhibit excitement about bringing their own ideas to life” when trying to identify potential entrepreneurs – which, by the way, is all the time.

Hiring managers need to take a proactive approach to recruitment and constantly be on the lookout for the next entrepreneur; otherwise, waiting until a hiring need opens up couldresult in a panicked hire.  “Panicked hires typically aren’t successful, particularly if you’re building a typical DNA [for your employment brand]. Everyone you hire is a reflection of that brand.”

Not only can a panicked hire be a costly mistake for employers, Prosek says that panicked hiring doesn’t reflect well with employees, either. Employees can sense when they’ve been hired out of desperation, which significantly lowers their excitement about the company; whereas employees who are courted over a period of time by prospective employers go into their new jobs feeling special “because they are.” 

Prosek says recruiting candidates early on and staying in contact with them is key to building that talent pipeline – and ensuring they will feel special when the time comes to actually hire. Some of the ways employers can keep candidates engaged include sending them quarterly company updates via email, going to career fairs and networking events, and, not least of all, utilizing social networking. “If you have social media presence and blog, these things make it incredibly easy to stay in touch with your talent pipeline.”

Build an army of brand ambassadors.
But perhaps the most important factor in this strategy is an employer’s current employee base. “My whole book is about giving responsibility to your employees, asking employees to be brand ambassadors. The right employees love this activity and can be more successful at it than managers.”

And while offering rewards like cash bonuses can effectively generate participation in employee referral programs, monetary incentives are not the only option here.  Giving employees ownership over the responsibility of bringing in new employees – and, essentially, helping to grow the business – can go a long way in motivating them. 

Recognition is key here, too. Employers tend to forget how much value employees place on getting recognized for their efforts and contributions to the business, Prosek says, but it is absolutely essential. “People do not necessarily understand how the business works all the time. Once they understand that, and how they fit into it, they’re engaged on a whole other level,” she says. “When you teach people the business, magic happens.”

Jennifer Prosek is the founder and CEO of the award-winning international public relations and financial communications consultancy CJP Communications (CJP). Her new business book, Army of Entrepreneurs: Create and Engaged and Empowered Workforce for Exceptional Business Growth, is available now. Visit http://www.armyofentrepreneurs.com/ to learn more.

Can you change the world? That’s the challenge Guy Kawasaki sets forth for his readers in the beginning pages of his latest book, Enchantment: The Art of Changing Hearts, Minds, and Actions.

The 10th book from the former chief evangelist for Apple and co-founder of Alltop.com, Enchantment is slightly loftier in tone than his previous business books, which include The Art of the Start and The Macintosh Way. That, however, is no accident.

Kawasaki admitted to me in a recent phone interview that his latest endeavor was largely inspired by Dale Carnegie’s 1937 book, How to Win Friends and Influence People.  With Enchantment, Kawasaki aims to teach “anyone who has $26 and wants to be more enchanting.”

Why enchantment? Actually, Kawasaki doesn’t waste much time talking about why we should all strive to be more enchanting (he dedicates only one chapter – the first – to the subject, which he summed up for me in one sentence, saying, “The world is a better place when you’re enchanting”), but gets right to the how, focusing on the exact steps one might take to charm anyone from your boss, to your customer, to the stranger whose place at the front of the bathroom line you desperately covet.

The power of Enchantment lies in its simplicity. Kawasaki doesn’t put forth any advice that the average person cannot easily apply to nearly any situation, in nearly any area of life, whether personal or professional.

While the focus of the book is largely on marketing – yourself, your business, or your cause, mainly – for the reader looking for leadership and management advice, there’s much to take away. Almost every principle in the book can be applied to employee engagement.  For example, Kawasaki’s advice for creating win-win situations with clients would easily translate to the boss-employee relationship, while he might as well be talking about employment branding in his chapter on the do’s and don’t’s of social media marketing.

For those looking for more tactical career advice, however, Kawasaki does dedicate two chapters specifically to enchantment in the workforce – one from an employee’s perspective, the other from an employer’s.  Here again, though, he reintroduces the simple, but important concepts that are too often ignored or forgotten, such as “don’t ask employees to do what you wouldn’t do” and “judge yourself by what you’ve accomplished and others by what they’ve intended.”

Time will tell if Enchantment has the staying power of Dale Carnegie’s iconic bestseller, but there’s no question that it is indeed an enchanting read. Kawasaki deftly combines business advice and casual storytelling. He understands the art of brevity, keeping chapters short and concise, and peppering them with colorful anecdotes that keep readers engaged while illustrating his points. The concepts in the book might not be entirely groundbreaking, but they’re delivered with a fresh perspective that makes the reader think. At the very least, Enchantment serves to remind readers that even the smallest, most ordinary gestures can go a long way in winning friends and influencing people.

Will this book help you change the world? Maybe…maybe not. But it sure makes you want to try.

Disclosure: I received a free review copy of Enchantment: The Art of Changing Hearts, Minds, and Actions.

“One of the things I believe is important to being a true leader is that you connect emotionally to your employees,” says Jim Welch, president and founder of The Growth Leader, Inc.

It should come as no surprise that emotional connections are at the forefront of Welch’s leadership philosophy. After all, Welch was once Senior Vice-President of Marketing at the company that has built a business around helping people foster emotional connections: Hallmark.

Now a principal owner of LeaderFuelNow, LLC and author of the book Grow Now: 8 Essential Steps to Flex Your Leadership Muscles, Welch is a nationally recognized speaker and consultant on the subject of leadership and growth culture.  Next month in collaboration with CareerBuilder, Welch will lend his expertise to the masses for a special webinar titled, “Real World Employment Branding: A Blueprint for Success.”

When I spoke with Welch over the phone recently, he gave me a sneak peek into what he planned to cover in the webinar, including what it means to connect emotionally with your employees, what it means to build a strong employment brand, and why it’s essential that great leaders do both.

“The need for emotional connection is your brand.”
“Emotion” isn’t often a word you see in business books; yet in Grow Now – as well as in daily conversations with clients – it is the central topic of discussion. “In the business world, emotion gets a bad rap, but the fact is an emotional connection – whether it be with your customers, your employees or your peers on the team – is critical,” Welch told me. Critical, because without that emotional connection, employees easily become disengaged from their jobs, their leaders and the companies they work for.  They have no motivation to put forth more than the minimum amount of effort required of them – and no motivation to stay when better opportunities come along.  Thus, today’s leaders need to work to ensure that emotional connection is there.

That emotional connection, Welch explains, starts with trust. “There has to be a culture of trust created where employees can give feedback…openly and without any reprisal or negative repercussion for their career or personal growth within the company.” 

He recommends having regular small group meetings – such as monthly roundtable discussions – where employees are not only able, but encouraged to speak candidly about their concerns. Not only do these types of discussions establish trust between employees and leaders, but it’s better for business. After all, issues that are important to employees are important for the organization overall. But because leaders are all too often disconnected from their employees, they fail to get the information they need to make crucial organizational decisions.

“As you move up in an organization and get more and more senior, you actually get less and less given to you in a straightforward manner.  There’s a real danger that by the time you become CMO or CEO or whatever that you’re too far removed, and you end up making decisions without getting all the answers,” Welch says. For this reason, it’s crucial that leaders have meetings to check in with their employees in order to stay engaged in what’s going on in the organization.

“You need to break down through those levels in the organization and talk to the people who are doing the work and out on the frontlines every day and find out what their issues are. And you need to do that in small groups,” he says.

Another good practice, Welch says, is simply blocking off time in your calendar each week just to walk around the organization and have conversations with people, something he used to do as chief marketing officer at Hallmark.  “I’d talk to administrative assistants, I’d talk to catalog coordinators, whomever, and just ask them open-ended questions like, ‘What are we doing that’s working? What are we doing that’s not working? Is there something we’re not doing that we should start doing?’ And people would really open up.” Welch says the practice not only kept him aware of important organizational issues, but helped him establish connections with his employees as well. 

“You’ve got to be transparent with people.”
“How many times have we heard, ‘Well, people are just happy to have a job right now’? Well, the key part of that sentence is ‘right now,’” Welch says when we get on the subject of succession planning. The recent finding that only 35 percent of companies have a succession plan in place doesn’t surprise Welch, who says in his book that leaders fear succession planning because they want to avoid making promises to top performers and causing average achievers to overreact.

And while there may be risk in being transparent with people about succession planning and where they stand in the organization, it’s far more dangerous to stay quiet. “If you don’t talk to people, they assume the worst possible case scenario…People leave an organization because of that.”

Failing to discuss succession planning with your employees is especially risky now, when employers are most at risk for losing top performers. “It’s a proven fact that whenever an economy turns around, or whenever an organization goes through change, it’s the top performers who leave first,” Welch points out. “At that point, anything you do [to try to keep those employees from leaving] seems disingenuous because you didn’t demonstrate that back when they were ‘lucky just to have a job.’” 

“Employment branding isn’t nearly as top of mind as it needs to be.”
One of the determining factors in retaining that top talent is the strength of one’s employment brand, something that Welch believes employers place far too little emphasis on as a business strategy.  While you’d be hard-pressed to find a company that names employment branding as a top priority, he says, the majority of companies do believe that recruiting and retaining top talent is a priority. What many companies fail to understand even today, however, is the connection between these two concepts.

