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.

“I’m not looking for great storytellers. I want to figure out what makes people tick and how they operate on the job.” – Jay Goltz

In the following Q&A, small business expert Jay Goltz draws from his experience as an entrepreneur to discuss the lessons he’s learned – often the hard way – about what it really takes to hire and retain the best people to run a successful business (or, in his case, five). On Wednesday, November 9, Jay will host Hire with Purpose, a complimentary webinar to discuss insider tips, takeaways and tactics small business owners can apply right now to ensure they make the right hiring decision for their teams.

In your book, The Street-Smart Entrepreneur, you talk about lessons you learned the hard way. What’s your most memorable lesson in terms of hiring? I once interviewed a sales manager at a retail shop that had five salespeople, and I asked her, “How many people did you go through before hiring those five great salespeople?” And she said, “Just five.” I literally laughed and said, “Either you have much lower standards than I do, or you’re a hiring guru.” I hired her, and she turned out to be a hiring guru. She moved away about 10 years ago, but most of the people she hired while she was here are still with me.

The lesson there is that part of hiring well comes down to who’s doing the interviewing. There are some people who can hit a fast ball and some people who can’t. Likewise, there are some people who are great at interviewing and some who aren’t. There’s some element of natural talent there. And that realization has had a profound impact on my company. It used to be, when I hired, only 30 or 40 percent of the people I hired worked out great, and now it’s up to 80 percent. And that’s because we’re much better at hiring.

At the recent Inc500/5000 Conference, Gilt Group CEO Kevin Ryan mentioned how reference checks are often an underrated virtue of the hiring process. What’s your stance on that? I totally agree with that. Whenever I hear about people who are having problems with an employee, I always ask them, “Tell me how you hired this person.” No one has ever said to me, “I put an ad out, I interviewed a lot of people, I did some really thorough questions, and then I really checked references.” It’s always, “Yeah, I didn’t check references.” So people are getting what they deserve, I’m sorry to say.

The other thing is, when you’re doing reference checks, you have to read between the lines. I had a call in about a designer one time, and the reference just blurted out, “Oh, she’s really talented.” After interviewing [the candidate] some more, I realized she was really neurotic, but the woman I used as a reference clearly didn’t want to say that. All of a sudden, it made sense why the reference didn’t say, “She’s great. You should hire her.” When someone’s a great employee, people say things like, “Oh, you’re really lucky she applied. You should hire her right now. She’s a wonderful employee. I really miss her.”  Is reference-checking 100 percent reliable? No. Even if you do everything right, you’ll still probably only have a 90 percent chance of them working out – maybe 80. But if you don’t do everything right, those chances go down to 30, 40 or 50 percent.

Aside from failing to check references, what are some of the biggest mistakes people make in the hiring process? They don’t ask right questions on the interview. They don’t drill into the reasons people left their previous jobs. I’ll ask them, “Did you quit or get fired?” And a lot of times, they’ll say, “Well, it was sort of a combination of both.” And I go, “Oh, really? So you quit, and your boss said, ‘That’s such a coincidence – I was just about to fire you.’” To me, that sounds like bull.

Other mistakes people make include asking bad questions, not listening to the answer, hearing what you want to hear, or not asking enough follow up questions. I follow up with stuff, because the fact of the matter is, if someone’s looking for a job, (unless they’re straight out of school) there’s a story to tell. People change jobs for a reason. One of my favorite questions to ask is, “Tell me about the most difficult customer situation you’ve had to deal with, and how you dealt with it?” Those [behavioral questions] are always telling. I always say, “Past performance is the best indicator of future performance.” If someone’s had six jobs in the last two years, they’re probably not going to be with you too long. Questions like “Who’s your hero?” might work for some people, but I’m not looking for a great storyteller. I really want to figure out what makes them tick and how they operate on the job.

What specific traits do you look for when you hire? I have four things I look for, which we call the BATH test. B means I want someone who buys into the concept. In our case, the concept is that we’re a design company, we’re a customer service-driven business, we do what we can to take care of the customer, and we treat people well. I look for people who buy the concept of what we do and are into it. A means they’re able. I want to know from past jobs that they have the ability to do this, not just someone who says, “I’d like to do that. I’d probably be good at it.” The chances of that being true could be as low as 25 percent (when it’s a highly skilled position) – and it’s not that they’re not lying, they just don’t know. I want someone who has a proven track record. T means they’re team players. I want someone who’s going to tell me what’s on their mind, who can tell me right to my face, “Jay, you’re driving me nuts. What can we do about this?” And finally, H is for hungry. I want someone who’s hungry, who really wants to do this.

In your upcoming webinar, one of the topics you’re going to cover is creating compelling job advertisements. What constitutes a ‘compelling’ job ad?  A compelling job ad includes some piece of information about your company that might make candidates stop and take notice. Maybe you can offer them flex time, for instance. Or how about free parking? What about 401(k) plans, or health insurance plans? Employees are more enlightened these days. They want to work at a company where they have input in the decisions that are being made. The best employees are mission-driven. So if you can let them know that they’ll be involved in things at the company, that’s compelling.

What do you do to orient new hires into the company? After they’ve been here a month or two, we have an indoctrination where we tell them things like the whole mission of the company, where we came from, the history, as well as more tangible stuff such as if they have a problem, what they should do about it, etc. And we purposely don’t do it on the first day. We wait till they get a little used to the place, so that at the end of it, we can go, “Okay, do you think I’m lying, from what you’ve seen?” So at least one time, they’re sitting there with the big boss, and I’m telling them, “Look, if you think I’m full of it, call me on it. Feel free – I’m telling you right now: stop me in the hall, leave me a note, give me a call. If there’s something I’m telling you that really isn’t the case here, please tell me!” It lets people know we believe what we say, and if they’re not happy here, what they can do about it.

What is your stance on exit interviews? We do them. Our HR department conducts them, but, personally, I’ve never gotten any huge revelations out of them. That’s not to say that exit interviews are worthless, but if you’re running a good business where there’s open communication, you shouldn’t need exit interviews. If you’re learning something new, that’s the symptom of a problem. You shouldn’t be learning anything new in an exit interview. There’s a value in it, but they’re like seatbelts: Most of the time they’re useless, but once in a while, it might really make a difference.

Jay Goltz is a nationally recognized author and speaker on the topic of running a successful small business. Jay has been featured in various media, including Fox Business News, Inc. Magazine and Bill Clinton’s bestseller, Giving, and is currently a business blogger for NYTimes.com.

Want to get a free copy of The Street Smart Entrepreneur: 133 Tough Lessons I Learned the Hard Way? Simply register now for Hire with Purpose (happening live on Wednesday, November 9 at 1 pm CST), and be one of the first 100 attendees. Learn more…

Earlier this week, employees everywhere helped bosses celebrate National Boss’s Day. Some gave flowers, or left a handwritten card on their boss’s desk. Others took their bosses out to lunch at their favorite little bistro, or treated them to that pedicure their toes had been screaming for. Still others just wished their boss a heartfelt “Happy Boss’s Day.”

Right about now, bosses everywhere may still be basking in the afterglow of well-wishes, or high on endorphins from that chocolate cupcake display designed to spell out “B-O-S-S.” And they may be thinking to themselves, as they wipe cupcake crumbs off their suits, “Yep — they love me. So much that they wish they had my job.”  Truth? Probably not.

“I don’t want… your job”

Though it may be natural to think your employees would take your job in a heartbeat if they could, it’s not necessarily true. New research from OfficeTeam signifies that few workers today are fighting over the boss’s job. In fact, more than three-quarters (76 percent) of employees polled in the OfficeTeam survey of 431 office workers said they have zero interest in having their manager’s position. Could it be out of a mindset that they’re not equipped for the position? Possibly — after all, nearly two-thirds (65 percent) of those workers surveyed believe they couldn’t do a better job than their boss. On the flip side, of course, that means that 35 percent believe they can do a better job than their boss — so what’s really going on here?

These findings remind me of a survey CareerBuilder conducted on how workers really feel about their bosses. What much of the “I can do my boss’s job better” thinking in that survey came down to was a feeling of disconnectedness and a lack of communication. Many workers reported being disenchanted with their boss’s leadership style, believing the boss wasn’t adequately focused on career development, feedback, or support.

So, maybe it’s not so important that workers don’t want their boss’s job, but why they don’t. Workers may never want their boss’s job, and that’s OK — but negative survey results like these should be a caution sign for employers to examine their relationship with their employees. If employees believe career advancement is hopeless — and don’t think their boss cares — they will start looking elsewhere. By opening up the lines of communication and working harder to give employees what they need when it comes to their careers, bosses can begin to repair that frayed relationship and show employees they have value, worth, and room to grow.

In regard to why many employees don’t want their boss’s job, Robert Hosking, executive director of OfficeTeam, points to the fact that many managers aren’t really fit for a role as a leader. ”Many aspects of management involve making difficult, sometimes unpopular decisions, and not everyone is comfortable in this role.” Being a strong individual contributor does not necessarily equate to being an effective leader. The most successful bosses excel at motivating others to achieve great results.”

OfficeTeam identified seven traits potential leaders must have:

1. Integrity. The best managers foster trust among employees by placing ethics first.
2. Sound judgment. Top supervisors can be counted on to make tough decisions based on logic and rationale.
3. Diplomacy. Handling challenging situations with tact and discretion is a must. Effective managers don’t take all the credit for results — they consistently acknowledge individual and team contributions.
4. Adaptability. It’s essential that leaders be able to think on their feet. They should be innovative while also encouraging team members to develop creative solutions.
5. Strong communication. To motivate and guide employees, influential managers freely share their vision with others.
6. Good listening skills. Successful bosses realize they don’t have all the answers and seek input from colleagues.
7. Influence. Great managers build strong networks within the organization to gain support for their ideas.

What do you all think? As a leader, have you found the above to be true — that employees, more than most other factors in the boss/employee relationship, seek career guidance and support? Let me know in the comments. And wipe that cupcake frosting off your chin!

What do employees want? Oh, that’s such a loaded question! I’m sure many of us could make lists the length of the office hallway detailing our opinions on what we believe makes employees happy. One thing do we know for sure is that employee morale isn’t a trend, but an ongoing effort. Within that ongoing effort, though, how do we know what’s on our employees’ own wish lists?

Well, a Staples.com survey released in observance of  “Improve Your Office Day” has come along, peeled ink-stained paper out of the Trapper Keeper (where I have just decided all employee wish lists are stored), and shared their M.A.S.H. results survey findings with the world. Let’s take a look.

The survey, which asked employees about their likes/dislikes at work, as well as their suggestions for improving the office environment, found many employees aren’t too pleased with their technology – or their humble surroundings: More than half (52 percent) of the more than 300 workers surveyed gave their office furniture and office décor a “C” grade or lower, and 41 percent gave their office technology the same grade. Also on their lists? Politics, the right to work at home (or lack thereof), and privacy.

What is on employees’  office-improvement wish lists?

• Eliminating office politics (44 percent)
• Allowing or encouraging telecommuting (41 percent)
•  Upgrading computers and other office technology (37 percent)
• Getting nicer or more comfortable office furniture (35 percent)
• Providing more private work areas and more flexible work hours (tied at 34 percent each).

Though it’s true that some employees do think they can do a better job than their boss, employees seem happy overall with their superiors. Nearly half (47 percent) of respondents gave their boss a solid “A” grade, with a combined 78 percent rating their boss an “A” or “B.”

The snack dilemma

I know I’m not alone in saying that sometimes you spend what seems like days just staring at the office vending machine (or wall space where you imagine one should be), dreaming of that perfect snack you know won’t magically appear, no matter how many times you try your best Samantha Stevens nose twitch. And then, in utter despair, you don your heavy coat and slumber out into the crowded streets to hunt down the perfect piece of fruit or freshly made salad, all the while thinking of that big assignment you need to finish. But your stomach is winning the battle…

Wait a minute. Wouldn’t more snack and beverage options at work help save you a whole lot of time? According to survey results, yes: 57 percent of office workers have to buy their own snacks and beverages at work, and one in two respondents reported leaving the office on coffee or snack runs at least once a day, with some making as many as five trips per day. That’s a lot of lost productivity and unnecessary interruption. Now, I know what you’re thinking — employees can bring their own snacks. While this is true, it’s easy to forget those little things sometimes in the bustle of everyday life. As a wise man once said, sometimes, a bowl of bananas can make all the difference.*

*A wise man probably never said that… but still…

Happy employees don’t have to break the bank

Many businesses have taken measures to cut costs, and with that cost-cutting, those extras that employees enjoy so much are often the first to go. But doing little things to make employees smile or get through that extra-tough meeting don’t have to cost employers much at all — and they can make a big difference in the minds and hearts of the people so important to the business.

