Parallel HR » Building a Best Place to Work

Avoid Culture Shock at Your Growing Organization

Mary Lorenz — Tue, 07 Feb 2012 15:00:44 +0000

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. Continue reading

Back to the Future (of Recruiting): Is Your Company Prepared for What’s Ahead?

Amy Chulik — Fri, 30 Dec 2011 11:15:18 +0000

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). Read more

2011 Opportunities in Staffing: How to Make a Bigger Impact With Clients, Candidates and Employees

Amy Chulik — Fri, 04 Nov 2011 22:04:46 +0000

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 [...]

Job Seekers Show the Way for Forward-Thinking Employers

Chuck Loeher — Wed, 02 Nov 2011 13:46:07 +0000

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:

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.
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.

Getting Out of the Corner Office and Going Undercover: BrightStar’s CEO Talks ‘Undercover Boss’

Mary Lorenz — Fri, 22 Apr 2011 16:39:32 +0000

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.

Employment Branding the Gold Crown Way: Lessons from the Former CMO of Hallmark

Mary Lorenz — Mon, 04 Apr 2011 21:01:43 +0000

Last month, Jim Welch brought his 25 years of management and leadership expertise to CareerBuilder, hosting a special webinar on employment branding. In Real World Employment Branding: A Blueprint for Success (available for full download here), 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

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.
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.”
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.

Stop Hiring Employees and Start Hiring Entrepreneurs.

Mary Lorenz — Thu, 24 Mar 2011 14:20:58 +0000

“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.”

Book Review: Enchantment by Guy Kawasaki

Mary Lorenz — Wed, 09 Mar 2011 15:52:32 +0000

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 One Thing Every Great Leader Must Do

Mary Lorenz — Tue, 22 Feb 2011 21:07:30 +0000

“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

Before Selling Candidates On the Job, Sell Them Out of the Job First

Mary Lorenz — Mon, 31 Jan 2011 20:38:17 +0000

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.”