An employment brand is essential to be able to recruit and retain top talent. And that entails understanding how you as an employer are perceived through the eyes of employees.  According to Welch, the key to retaining great people is to establish connections with them, which only happens when they feel appreciated, that their opinion counts, that they have the freedom to do what they like and the resources to be successful, that they get frequent, valuable feedback from their leaders, and that they have a future with the company.

All too often, leaders are too far removed from their employees to know for sure how their employees really feel about them. Assuming simply isn’t enough. “People want to stay with organizations they believe in and they share common values and they connect with their leaders. People leave organizations because they don’t feel emotional connections to the boss and they don’t feel a connection to the organization in total.”

Keep reading to learn about the 8 Cs of The Practical Growth Leader

Jim Welch’s 8 Cs of The Practical Growth Leader
Welch developed his 8 C’s of The Practical Growth Leader model after years of experiencing and observing different leadership styles. He says he found that the strongest leaders were those who established an emotional connection to their employees by embodying the following characteristics:

1. Caring: The single most important thing you can do as a leader is not just tell, but show you team how much you care about them. Caring is best demonstrated in “unexpected” ways.
2. Candor: Playing to win requires facing the reality of the brutal facts…If you fail to practice total candor, you will lose the trust of your team, your leadership and your customers.
3. Confronting Conflict: You must create a culture that welcomes conflict like a special guest to a holiday party. Confronting conflicts and taking on the big elephent on the table can create breakthrough bridges to growth.
4. Circle of Trust: It is critical that you have the trust of your team. This means that…what is said inside these four walls must stay within the team. The circle of trust will take the team commitment to growing your business to a new place.
5. Collaboration: The best way to collaborate and play to win is to utilize the CEO rule and hire people who are smarter than you. If you treate every team  member the same way you treat your CEO, life would get a whole lot better.
6. Credit to Others: It is critical that the Practical Growth Leader gives all the credit to other team members. This will help to create a high energy environment where new innovators emerge. You must publicly and tangibly reward the innovators. Remember, it is not all about you.
7. Communication: Remember, when it comes to communication, the goal is to drive fear out of your organization. Fear kills growth.
8. Celebration: Nothing drives change momentum faster than celebrating your successes along the way…Celebrate by storytelling and reinforcing key actions, accomplishments and behaviors you want to spread as part of changing your culture

ABOUT JIM WELCH: Jim Welch is the former chief marketing officer of Hallmark and founder of The Growth Leader, where his work as a speaker and leadership consultant has been recognized by colleagues and industry thought leaders alike. His book, Grow Now – 8 Essential Steps to Flex Your Leadership Muscles, has been hailed as a “high-powered and entertaining business growth leadership book.”

Such is the advice of Garrett Miller, author of the new book Hire On A WHIM: Four Qualities That Make for Great Employees.  As the president and CEO of workplace management company CoTria, Miller frequently coaches companies and gives keynotes on the subject of workplace productivity. 

Shortly after starting CoTria, Miller says he started to reflect on the things that made him successful in his previous career, and one thing he always came back to, he say, was hiring. 

“I started to wonder, ‘Why did I have so much success hiring?’ As I wrote down qualities that made them [great hires] great, I began to see these four threads that wove them all together. And suddenly, the word ‘WHIM’ popped up,” he told me in a phone interview recently.   Thus, the inspiration behind his new book.

“No matter how good you are as a manager, you can’t teach someone integrity.”
WHIM, as the book’s title implies, is an acronym for the four qualities Miller believes are the foundation for a great hire: work ethic, humility, integrity and maturity.  

Why these four qualities? “What makes these qualities so unique is that you can’t teach them,” Miller says. ”No matter how talented a manager you are, you can’t teach someone to have more integrity. That’s something life teaches you.  And, yes, you certainly can learn these qualities, and you can grow in these qualities, but as a hiring manager, I can’t adopt you without these qualities.” 

What’s conspicuously absent from WHIM is the mention of skills or experience, but as far as Miller’s concerned, that’s no accident. He says he’s not discounting the importance of experience when making a quality hire, but even the most experienced employees will make poor hires when they lack any one of these qualities.  “What separates the great employees from the mediocre employees? And it comes down to these qualities.”

And only a candidate who possesses all four qualities will do, Miller insists. He says he learned this lesson the hard way that “if you hire three and give a pass to one, you’re going to pay for it…It cost me dearly and my team dearly. And it’s affected my reputation as a manager, because everyone I hire is really a reflection on me, isn’t it?”

“Peel back the onion” by asking unexpected interview questions
To help others avoid the same mistake, Miller provides a list of questions at the end of each chapter in WHIM to guide hiring manager through the act of “peeling that onion back so that you’re really seeing the individuals – as opposed to someone who answers questions well.”

Miller says that one of his personal  favorite interview questions is, “What one event helped to shape you into the person you are today?” because it’s an unusual question that generates a thoughtful answer – one that reveals whether or not a candidate “can come through adversity on the other side and grow from it.”

In fact, Miller seems to have a soft spot for unusual interview questions. “One last thing I do in an interview is I sell them out of the job,” a tactic that Miller uses to keep himself from setting false expectations and reducing the amount of “I wasn’t expecting this” feeling from new hires.  “Once they’re in the ‘I wasn’t expecting this phase’ part…in a sense, they feel you’ve lied to them. So now, the integrity is busted, and they look at you without integrity. And you can’t have that in any type of relationship.

“We need to keep in mind the ROI of getting this right.”
But Miller also understands that sometimes just getting to the interview phase of the hiring process is half the battle. “It’s funny, because people think this is the greatest time to hire because you have so many applicants, but it winds up being a nightmare – you  post a job, and you get 300 resumes.” While Miller doesn’t have an “easy answer” to those hiring managers who are overwhelmed with more resumes than usual right now, he is adamant in his belief that as time-consuming as the process is, going through those resumes thorously will pay off in the end.  “What takes more time is when you hire incorrectly.  We need to keep in mind the ROI of getting this right.” 

He suggests having a sort of litmus taste when going through resumes that revolve around WHIM, such as screening for charity or volunteer work. Another piece of advice he has is giving priority to those resumes that come from personal recommendations and networking, which he has personally found leads to a lot less “spam” and a higher quality of candidate.

“I can’t guarantee a great hire every time, but I can guarantee MORE great hires,” Garrett says of what readers will get out of his book.  “My goal isn’t to be right, but to share what made my career so great,” Miller says of his purpose in writing these book.  He hopes others can take away the lessons he’s learned and apply it to their own careers, and understand that “no matter how good they are, they can be better.”

So what is the secret to his success? “It wasn’t because I was a good manager,” Miller says, “but because I hired great people and then got out of the way.”

* * * * *

Garrett Miller is a workplace productivity coach and keynote speaker with extensive experience in hiring, training, attracting, and retaining top talent. Learn more about his book, Hire on a WHIM: Four Qualities that Make for Great Employees, at www.HireonaWHIM.com).

For the sixth year in a row, Hay Group released the results of its Best Companies for Leadership study, naming General Electric the top company for leadership worldwide.  Proctor & Gamble, Intel, Siemens, Banco Santander, Coca-Cola, McDonald’s, Accenture, Walmart and Southwest rounded out the top 10.

What exactly does ‘great for leadership’ mean? In a nutshell, the companies on this list actively promote and support leadership development throughout all levels of the organization, providing extensive training, education and mentoring programs – as well as viable work/life options. 

Notice how the top companies for leadership also happen to be leaders in their industries as well? That’s no coincidence – their leadership and development initiatives benefit the bottom line just as much as they benefit the individual employees.  Hay Group’s research finds that these companies owe much of their long-time success and sustainability to “attracting and developing leaders who can collaborate, inspire and lead,” according to the group’s website.

Leading the Way: Four Characteristics that Define a Great Company for Leadership
For more specific examples of what defines a company that’s great for leadership, check out the list below of the characteristics that define these companies – according to Hay Group’s official study – and how various companies on the list embody these characteristics:

1. Diversity is Valued as a Business Asset.
Diversity and inclusiveness is central to General Electric’s mission, with affinity networks and employee groups geared specifically toward minorities, women and veterans, among other groups. Proctor and Gamble has a U.S. Diversity Recruiting Team in place to ensure “consistent and continuous representation in the leadership networks in order to provide the best sourcing pipeline available” Siemens’ management training programs are specifically designed to teach managers “how to effectively leverage and develop the talents of our employees across the entire spectrum of similarities and differences.” The company also keeps the conversation on diversity alive across the the company with its blog, DiversityTalk@SiemensUSA. And as part of its diversity commitment, FedEx encourages employees to get involved with community service and volunteer initiatives, an effort furthered by its partnerships with such organizations as the American Red Cross, United Way, NAACP, and the Special Olympics.

2. Effective Leaders are Increasingly Collaborators.
According to the study, companies that are great for leadership have programs in place “designed to develop leaders who can creatively bring together resources across different parts of this organization.” Such is the case at Southwest, where employees can spend a day on the job of another employee if they’re interested in another department or position at the company, and its Manager in Training Program is designed to identify and develop leaders. In addition to internal communities and networking events, Accenture ensures collaboration between leaders and employees with its mentoring program. And with its Performance and Development Planning program, Unilever encourages employees to take responsibility for the next step of their careers as they maintain an ongoing dialogue with their managers for feedback and guidance.  According to Pfizer’s career page, “each individual contributes to Pfizer’s scientific medical and business leadership possible.”  The company’s interactive “It Begins With Me” website highlights the ways in which employees are collaborating in order to accomplish this mission.  