Staples offers these quick tips for improving the office in ways both employees and employers will appreciate:

1. Stock the kitchen or break room with coffee and snacks that will energize the staff and keep them going. Providing nutritious snacks keeps employees healthy and productive.
2. Take inventory of your technology, and replace outdated equipment that may be impeding productivity. In the last few years, technologies like wireless networks and all-in-one printers have advanced dramatically, while prices have actually fallen.
3. Consider office décor and furniture upgrades that don’t require a complete overhaul. Simply replacing old, worn desk chairs and/or redecorating conference rooms can be easy, low-cost ways to make the office more attractive and comfortable.
4. Arm employees with technology that makes it easy for them to telecommute. Tablet and notebook computers give employees the ability to take their work with them wherever they go, whether it’s on the road, at a client site, in a conference room or working from home.
5.  Take employee privacy concerns into consideration when expanding or redesigning the office. Many newer office furniture systems, such as Staples’ environmentally preferable e3 panel system, offer creative ways to preserve privacy while maintaining an open, collaborative environment.

Again, changes don’t always have to come with a parade and fireworks to be effective. Even slight (and free) touches like adding more natural light in the office or changing up the same old meeting routine can help employees — and your business — be more successful, stimulate creativity, efficiency and communication. And if you want to know more specifics about your employees really want, don’t forget to ask them.

What changes has your workplace made recently to give employee morale a little lift?

Image courtesy of theogeo on Flickr

“I’ve always had the philosophy that strategy in leadership is as much about what you don’t do as it is about what you do.”

In the following interview for CareerBuilder’s Leadership Series, Sun Life CEO Wes Thompson reflects on the importance of people as they relate to sustainability, what he looks for in candidates, and the value of trusting your gut.

What do the employees at Sun Life mean to your organization?
People are really the only sustainable advantage that any organization has over time. Products come and go. Ideas can be copied. These are not sustainable differentiators. Companies that are truly sustainable are those that focus on A-player talent, because you can’t copy talent. So if you’re able to constantly recruit, retain and develop the best people, you can differentiate in the markets that you compete in, and you’ll have a sustainable advantage. It’s really that simple in my view.

What’s your philosophy in terms of how you find great people?
There’s a lot of hiring that’s gut-related, especially when you get more experienced at interviewing candidates. Technical competencies, product knowledge—those kinds of things can be learned over time. Oftentimes, I’m looking for the challenges individuals have taken on in their lives and careers. I look for examples that clearly demonstrate they’ve been able to overcome some significant challenges. I try to ascertain the values they stand for and if they fit with our core values here at Sun Life. This fit is critical to building a solid foundation and culture at any good company.

Throughout your career as a leader, what’s the best or most significant hiring decision that you’ve made?
It’s hard to quantify your best hiring decision. As I reflect on my career, there are so many talented people that I’ve had the pleasure of hiring and watching succeed. In one instance, I hired someone that was my peer at another company. I knew our competencies were extremely complementary, which is important. And we both realized that we could build something unique. I firmly believe if you surround yourself with great talent, you’ll figure out how to win.

Why would someone want to work here?
The culture at Sun Life is shifting and so are the reasons behind why our employees enjoy working here. Historically, you would want to work here because it’s a nice place to work and you could be here for 30 years. I think our employees are beginning to consider Sun Life a great place to work because you can be challenged, you have the autonomy to drive results, and the results are visible and rewarded.

What’s it like to work for this organization? How is the Sun Life culture reflected in the brand?
Our first ever national brand campaign in the U.S. has had a tremendous impact on the culture and the way our employees feel about working for Sun Life. Everyone wants to be affiliated with a company that has a strong brand. And it makes it easier when your brand reflects who you really are. We highlighted our strengths that are deeply ingrained in our culture, particularly our financial strength and focus on sustainability, but we had some fun with it and added some humor to the campaign. It resonated well with our employees, particularly long-term employees, because we stayed true to ourselves. Our people really embraced that.

What is your leadership philosophy?
First, I don’t believe that the leader has all the good ideas, and I’m open to being challenged. Leaders can’t be successful if people are afraid to challenge them. This will stifle the creativity of the organization and you will not get the best out of people. Second, I’ve always had the philosophy that strategy around leadership is as much about what you don’t do, as it is about what you do. Through my experience, I have found that it’s really easy to figure out what to do and what to start, but it’s really difficult to figure out what you’re not going to do, particularly when there are implications for not pursuing or stopping initiatives. And, third, I am big believer in rotating talent at all levels of the company. This not only develops our people but brings new perspectives to all areas of the business, helping to drive collaborative and innovative thinking.

So you just went through, a tough time, a recession.  What did you take out of it?  What did you learn in those last three years?
During a time when external forces are affecting your business, you must focus on the things you can control. You must have a long-term view of the business and what is truly sustainable under various market conditions, not just the favorable conditions. Alignment along all aspects of the value chain is critical in order to be sure you’re focused on markets that have sustainable value from a shareholder perspective.

ABOUT WES THOMPSON: As President of Sun Life Financial, U.S., Wes Thompson leads all aspects of the company’s growing operations in the United States across the annuities, employee benefits, and life insurance business lines. Since joining Sun Life in 2008, Thompson has been instrumental in renewing the strategic direction of SLF U.S. He has championed key initiatives focused on growing the business and positioning it for further success. Prior to joining Sun Life, Thompson held leadership roles at Lincoln Financial Group, where he created the company’s wholesale distribution organization, before becoming President of Employer Markets and then President of the Retirement Solutions division. Thompson started his career at Aetna in 1979 in the Executive Management program. He later joined CIGNA in 1994, where he played an active role in the integration efforts as Lincoln Financial Group acquired CIGNA’s individual life insurance business in 1998. Thompson received a bachelor’s degree from Brown University. He is an active board member of the Boys and Girls Club of Greater Hartford and the Wadsworth Atheneum-Amistad Foundation.

ABOUT SUN LIFE FINANCIAL: Sun Life Financial is a leading international financial services organization providing a diverse range of protection and wealth accumulation products and services to individuals and corporate customers. Chartered in 1865, Sun Life Financial and its partners have operations in key markets worldwide, including Canada, the United States, the United Kingdom, Ireland, Hong Kong, the Philippines, Japan, Indonesia, India, China and Bermuda. As of March 31, 2011, the Sun Life Financial group of companies had total assets under management of US $484 billion. For more information, please visit www.sunlife.com/us.

“At the end of the day, it isn’t just about a having a visionary idea or business plan. It’s about employees who bring passion and flawless execution.”

Such is how Kevin Ryan began – and set the tone for – his keynote address, Hirer’s Remorse? Why 80 Percent of Business is Choosing the Right People, at the recent Inc500/5000 Conference & Awards Ceremony in Washington, D.C.

Ryan should know a thing or two about what it takes to grow and run a business. He has launched several New York-based businesses, including Gilt Groupe (for which he is the current CEO), Business Insider, ShopWiki, 10gen/MongoDB, and, not least of all, DoubleClick, which he helped grow from a 20-person startup to a worldwide company with over 1,500 employees.

Drawing from his own experience, Ryan discussed the beliefs and practices that have fueled his success as a business leader, the foundation of which, are based on people.

Rules to Live – and Lead – By
Lessons from Gilt Groupe Founder and CEO Kevin Ryan

• Don’t just say people are your greatest asset. Believe it. “Your idea isn’t what’s separating you. It’s the execution. And that goes back to people,” Ryan says. While companies tend to claim that people are the most important thing to their business, they don’t really believe it. Instead, they operate under the illusion that products or ideas – not the people – determine success. If you want your company to be successful, recognize that people truly are your greatest asset – and you should treat them as such.
• Make recruitment your primary job. “Do you spend more time recruiting and managing people than anything else by far?” Ryan asked the crowd of entrepreneurs and small business leaders. Ryan says he spends as much time with head of HR as he does with CFO, because the two are equally important. “It’s just as strategic,” he says. “I want someone who not only has the skills to be head of HR, but who also has business skills as well.”
• Create success for your employees – even if it mean they won’t be your employees anymore. If you were the coach of a professional sports team, Ryan says, you would constantly be evaluating your players to ensure the team is operating at its best at all times, wouldn’t you?  The same goes for your organization. Don’t be afraid to say to an employee whose no longer a fit for your company or performing to your company’s highest standards, “Maybe this isn’t the right company for you. I want you to be successful, and I don’t think it’s here.”  If someone’s not working out, it’s your job as CEO to address it; otherwise, the more you let it go, the more you let the problem fester, the greater chance you have of ruining the morale and the performance of the whole team down the line.
• Don’t underestimate the value of the reference check. Of the three main steps in the hiring process – resume, interview and reference check – Ryan says, people tend to over-evaluate the first two and under-value the third. “When I think of why people don’t succeed, it’s not because they don’t have technical skills. It’s because of those intangibles that don’t come up in interview that are hard to judge.” Reference, therefore, are the key to finding out if those candidates have the intangibles you need. “People who worked with that person know,” Ryan says.
• Be the person you want to work for. “There’s a saying that A-level people hire A-level people, and B-level people hire C-level people…but I think it’s actually that A-level people want to work with A-level people, and the B-level people who are hiring can only get C-level people,” Ryan told the crowd.  “People will put up with a tremendous amount of unrest [at a company] if they wake up every day and think, ‘I like my managers. He/she supports me, and I’m learning from that person,’” Ryan says. He attributes Gilt’s low rate of turnover to the company’s “obsessive focus” on making sure employees are constantly having fun, learning, being challenged and being recognized.

In closing, Ryan made sure to reiterate that his number one focus as CEO isn’t on business results, but on people. “People, people, people. That’s what I do all day.”

Do you realize…

…one in two job seekers want to find and engage with companies in social?
…80 percent of companies use social media to recruit?
…12 percent of job searches are done via mobile devices?
…54 percent of job seekers are more likely to apply to your job at your company after they follow you on social media?

Yesterday, CareerBuilder’s Vice President of Corporate Marketing and Branding, Jamie Womack, along with CareerBuilder Area Vice President Andrew Streiter discussed these very findings in the featured webcast, Going Social: How to Leverage Social Media In Your Recruitment Strategy. 

In addition to these findings, they also gave practical tips for employers on the best ways to leverage emerging media to strengthen employment branding and recruiting efforts, including…

…the latest tools, trends and techniques for attracting top talent
…what emerging media are and what they mean for your business
…how to integrate emerging media into your current recruitment strategy

Missed the webcast? Download it now at www.careerbuilder.com/GoingSocial.

Keep the conversation going – use #CBGoSocial on Twitter…

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Related articles:

• Think Like a Marketer to Capture Top Talent
• Emerging Media: The Best Ideas You Aren’t Taking Advantage Of
• Why Video? 6 Benefits of Making Video Part of Your Recruitment Mix

Earlier this month, Target retail stores and its online site were overrun with activity from customers desperate to own a piece of squiggle-patterned luxury at a bargain price. On Sept. 13, famed Italian house Missoni launched a line exclusively for Target, and everybody wanted in. The Internet traffic caused Target’s website to crash, and the Missoni line was essentially sold out in a few hours. If you visit the website today, you will see most items are listed as “out of stock.”

It’s interesting that even in today’s economy, when many people are tightening their purse strings and have less disposable income, they still turned out in droves to spend on this collection, which, while affordable, is not comprised of necessities. People are even taking advantage of the craze by reselling the items on eBay at outrageous prices!

The consumer enthusiasm was (and still is) certainly driven by hype and Missoni itself, but Target did a lot to ensure that the line would be well-received. Though they made some mistakes , there are still nuggets of information to be mined from this situation – namely, building excitement without creating disappointment. How can you apply the good pieces of Target’s tactics to your recruitment strategy?

1. Create a buzz. Target released news and information about the Missoni collection months before it officially launched. They also included photographs of the entire line and pricing information. People started to get excited and planned their purchases. You can create a similar buzz about job openings by posting the information in several places and heightening the excitement. For example, if you have several marketing positions to recruit for, you can start tweeting and posting about them via social media. Sample post: “I’ve got a few excellent marketing positions coming soon! Limited-time offer, check back for updates! Going live 9/25.” This simple post gets people who are interested in those positions interested in your Twitter feed. They’ll start paying closer attention, waiting for the date when you post the opportunities.
2. Instill a sense of urgency in candidates. Target let consumers know that the line would only be available in limited quantities, for a limited time. You should let candidates know that the job opening will be filled quickly. Set a deadline, and stick to it. This is useful because it enables you to see which candidates can adhere to deadlines; it also lets candidates know that the job is desirable and there is significant competition. (If you’re worried about not getting enough candidates, you can always repost or extend the deadline later.)
3. Follow through on your marketing. Target has made it clear that, despite the high demand, they won’t be ordering any additional Missoni goods beyond additional scheduled shipments. They are sticking to the limited-quantity collection they advertised. If you set a deadline for applications, make sure you also set a deadline for yourself to go through them and respond to people. If you phone interview people, respond to them quickly about in-person interviews and so on. Instilling a sense of urgency but not following through on that promise will only serve to annoy some candidates.
4. Handle the resultant attention with aplomb. Target has been responding to customer feedback, but some customers are still dissatisfied because of delayed shipments and order cancellations.  If your number of applicants is much larger than anticipated, don’t panic. Send a note to each applicant letting him/her know you received his/her application, and that there was a high volume of applicants. Let them know that if they don’t hear anything by a certain date, then they should assume that the position has been filled by another applicant. That should alleviate disgruntled applicants.