3. Leadership Development is a Continuous Priority.
General Electric claims to invest more than $1 billion annual on training and educational opportunities, including its Masters and MBA Leadership program to further their careers, and the Undergraduate Leadership program, which combines “responsible and important job assignments with formal classroom studies,” according to GE’s website. Intel employees can attend Intel University for nearly every learning need – from developing management abilities to improving computing skills, to enhancing personal organization. Employees also have anytime-access to an entire library of professional development books.  McDonald’s Corporation is the only restaurant organization that awards college credits from the American Council on Education, and its Hamburger University teaches in a total of 28 languages, including Spanish, German, French, Japanese and Mandarin.

4. Work-Life Balance is Encouraged.
Intel employees enjoy a slew of flexible work options, such as compressed workweeks, alternate work schedules, telecommuting and part-time and job share opportunities.  Not to mention various transportation opportunities like rideshare and shuttles to take the stress out of getting to and from the office.  And with childcare and eldercare benefits, employees are still able to put family first. In addition to easier travel options with free flights, Southwest employees can share certain flight privileges with friends and families as part of the company’s Buddy Pass program. PepsiCo counts an employee assistance program, adoption assistance, family leave, an auto and home insurance program and service awards among its work/life benefits.

But again, these are just a few of the many examples as to what makes these companies great for leadership.  To see Hay Group’s full list of winners and methodology, go here.

Where does your company fit in with these categories? Share!

“Engaged employees are the competitive advantage of today,” Eric Mosley and Derek Irvine argue in their new book, Winning with a Culture of Recognition.  If they’re to be believed, that means bad news for employers: Employee engagement is at its lowest level in 15 years, according to a recent Hewitt survey.  From that standpoint, it’s no wonder the number employers are struggling to hold on to top employees, despite a still-slim job market.

If anyone can speak to the important role engagement has in an organization’s success, it’s Mosley and Irvine. Through their work at Globoforce®, they have helped companies of all sizes – including such recognized corporations as Dow Chemical, Intuit and Fairmont Hotels – develop strategic recognition programs to increase employee engagement levels and ultimately drive bottom line results. Winning with a Culture of Recognition is their effort to bring those same strategies and solutions to a broader audience.

I recently had the pleasure of speaking with Irvine, who heads Globoforce’s strategy and marketing team, via e-mail to discuss how the book addresses today’s key employer challenges, including what is causing the drop in engagement levels, the impact it is having on U.S. businesses, and what leaders can do to not only stop – but reverse – these effects.  Below is the edited version of our conversation.

What sets “Winning with a Culture of Recognition” apart from other management books? Winning with a Culture of Recognition gives practical step-by-step guidance, proven stories of success, and the research behind the power of recognition to create a culture of appreciation that increases employee engagement for dramatic bottom line results. This isn’t a soft-skills “1,000 ways to thank your employees” book. This is a hard management practice with proven results. We bust the myths around old-school recognition and incentives, making strategic recognition attainable for companies of any size.

In your book, you talk about “strategic recognition.” What do you mean by that? Strategic recognition means integrating recognition with a company’s core values and strategic goals.  It helps employees understand the behavioral norms you have identified to achieve the desired business outcome. What matters in the recognition moment is not showmanship but sincerity. Let the managers express appreciation in their own way; if it’s personal, tied to company values, and genuine, it will be effective.

What does “winning with a culture of recognition” mean?  “Winning” with a culture of recognition refers to winning in the marketplace. It’s proven that companies with more engaged employees are more successful. Recent Gallup research found that for companies in the top 25 percent for employee engagement, earnings per share (EPS) exceeds competition by 28 percent. That number increases to 72 percent for companies in the top 10 percent. What did the level of employee engagement mean to companies during the recession? Those in the top 25 percent that were trailing competition before the recession surpassed the competition in 2008. Those in the top 10 percent were already ahead of their competition in 2007, but widened the gap further in 2008.

What sets the companies that successfully foster a culture of recognition apart from others? Three things set them apart: 1) Executive sponsorship with defined goals. Support from senior management is critical to success in any ini­tiative, and this is especially true in managing corporate culture.  2) A single, global strategy. A global strategy creates a single recognition brand and vocabulary. It creates clear visibility into budgets and can be audited. Executives in different divisions, locations, and markets can view uniform metrics that provide insight into program adoption, operation, and results. 3) Alignment with company values and objectives. When individual-recognition moments are consciously linked to company values and goals, employees understand how their actions directly affect the culture.

What is the biggest roadblock to creating a culture of recognition? Possibly the biggest roadblock is overcoming the assumption that a company culture cannot be proactively created and managed. It absolutely can be, but the first step is determining what your company culture is today. After spending so much time and effort developing a strategy, mission and values, company leaders hope those values become the basis for the company culture, but that is not always the case. Unless the values are visibly and quantifiably reinforced on a daily basis, they become nothing more than an engraved plaque hanging on the wall.

Why is recognition so important? Why do you find that it is so frequently overlooked as a business strategy? Too often, recognition is believed to be a “soft-skill” – a nice-to-have component if managers are willing to do it, but certainly nothing to push for. Recognition, when done strategically, is much more. It’s a data-driven business initiative that can have quite significant impact on a company’s bottom line.  

There is a great deal of data to support this from various research organizations including Gallup, Towers Watson, the Human Capital Institute, Deloitte Consulting, and many others. For example, Gallup has shown managers who focus on employee strengths have 61 percent engaged employees versus 1 percent actively disengaged. But managers who focus on employee weaknesses have 45 percent engaged employees and 22 percent actively disengaged. Managers who ignore their employees are the worst with only 2 percent engaged employees and 40 percent actively disengaged. Employees need feedback – they need to know how they’re doing and if their efforts are valued and appreciated by others.

But what’s the impact on the bottom line? Employees who are engaged drive financial results. And those results are not insignificant. In their 2007-2008 Global Workforce Study, Towers Perrin (now Towers Watson) found that companies with high employee engagement vastly outperform low-employee engagement firms in terms of operating income, income growth rate, and earnings per share.

What advice do you have for employers who say, “We can’t afford to give our employees pricey bonuses or raises, or throw extravagant parties, so we might as well give up”? Companies should make recognition a priority. If they do not, they are at risk of losing employees even in a down economy and having a disengaged workforce. Strategic recognition does not have to be costly, though it does require investment. Our customers have found that, simply by consolidating multiple tactical programs, they can fund a strategic recognition investment. Giving up just isn’t an option.

Yesterday, FORTUNE released its annual list of the Best Companies to Work For.

Simply looking at the profiles FORTUNE provides for each company, which includes such big names as Google, Whole Foods Market and Goldman Sachs, you might be thinking, Well, sure, if my company had an annual revenue of $23.6 billion, we could afford to give our employees on-site dry-cleaning and free gourmet lunches, too.  But it’s important to remember that the perks FORTUNE highlights in its profiles of these companies are just that – perks. 

Sure, things like Google’s free laundry services, Zappos’ no-charge vending machines, or the state-of-the-art gym at SAS are nice – very nice, in fact – but those things don’t even scratch the surface of what makes these companies great workplaces.  In other words, it’s not the benefits themselves, but rather the implication that employees and their work are valued that keep employees happy, engaged and productive.

Building a Great Workplace: Think ‘How,’ Not ‘What’
Last month, I had the pleasure of speaking with Michael Burchell and Jennifer Robin, researchers at the company behind FORTUNE’s list, The Great Place to Work® Institute, to discuss what differentiates great places to work from other companies.

As they note in the opening pages of the new book they co-authored, The Great Workplace: How to Build It, How to Keep It, and Why It Matters, when it comes to creating a great place to work, “it’s not what you do, but how you do it.” And these companies execute their employee benefits in such a way that says, “We value you.”

It should also be noted that these companies don’t treat their employees well because they can simply afford to offer a bunch of perks, but they can afford to offer perks precisely because they treat their employees well.

“The research we’ve done on the business benefits are pretty clear and compelling that great workplaces just do better financially [than their competitors],” Burchell says.

Aside from the financial impact, however, Burchell notes that a lot of leaders simply believe creating a culture that recognizes and rewards employees for their hard work is just the right thing to do.  The fact that it happens to be good for the bottom line, too?

Well, that’s just a perk.

FORTUNE’s Best Companies to Work For 2011: Top 10
Get a peek at what makes these places so great…or check out the entire list here:

1. SAS: While perks like on-site healthcare, high quality childcare, summer camp for kids, car cleaning, a beauty salon, and access to a state-of-the-art, 66,000-square-foot gym are nice, the real reason employees stick around is because – as one manager told FORTUNE – “they feel regarded — seen, attended to and cared for.”
2. Boston Consulting Group: Employees here have the chance to work with the U.N. World Food Program and Save the Children through the company’s Social Impact Practice Network (SIPN), contributing to a larger community effort.
3. Google In addition to recognition from executive leadership (Google employees recently received a surprise 10 percent pay hike and $1,000 bonus for their service), peer recognition is also emphasized here: Googlers can award one another $175 peer spot bonuses.
4. Wegmans: Combining the tenants of camaraderie with wellness, Wegmans holds a companywide challenge to eat five cups of fruit and vegetables a day and walk up to 10,000 steps a day for eight weeks. Wegmans also covered the costs of flu shots and H1N1 vaccines for its employees.
5. NetApp: Even hourly employees have it good here, with executive assistants making $76,450 a year, supplemented by a $21,917 bonus.
6. Zappos: Zappos follows through on its promise to “create fun and a little weirdness” by offering, among other benefits, a full-time life coach on hand.
7. Camden Property Trust: When economic pressures forced budget cuts, Camden gave its employees a say in how it should trim $6 million in costs, which ultimately entailed renegotiating contracts and reducing pay.
8. Nugget Market: Nugget embodies the ‘Communication is key’ idea, as management uses a big flat screen computer monitor in each store to deliver important information about products, messages from the leadership team, employee awards, and pump up the troops.
9. REI: Employees get a none-too-shabby 50-75 percent discount on merchandise and free equipment rental – as well as the chance to participate in an outdoor adventure for $300 in grant money.
10. Dreamworks: Any DreamWorks employee can pitch a movie idea to company executives — and can take the company-sponsored “Life’s A Pitch” workshop to learn how best to do it.