“Diversity is included in everything we do – it’s a critical part of our mission. It’s so ingrained in what we do that we don’t even really see it.”

These were some of the words spoken by Cmdr. Brent Mitchell, Director of Marketing and Advertising for the Navy Recruiting Command, on day two of the recent ERE Expo in Hollywood, FL. During his “The Navy’s Record Year” keynote, Cmdr. Mitchell discussed many facets of the Navy’s recruitment successes and challenges — many of which translate not only to the entire military, but to employers in general. Below are some highlights about the Navy’s specific recruiting challenges, growth/success metrics, and tips that may inspire other employers or recruiters:

What’s it like to work for the Navy? A workplace snapshot

• 284 ships in commission
• 3700+ operational aircraft
• Personnel deployed: 52, 585
• Then (1992): 550,000 active duty; 406 ships
• Now (2011): 328,266 active duty, 203,796 Navy civilians, 102,080 reserves
• Navy recruiting command: Hiring 45,000 people a year, consisting of 42,079 enlisted, 3,989 officers, and 4,220 NROTC applications
• Hiring 45,000 people/year

Should be easy to reach their goals with such a great brand, right? Not so fast. “Lots of people have reservations about recruiting for the Navy,” said Mitchell. The reasons are widespread, but many stem from either physical concerns, fear (war and high-risk situations often pop into people’s minds) and cultural elements. Some of the most common concerns include those offered from the audience: “I hate push-ups; “I can’t swim” (the point, as Mitchell jokes, is to stay on the ship, not to fall off of it); “I’m going to have to cut my hair”; and “Where will I work, geographically? I have to leave home.”

Some of these are real concerns, and Mitchell acknowledges that they are a barrier the Navy deals with all the time. He went on to address other challenges the Navy faces both internally and externally.

Some of the Navy’s current recruitment challenges:

• Complex Mission: The Navy has what they call a “FIT” standard for talent — they need the right person, doing the right job, at the right time. In the old days, Mitchell said, you took a test to determine that you were morally and physically qualified, and then you were “in,” your job was chosen, and you were sent to it.Now, they have “gotten away from sending a general product downrange,” as he calls it, and it’s top-notch quality being sent off to boot camp. When you go to boot camp, you know what you will be doing after, and you’ve had all the security, financial, and background checks already done and the physical screenings taken care of.But this FIT element, Mitchell added, is like finding a blade of grass in a haystack, it results in frustration on part of applicants and recruiters, and it can be a strain on the most valuable resource — time.
• A shrinking population of qualified and interested youth: Mitchell asked audience members for a show of hands as to how many of their family members were in the military. Overall, he got about 50 percent raised hands; fewer, he said, than he would have gotten years ago. It used to be that entire families would consider the military as line of work — that 70 percent in that same audience would have raised their hands. Interest and military participation as a family tradition has dwindled, and with it a portion of the Navy’s target market.In addition, the skill sets for which the Navy is recruiting are intense; 98 percent of nuclear power plants, for instance, are run by Navy-trained officers — and this requires finding a very technically astute individual. Not easy to find, especially when two-thirds of the market (17- to 24-year-old males) isn’t even qualified to join the Navy.
• Navy Awareness lags all other services: In many ways, Mitchell said, the Navy is invisible to America. You can’t get on naval bases without an escort in most cases, if there’s even one near you — which makes it difficult for people to penetrate the barriers and get to know what the organization is really like. In addition, they have their own language of sorts — they use particular words for things that the general public isn’t necessarily familiar with, and they’re an insular, close-knit community. Kind of like an exclusive club, really — but this rep doesn’t do much for raising awareness.
• Resource reductions and the changing economy pose a moderate risk in the near term: Marketing for complex jobs is difficult, Mitchell pointed out. The Department of Defense has taken a $26 billion reduction, so trying to make decisions on whether to spend money on recruiting or equipment needs can prove to be quite challenging.
• There’s a high demand for professional skill sets in the private sector: The Navy also struggles with people relatively immune to unemployment — people with very specific skill sets and an advanced level of education, like doctors, chaplains, and dentists. With a shortage of Roman Catholic priests in the U.S. and many parishes in need of them, for example, it’s hard for the Navy to justify taking them away — and it can cause quite a dilemma.
• A sense of identity and awareness among the public: The Navy has suffered from the lack of a clear identity and awareness among the broader American public. News reporters and the public at large believe the Navy is manned by generals and soldiers, and they don’t know what service actually entails or what kind of impact the Navy has on their daily lives. Without this foundation, it’s difficult for the general public to support Naval efforts.This hurts when it comes to getting the right people in the door. There is currently a 7 percent female interest in the Navy, compared to an 18 percent male interest in the Navy. There’s a steady decline for female interest, though the Navy has more and more jobs opening for females — it’s a problem of perception versus reality. Not only does the Navy want more female recruits — it needs them. They’re about to onboard their first female submariners, which is huge.

How the Navy has overcome some of its biggest challenges:

As Mitchell shed light on how the Navy has tackled some of these challenges and achieved a record year for recruiting, it struck me that many employers face the same types of recruiting challenges — and that the solutions were often ones that translate outside the military environment.

• A supportive work environment: Mitchell talks about his early days of being a recruiter, when employment was only 3.8 percent in Phoenix. The district missed their recruitment goals by a huge margin, and he says the one thing that helped turn things around was visiting the sailors in their stations and examining their work environment, and listening to what bothered them. Many things were in disrepair, and it bugged them; they didn’t feel the pride and professionalism they had felt before. After a year of this, the district started to make its recruitment goals again.
• Ensuring quality of talent: Putting great talent in your open positions does, as we all know, make a huge difference in the business. Measure enlisted quality by 1) high school diploma graduates and 2) how they score on the ASVAB (Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery) — Mitchell describes the latter as the SATs for the military. Eighty-eight percent score on the upper tier for this test, and 98 percent of enlistees have a high school diploma (77 percent is the minimum). Their recruiters must be doing something right: Their new hire program is holding at 11 percent attrition — as Mitchell said, “that takes a lot of time and attention and effort.

• Recruiters who get it: The Navy dubs their recruiters “Sailors on recruiting duty” — and for good reason. Although the brand image of the military recruiter isn’t that great (Mitchell mentioned the common perceptions being someone who’s stressed, running toward a quota and will tell you whatever you want to hear to get you to sign the bottom line), “It’s anything but.”

  Their recruiters are actually high-performing sailors in the fleet who have done very well and qualified to become recruiters. They do three years of recruiting duty, then go back to the fleet to work alongside the people they brought into the Navy. In other words, if they recruit bad people, they’re stuck working with bad people. The Navy is a small community, Mitchell stressed that “we can get tough with each other with one phone call and one email, and we do. If you send a bad product (recruit), the fleet’s going to tell you. We’re picking our own team.”

• Better communication efforts: The Navy has adopted a multi-channel approach to fuel awareness. When it comes to the Navy’s communication efforts, Mitchell tells his colleagues, “It’s not one thing; it’s everything.”

  1. A simpler website. Whereas before, their website was full of internal language and buzzwords (sound familiar?), they realized potential candidates didn’t understand much of the language and fancy job titles and terms they were using — only internal employees did. This was hurting recruitment efforts. Now, the website is written from the point of view of someone who’s never been in the Navy. Users of the site want to understand what they would be doing in simple, straightforward terms, as complicated job titles no one understands causes many to lose interest.“Do you like solving puzzles” makes much more sense to a potential recruit than “Cryptologist.” “We have to put it in the language of our target market. Try to navigate your own website from someone who doesn’t speak your internal language,” said Mitchell. And he made a great point — once these candidates come into your organization, they’re going to learn to speak your language.

  2. Branding. As the Navy realized they suffered from a lack of identity and awareness, not only from the general public, but within their own organization, they decided to go down the pathway of branding.Prior to 2009, Navy’s communication efforts focused exclusively on short-term goals. i.e. recruiting prospects. The organization has had four different recruiting slogans since the inception of an all-volunteer force, all targeted to prospects ages 18-24 focused on a “what’s in it for me” proposal (do you remember the “Navy. It’s not just a job. It’s an adventure” or “Accelerate your life” campaigns?) They realized that these campaigns were very inward-focused, but they weren’t cohesive with what the Navy was about as a whole. They didn’t speak to older workers, Navy family, or retirees — and that’s a big part of the organization. Now, their mission statement is, “America’s Navy is the global force that protects the world by whatever means necessary 24/7.” This has been adapted into many different campaigns, but the message is true to their mission across the board.

• Diversity-focused engagement: Mitchell says they view diversity as a strategic imperative — and that it’s not just about race or ethnicity. “Your Navy forces should look like the population and the people it serves.” The Navy has initiated many diversity-focused efforts — but as Mitchell said, when asked what portion of his budget was reserved for diversity recruiting, he answered: “All of it.” “Diversity is included in everything we do – it’s a critical part of our mission. It’s so ingrained in what we do that we don’t even really see it.”But how did they get to this point — a point in which diversity just happens?The truth is, it takes a lot of outreach. They partner with various affinity groups like the National Society of Black Engineers, groups which are primarily student-focused and engineering-based, and they engage with them on a national, regional, and local level. This way, they start putting the Navy into students’ consideration process early on. The Navy also lets some of these students explore Navy jobs actually experiencing time with the Navy on the ships. They’re able to talk to people and ask them anything — and they tend to get honest answers about what they do and don’t like about their job, and to get the inside scoop from employees who are really proud of what they do. After all, is there a better way to get a real sense of an organization and its people than by talking to them?The Navy has also created focused diversity marketing and advertising campaigns. Mitchell recognizes that building trust takes time. As he put it, “you can’t ‘surge’ trust.’” They start early and often. “As we’re out there in the community, building trust is continual. With that, I have to make investment decisions that may not give me an immediate return on my investment. You have to start the investment early — that’s how you get top quality people.”

• Evolving technology: The military’s IT is the largest Intranet in the world, Mitchell said, but it’s built for security, not designed to be mobile or have 4G connectivity. “It’s designed around our primary business lines, but it doesn’t fit recruiting.” Yet, the recruiting command has made huge improvements. “We just armed our recruiters with laptops and mobile connectivity, and a biometric thumb device. Now, when signing paperwork, candidates sign with a thumbprint rather than a signature. This allows us to get to near real-time processing.” Sometimes, it’s the small process adjustments and simplifications that can make a huge difference in your recruiting (on both sides of the interview chair).
• Social media engagement: “We had a great plan. Be ready to change your plan. We have a saying that ‘no plan survives first contact with the enemy,’” Mitchell said, laughing. Initially, they had created 15 Facebook pages focusing on different elements of the Navy. Recruiters were already connected and wired, so Mitchell had them respond to inquiries and comments. The problem? Some did, but some also left — and when they did leave without anyone to take their place, that hurt engagement on the pages. They had to retool their plan, and “Now, I have 50 core recruiters at headquarters who respond to social media. Now, questions don’t go unanswered and engagement happens.” Of course, there’s good engagement (Recruiter to candidate: Here’s where you go to find out info, and if you have more questions, get in contact with me) and bad (Go to the website), and encouraging the good engagement is an ongoing process. NavyforMoms.comis one of their most successful social media efforts, with 1,222 new members per month,  more than 10,000 discussions on site, and a true sense of community and Navy mothers helping each other — it’s taken on a life of its own.

Mitchell included a great quote from Admiral Gary Roughead, Chief of Naval Operations, part of which stated, “Many of our organizations have focused on leaders as communicators. Now, we have the chance to be leaders of communicators.” In social media, this couldn’t be more true — and organizations that get this are way ahead of those that don’t.

Times continue to change, and, from what Cmdr. Mitchell said at the ERE Expo, the Navy is learning to change along with them.

How do you think your organization could adapt some of their success strategies in your own organization — or how have you?

This morning, Netflix co-founder Reed Hastings issued an apology on the company’s blog for failing to show “respect and humility in the way we announced the separation of DVD and streaming, and the price changes.”

For those who haven’t heard, Netflix recently announced it was going to start charging its streaming and DVD-by-mail services separately (now, the latter service will be named Qwikster). Now, Netflix customers who want only DVDs or only streaming can pay less for the one service, but will end up paying more if they want to keep both.

Not surprisingly, the veiled attempt to charge customers more while pretending that they’re charging them less made for some unhappy customers.  To add insult to injury, most customers didn’t even get the news directly from Netflix itself, but through stories leaked on various blogs and news sites. (I myself didn’t get so much as an email to make me aware of this change, and had to find out through Twitter.) To say the company lacked respect and humility is an understatement: Netflix had no regard for their customers whatsoever in this situation. As a result, the company will – and already has – lost a great deal of customers and business from the ordeal.

Now, as Hastings desperately attempts damage control, not only do businesses have the opportunity to learn from about what not to do when it comes to customer service, but leaders could also apply these lessons to handling bad news- and correcting mistakes – with their employees.

5 Do’s and Don’ts for Communicating Bad News – and Righting Wrongs

• DO: Own up to Your Mistakes. “I messed up. I owe everyone an explanation,” begins Captain Obvious’ Hastings’ blog post. Well done: straight and to the point. Some leaders frown on admitting wrong, but in Netflix’s case, the admission was necessary. So overwhelming was the backlash from customers, that for Hastings to do anything less than apologize would be an even bigger insult – and more fuel for unhappy customers’ fire. Sometimes, all customers want is to know they’re being heard, and Netflix finally took the time to acknowledge their customers’ feelings. And while many will see Hastings’ post as too little, too late, it’s at least start in a long way to winning back customers.
• DO: Utilize video. Realizing that people have shorter attention spans today – and that angry people have even shorter attention spans -  Hastings also issued a 3-minute video apology for the many customers who likely will not take the time read through the lengthy apology and want to see and hear for themselves that Netflix is sincere in its efforts to appease customers (at least, we hope that’s the case). Video is the next best thing to apologizing in person, and it’s a quick, easy way to reach your audience – be they customers, employees or candidates.
• DON’T: Try to make bad news sound like good news. Netflix keeps insisting that what is really a price hike is really a better deal for its customers. C’mon, Netflix. Give us a little credit. As NPR’s Linda Holmes puts it, Netflix’s attempts to sell the price change as a bargain is “like a shoe company deciding to sell right shoes and left shoes for 12 dollars each where pairs of shoes used to be 20 dollars and thinking that consumers will notice the lower 12-dollar price but not the fact that it buys only one shoe.” Tell your customers/employees the truth from the start; otherwise, they will notice that you’re hiding something from them, and they will lose trust in and respect for you.
• DO: Listen to what people are saying about you on social media. Netflix customers used the greatest weapon at their disposal to fight the price hike – by taking to Facebook, Twitter and blogs in droves to voice their disgust. Finally, it got to the point where Netflix could no longer ignore the overwhelming criticism on social media – try as the company might have (which brings me to my next point…).
• DON’T: Wait two $&@%ing months to make an ‘official’ announcement. Two months? That’s decades in social media time, y’all! By the time Netflix customers got the ‘apology’ from the CEO this morning, the story had already been circulating the Internet for weeks, and Netflix was way past the “My bad! Forgive us?” stage of admitting wrongdoing. This, in my opinion, was the company’s biggest offense of all. Hastings was wrong to not alert customers about the price changes in the first place, but he should have owned up to that mistake far earlier than he actually did. Customers deserve better than that, and so do employees. The more you try to ignore a problem, the worse it will get, and it’s going to take one helluva a team bonding outing to undo that drop in morale. (Good luck!)

As we’ve discussed before on The Hiring Site, your employees are your customers, and if Netflix has taught us anything, it is how imperative it is that you treat this group with respect – especially when it comes to handling bad news – otherwise, you risk losing the loyalty and respect of your employees – if not employees themselves.

Do you think Netflix was right to apologize the way it did?  Were this a company CEO addressing his employees about a leadership wrongdoing, how would you have handled the situation?

More than two decades and countless discussions after the term “work-life balance” entered the workforce lexicon, we don’t seem to be any closer to figuring out how to achieve it. Author Matthew Kelly believes he knows why.

“The question has always been framed in the wrong way,” Kelly told me in a phone interview last week. “The term itself is fatally flawed.”

He says the term implies that work and life should be separate, when in reality, they are intertwined. “Most people spend the majority of their lives working. So when you tell them their work isn’t a part of their life, they don’t respond very well to that.”

In fact, prior to the early 1990s, when Fortune 500 companies started addressing the topic in their employee surveys, Kelly believes employees didn’t give much thought to having a work-life balance at all.  After interviewing more than 3,000 people as research for the book, Kelly and his colleagues found the same holds true today: workers don’t truly care about balance at all. What they want is satisfaction in both areas of their lives – personal and professional – at the same time.

An internationally renowned speaker and business consultant, Kelly has built a career around a core principle he developed as a first-year business school student: “becoming the best versions of ourselves.” Today, as president of Floyd Consulting, Kelly helps organizations and people become the best versions of themselves on a daily basis.

In his new book, Off Balance: Getting Beyond the Work-Life Balance Myth to Personal and Professional Satisfaction, Kelly refocuses this core principle to help others become the most satisfied versions of themselves. When I spoke to Kelly last week, he discussed how employers could use the insights from his book to tap into their employees’ needs and create a more satisfied – and more productive – workforce.

Employers need to take ownership of employee satisfaction
While no one is more responsible for their satisfaction levels than themselves, Kelly says, companies do have a responsibility to help their employees achieve satisfaction.  And a large part of that responsibility lies in defining its culture. “A lot of company cultures are passive aggressive, saying, ‘We care about our people, and we want them to have a work-life balance and satisfying personal and professional lives,’ but there’s an underlying pressure to work a 60- to 70-hour week,” Kelly says.

Companies have an obligation to be honest and open with their employees about what is expected of them. He uses Microsoft as an example of a company that takes on this responsibility well. “At the start up of Microsoft, all these guys were working an 80-hour work week, but they knew what they were signing up for.”

At the same time, however, companies also need to be aware of the higher workloads their people are taking on and extra hours they are putting in, especially in light of the recent “macroeconomic meltdown.” Employees simply can’t withstand that kind of pressure over a sustained amount of time. “It’s okay if we know the fourth quarter is the busiest quarter, but every quarter shouldn’t be like that,” Kelly says.

In addition to defining one’s culture, Kelly says it is of vital importance for a company to have a compelling, clearly defined vision – “something people can work toward” – in order to keep them engaged.

“Highly engaged people tend to have a vision for their life, and there are dreams that they are working toward,” Kelly says. Therefore, in order to increase engagement, employers should find ways to let employees pursue their passions at work – in any way possible, no matter how small.

“If we can nudge people closer to their core strengths so they’re spending a little more time doing something they’re really impassioned about…even if big changes aren’t made in that area, if employees are seeing their employers are interested in that, I think it makes a seismic shift in the culture.”

Help Your Employees Increase Their Level of Satisfaction with One Simple Exercise
In Off Balance, Kelly outlines various ways to increase one’s level of satisfaction. Here’s one you can suggest your employees try today: Suggest they carve out a half hour each week – say, on a Friday afternoon or a Monday morning – and take out a notepad. Then, on a scale of one to ten, rate their level of professional satisfaction and rate their level of personal satisfaction. (Professional satisfaction, after all, can influence personal satisfaction and vice versa.) This exercise will do two things: First, it helps people identify the source of their dissatisfaction. Once they’ve identified this source, they can then begin to work toward changing it for the better. This step is where you come in. Be open to discussing ways your employees can increase their satisfaction at work – whether that means taking on a new challenge or perhaps scaling back in other areas.

Matthew Kelly is the New York Times bestselling author of The Rhythm of Life and The Dream Manager. His newest book, Off Balance: Getting Beyond the Work-Life Balance Myth, comes out today.

It’s Your Turn
What do you think? Is it your responsibility to support a climate of work-life balance, or is is the right focus employee satisfaction?

One in five Americans who work from home spend one hour or less working, according to new CareerBuilder survey.

(See the full infographic.)

It’s a debate as old as time: Is working from home an efficient alternative to the traditional office job or a productivity killer?

Thanks to the results of a new CareerBuilder survey on telecommuting, the debate…well, continues. According to the survey of nearly 5,300 employees nationwide, of those Americans who telecommute at least part of the time…

• 17 percent spend one hour or less per day on work
• 35 percent say they work eight or more hours per day (up from 18 percent who said the same in 2007)
• 40 percent work between four and seven hours per day

Thanks to the mass adoption of smart phones and advanced network technologies, Americans are able to work from home on a more regular basis than they were four years ago. Ten percent telecommute at least once a week – up from eight percent in 2007.

“The autonomy of working from home can be very rewarding so long as it doesn’t diminish productivity,” says Rosemary Haefner, vice president of human resources at CareerBuilder. In order to ensure telecommuters are staying productive, managers should be clear about expectations and establish daily objectives, Haefner advises.

Telecommuters are largely split as to whether time spent at home or at the office is more conducive to high-quality work.

• 37 percent of workers say they are more productive at the office
• 29 percent report they are more productive at home
• 34 percent say they are equally productive at home and the office.

What’s keeping workers distracted?
While most offices have their fair share of productivity roadblocks, home is hardly a disturbance-free zone. Telecommuters say the following are the biggest distractions:

• Household chores – 31 percent
• TV – 26 percent
• Pets – 23 percent
• Errands – 19 percent
• Internet – 18 percent
• Children – 15 percent

4 Tips for Managing Work-from-Home Employees
In July, I posted a recap from a particularly interesting SHRM session about managing remote workforces. Below are a few of the takeaways:

1. Put Your Expectations in Writing. Create a physical document that outlines the expectations and responsibilities for everyone on the team. The physical reminder will keep people aware and accountable for their duties. Schedule a time to revisit this document every six months.
2. Harness Technology. From project management software and CRM tools to micro-blogging sites (like Twitter and Yammer) and Wiki’s, there are so many resources today that enable remote teams to work together–it’s just a matter of picking what works best for your team.
3. Set Goals and Track Performance. Make sure you clearly communicate deadlines and projects. Everyone should know who is responsible for completing which part of the project when in order to ensure everyone’s on same page. Consider having employees submit short, weekly reports to keep everyone in the know of the projects they’re working on.
4. Build a Strong, Cohesive Team. Strive to build a sense of community by promoting teamwork and team building. It will make working remotely seem much less distant.

What do you think?
Do you struggle with managing employees who work from home? How do you keep them in check?

It all started innocently enough. Justin over on The Work Buzz, CareerBuilder’s job seeker blog, tweeted a link to The Oatmeal’s 10 Words You Need to Stop Misspelling graphic, and he was immediately bombarded with résumé spelling pet peeves from job seekers and employers alike, which he then included in a post about readers’ most egregious job seeker spelling crimes. That turned into me asking all of you on Twitter for the top three things that make you toss a résumé in the nearest trash can (or at your office neighbor).

The result? You fired at me from all directions with your most agonizing résumé errors — and I’ve included them below. There are those resumes that make you go hmmmmm (thank you, C+C Music Factory), but then there are those that make nails on a chalkboard a preferable torture — the latter of which is our focus today.

I’d like to talk about job seekers’ most aggravating résumé mistakes here, not because I want to make job seekers feel bad, but rather to empower them with advice from people who would actually be sitting on the other side of an interview. (Hint: That’s where you come in.) The more honest information you can share with job seekers about what you are — and are most certainly not — looking for, the more it will help both parties get what they want out of the recruitment process (and stop wasting each other’s time). Below is a collection of the tweets I received from some of @cbforemployers’ Twitter followers about their top resume pet peeves; not surprisingly, spelling, formatting, and unexplained employment gaps topped the list.

 Your top nails-on-a-chalkboard résumé mistakes:

@OSGCORP Lack of details & presentation, if resume has different fonts and misspelled words.

@AaronBahls Spelling! Formatting issues! and Job Hopping!

@mtATL When a candidate has little experience but a 3+ pg unformatted resume filled with nonsense & fluff

@prettylady1205  bad grammar, misspelled words

@DCC_Careers  Comic Sans! Background Images, and Headshots including marital status, visa status, blood type, eye colour, etc.

@hplumley Typos in the resume and / or cover letter, incorrect use of apostrophes.

@Amanda_McDaniel A bogus cover letter. Who needs ‘em?!

@NSagal 1. Spelling errors 2. Major formatting issues 3. Objective/Cover Letter that doesn’t match current job

@NicolaFranklin 10 pages of dense text; spelling/grammer errors; repeated applications for wildly varied job roles/levels…

@CobellRecruit  I would look past a resume that has misspelled words, has no contact details and, really bad formatting!

@Thiru_VM Its purely on the requirement 1. Salary range 2. Lack of skills 3. more break ups in career

@Jolive61 poor spelling, lots of different jobs with short tenure.

@KanthawalaYusuf  1) unreadable / fancy fonts, 2) very lengthy resume, 3) insufficient relevant data.