What makes your company a great place to work?

“The way in which we understand great workplaces is based up on relationships in the workplace,” says Michael Burchell, corporate Vice President with The Great Place to Work® Institute . “So a great place to work is one that has a high degree of trust between employees and leaders, a great deal of pride between employees and their work, and a great deal of camaraderie between employees and other employees.”

Burchell would be the person to ask. Not only is The Great Place to Work Institute the company behind the annual Fortune 100 Best Companies to Work For list, but he – along with colleague Jennifer Robin, a Research Fellow at the institute – literally wrote the book on great workplaces.

Their recent collaboration, The Great Workplace: How to Build It, How to Keep It, and Why It Matters, draws on 25 years of case studies and testimonials from employees working at the best workplaces in the U.S. to answer the question, “What is the business value of creating a great workplace?” 

And with so many employers today struggling to both find qualified talent to fill open positions and retain their top performers, the timing for this book could hardly be better. 

Trust, Pride and Camaraderie: A Winning Formula
Looking at the over two decades worth of research on great workplaces, one thing is glaringly evident: Culture is king. “When we talk about a great workplace, we’re really talking about a culture – a culture of trust, pride and camaraderie,” Robin says. The Great Workplace aims to show leaders how they can create that culture by building relationship with employees based on those three elements – trust, pride and camaraderie. 

“Pride and camaraderie are a lot of fun to build, whereas trust is a bit harder. It takes a lot of persistence and it takes a lot of deliberate thought to try to develop relationships with people,” Robin says. And that’s where managers tend to run into trouble. “We often hear [from managers], ‘I’m a working manager. I have my own set of responsibilities, and I don’t have time to add anything to my plate.’”  

But what managers need to understand – and what the authors emphasize throughout the book – is that the extra time and effort they put into building those relationships now will have a huge payoff later on. One need only look at the list of companies highlighted in The Great Workplace – Google, General Mills, Microsoft, to name a few – to understand that, business-wise, creating a great place to work simply makes sense.

“The research we’ve done on the business benefits are pretty clear and compelling that great workplaces just do better financially,” Burchell points out. 

But there’s more than just the financial impact to consider, too. “I think there are two issues here – a head and a heart issue,” Burchell says. Certainly, there are many leaders who want to build a great place to work because it makes sense financially; however, for many other leaders, creating a great workplace is simply the right thing to do.  “Leaders have a huge opportunity to have a huge impact on a lot of people. And so the question there is, ‘What kind of legacy to you want to leave?’”  

Creating a Great Workplace: It’s About Knowing Who You Are
There’s a reason this book is called The Great Workplace and not The Best Workplace: There’s no such thing.  “There are companies on the [Best Places to Work] list I wouldn’t necessarily want to work for – and not because they’re not fantastic companies, but because they’re not a fit for me,” Robin says.  And that’s totally okay. What makes them great companies is that they have a clear grasp on who they are and what they value – and they actively seek out employees who share these values. 

“Great companies know who they are and they’re able to communicate it through their managers, their leaders, their employees, their new recruits – in a way that helps people decide ‘do I want to work there?’ first, and second, ‘here’s how I could contribute, and here’s how I could grow and thrive as well,’” says Robin. 

Michael Burchell and Jennifer Robin are the authors of The Great Workplace: How to Build It, How to Keep It, and Why It Matters, now available on Amazon.com.

Last month, I spoke with Heidi Grant Halvorson, author of the recently released book, SUCCEED: How We Can Reach Our Goals, which takes a unique approach to helping people achieve success: unlike other motivational books that rely on personal experiences and anecdotes to prove a point, SUCCEED draws from years of  scientific studies to uncover practical but effective strategies that have been proven to help people from all walks of life achieve even their most hard-to-reach goals.

While SUCCEED is written for all audiences, Halvorson was kind enough to take a moment and offer insight into how managers in particular can apply the lessons in the book to their own careers, especially in regards to engaging and motivating their employees.

Here’s what she had to say about the following management topics:

On motivating your employees…

“People need to feel that their work has impact – that it matters to someone – even if that someone is their immediate supervisor.” Halvorson says she hears a lot of complaints from employees who’ve put a lot of work into a project that ultimately – for whatever reason – gets tossed by someone up the chain of command, making them feel as if their efforts were worthless. “As the manager, something you need to remember to do – besides just saying, “Bummer” – is to make them feel like their work wasn’t pointless – that even if that project isn’t getting the green light, you as their manager, noticed. You thought their work was excellent. You are impressed with the way they tackled the challenge.” You may not have the power to give every project the green light, but you do have the power to create a feeling of impact among your employees. Use that power. Otherwise, your employees will start to feel like they’re wasting their time, and little else is better at killing engagement.

On giving workers the freedom of choice…

“Realistically, most employers can’t just let employees run around making their own decisions about everything, but there are a lot of studies that show that giving people ‘the feeling of choice’ is just as effective.” Equally as important to workers as feeling like their work matters is a feeling of autonomy. Here again is an instance where you as a manager have more control than you may realize, because you can create that feeling of autonomy by allowing employees as much choice as possible.  Even if you can’t give employees total control over their job, you can at least give them certain jurisdiction over certain aspects of their work – no matter how small. “People need that feeling of choice,” Halvorson says. That feeling of control – “that feeling like you’re sort of the master of your own destiny,” as she puts it – weighs heavily on engagement.

On what she really thinks about annual performance reviews…

“They’re awful. From a psychological perspective, the annual performance review does everything you don’t want it to do in terms of motivating people.” One of the major problems with the annual performance review, says Halvorson, is that it focuses too much on where employees are – rather than how far they have come.  “People don’t get enough points for improvement. Someone who goes from being a terrible communicator to a mediocre communicator, that’s actually a pretty good step forward. So let’s applaud that.” None of this is to say, however, that any sort of feedback should be abolished altogether. Rather, feedback should be frequent (on a weekly basis, ideally), as specific as possible, and focused on progress. “Managers need to own up to a responsibility that they don’t simply tell people that they didn’t do well, but help them figure out what the recipe for success is.”

On the art of giving feedback…

“People tend to either see a goal as an opportunity to gain something or seeing it as an opportunity to avoid a loss.” For instance, one person will look at an upcoming performance review and say, “This could be great for my career. It will help me climb the ladder”’ and another person might look at it and say, “I want to do well on this because I don’t want to lose my job.” Therefore, an employee who tends to focus on gains will find optimism very motivating, whereas for someone who focuses on loss, “giving them the ‘rah rah’ motivation speech doesn’t work for them, because on some intuitive level, they’re thinking, ‘If I allow myself to believe that I’m awesome, I’m going to let my guard down, lose my motivation, and fail,’” Halvorson says. Managers are most effective when they can recognize which type of employee they’re dealing with, and give feedback accordingly.

On regaining momentum as we come out of a recession…

“There’s an opportunity here to say, ‘Here’s what having less has taught me about what makes me happy and what actually makes me feel effective,’ and to remember that experience.” Given everything you and your employees have had to deal with over the past several months – longer work hours, fewer resources, extra workloads – it’s to be expected if you’re all feeling a little disengaged right now.  One of the ways to combat this feeling is to take a moment to reflect on everything you have gone through together – and worked to overcome – and use that as motivation for future endeavors. “Having weathered the storm, you realize you’re capable of handling adversity that you never thought possible. This can be confidence-building. The best way to look at this experience of getting through a difficult time is to go, ‘If I can do that, what else am I capable of?’”

Heidi Grant Halvorson is a motivational psychologist and the author of SUCCEED: How We Can Reach Our Goals, now available on Amazon.com.

GUEST CONTIBUTOR: Co-Authored by Andrea Briggs, Project Manager, Talent Intelligence and Consulting for Personified, and Sanja Licina, Ph.D., Senior Director of Talent Intelligence and Consulting.

With many organizations claiming that workforce diversity is important in today’s business world, the mystery remains as to why diversity and diversity initiatives are still lacking in many of today’s workplaces.

The latest evidence of this comes in light of a recent study by Personified, which indicates that while many employers and workers agree on the positive impact diversity has on their organizations, many employers are unsuccessful in their diversity efforts.  For this study, conducted in September 2010, we surveyed nearly 500 hiring managers and 2,000 employees nationwide to find out how workers and employers perceive diversity and its effect on both organizations as a whole as well as day-to-day business.

Perception Versus Reality
One of the major findings of the survey was that respondents believe a diverse workforce  benefits  their day-to-day work and the organization overall. Yet, despite the perceived benefits of diversity, evidence suggests that diversity and a focus on diversity initiatives are still lacking at nearly half of all organizations.  Only 54 percent of survey respondents agreed that their organizations were diverse, and at least a quarter of hiring managers believe their organizations are unsuccessful in achieving the diversity efforts they set forth.

None of these findings are to suggest, however, that employers aren’t trying to diversify their workforces, because many are. But like any other business initiative, successfully achieving diversity requires a long-term investment of time and resources. Unfortunately, too few employers make this initiative a priority.  

One of the reasons for this oversight is that very few organizations have a definition of diversity that extends beyond race, gender, ethnicity and sexual orientation; however, diversity encompasses so many other factors. For the purpose of the survey, for example, we defined diversity as “the variety of differences between people in an organization, encompassing race, gender, ethnic group, age, personality, sexual orientation, tenure, organizational function, education, background and more.” 

Creating a more meaningful definition of diversity is an important first step to targeting various groups and creating a strategy around recruiting a diverse set of qualified candidates.  Far too often, we see employers use a uniform advertisement, highlighting only one recruitment message; yet, the same message is not going to resonate with a wide variety of candidates.  By creating multiple messages to speak to many different people, employers can make a substantial impact on their ability to recruit diverse candidates.  For example, additional Personified  survey research shows that advancement opportunities are significantly more important for African-Americans and Hispanics over Caucasians, and for younger age groups over older ones. 

Another reason it is important for employers to keep diversity front of mind when creating their recruitment message: our survey found that 35 percent of job seekers have applied to an organization mainly because of its commitment to diversity.  Yet over half of hiring managers revealed that they rarely or never discuss diversity initiatives in their recruitment efforts.

These findings suggest that organizations miss an opportunity to differentiate themselves from their competitors for an entire third of the job seeker population by failing to discuss their diversity initiatives in their recruitment efforts. 

Mean What You Say
When it comes to diversity, however, it’s not enough for organizations to simply say they value it; they must actually show it. Otherwise, they risk losing highly qualified talent.  According to the survey, a remarkable 30 percent of workers said they would leave an organization they did not feel was diverse enough.

This finding underscores the important role that a company’s commitment to its diversity initiatives plays in its ability to retain top talent. 

Even more disheartening is that over 10 percent of the hiring managers surveyed say their organization does not measure their success in achieving diversity initiatives at all. This finding represents one of the major roadblocks employers encounter when implementing diversity initiatives: they fail to assign objective measurement to these efforts and thus have a difficult time understanding whether their efforts are effective. 

Achieving Diversity: What Does Success Look Like?
So what does it mean when organizations successfully “achieve diversity”? 

When we speak with clients in terms of successful diversity efforts, we’re really referring to two things: not only providing equal opportunities for all groups, but also building a workforce that is truly representative of the clientele they serve. In other words, organizations shouldn’t just recruit people who fit certain standards of diversity, but focus on building a team of people who truly understand customers and clients across different groups, with various backgrounds and experiences. 

Especially now, as the economy recovers and businesses become more financially stable, it is crucial that organizations refocus on their diversity efforts. Not only does today’s qualified talent demand it, but people from different backgrounds, different education and skill sets have a lot to bring to the table in terms of innovative ideas and game-changing perspectives. They will be the drivers who help move these organizations forward.

The business world is as competitive as ever, and if employers plan to stay ahead of the curve, they need to realize that diversity is just like any other business initiative, wherein if they invest the right amount of time, energy and resources, they will see the impact of these efforts in their bottom lines. Otherwise, they will find that as society becomes more diverse, they simply won’t be able to keep up.

Andrea Briggs is Project Manager, Talent Intelligence and Consulting for Personified, a division of CareerBuilder. Briggs works with numerous clients to improve the efficiency of their recruitment strategies. With both a professional and personal commitment to diversity, Briggs completed her Master’s thesis on racioethnic diversity and how it affects team interaction, and has a publication in the Journal of Management examining team demographic diversity and its relationship to performance.

Sanja Licina, Ph.D. is Senior Director of Talent Intelligence and Consulting. Dr. Licina directs the talent management consulting efforts for Personified. Under Dr. Licina’s leadership, Personified has assisted thousands of organizations in leveraging business intelligence to make strategic cross departmental changes in their organizational initiatives. Dr. Licina is an employment expert who is often asked to discuss the state of the job market, hiring practices and workplace issues by trade groups and publications.

While it’s common to see film and television studios convert best-selling books to screen, rarely does it go the other way around. And yet, that’s exactly what Eli Holzman and Stephen Lambert, creators and executive producers of CBS’ hit show “Undercover Boss,” have done, with the release of their new book, Undercover Boss: Inside the TV Phenomenon That is Changing Bosses and Employees Everywhere.

“It’s the story behind the story,” Holzman said of the book in a recent phone interview. An extension of the television show, Undercover Boss features new, in-depth interviews with the bosses featured in the first season of the show, offering greater detail about what went on behind the scenes, how they changed since the show and where their employees are now. 

But beyond the book’s entertainment value, readers will also be able to take away some valuable business lessons and management insights, as well. (The book even includes a “How to” guide for bosses who want to experience going undercover themselves.)

‘Boss’ as Business Book
If anyone can speak to the show’s value as a business tool, it is Holzman himself, who says that working on the show and witnessing what these CEOs experience first-hand has influenced the way he now runs his production company – and to which he attributes much of the success of the show.

“That message of appreciating people is a really powerful one, and it’s really good business,” he says. He has found that having people who work hard and dedicate themselves to their work and producing a quality product is a direct result of that message. 

Holzman just may be on to something, because he’s clearly doing something right: Undercover Boss became the most-watched premiere of a reality series in history when it premiered to an audience of 40 million viewers last February – a number that surprised even the producers.

“We loved the show and we were incredibly proud of it, but we didn’t dare to dream it would reach such a wide audience,” Holzman says.

Tapping Into Americans’ Desires for Recognition
So what accounts for the show’s popularity? Holzman believes the show gets such a large audience because so many people can relate to it. “I think every one of us has thought at one point, ‘Gosh, if they only knew what they’re asking of me, they’d appreciate me much better.’ I think we all have that longing. And we tapped into that.”

He recounts one visit to a White Castle frozen food packaging plant, when the CEO was giving him a tour of the facility prior to taping.  In the middle of the tour, the CEO stopped to introduce Holzman to a woman working on the line, pointing out that she had a perfect attendance record going back nine years.  Recalling the look of joy on the woman’s face upon being recognized for the distinction, Holzman says, “I think that’s what’s at the heart of Undercover Boss: We crave esteem, and we crave recognition for our hard work…and when someone appreciates us, it means the world to us.” So when audiences see it happening on television, he says, “it touches a nerve.”

Hitting Close to Home
But it’s not only his audience with whom these stories resonate: Simply working on the show has pushed Holzman to try to be a better boss himself.  “People tell me ‘you made me cry again. Well, we cry when we make the show,’” he says of witnessing the emotional impact this experience has on both bosses and the people who serve them.

He admits that, early in his career, he gave little thought to developing his skills as a manager, something he now realizes is as important to the success of his business as anything else.

“One of the things that is really challenging for bosses of big companies, they have so much going on that they can’t immerse themselves in the details… however, as important as [things like the bottom line and key growth areas] may be, they don’t trump the vital aspect of the quality of your workforce,” Holzman says, recalling how Harvey Firestone used to say, “We’re not in the tire business, we’re in the people business.”

“It’s an old adage,” he admits. “But it’s true.”

Listening to Holzman talk, it’s clear that with both the book and television show, he is setting out to provide more than just entertainment value. “I like to think that we [the people behind the show] help our world to the extent that we can make a show that helps people understand each other a little bit better, that helps people appreciate each other a little more,” he says. 

And while he admits that trying to make the world a better place is “a very lofty goal,” he also believes – after witnessing it firsthand – that it’s not an impossible one.  And with a new medium by which to spread that message, the co-author of Undercover Boss is that much closer to reaching this goal.

Eli Holzman is president and cofounder of Studio Lambert USA, where he launched and executive produced Undercover Boss. The second season of Undercover Boss airs Sunday nights on CBS at 9/8 CST.  Undercover Boss: Inside the TV Phenomenon That is Changing Bosses and Employees Everywhere is available for $24.95 by Jossey-Bass.

While it’s widely understood that employee referrals are one of the easiest and most cost-effective ways to recruit new employees…what’s not always easy to comprehend is why so many company-sanctioned employee referral programs fail don’t meet their full potential.

Recognizing the great business benefit of having a well-designed employee referral programs, CareerBuilder wanted to create a resource that would enable employers and hiring managers across all industries and organizations to create and build a program that would benefit not only their hiring process – but their business overall.

Introducing our new eBook, Referral Madness: How Employee Referral Programs Turn Good Employees Into Great Recruiters and Grow Your Bottom Line, with such advice as:

• What employee referral programs mean for business
• Three essential elements of any successful employee referral program
• Easy, inexpensive ways to get your employees involved
• Potential pitfalls and how to avoid them

We consolidated the best in advice, solutions and best practices to create one comprehensive (20 pages, y’all!), easy-to-read guide.

Think of it as your anti-business book business book. Download Referral Madness for free today!

“I woke up one morning and just said, ‘I…hate…my…job,’” workplace engagement expert Peter Stark told the audience of HR executives during his presentation during SHRM 2010 in San Diego last month.  “The problem was, I owned the company.”

Laughter ensued, and I took the crowd’s immediate engagement with Stark as a good sign that I wouldn’t be wasting my time in a presentation titled “Engaged!” – about how top companies create a culture where employees love to come to work. 