@BrianLoof  1. Spelling errors 2. Paragraphs instead of bullet points 3. Novels instead of resumes. Thanks for asking!!

@MorrisMelanie  typos!

@AimeeTRUJobs  Typos &/or incorrect use of words, poor grammar. Stuff that’s easy enough to fix. Spell check, people!

@DianneMHarrison Spelling errors, spelling errors and spelling errors

@SusanStrayer 1) typos & grammar errors 2) clearly created 4 another job 3) reads like job descript. w/ no details on what they act. did.

@PuppetRecruiter * objective &/or skills/expereince irrelevant to the job *wrong employer name * extensive spell/gramm errors

OK, so… now what?

By letting job seekers know what you don’t want, you are also shedding light on what you do want. They want guidance, direction, and advice — and some may need a little tough love, too. So feel free to add to this list in the comments with your personal list of worst offenses. But while you’re at it, remember that while getting stock of what not to do is essential, it’s also really valuable to job seekers to get clear, specific information about what you’d like to see more of on their résumés. What tips do you have to help job seekers improve their résumé game (and make it easier for their job history to stop ending up as a dartboard)?

They’ll appreciate you for it — and you’ll appreciate the end result.

So… about the other night. It was great. We really connected on a deeper level. No topic was off the table — we talked about our experience, turn-ons and turn-offs, and what makes us tick. We were brutally honest with each other.

You know, in the #cbjobchat. Remember? For one glorious hour (quick plug: It’s the first Monday of every month at 7 p.m. CST — except for last night, because of the Labor Day holiday), we covered job seeker experience. Are experience requirements flexible? What are acceptable reasons for job seekers to have employment gaps — and what won’t you stand for? Should the candidate’s first job as an ice cream company mascot really have a place on a job seeker’s resume? And do you care whether a candidate was terminated or laid off?

We covered these questions and more — much more, actually. I tried to squeeze as many highlights in as I could, so you could see what your peers are saying (and job seekers can get some great tips), but I want to hear from all of you. What do you agree or disagree with? What do you have to add from your own employer, recruiter or job seeker experience, when it comes to experience?

#cbjobchat: All About Job Seeker Experience

Q1: How much leeway is in a job posting? Are experience requirements flexible?

(What job seekers said):

@Hansell_Gretel: if I really want the job, if I’m > 80% of them I will still apply & hope they love me enough to make an exception!

@CaressaCrawford: personally, if I meet half the requirements I’ll apply #jobseeker #cbjobchat

(What employers & recruiters said):

@SGaspary: Some experience requirements are negotiable, but be reasonable and ready to explain.

@kbaumann: Most job postings are straightforward. If you have the experience, apply. If you’re close…apply.

@Jeffrey_PHR: As a recruiter I can tell you #jobseekers do not adhere to work experience requirements, but recruiters do.

@creativevp: if i can make a connection btwn the skillset it takes to do a particular task then i am willing to be flexible.

@kbaumann: Job postings can be very subjective. It’s about the right fit. Exceptions can be made. Pay attn. to the posting. Requirements are usually mandatory; preferred qualities are more flexible.

@SalarySchool: My experience is that experience requirements tend to be more flexible with internal hires, or if the market is really tight. I have seen cases where that “director” job turns into a “manager” job to get the right person into the position.

Q2: What are OK reasons for job seekers to have a break in employment, if their skills meet the job requirements?

@khairyalonto for #Employers , ok reasons could be post-grad education, giving birth, even getting laid off, etc. It’s the “why” that matters.

@kbaumann: You have to be able to explain the gap in employment. “I was finding myself” isn’t an answer. Fill the time w/volunteer exp.Ok reasons for gaps: Deployment, family, etc. It’s not so much about the gap. It’s about what you did/accomplished.

@iJobSeek Relocated.

Q3: Should there be a cutoff point for experience or is all experience relevant?

@TomBolt Most companies will want to know all employment in last 6-10 years or last 3 jobs. Most valuable experience on resume is the most recent.

@lunarising As far back as ‘exp required’ requests or at least 5-6 yrs

@JLLCareersAUS Not all experience is relevant. But giving us details on your career path will also help us get an idea of your progression.

@mtATL depends on the relevancy and the experience requirements, though 10-15 years is usually a good cut off in general.

@khairyalonto #Employers won’t have time to go through everything. #jobseekers should share relevant experience that will help get an interview.

@JLLCareersAUS Last/current job is the most important. We prefer to speak w/ 2 companies though.

(And, from the job seeker perspective:)

@TheJobFactor I think we should give less importance to experiences which are not required for the applied job.

@PuppetRecruiter I want to see ALL in 10 yrs not just ‘relevant’, let employer detrmine what is/isn’t relevant, explains gaps!

Q4: How much does a termination or layoff influence a hiring decision for #employers?

@mtATL #Employers It can be a negative influencer. Candidates need to be prepared to talk about what happened. #tricky

@SalarySchool It can influence mgr, but if you have a good track record, you can easily address. Get great former boss ref’s

@TomBolt Layoff not a killer, but be prepared to explain the circumstances and what you have done since if still unemployed.

@khairyalonto for most #employers, termination is a red flag, but getting laid off really shouldn’t be. Finding out the behaviors is key

JLLCareersAUS  Termination/layoff: depends on the reference checks. Crosschecking with a 2nd/3rd reference helps us make a decision.

Bonus Q&A (aka unchartered territory):

And, as all good conversations do, we sidetracked a bit and delved into side topics (but great ones). Here are a couple of exchanges between #cbjobchat participants worth highlighting:

On age discrimination:

@edjalberts Does a “mature” future employee have a chance in the digital world? & how to NOT be discriminated due to age?

@abalderrama @edjalberts In digital jobs your skills(and portfolio) CAN (not always, sadly) outweigh bias. Let the work prove your worth.

On cross-country relocation:

@caligirl62011 Any advice for cross country relocation job seekers? I am not looking for $$ to relocate or interview-just a new job.

@danielkjacobs @caligirl62011 For my last job, I said I was willing to relocate at my own expense in my cover letter. Then negotiated relocation #CBJobChat

SalarySchool @caligirl62011 If you are going to be in the area for any period of time, mention that. e.g. ” will be in NYC for the summer.”

@abalderrama @caligirl62011 Mention your willingness to relocate at your own expense in your cover letter. They’ll know you’re serious.

Check out the highlights from past chats:

August’s #cbjobchat – Job seekers’ toughest interview questions
July’s #cbjobchat — Your most cringe-worthy hiring mistakes
June’s #cbjobchat — Your biggest lessons in candidate search
May’s #cbjobchat — All about the interview process
April’s #cbjobchat -- All about the application process

 So tell us — what advice do you have for job seekers that we missed?

“Ask your neighbor what they do,” said Peter Cappelli to the room full of us in the Managing the Older Worker session at 2011′s SHRM conference. Most people in the room complied. “Then,” he continued, “ask them how old they are.” People laughed nervously; no one moved.

That was how Cappelli, the George W. Taylor Professor of Management at The Wharton School and co-author of Managing the Older Worker: How to Prepare for the New Organizational Order, started his discussion on older workers — and as he went on, he explained the current surge in older workers we’re seeing, shared his thoughts on ways in which older workers are better hires than their younger counterparts, discussed how employers can best engage the older generation, and more.

Why the big workplace shift?

The workforce is getting older — and it’s causing a lot of age-related changes in the workplace that many companies are ill-equipped to deal with. Why? Well, first of all, said Cappelli, we’re living longer — babies born in 2010 will live 10 years longer than those born in 1950. If your parents are 65, he added, there is a 50 percent chance that at least one of them will live to the age of 90.

Second of all, we’re also living healthier, and the percentage of older workers who need to work (to support living longer) is growing. And even they don’t have to work, many older people are healthy and want to keep busy; 84 percent say they would work even if they were set for life — not to work for the money, but to stay active.

As more people are increasingly working full-time and baby boomers are getting older, the workforce is also getting older. Basically, Cappelli said, longer life, baby boomers, and people working longer are the three main factors driving an older workforce.

What do older workers want?

Learning how to work with all the generations in the workplace is important for employers, but with a growing older workforce, it’s even more important that we examine what older workers actually want (hint: as mentioned above, it’s not really about the money).

• A friendly environment — 94%
• The chance to use their skills — 94%
• The chance to do something worthwhile — 91%
• To feel respected by coworkers — 90%
• The opportunity to learn something new — 88%
• The ability to help others — 86%
• Adequate paid time off — 86%
• Health care and insurance benefits — 84%
• A flexible schedule — 76%
• To do something they’ve always wanted to do — 75%

The problem? They’re not getting it — because they can’t find work

A whopping 75 percent of those workers approaching typical retirement age want to keep working — but of those workers, only about one-half actually do. Of those who do find new jobs, only one-quarter can actually get hired by somebody else. Many older workers become self-employed because they have a hard time getting anyone to hire them.

Why can’t older individuals find work?

After all, employers complain of not being able to find quality workers, but compared to their younger colleagues, older workers:

• Quit less, are absent less, and have fewer accidents (even car accidents)
• Have more knowledge and better social skills
• Have better job performance
• Are happier, as it’s shown that people get happier as they get older (you want happy workers, right?)

The only thing older workers are generally poorer at, said Cappelli, is solving novel problems under time pressure without aids (advice, calculators, or other help); for example, taking SAT tests — yep, that’s it.

What do employers say they want?

• A just-in-time workforce that doesn’t need training and can “hit the ground running.”
• Flexible workforce that isn’t expecting long-term commitments
• Better interpersonal skills
• Better “knowledge management” of tacit information

Older workers are a perfect fit for what employers say they want – more flexibility, better interpersonal skills and workers who can hit the ground running.

Do older workers cost more?

Quite simply, no. Though there’s a general misconception that this is the case, there’s no premium in the labor market for age – only for experience. Yes, older workers’ health care use is greater, Cappelli said, but they don’t have dependents to pay for (no pregnancies or little kids). In fact, doubling your percentage of 55-year-old workers raises your business’s total compensation costs by a mere 1 percent.

So why aren’t more older workers being hired?

To sum it up in a phrase, age discrimination. I was surprised when Cappellis said that age discrimination becomes apparent for 36.5 percent of older workers at the age of 50. As Cappelli pointed out, we as a society think certain topics or demographics are off-limits when it comes to comedy, yet the one topic deemed not offensive is making fun of older people, which suggests how common it is to hear, see, and accept people being disparaging about age. Age discrimination appears to be more common than gender or race discrimination, Cappelli added, and 67 percent say they’ve experienced or seen it on the job. In addition, 25 percent of employers say their organization is reluctant to hire older workers (and that’s only the percentage that admit it).

It’s even worse when it comes to the IT field: The majority of IT employers said they wouldn’t hire anyone over 40.

Older workers — and younger supervisors

As the workforce ages, executives are actually getting younger, and the percentage of supervisors who are younger than their subordinates is growing. It’s no secret that older workers and younger supervisors don’t exactly mesh all of the time — and as Cappelli said, this conflict is compounding the issue of older workers having trouble getting work.

We’re seeing retired workers coming back into the workforce and take lower jobs, because younger supervisors are acting as gatekeepers to keep many older workers out. But why?

• 88 percent of employers worry about hiring older workers because of conflicts with younger workers (talk about a never-ending cycle), among them the fact that younger supervisors are less likely to give older workers feedback or hold them accountable.
• Younger supervisors are also more likely to believe that performance problems with older subordinates can’t be fixed.
•  Younger supervisors, many of whom rely on a “carrots and sticks” mentality that encourages a promotion for doing well and a demotion/getting fired for not doing well, are afraid of managing more experienced subordinates, because these things  don’t matter as much or go over well with older workers later in their careers. Older workers are less motivated by pay, and less afraid of being fired. The formal  “because I said so” or “because I know best”type of authority doesn’t work with them.
• Younger supervisors are uncomfortable managing older workers — traditionally, it’s been flipped, and they just can’t shake their feeling that they shouldn’t be in a position of power.

Can we fix this?
The short answer? Yes. The solution, according to Cappelli, involves a different model of leadership and management practices, and in his presentation, he mentioned a few ways for organizations to better work with older workers in their organization:

• Tailor your rewards and benefits to their lifestyle and interests: The promotion, bonus or stock options don’t matter as much to older workers, as mentioned above. Instead, provide motivation through meaningful work and social relationships; these factors are a bigger priority for older workers than financial- or career advancement-motivated rewards.

• Consult and empower them: Older workers want to be consulted, so ask them to participate in the decision process on a project or challenge a bit more. They have experience behind them and wisdom to solve many workplace problems, so ask them to get involved.
  
• Don’t ignore them: Older workers don’t want to be ignored, and they still need to be managed. Remember that managing someone older doesn’t mean you’re giving up authority; older workers must be held accountable, too.
  