Turns out, I was right. Not only is Stark a dynamic speaker, but dude knows his stuff: Stark had studied 250 companies employing 100,000 people.  And after narrowing them down to the top 25 percent in terms of employee engagement, he found 10 factors these top companies have in common, which I’ll share with you now…

Oh, but first, a quick side note: Before Stark shared his list, he did something interesting.  He challenged the audience to tell him the difference between a leader and a manager…which turned out to be a deceptively difficult task. After listening to a few good (but apparently wrong) guesses from the crowd, Stark revealed the answer: A manager is just a title; whereas a leader is someone whose qualities lead people to follow them. “Followership is a conscious decision, with or without a title,” Stark said. (The more you know…)  Anyway, without further ado…your recap of Stark’s list of…

10 Ways to Get Employees to Say, “I Love My Job”  

1. Create a compelling, positive vision with clear goals. The top leaders have a very clear vision of where they’re heading. According to Stark, a great vision is composed of three key qualities: it must come from the heart, be unique to the organization, and be radical and compelling. People have to care about it.
2. Communicate the right stuff at the right time. Yes, even the “hard stuff”…Stark found that the best of the best companies were better at communicating the hard stuff to their employees.
3. Select the right people for the right job. Seems like a given, yet some companies are much better at this than others. Why is that? Stark says that what the best companies do differently is have more people involved in the hiring decision than the typical organization, and they have a thorough understanding of the competencies they need individuals to have in order to be successful at their organization. (Side note: Nancy Newell also spoke to the importance of this understanding in her SHRM panel on interviewing. Consistency!)
4. Facilitate cross-departmental teamwork. It’s important to remember that you all work for the same company – with the same goal. The best companies are better at cross-departmental teamwork.
5. Do “cool stuff.” When you’re working on cool stuff, Stark says, the rest of the organization has to respond to you; therefore, you become a leader. So practice continuous improvement and innovation. (Warning: The best companies are able to do this because they already have their day-to-day ducks in a row, so you might want to consider that first.)
6. Recognize and reward excellent performance. While some people aren’t crazy about rewards systems, it makes others work for it. (And, oh yeah, it seems to be working pretty well for top companies.)
7. Make accountability and performance count. “If I came in and reviewed your performance reviews, could I truly see a difference between employees? And could I see that the manager truly cares about the employee?” Stark asked the audience. Performance reviews are a window into how you treat your employees – and how engaged your employees are likely to be as a result. After all, a manager who can’t take time to write a performance review is unlikely to take the time to communicate clearly with employees on a consistent basis (see #2).
8. Make sure every employee has the opportunity to learn and grow. Giving employees a growth and development plan is essential, as it tells them, “I care about your success. I believe in you.”
9. Don’t let problems be any problem at all.  The top companies foster a culture that allows for mistakes, because they know they can handle them.
10. Make it all about the customer.  When you’re able to focus on the business side and the customer side, Stark says, it increases your credibility and value in the organization.

Anything you’d add to this list? Chances are you’ve heard several – if not all – of these concepts before; still, it’s always good to have a refresher, as it is probably easy to forget the crucial importance of keeping the very people you rely on to run your business motivated, and at the very least, not….hating…their…jobs.

Look at any “best places to work” list, and you’ll notice that most of the companies listed tend to share the same four employee benefit offerings, SHRM’s Steven Williams pointed out during his presentation on employee benefit programs for the organization’s annual conference in San Diego last month: 1) Health care; 2) Work/life balance; 3) Unique or unusual benefits; and 4) Leave. 

It should come as no surprise that companies that offer these types of benefits would be considered great places to work.  Unfortunately, with the economy the way it is, and health care being the most expensive benefit to offer, it should also come as no surprise that not every company has the luxury to offer employees health care…

…And not for lack of trying, either: According to 2010 SHRM internal research, despite rising health care costs, employers say the are unlikely to drop health care coverage at their organizations, for fear that doing so will: lower employee morale and satisfaction; hinder their ability to recruit new employees; and significantly increase employee turnover, among other concerns.

And at a time when companies are struggling to both recruit the skilled talent they need and retain top employees as new opportunities open up, these concerns are certainly valid. Yet, as health care costs continue to increase, what is a budget strapped employer to do to maintain this benefit?

Five Ways Employers Can Reduce Health Care Costs
Fortunately, Williams had some advice for these companies, addressing the following five tips for reducing health care costs:

1. Design the health care premium around each employee’s base salary or tenure
2. Make available – and encourage the use of – wellness programs. If implemented correctly, employee wellness programs work: they effectively reduce healthcare costs; they help cut down on employee turnover; and they decrease instances of absenteeism.  (See more about the benefits of implementing wellness benefits in 7 Habits of Highly Successful Corporate Wellness Programs .)
3. Emphasize the use of a mail-order prescription drug program on all maintenance prescription drugs.
4. Require working spouses to elect coverage from their employer, and charge extra to employees whose spouses do not elect such coverage.
5. Consider association-sponsored plans or partnering with other companies.

What about you? Does your company use any of the above methods to reduce health care costs? What else? Please share with us how your company cuts back on health care costs in the comments section below!

SAS. Nordstrom. Google. Whole Foods. What do all these companies have in common beyond their brand recognition? They all made the 2010 FORTUNE 100 Best Companies to Work For. And this year at the 2010 SHRM Annual Convention in San Diego (#SHRM10), Michael Burchell, Ed. D., vice president for Global Business Development, Great Place to Work® Institute returned to talk about what exactly these 100 company’s do to make the list (last  year his talk focused on the 50 Best Small and Medium Companies to Work For in America).  He noted that any company has the potential to make one of these two lists, regardless of industry, employee demographics, location or work status.

Commonalities between companies that make the list
Burchell started his presentation asking, “What is the difference between a good place and a great place to work?” following that up with, “It’s not about what you do, but how you do it.” Through his company’s 20-plus years of research on this topic, Burchell found the one thing all these companies have in common: TRUST. These companies are all places where employees “trust the people they work for, have pride in what they do, and enjoy the people they work with.”

The Three Components of Trust:

1. The relationship between employees and management.
2. The relationship between employees and their jobs/company (pride).
3. The relationship between employees and other employees (camaraderie).

Building this kind of trust enables companies to reap positive business benefits and increased productivity through increased caliber of employees, increased quality of products and increased levels of risk taking and innovation.  It’s an investment, but a worthwhile one.

Having this kind of trust also decreases costs by lowering turnover (best companies typically have a voluntary turnover of 9% or less) and lowering resistance to change.  Surprisingly, it also lowers health care costs: Employees who feel trusted – and trust their companies in return – tend to have healthier lives outside of work because they leave work at work, leaving them with more to give to their personal life (family and community). This also means that when they are at work, they show up because they want to and are ready to contribute because they have the perception the company offers a special and unique culture where “we are not like others.”

Building Trust
Trust between employee and company (and vice versa) begins during the pre-hire stage; although the treatment employees get on their first day of work really sets the stage for future trust. Employees who feel welcomed and appreciated generally foster a genuine level of trust much faster than those employees who are just shown to a desk to begin working right away. Makes sense, right? You’d be surprised how many companies overlook these little details. Burchell continued by saying that employees who have the opportunity to interact with senior leadership very close to their hire date are better informed and feel true value and connection immediately.

Best Companies to Work For also…

• Motivate
• Empower
• Listen
• Thank
• Develop
• Care
• Celebrate
• Share

Common Benefits that Best Companies to Work For Offer:

• Job sharing
• Telecommuting
• Compressed work weeks
• Flexible scheduling
• Phased retirement
• Paid sabbaticals
• Child services
• Dry cleaning
• On-site mailing
• Free beverages or snacks
• Personal travel experience

And while this list of perks is impressive in and of itself, what truly makes the difference is how the company communicates these employee benefits, supports them and enables employees to take advantage of them. One example given was Goggle’s TGI Fridays – and yes, it does revolve around food, but not exactly in the way you might think. Each and every Friday employees are invited into cafeterias for an agenda-less meeting where employees get to talk with Google’s CEO and senior leadership team about anything. And as you’d expect, not all questions hold the same weight but all questions are valid and go back to the idea of trust. This practice also shows employees that they are valued as a part of the business, not merely people who work for the company. This is also a time for the leadership to reinforce the company values and make everyone feel connected. Google’s success is unquestioned, but did you know they have also created a pool of quality applicants that is so extensive, they may never have to actively recruit ever again?

The Hidden Benefit to Being  a Best Place to Work
Earlier, I mentioned the benefits a company gains by striving to be a best place to work – such as higher productivity and profitability - but there’s also this other (kind of huge) perk: Once word gets out that your company is a great place to work, you’ll really start to see more qualified applicants applying to your open positions.  I’m talking about people who understand your company’s unique culture and want to be a part of it because they feel a connection to your values.

While much of this information may not seem new, it is wonderful to see so many companies really trying to step up their game to become a best place to work. Remember, employees are your greatest asset, and they leave every night. What are you doing to ensure they return? If you build around this model, everyone benefits. Hiring gets easier. Top talent is retained. Production increases. Profits grow. Build a best place to work and you build a foundation for ongoing success.

Explore our previous Building the Best Place to Work article series to gain insights on our five basic building blocks and other tips for creating the best working place. As always, we welcome your feedback in the comments section of this post. Tell us more about your own recruitment and employee engagement experiences as you try to build a company that your employees call a best place to work.

Liberty Tax Service has been the recipient of several awards in the past couple years – which of these are you most proud of and why?

We’re proud of all of them, but I think the one that we’re most proud of is one that we just received locally from Inside Business magazine, calling Liberty Tax Service “one of the best places to work in Hampton Roads” (which is the Tidewater Region of Virginia). To be named the best place to work in an entire metropolitan region was really special to us because we really embrace our culture, and we are proud to be recognized as a great place to work. Our rankings in Entrepreneur Magazine also stand out because that’s an industry-wide franchise publication that many people refer to when they’re looking to purchase a franchise opportunity. To be recognized by them as one of the fastest growing franchise opportunities – and one of the best out of 500 opportunities – is good for the franchise system in general.

The Liberty Tax Service franchise opportunity is #9 on the fastest growing franchises list of the 2010 Entrepreneur “Franchise 500.” To what do you attribute your growth?

I think the number one thing is the experience of the management team. Our CEO, John Hewitt, founded Jackson Hewitt Tax Service in 1982 and grew that to a very large franchise system, a system that today still bears his name. I, myself, am one of the founders of Liberty Tax Service, and I have over 20 years of experience in the income tax industry. When we decided to start another income tax company, we made a bunch of rules: to learn by our mistakes, to help foster the culture, and to promote people to jobs that they were good at. I think that the reason that we’ve been so successful is because we have been able to hire the right people, make them happy and then bring on great franchisees.

How would you describe your philosophy as it relates to people and their impact on your daily business?

I believe that people should be left to do their jobs. I don’t believe that [micro management] fosters creativity and excitement in the workplace. My personal philosophy is to hire the right people, give them their job description and what their key result areas are, and then let them go ahead and figure out how they are going to achieve those results. One of the principles of our company is, “Mistakes are a wise person’s education.” We believe that nobody’s perfect, and you’re going to make mistakes, and your mistake is like an education. We [as managers] are here to guide you, but you’ve got some freedoms and some flexibility to make your own decisions on how you’re going to run your business.

How do you engage and relate to your people? What experiences or lessons influence your leadership style?

Many folks who work with me have been with me for a long time, from the beginning of starting Liberty Tax Service. We are, as a group and as a department, very tight. There’s a lot of laughing that goes on, but when the work needs to get done, we push to be the best and to really get results because everybody is proud to be a part of the marketing department. If I attribute anything to my management style, it’s the fact that I let people do their jobs. I truly believe that you can have fun every single minute you’re at work if you enjoy what you’re doing.

How do people affect your business, particularly as it relates to your revenue stream?

We manage our employees though the position-results description method: Our employees set a goal for what their job is, and then there are key result areas that they agree with their manager are “the things that I am going to achieve this year.” We make sure that each key result area is measurable, but we also make sure that they are attainable. We work together throughout the year to make sure that everybody is on track. It’s a really good way to kind of put your goals down on paper and then track if you are achieving them.

Some people believe HR to be the only department with a responsibility for the organization’s people, yet you’ve made your overall talent strategy a priority in your role. Tell me about that.

I think our company operates quite a bit differently from some other large companies to attract good people. We have a referral program that motivates our employees and our franchisees to seek out good people. Our HR department is not a traditional HR department. They help us with issues, but when it comes to the actual hiring process, it is really left up to the managers to find and interview those people and make the hiring decision. We look for the right people, we bring them on, we test them in different positions, and we find the right job for them. It really boils down to this: you’ve got to hire for attitude and then train for skill. If somebody doesn’t have the right attitude, it doesn’t matter what job you put them in, they are not going to perform. We like to hire people who are happy, positive, and willing to stretch and to learn.

I understand that Liberty Tax Service doesn’t advertise nationally, and you’ve relied heavily on guerilla marketing with wavers and franchisees generating most of the buzz about your brand in the market. How have you used social media to extend your non-traditional marketing to reach a wider audience, centralize marketing efforts, and preserve your brand?

We’re new to social media. We knew that we needed to be involved in that, but we weren’t really sure how to do it. The first thing we did was hire an online brand manager who has experience in that environment. We’ve relied pretty heavily on the folks at CareerBuilder to help guide us through that and give us ideas on how we can better position ourselves on the web with social media.

We don’t believe in traditional national advertising. Television has lost a lot of its effectiveness. We continue have a very high percentage increase in business every year, and I attribute it to the fact that we’re doing non-traditional things, whereas our competitors are still acting very traditionally when it comes to media and to advertising.

We’ve developed a persona: We’ve developed a Facebook page that is dedicated to “Libby” and her adventures going across the United States and what she is going to encounter during tax season. We also have a traditional Facebook page where people can ask questions and we can post tax tips. Building the friend base has been very easy. People are interested, especially during tax time. Everybody has to file taxes, so you have a ready-made base of people who are seeking information, and we’ve found a fun way to do it through the interaction on the social media sites. And it has been very successful for us so far.

Tax preparation is a very personal service, and communicating on a one-on-one basis is far more meaningful to our customers than mass media advertising.

What lessons have you learning along the way in regards to social media?

One lesson we’ve learned is that you need to have a solid background in what your strategy is and how you’re going to implement it. I think you can hurt yourself very easily by going out onto Facebook or Twitter and not understanding what the rules of engagement are. You can kill your image as quickly as you can build your image if you don’t respect those parameters.

When we started, we were dabbling in it and didn’t really have a firm grasp of what we should be doing. I think we made some wise decisions by getting help from people who understood the space and could make some recommendations on how we should move forward. I feel really comfortable with where we are now with our social media presence, because we are moving through the environment in a way that is not only proper, but also fun and inviting for the people who are participating on our sites.

How have you leveraged your employment brand to grow your business? Why is this important to you?

It may sound cliché, but we have a group of advocates out in the marketplace, in virtually every DMA in the country who really love Liberty Tax Service, and who love working for Liberty Tax Service. So we’ve got this band of advocates who are out there singing our praises. Just last weekend I was at an office and there was a waver out on the street, and we had three separate people walk in and say, “How do I get that cool job? I’d like to have that job.” It’s rewarding and gratifying, but it also lets you know that people are noticing us and they understand what it means to be part of Liberty Tax Service. We’re just doing an outstanding job of recruiting the right people, showing them the right way to do business, and they in turn tell everybody they know.

I would have to start with our CEO, John Hewitt. John is the consummate workaholic. He is constantly striving for betterment: both betterment of the company and giving the people who work within the company the opportunity to continue to grow and to achieve. His leadership, wisdom and vision are paramount to the success of our company. We like to call him the granddaddy of the industry. His wealth of experience and knowledge is unsurpassed in the income tax industry and in business circles in general.

Then I would have to use the franchisees, collectively, as our second group of people who propelled Liberty Tax Service to where we are today. We’ve got, I think, an unusual group of franchisees. Our franchisees are very entrepreneurial and are constantly bringing us all kinds of great ideas. And they bring them to the table with passion and understanding of what it’s like to be out in the field and on the front lines with the customers. They’re all just very, very motivated and really love what they are doing: They’re the kind of people that you want to hang out with.

What other advice would you share through this piece?

My advice to anyone who is looking to start a business or to re-engineer their business is to look outside of what you know. Just because this is the way that we’ve always done it doesn’t mean that’s the way that it always needs to be done. And that applies to virtually any business – whether it’s manufacturing, retail, science, or anything – because if you don’t look for a different way of doing things, you’re going to get the same results you’ve always gotten.

John likes to say, “If you do what you always did, then you’re going to get what you always got.” Another one of our principles is to break boundaries. You have to take those risks. You have to be able to steel yourself and say, “Okay, I’ve never done this before, but now I’m going to figure out how to do it and here’s the goal that we’re going after.”

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About Liberty Tax Service

Liberty Tax Service is the fastest growing retail tax preparation company in the industry’s history. Founded in 1997 by CEO John T. Hewitt, Liberty Tax Service has prepared over 7,000,000 individual income tax returns. Liberty Tax Service provides computerized income tax preparation, electronic filing and online filing through eSmart Tax. Each office offers customers audit assistance, a money back guarantee and free tax return checking. The Liberty Tax Service franchise opportunity is #9 on the fastest growing franchises list of the 2010 Entrepreneur “Franchise 500.” For more information on Liberty Tax visit www.libertytax.com

Can you remember the last time you heard the phrase “You’ve got mail”? (And NOT counting all the times it’s followed the question “What movie is the Oxygen network going to be playing this Friday night?”)  Feels like a while, huh?

Well, prepare for a blast from the past, because the company that used to be America Online is suddenly a hot commodity again…or at least it is among job seekers…

In the past year, AOL has successfully recruited employees from high-profile companies like Google, Yahoo!, Microsoft, The New York Times and Time Warner, prompting AdAge’s Michael Learmonth to ask, “Why does everyone want to work at AOL all of a sudden?” in a recent article for the online magazine.

You can’t blame the guy for asking: Nothing against AOL, but it’s been roughly a decade since the company’s heyday as the “goliath of Internet service providers.”  So how is it suddenly an employer of choice among what is surely a highly sought-after talent demographic?  Well, it’s simple, really: Basically, AOL is a lesson in employment branding done right.

By understanding the specific talent demographic its brand appeals to, AOL gets one of the most crucial elements of employment branding right: It knows what it stands for – as well as what it doesn’t stand for – as an employer.  

“Employment branding is about knowing who you are as an employer, but just as importantly, it’s about knowing who you aren’t,” says employment branding expert Mary Delaney, President of CareerBuilder’s human capital consulting company, Personified. 