• Initiate mentoring/onboarding: Companies like Deloitte have taken advantage of older workers’ unique talents by asking them to share problems they see in the organization that they’d like to work on and fix. Their attitude is, “If you think it’s a good idea, we will too, almost without exception. We trust you.”

Sometimes, Cappelli said, older workers have to help younger supervisors understand how to best manage them — and to engage younger supervisors in different types of relationships by taking initiative and speaking up for things like what motivates them, the type of environment they want to be in, or their strengths.

How has your workplace found ways to better integrate older and younger generations?

Veteran employees bring unique skills sets to the workforce.

The holiday may be well over two months away, but really, is it ever too early to start preparing for it? I’m talking, of course, about Veterans Day.

Do you realize about one million military veterans today are unemployed? Hard to believe, considering the vast array of skills they possess, training they’ve gone through and discipline work ethic they demonstrate – all of which are valuable skills in any industry. So if you’re looking for suggestions on ways to acknowledge the upcoming holiday, you could start with focusing your recruiting efforts on this remarkable group of men and women.

But don’t take my word for it…

A 2009 CareerBuilder survey asked employers who have hired U.S. veterans or members of the National Guard to list the top attributes military personnel brought to their organization.

Survey participants cited the following valuable traits these employees possessed:

• Disciplined approach to work (cited by 68 percent of employers surveyed)
• Ability to work as part of a team (63 percent)
• Respect and integrity (57 percent)
• Leadership (50 percent)
• Problem-solving skills (46 percent)
• Ability to perform under pressure (44 percent)
• Communication skills (37 percent)

A few other things you might want to know about hiring veterans: With an honorable discharge, service members are basically certified drug-free. And many military personnel have achieved some level of security clearance, demonstrating that an individual is recognized as a trustworthy person. It’s also possible that you could qualify for government-paid relocation services if hiring a military person coming off active duty from another location.

And now that President Obama has proposed a new tax credit for employers who hire veterans, there’s even more incentive to hire military service men and women.

But perhaps Obama articulated the greatest reason to hire veterans when –during a speech last month in Washington, D.C.’s Navy Yard – he said:

“Just think about how many veterans have led their comrades on life-and-death missions by the time they were 25 years old. That’s the kind of responsibility and experience that any business in America should want to take advantage of.”

To further help companies find employees with these valuable skill sets, CareerBuilder recently launched Employvets.com, dedicated to helping match employers and military personnel. Veterans and National Guard members can identify employers who are sensitive to their employment needs, while employers can benefit from targeting these uniquely skilled workers for their positions.

13.9 million Americans are currently looking for work, according to BLS statistics. It goes without saying, then, that making a positive impression with potential employers is of utmost importance to job seekers. Despite good intentions, however, the reality of these efforts sometimes falls short of the goal. While it’s clear that many of us have made a résumé mistake at one time or another in our job-searching experiences, as well as a few blunders during the interview itself — some mistakes are more, ah, memorable than others. Then again, some of them may not turn out to be mistakes at all. Let’s weigh in on results from a just-released CareerBuilder study of more than 2,600 employers nationwide — revealing the most unusual résumés they’ve seen seeing.

Resume reviews: Faster than you (should) brush your teeth

Turns out that nearly half (45 percent) of human resource managers said they spend, on average, less than one minute reviewing an application. Less than one single minute! While this comes as n surprise to those with the responsibility of hiring, it is quite the shock for many job seekers who think you’re spending hours poring over the intricate résumé details they worked so hard to perfect.

Not to fear, however: In that less than one minute’s time, human resource managers can retain quite a lot of the absurdities that come across their desk. When asked to recall the most memorable or unusual résumés they’ve gotten, human resource managers and hiring managers shared the following gems.

Employers’ 15 most memorable résumés:

1. Candidate said the more you paid him, the harder he worked.

2. Candidate was fired from different jobs, but included each one as a reference.

3. Candidate said he just wanted an opportunity to show off his new tie.

4.  Candidate listed her dog as a reference.

5. Candidate listed the ability to do the moonwalk as a special skill.

6. Candidates – a husband and wife looking to job share –submitted a co-written poem.

7. Candidate included “versatile toes” as a selling point.

8. Candidate said that he would be a “good asset to the company,” but failed to include the “et” in the word “asset.”

9. Candidate’s email address on the resume had “shakinmybootie” in it.

10. Candidate included that she survived a bite from a deadly aquatic animal.

11. Candidate used first name only.

12. Candidate asked, “Would you pass up an opportunity to hire someone like this?  I think not.”

13. Candidate insisted that the company pay him to interview with them because his time was valuable.

14. Candidate shipped a lemon with résumé, stating “I am not a lemon.”

15. Candidate included that he was arrested for assaulting his previous boss.

To hire — or to run?

Let’s keep in mind that while unusual résumés may be something some hiring managers guffaw over or use to perfect their free throw shot, smart recruiters and employers know that strange can sometimes lead to a successful employee. Don’t be so quick to write off a candidate who, upon further inspection, may simply be thinking outside of the normal résumé confines.

For example, maybe the candidate who included first name only was just being particularly cautious about his or her employer finding out that one of their star employees was job hunting. And the candidate who survived a bit from a deadly aquatic animal? He or she could have a fantastic sense of adventure and survivor instinct that may play well with your company culture. The candidate who wanted to show off his tie may simply have been making a genuine attempt to get your attention with humor. And the candidate who sent a lemon with the “I am not a lemon” wordplay? Clever, memorable — and probably someone you want to give a second look. In today’s extremely competitive hiring environment, a candidate who is willing to take a risk and be creative may be someone who will make the right risks at your company, brainstorm creative solutions to your business challenges, and be a huge asset to your bottom line.

That candidate who does a great moonwalk, though? While an impressive feat, to be sure, likely not one that will do much for your business (unless you are in the dance business, in which case I retract my hasty statement).*

*Also see: Candidate had shakinmybootie in email address.

And obviously, examples like No. 15 are a more serious matter altogether.

When trying to decide whether a résumé is unforgettable — or simply one you want to forget — consider the following factors:

• Is it relevant to the job?
• Is it clear and coherent?
• Is it smartly executed?

If your answers are “yes,” you should strongly reconsider tossing what some would consider a brilliant business move into the trash. Wouldn’t you rather a candidate work to get your attention, rather than blast out the same boring résumé to you and a dozen others? And hey, it’s not as if these candidates are lying to you on their résumé; if anything, they’re guilty of revealing too much.

Creativity solely for the sake of creativity isn’t always a winner, but if that creativity cleverly touches upon your company or open position, or a candidate’s skills in relation to the position at hand, you might not have such a lemon on your hands, after all.

As Rosemary Haefner (@haefner_r), vice president of human resources at CareerBuilder, points out: “In a crowded job market, a stand-out résumé can be the difference between getting the interview and being lost in the pile. But job seekers need to ask themselves if they’re standing out for the right reasons.”

So tell us — what’s the most unusual résumé or job tactic you’ve come across? Was it worth giving the candidate a second look?

Today, CareerBuilder released its new e-book, From Q&A to Z: The Hiring Manager’s Complete Interviewing Guide. 

Few things are as critical to the hiring process as the interview. If nothing else, the interview process is a networking event – an opportunity to brand your company in the eyes of a potential employee, brand advocate or customer. But ultimately, if executed correctly, it can help you find the right fit for both the job and your organization overall (and, as a bonus, reflect well on you for finding this person).

This quick-and-easy hiring guide covers everything from preparing for the interview to evaluating candidates afterward.  Readers will walk away with the following takeaways:

• Steps to take to prepare for the interview
• The importance of body language
• When to raise the red flag (and when to let it go)
• The best and worst interview questions
• How to avoid asking inappropriate interview questions
• What the candidate wants to know

Get From Q&A to Z: The Hiring Manager’s Complete Interviewing Guide for free today. 

Get the inside information you can apply today to conduct more effective interviews and make smarter hiring decisions.

While you were busy hobnobbing with Michael J. Fox, greasing up with the Thunder From Down Under or singing along with da best singer in da world at Caesar’s Palace, here’s what you might’ve missed at CareerBuilder’s booth during SHRM 2011…

The following videos feature presentations given by our recruitment experts during SHRM’s annual conference in Las Vegas this past June, and they cover everything from social media, video and mobile recruiting efforts to the wonders of data intelligence, to what CEO’s really want from HR.

See below, or check them on our YouTube channel.

Emerging Media and Your Recruitment Strategy

Here, CareerBuilder’s VP of Corporate Marketing, Jamie Womack, discusses how and why companies need to utilize social media, online and mobile platforms for recruitment right now.

Your Company in 2020

Building an integrated recruitment strategy is a much different task today than it was three years ago. Here, Jamie Womack talks about how to build a talent pipeline to fuel your company’s future growth, pulling in aspects of messaging and emerging media and compensation.

Data Not Just For Data’s Sake

Personified’s VP of Development, Abdel Tefridj, demonstrated both the need and the opportunity for business leaders to use data – and use it more efficiently – as they make critical decisions daily in an ever-changing world.

What Your CEO Wants to Know

This year was particularly exciting for CareerBuilder, as our CEO, Matt Ferguson, presented during the SHRM official sessions. Here he is at the Las Vegas Hilton, discussing a recent nationwide survey of CEOs that highlights how the CEO/HR professional relationship has evolved over the last five years.

What’d you think? Anything we didn’t cover that you’d like to see next year? Let us know!

CareerBuilder continued our monthly #cbjobchat Twitter chat last Monday night (quick plug: It’s the first Monday of every month at 7 p.m. CST)– so if you skipped the trainwreck that was the Real Housewives of New York Reunion Part II, you might have caught it! If you didn’t, do not fear — we’ve recapped the best bits of the chat for you.

This month’s chat was all about tough interview questions. Candidates aren’t strangers to them — those questions that seem to flow effortlessly from an interviewer’s mouth, but that leave candidates themselves speechless, or trailing off into a long, random story about sixth grade camp and s’mores and that cute girl with the pigtails and the camp counselor who told them to never be afraid. Never. Be. Afraid! Wait, now where was I? Ah, yes. Tough or scary interview questions — employers have to deal with them too (just on the other, less scary side). So this past Monday night was the perfect opportunity to merge the two worlds together, to share advice and give everyone the opportunity to learn a little more about the other side’s experience.

For those who aren’t familiar with #cbjobchat, we aim to bring together both job seekers and career experts to discuss today’s most pressing recruitment process questions.When job seekers had questions, you all didn’t hide your feelings. But job seekers had some opinions to share with you as well. Let’s dig in:

Chat Highlights:

Q1: How do you explain an involuntary departure, such as a layoff or firing? Do employers care about a layoff vs. being fired?

The general consensus here was that honesty is the best policy — layoffs have become more commonplace and job departures less stigmatized.

@KaraSingh Be honest. Keep it short and professional. If the hiring manager wants to know more they will ask.

@V167 Honesty is the best policy, but you have to remember to not insult a former boss or job regardless of the outcome.

@MatthewTForrest Seems like the stigma that was once there isn’t there for the most part. Just be honest about your situation.

@ChangePR Agreed. Layoffs are far too common nowadays anyway & honesty is always best policy.

Q2: How should job seekers explain leaving their current job without badmouthing a boss, and still sound sincere?

Experts advised candidates to look forward and stress how they can contribute to their full potential at a new company/in a new role. Recruiters need real reasons, but an employer wants to know what you are looking for in the future. Above all, candidates should not bash a former employer. Diplomacy is the way to go.

@mtATL Be positive about your old job, but focus on the direction you are looking to go. No need for badmouthing.

@michaelranaii If you badmouth your old company, who’s to say you won’t bad mouth ‘this company’?

@KaraSingh Say you’re looking for a position that will challenge you to your full potential.

All about the application process

Nearly 30 years later, Bananarama’s haunting words once again ring true: it truly is a cruel, cruel summer…

…at least it is for those employers who say their workplaces are suffering from a decrease in employee productivity right now.

According to CareerBuilder’s recent survey on employee productivity, one in four employers (26 percent) think workers are less productive in the summer and nearly half (45 percent) think workers at their organization are currently burned out on their jobs.

Turns out, the reason employees seem burned out is because they are. (Shocking, right?)

Of the nearly 5,300 employees surveyed, 77 percent say they are sometimes or always burned out in their jobs, and 43 percent say their stress levels on the job have increased over the last six months.

The rising stress could be a result of heavier workloads. Nearly half (46 percent) of employees reported an increase in their workloads in the last six months, while only eight percent said their workloads decreased.

As if feelings of burnout aren’t enough to distract workers, summer provides its own special recipe for productivity disaster: Nicer weather, vacation-fever, and kids being out of school led the list of reasons employers felt their workers were less productive.

Productivity perceptions differ
The goodish news is that productivity is actually up from previous years…depending on who you ask: Looking at overall productivity trends year-round, 30 percent of the more than 2,600 employers surveyed say workers are more productive today than before the recession began; while 12 percent feel workers are less productive than before the recession.

Employers who saw a rise in worker productivity during the recession primarily attribute the increase to the fear of losing a job and the effects of downsized staffs on individual workloads. In addition, 73 percent are seeing the increase sustain today and 14 percent state productivity has increased even more.

Brent Rasmussen, president of CareerBuilder North America, says it’s no wonder workers are feeling burned out right now. In a statement for the press release, Rasmussen says:

“The recession produced consequences for not just those who were laid off, but also for the many employees who were asked to work harder as a result of leaner staffs. While getting more out of a smaller workforce is a sign of organizational agility during unpredictable times, it’s hard to see such yields in productivity holding forever. Headcount will be needed to meet increasing demands.”

4 Fast Fixes to Employee Burnout
While there’s no (legally available) magic pill to make employee burnout go away, you can help relieve some of their feelings by implementing a few of the following tactics.

1. If you love them, let them go. Encourage your employees to cash in their vacation time. Even if they can’t afford to leave town, taking a day or two off will help them refresh.
2. Add an “ish” to that clock in/clock out time. If it works for your company, be a little more flexible with letting workers come in later or leave earlier, or maybe work from home a few days a week, so long as they get their work done. Better yet, consider implementing “Summer Fridays” and letting your employees off at noon to let them enjoy a little extra weekend time.
3. Have class outside. Re-energizing your team could be as simple as taking a break from the routing and getting out of the office every once in a while. You might consider organizing an outing to a museum, baseball game, bowling alley or nearby restaurant for a team lunch or happy hour. In addition to boosting morale, out-of-office gatherings give co-workers a chance to mingle in a more relaxed environment, strengthening both business and personal relationships.
4. Adjust the A/C. Yep, you read that right. It may sounds simple-to-the-point-of-silly, but a recent survey shows extreme office temperatures can affect worker productivity. It may be hot outside, but that doesn’t mean the a/c has to go bull blast inside. Don’t ignore the a/c either, though. Smelly, sweaty and hot is a triple threat to productivity, if not the senses.

Are you feeling the effects of worker burnout this season? How are you coping?

“What words come to mind when I say “Gen Y”? Aaron Kesher asked the many SHRM 2011 attendees packed into the room.  “Entitled!” shouted one person. “Job hoppers,” chimed in another. Soon, many in the room (many of them non-Gen Yers, with some Gen Y members sprinkled in) were shouting things like “smart,” “resume builders,” “technically savvy,” “stereotype,” “comfortable with change,” and “creative.”

Obviously, we all have specific words and phrases and ideas that match how we perceive Gen Y to think and behave in the workplace. Gen Y, made up of those born between 1980 and 2000, has their own notions of themselves, too. In Aaron Kesher’s “Why Y? Plugging Into a Generational Powerhouse” session at SHRM 2011, Kesher encouraged all of us in the room to rethink our notions of what we think Gen Y is all about, to consider the strengths they bring to today’s dynamic workplace, and to use this knowledge and understanding to more successfully recruit and retain Gen Y workers.

“Do not doubt that this generation will change the face of the American workplace as their parents did,” Kesher said. “In the next five to 10 years, Kesher said, the number of Gen Yers in the workforce will increase dramatically.”

As the number of Gen Y workers is only getting larger, it’s about time we as a collective workplace learn more about Gen Y so that we can understand them, appreciate their unique strengths, and more successfully integrate them with other generations in the workplace.

What is work from a Gen Y Perspective?

• Work ethic: Job loyalty, for a long time, was shown by how long you stuck around and paid your dues — and older generations still think in line with this. Gen Y, on the other hand, says, “I show you love by how hard I work, not how long I stick around.”
• Tech savvy: It’s not so much that Gen Yers are tech savvy, Kesher pointed out – they’re tech dependent.They’re the generation that’s come of age with the explosion of technology, so it’s natural that they would be comfortable with it.
• Communication and teamwork: Gen Y is not necessarily entitled; they just feel comfortable asking for what they want. When it comes to communication, you can often count on Gen Yers to spread out the message fast and often. We need to realize, Kesher said, that throughout Gen Y’s public education, the majority of the work was done in groups, and that their role wasn’t usually as the leader of a group – instead, many were “equal” team members. Therefore, many Gen Y members function fairly well as a group and as “team players,” but some struggle in standing out as individual, assertive leaders.
• Money:  Employers, listen up: Gen Y is talking to each other about the money they are (or aren’t) making at your organization. They are comparing how competitive your salary is with your competitors — and they’re not afraid to share their findings. One audience member mentioned recently hearing Gen Yers discussing openly the job offers and bonuses they were getting — and she was shocked.  After all, discussing how much money you make is one of the last great American taboos — yet Gen Y seems more comfortable with discussing this sort of information.
• Recognition: Gen Y is a generation of the “there are no losers – everyone’s a winner” mentality. “But they didn’t make that up (boomer parents),” Kesher pointed out, to a round of laughter. Gen Yers don’t care how it gets done – they just want to get it done. And they want to be told they did a good job once they do it; recognition is very important.
• Diversity: “Why do only white people work here?” might be something a Gen Y worker thinks while viewing a company site or sitting in the lobby while waiting to be interviewed and noticing the lack of diverse employees. Gen Y doesn’t embrace diversity – they expect it — and if your company says you believe in diversity, but then a Gen Y worker shows up and all workers look the same – they will think you’re not living up to your diversity message. This generation has grown up with a greater awareness of and comfort with diversity of all kinds. From home lives, to school experiences, to messages absorbed from pop culture, they often don’t see what all the fuss is. This can manifest as difficulty in understanding why others struggle with issues around differences. A question of whether gay marriage should be legalized, for example, is a non-issue for many Gen Y individuals — and this shift ties into a larger cultural shift in general.
• Work versus life: “I love my job, but I love my life more” — that’s something you may hear a lot of Gen Yers say. One of the critical issues that will need to be ironed out at work in the future, Kesher said, will revolve around workplace flexibility. We’re increasingly seeing workplace flexibility issues evolving in the workplace, and Gen Y workers in particular (though they’re not alone) want to know how they can maintain their relationship with work while still having the flexibility to live the life they envision. As mentioned above, Gen Y has no problem with work, or with the idea of working hard — it’s just that their job will never be the whole of their identity. They raised with the imperative to “follow your dreams!”, and their job and life may intersect in new ways than we’ve seen in past generations. “Gen Y,” Kesher stressed, “doesn’t want a job – they want a life that hopefully includes a job.”
• Being green: This is the generation that’s leading the green movement – so give them the power to build, make changes, and become leaders in your organization’s (existing or non-existing) green movement.

Why worry about Gen Y?

Ensuring that the different generations working together under one roof actually work well together is a big concern for many employers. After all, if knowledge isn’t able to be sufficiently shared from generation to generation, older generations will eventually retire — taking with them decades of experience. In addition, workers who work well together are likely to be happier, more productive, and better brand ambassadors for your company.

To effectively work with Gen Y workers, Kesher said, you don’t need to change who you are – just your approach. In a great reverse example of this, an audience member told the story of her (as a Gen Y worker) learning to compromise with a Silent Generation worker. The older worker, she said, took a long time to respond to emails, but whenever she had a printed piece for him to look at, he worked much more quickly. After figuring this out, she started printing out  her emails to him and putting them on his desk – and now his turnaround time on feedback to her is much faster. It’s small steps like this that can make a big difference between two generations that don’t always see eye to eye — or medium to medium.

By learning the “why” behind this generation’s interests, ideas, and behaviors, you will understand how Gen Y workers function best in the workplace, and you will be better prepared to recruit and retain them. Here are some ideas to get you started, courtesy of Kesher:

6 ways to more successfully recruit Gen Y:

1. Have fun. Use the media to get your company message out there. Gen Y is all over social networks, and as mentioned above, they are very comfortable with technology, so get in front of them on various mediums — and get creative in your efforts. Speak their language; what have you learned about the things that matter to them that you as an employer are able to provide? Connect work to their lives; how do the two successfully intersect in your work environment? Are you able to offer workers a great work/life balance and opportunities for them to enrich their lives outside of the office walls? Show them.
2. Challenge them. Gen Y workers are attracted to a challenge, so by providing your employees with interesting work that asks them to get outside their comfort zone and take risks, and lets them make mistakes and fail, you are likely to get these workers’ attention.
3. Give them opportunities. Do you give your employees multiple paths to explore when taking on a project, or find ways for their work to have an impact on the organization as a whole? Demonstrate to job seekers that you encourage employees to do work that is meaningful and and makes a difference outside of your organization. Do you give employees opportunities to further their training, brush up on their skills, or learn new disciplines outside of their current role to help them grow both inside and out of work?
4. Support their lifestyle. Recognize the importance their life outside of work has to them, and understand that they have often strong, close connections with their families (Kesher gave the example of parents calling to ask why their son or daughter got a bad review example, or dropping off a resume for their child — it happens more than you might think). Offer flexibility in your benefits, and realize that for many Gen Y workers, the line between work and personal life has blurred. Work happens at home, and vice versa — does your organization support a flexible workplace?
5. Embody diversity. Show it, don’t just talk about it! Demonstrate to potential employees how diversity integrates with your organization’s mission – but be authentic. Job seekers can see right through empty words; be true to your values by actually being a diverse workplace.
6. Reinforce your mission. Show job seekers the “why” – why is the work your organization does important to the rest of world? What is the larger context of the projects you take on, or of your core business? Reinforce your mission constantly, and help workers find connections to others in the organization through social media, your website, or in-person interactions.

… And 5 ways to retain them:

1. Make them feel at home the first day. This does not mean simply showing them the employee handbook, their cubicle, bathroom code, and then leaving them alone. Plan on a longer orientation duration than in the past. Establish personal connections with employees — and continue building those relationships throughout your employees’ tenure.
2. Give them feedback. They want more rather than less, and they want it sooner rather than later. Recognize everything employees are doing, and give them honest and open feedback. Waiting five years to get to the next step in an organization isn’t realistic anymore, Kesher pointed out — so provide them with the tools they need for success and career advancement. Give employees more chances for lateral development by helping them learn new skills, get new certifications, and expand their knowledge base.
3. Allow them to fail! Define clear expectations for tasks and projects, give them incremental goals along the way, and find ways to connect the work they’re doing to their personal values and goals. Let them stretch their boundaries, make mistakes, and learn from them — and most of all, listen to your employees. They want to give you input, so make it easier on them by asking for it where you can, and being available as a resource and mentor.
4. Again, listen. Pay attention to them (they’re going to talk to you a lot), be aware of their personal goals, and lead horizontally. They’re living in a world of connectedness and entitled communication; hierarchy isn’t as built into their mindset as it is in generations past. Try to be their leader without looking down on them.
5. Connect with them. Get to know them and what they’re all about (and hey, maybe even their helicopter parents, too). If you want respect from Gen Y workers, you have to give it. Many Gen Y workers feel misunderstood by their peers or their leaders; by working to connect with them and encouraging other employees to do the same, you will begin to chip away at the negative Gen Y stereotypes that are actually hindering generational progress in the workplace.

 Moving forward, together

During the session, a Gen Y professional raised her hand and pointed out that as an HR professional, she’s noticed a lot of overly negative critiques of Gen Y workers. She wondered why we couldn’t focus on the positive traits of Gen Y to hook into as a great resource — a great point, and one that Kesher drove home in his presentation.

After all, every time we think another generation doesn’t have something we have, Kesher said, we’re stereotyping. Every generation has boundaries and a work ethic — they may just happen to be different than ours.

But isn’t the fact that such a multitude of perspectives, ideas, backgrounds and behaviors exist what makes the workplace so great?

If you’ve seen the movie Horrible Bosses, I’m hoping you did it because you lost a bet/got your money back/at least enjoyed your popcorn didn’t recognize yourself in any of the film’s managers, played by Jennifer Aniston, Kevin Spacey and Colin Farrell.

If you’re not familiar with the film, which opened nationwide on Friday, here’s the gist: Three friends (played by Jason Sudeikis, Jason Bateman and Charlie Day), trapped in terrible jobs but afraid to quit due to the economy, plot to kill each others’ …wait for it…horrible bosses.  As you can guess (unless you’ve never seen a Hollywood film ever), things don’t go exactly as planned, and hilarity ensues. (Or at least I’m sure what the director had in mind.)

For the most part, Horrible Bosses is a complete waste of an otherwise entertaining cast – and viewers’ time; however, if there’s one redeeming quality about the movie, it’s the lesson it teaches in what not to do as a manager.  Despite the absurd characters and storyline, the movie brings to light one important truth: Many employers take unfair advantage of their employees’ work and time, falsely believing their employees are simply grateful to have a job.