In AOL’s case, the company knows it’s no Google…nor is it trying to be.  Sure, Google enjoys a reputation as a top company to work for, but that doesn’t mean that it’s the right fit for every single worker ever.  Understanding this, AOL seems to be using its smaller position in the industry as its employee value proposition: By marketing itself as a place where employees will be challenged to expand their knowledge and help rebuild what was once an industry giant, AOL is appealing to a candidate base that is hungry for career, professional development and training opportunities, factors that a recent employment branding study found to be among the top reasons employees chose their employers. 

Similarly, if you look at the list of the 50 Best Small and Medium Companies to Work For in America, you’ll notice how these employers sell their brands as ones that can meet employees’ intangible needs – such as motivation, empowerment, trust and recognition.

The takeaway here? All too often, companies try to sell themselves as something they are not – effectively making promises they can’t fulfill – when, in fact, they should be embracing what differentiates them from other companies and focusing on what they do offer. 

As AOL demonstrates, companies need to look at what is unique about their culture – and what demographic is attracted to that – rather than waste their time trying to appeal to a group of candidates that would fit better elsewhere.

Thoughts?

If Quiznos’ was hoping to boost its employment brand, the fast food chain’s new environmentally conscious “Eat Toasty, Be Green” campaign – which includes the use of new biodegradable packaging and employee uniforms made from recycled materials – could not have come out at a better time.   

Job seekers seem to gravitate toward social responsible companies, according to a recent Kelly Services survey of nearly 100,000 people in 34 countries in North America, Europe and Asia. 

The reason for this? “Employees gain a sense of fulfillment when their employer is focused on not only the bottom line but also on initiatives and practices [that] have a common connection with the communities in which they operate,” said George Corona, Kelly Services’ executive VP and COO, in an article for Staffing Industry Review Magazine.

(Perhaps this helps explain why companies like Whole Foods and Starbucks – both of whom are often acknowledged for Corporate Social Responsibility efforts – often find themselves on ‘best companies to work for’ lists.)

Among the survey’s other findings:

• Almost 90 percent of respondents say they are more likely to work for an organization that is considered ethically and socially responsible, something that is consistent across all generations.
• 80 percent are more likely to work for an organization that is considered environmentally responsible, a figure that is considerably higher among older age groups.
• In deciding where to work, an organization’s reputation for ethical conduct is considered “very important” by 77 percent of Baby Boomers, 72 percent of GenX and 65 percent of GenY.
• 53 percent of Baby Boomers would be prepared to forego pay or a promotion to work for an organization with a good reputation, compared to 48 percent of GenX and 46 percent of GenY.
• In deciding where to work, policies to address global warming are considered “very important” by 36 percent of Baby Boomers, 35 percent of GenX and 31 percent of GenY.

Quiznos is just the most recent in a long line of companies who have started tweaking their products to appeal to an increasingly environmentally conscious consumer base, and hopefully, other companies will follow suit. 

While these initiatives are certainly good for branding purposes (and, of course, Mother Earth), employers should be aware that, in order to truly engage employees, they should also focus on internal initiatives, like letting employees work from home or investing in energy-saving technology.

Not only do these efforts reduce the strain on the environment, but also – and perhaps more enticingly – they help improve the bottom line by qualifying companies for tax incentives, boosting employee productivity and garner consumer support. 

Do the above findings surprise you? What sort of environmentally-friendly initiatives is your company using to both reduce energy use (and how has it made an impact on your workplace)?

What makes a company great to work for? Recently, we asked all of you what you think makes your company great — specifically, how you sell your company to your ideal candidates. Your answers covered everything from honesty in your candidate expectations to allowing dogs in the office, and now, FORTUNE has released its own list of 2010’s 100 Best Companies to Work For. For the companies that made the cut, what makes them so great?

The answers include on-site child care, unlimited sick days, an absence of layoffs (some companies on the list have never had a layoff), time given to focus on creative projects, stock options, surfing lessons, the “no asshole” rule, high priorities on diversity — and that’s just a fraction of the amazing things some companies are doing to keep their employees happy and attract their ideal candidates.

What company strengths mentioned on FORTUNE’s list would be most appealing to your candidates and employees? Which do you share — and which are on your wish list?

In Part I of  “How does your company sell itself to ensure you win over your ideal candidates?” we asked all of you what exactly you’re doing to snag the attention of your ideal candidates. There were many great responses, and in sifting through them, I realized that while many of the ways you compete for candidates you want are conceptual, many others are so tangible you can pet them (dogs in the office, anyone?)

How Are You Getting An Edge?

Some of you said your company keeps abreast of new technologies to get an edge over your competition, and that you utilize social media like Twitter and Facebook to engage with candidates and promote awareness of your brand. Others talked about the importance of your company’s longevity, stability and growth in light of our current economic climate. Some said they swear by their employee-written company blogs and employee video testimonials, and more than one person mentioned job shadowing as a great way to not only introduce candidates to the company culture, but also give employers a genuine feel for the candidate and potential for a fit.

But wait — Do you know where your competitors are? As we’ve mentioned before, while these are all excellent examples of how to set your company apart from your competition and reach your ideal candidates, it’s all for naught if you don’t first know who who and where your competitors are. Once you are armed with this knowledge, you can tackle your competitive gaps head-on and more effectively employ your candidate “sales” strategies. How do you find out this information, you ask? Check this out.

Perk Up

Unique perks that entice your ideal candidates range significantly, and include:

• A healthy work/life balance
• Flexible or alternative work schedules
• Corporate volunteering groups and efforts
• Cross-training in various areas of the business
• “Green” building design
• Tuition reimbursement
• Health benefits for an employee and his/her family
• Casual dress code
• Dogs in the office
• Employee trips
• Candy at the reception desk
• Free yoga
• In-house massage
• Learning opportunities
• Fun contests to promote recognition
• 15 days off during the holiday season
• Profit sharing
• Onboarding programs

In your own words, a few of the ways you’re bringing unique back into the workplace:

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“There are usually one or two employee dogs roaming the office daily offering their own brand of therapy and if that doesn’t do it, we have free yoga classes. Great atmosphere, open and honest dialogue, and good benefits makes us a pretty easy sell.” ~Stacy
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“When we find the right candidate, we immediately send him/her a large box of Godiva chocolates (or special Hershey Kiss package if the candidate has kids)with a warm note telling the candidate how much we enjoyed meeting him/her and why we want him/her to join our team. As a result, we stand out in the crowd. Works every time.“ ~Julie
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We provide a full overview of the benefits that we offer, which are competitive. We also focus on work/life balance offering an alternative work schedule which is a very desirable benefit. ~Lauren
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Our company offers excellent benefit packages, continued training and advancement, and the ability to cross train in various divisions globally. ~Janine
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We post as many details about our jobs as possible. Careerbuilders job posts allow this detail. We include a link to our job board as well. At our website candidates can find complete information about our credit union as well as the benefits we offer. Our site lists all the charitable organizations we support. Any questions that applicants have can be discussed at the interview. ~Barb
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Our firm is on Facebook, Twitter and Linked In to engage candidates with news about our company. Every external signature on email contains our links so ensure the word gets out. ~Laura
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We share our information with candidates on all the “little” benefits we offer (outside of health insurance, etc.) such as an employee referral program, gym on campus, holiday party, employee recognition dinner, perfect attendance awards, etc. We also have a very generous Paid Time Off program. We may not be able to pay the best but we try to make up for it in other ways. ~Nicole
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A simple tour of our state of the art facility will let any potential employee know we mean business and are serious about growth. ~Matt
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Environment! Fun!  Opportunity! We place fun high on our priority list, and being on our staff is like being in the “A-List” crowd. We are all friends, and choose to spend time outside of work together because of our group dynamic.
Our patients “sense” the energetic camaraderie in our office and want to be here to simply bask in our warm, fun glow. As a result, we never have a problem hiring the “right people”, and no one ever quits. Even in 2009, we grew 6% over last year, and added staff. ~Melissa
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It is all about the candidate! What do they want, not what can I fit them into. Knowing their career goals and matching that with the clients needs creates a win/win/win for candidate/client/recruiter. ~Scott
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We are embracing social media! Twitter and Facebook for sure. ~Elizabeth
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We differentiate ourselves when it comes to hiring by really showing a prospective candidate the advantage to our products and technologies. We primarily recruit civil engineers and like to show the opportunities for them to really advance and get more out of this company than any other experience before. We have a uniquely open culture and we also like to talk on that as a good fit to any one looking for a progressive company. ~Chris
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We sell ourself through promotion of our excellent insurance benefits, safety record, corporate spirit/values, and job stability/security. Cash always talks too. If you want the best, you have to pay a little more. ~Josh
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We foster an entrepreneurial environment and make sure everyone enjoys a piece of the profits derived from their hardwork. ~Kelly
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We are always paying close attention to our candidates needs and concentrating on what will drive them once they become an employee: salary, benefits, work-life balance and career development. Several programs are inplace to ensure that once a candidate transitions into a new hire, they will want to stay until retirement. ~Trina
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And “Adam” quite possibly summed up the spirit and pride of many of you well with his statement:

-We are AWESOME
-We are FUN
-We have free drinks for everyone
-We are stable
-We have a great business model
-We have candy jars at the Receptionist’s desk
-We pretty much RULE THE WORLD. ~Adam

Do you want to see what other steps your peers and competitors alike are taking to attract candidates? I couldn’t mention all of the comments in this post, but many excellent minds contributed. Read all the comments here.