Aside from the obvious offenses – blackmail, public humiliation, sexual abuse, cocaine-and-hooker benders – Horrible Bosses also reveals some not-so-obvious habits real-life managers need to break now (lest they don’t want to stay managers for long).

Five Habits of Horrible Bosses
Do any of these characteristics describe you?

1. You over promise and under deliver. You may think you’re motivating your employees by encouraging them to work for a promotion or raise that you know is never going to happen. (Hey, as long as it makes them more productive, right? And isn’t the satisfaction of knowing you did a good job enough?) But you can’t dangle that carrot in front of them forever, and when they catch on, they won’t see what you did as motivating – they’ll see it as manipulative.
2. “Because” is not in your vocabulary. Don’t leave your employees in the dark when it comes to business decisions – especially those that affect them directly. If they’re not getting a promotion or raise, give them a reason why – a real reason. You’d be surprised how understanding they can be; otherwise, they’re going to assume the worst – both about you and the company.
3. You don’t ask for feedback.  As a boss, you may feel like you need to have all the answers, all the time. (There’s a reason you’re in charge and they aren’t, right?) But you’re not always going to have the right answers. Or the best ideas. You’re just not…which is why you need to hear ideas – even arguments – from your employees’ perspective as often as possible. They’re not necessarily going to have the right answers, either, but they will have valuable insight that you can always use.
4. You do ask for feedback…but that’s all you do. What’s the point of employee surveys if you’re not actually using the results to change or improve some aspect of the business – and communicating your efforts to them. Otherwise, you’re not only wasting everyone’s time, you’re sending the message that your employees’ ideas don’t matter – and nothing kills morale more.
5. You take credit for their work. Sure, maybe a lot of victories are ‘team efforts’, but when you fail to recognize people for their individual contributions, you’re telling them, “I probably could’ve done this without you.” Give credit where it’s due…before you lose all the people who deserve it.

Resume mishaps, interview no-no’s and follow-up faux pas…

We’ve all witnessed some degree of embarrassment – be it our own or others’ – when it comes to job search process. And last night’s #cbjobchat presented the perfect opportunity to reflect on these experiences.

As you may recall, #cbjobchat is our monthly Twitter chat, bringing together both job seekers and career experts, and dedicated to addressing today’s most pressing recruitment process questions.

What was interesting about last night’s chat was that a lot of the mistakes discussed were by no means exclusive to job seekers. In fact, a lot of recruiting experts could stand to listen to this advice as well…How so? Check out some of night’s best #cbjobchat sound bytes – from job seeker offenses to words of advice – and then see how recruiters and hiring mangers can apply these insights to their own jobs:

• @RecruitingMegan A big one I run into a LOT–talking too much in the interview, not letting the interviewer lead conversation!This advice applies to interviewers as well. Know the difference between leading the conversation and dominating it. Most people go by the 20/80 rule, in which the interviewer should only be doing 20 percent of the talking, and leaving the rest to the candidate.
• @incblot: Being inauthentic or trying to gloss over weaknesses.Admit it: Recruiters and hiring managers are guilty of this, too. We know you want great candidates, but intentionally misleading candidates to make a position or opportunity sound more glamorous than it is bad for business (and possibly karma).
• @DawnBugni First and foremost KNOW what the company does. I’ve interviewed people who didn’t even know what the company did.Isn’t it annoying when a candidate hasn’t taken the time to find out what your organization does? Think about how annoyed candidates must feel when you haven’t taken the time to review their resumes before the interview. Doesn’t exactly make them feel wanted…
• @RecruitingMegan I see people try to cram it all onto one page, and then I see people include every job they’ve held… everKinda’ just makes you want to gloss over the application and toss it aside, huh? That’s exactly the same reaction job seekers have when they see cluttered, unorganized job postings with too much irrelevant information. If applications aren’t coming in, take a look at your job posting and ask yourself, “Would I bother reading all of this?”
• @tombolt The candidate experience is all about setting expectations. If applicants are not told the rules for follow-up etc. Always ask.Don’t want candidates harassing you with pesky follow up calls and emails? Set the ground rules during the interview for when they should expect to hear from you (and when they should effectively move on).
• @Ashley_Beste I recommend bringing any material that sets you apart. Letters of Recommendation, Projects, Research!Just as the candidate is trying to win you over, you’re doing the same for them. Always go into interviews (or networking events, career fairs, etc.) prepared to discuss all the things that make your organization unique – the benefits you offer, the special things you do for employees, opportunities for advancement – all the things that are going to put your organization at the top of their ‘most desireable’ list.

Got something to add or an idea for a future chat? Feel free to add your two cents in the comments section below – or on Twitter using the #cbjobchat hashtag.

Thanks again to all who participated last night. And feel free to join us the first Monday night of every month at 7 p.m. Central. We’ll post reminders and details for upcoming chats on our Facebook and Twitter accounts, so make sure you’re following us!

“We often say that if you don’t love social media, you suck at social media, and that’s often true,” social media consultant and business strategist Amber Naslund recently told me over email.

She has a point: You can’t fake enthusiasm if it’s not there, and if you try, it will come across in the social space. This truth can pose a problem for employers, who find themselves in an increasingly social world where “every employee is a potential spokesperson,” as Naslund writes in The Now Revolution: 7 Shifts to Make Your Business Faster, Smarter and More Social.

One need only look at companies like Zappos, IBM and Southwest to see how employers benefit when employees blog and tweet on their behalves.  Unfortunately, not every employee is going to take an active interest in social media, and as hard as they might try, employers can’t force them to do so. Yet, if they give their employees a compelling reason to participate in social media, they won’t have to force anything.

“Employers need to educate their teams about the potential and opportunity on the web. They can show each employee how social media can relate to their jobs and make them more effective, and that’s compelling to anyone,” says Naslund, who hosts a free webinar on July 12 to discuss how small businesses can find social media success in today’s landscape.

Below, Naslund provides five more things employers need to understand about social media in order to stay competitive in today’s ever-changing business world.

The Five New Rules for Employers on Social Media

1. Above all else, you must have the desire to be successful in social media. “While businesses of every size and industry have the potential to be successful in social media, they do not always possess the desire and the willingness to do so. While an organization’s goals will ultimately determine what successful adoption of social media is  in general terms, it’s embracing the cycle of listening > responding > participating > storytelling while putting in place the internal pieces to make social media not just an add-on, but an integrated part of each piece of the business.”
2. Social media isn’t an and.  It’s an or. “Make no mistake: social media does take time and resources. But the businesses that invest  in it will find ways to adapt. “Auditing what we do already and finding the things that aren’t working anymore or that have run their course can free up people, time, and budget to put toward progressive ideas like social media. We learned to adapt to the phone, to the emergence of the web, and to email.”
   
3. Social media is not going anywhere. “Organizations that don’t adapt to social media aren’t doomed to fail; however, there’s no question that they are missing opportunities. And if their customers, partners, and peers aren’t driving them to adopt it now, they soon will. We used to argue whether or not we needed websites, and now not having one is inconceivable. The same will soon be said about social media.”
4. Listen first, decide later. “You don’t need to be on Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn to be successful in social media. At its core, social “media” is anything on the web that allows for interaction and engagement. Think about forums, blogs, video, audio (like podcasts), even mainstream news sites that allow for comment and discourse. Where you need to be all depends on the outcome of your listening strategy. Where are the people who you want to talk to? If they’re connecting on forums, be there. If you have an active blogging industry, get out there and start commenting and writing. Listening first is the guide to finding your best outposts on the web.”
5. Social media is the means. Not the end. “It’s important to understand that, as my co-author Jay [Baer] says, the goal is not to be good at social media. The goal is to be good at business, and social media can support that. Organizations need to focus on how to integrate social media and make it an operational part of their business. Social media isn’t easy, and it isn’t fast, but it can transform the way people work and do business for the better.”

Want to know more? Join CareerBuilder and Amber Naslund for a free webinar: Social Media for Small Business. Learn what you need to know now to grow your business by leveraging new social technologies. Tuesday, July 12 at 1 p.m. CST. Register today.

Have you ever compared the experience job seekers go through when searching for a job to the experience you go through when, say, buying a car? Believe it or not, the two experiences are more closely linked than you may realize. We have specific reasons for deciding to go through with a car purchase — or walk away from it — and the same is true for job seekers considering your company as a future employer in their job search process.

The experience you provide job seekers through your recruitment process is something they will evaluate, engage with, and accept or reject, ultimately deciding whether or not to “make a purchase.” A new CareerBuilder and Inavero study of more than 4,500 workers demonstrates that that decision can happen at any point in the job search process, from the time they first start thinking about searching for a new job to the moment they have your offer letter in front of them — and everywhere in between.

The job seeker/employer relationship: It’s complicated

Today’s job search experience looks drastically different from several years or even several months ago, and it continues to evolve. Now, although job boards still have a prominent place in the job search, the job search experience has become much more complex. When job seekers embark on a job search, they are actively using five specific methods to find their next job: Search engines; vertical sites (job boards and aggregators); social media; corporate and career sites; and user-generated content sites. They are using these five platforms in different ways and with varied intensity as they move through four distinct phases of the job search — Orientation, Consideration, Action, and Engagement.

To effectively build and manage your company’s employment brand, reach a large segment of the many job seekers you’re missing out on, and continue to position yourself as a visible and desirable place to work in today’s rapidly changing world, you must have a diversified recruitment strategy that incorporates these five platforms — and you must understand the mindset and behavior of job seekers as they move through the four stages of the job search process.

Job seekers have changed — have you?

The CareerBuilder and Inavero study takes you through a job seeker’s typical job search experience as it happens in today’s recruitment environment, a time in which job seekers are hungry for information and have a wealth of online resources at their fingertips. Long gone are the days of faxing or mailing a resume and simply waiting passively to hear back from an employer — today’s job seeker is much more hands-on.

By learning what job seekers are thinking and doing as they move through four distinct job search phases (Orientation, Consideration, Action, and Engagement) and crafting your strategy to align with those thoughts and behaviors, you’ll be equipped to reach the best candidates for your open jobs, position yourself as a strong and desirable brand, and ensure your approach is consistent from phase to phase.

The Four Phases of the Job Search

Phase I: Orientation — This phase consists of a job seeker’s self-evaluation and evaluation of the market. Ninety-seven percent of job seekers reported self-evaluation as one of the first five things they did when starting a search.

Phase II: Consideration – During this phase, the job search moves from a solitary to an interactive, social experience. Job seekers are seeking to validate the brands in their consideration set by posting on social media platforms and user-generated content sites, and collecting opinions from members of their online social and professional networks in order to narrow their focus to a handful of jobs.

Phase III: In this phase, a job seeker is going through the action of applying to jobs.

Phase IV: In this last phase, job seekers are interacting with employers and actively interviewing. Although the majority of research on a company is completed pre-interview, job seekers are conducting social research in this last phase by having personal conversations with employees of your company or close family and friends.

(Learn about the job seekers’ mindset and behavior during each of the four job search phases here.)

The importance of a great recruitment experience

Job seekers today are largely dissatisfied with the current hiring process offered by companies. Only 10 percent of respondents said companies they have reached out to have been responsive. The impact of this is immense: Nearly half (40 percent) of job seekers strongly agree that a poor application experience impacts their job decision. In fact, it might surprise you to find out that more than one in 10 people turn down a job at least once a month.

Bad experiences during and after the application process can easily negate the work and strategic investment in media you’ve made to bring the best talent onto your team.

Begin to create a more candidate-centric recruitment process by adding a human touch:

• Communicate with candidates when at all possible, and let them know where they stand as the process moves from phase to phase.
• Unplug cumbersome technology and flawed screening filters, and provide feedback and coaching.
• View all candidates as a customer or potential future customer, client or employee.
• Get the most out of the resources you’re investing by being responsive — in the long run, you will get better quality talent, protect your employment brand, and maintain a better reputation with clients (who once may have been your candidates).

Getting them to say “yes”

Job seekers are using a wide range of methods to find the right jobs, and by gaining a large presence through these methods, you will deepen your talent pool, engage and create trust with candidates early on, find more diverse candidates for your open positions, and, ultimately, improve your bottom line. Start thinking of your recruitment experience as a consumer product — and start
getting more job seekers to consider your brand, like what they see, and say “Yes.”

For details on job seeker behavior and mindset within the four job search phases and our recommended strategies for best connecting with job seekers at each point in the process, download the full report or learn more about adding the right platforms to your recruitment mix.

“You already possess the skills to needed to manage people you can’t see. I’m just going to wake them up for you,” Kyra Cavanaugh told the audience of human resources, hiring and recruiting professionals last week to open her SHRM 2011 session, Managing People You Can’t See.

Those “people you can’t see” to which Cavanaugh, President of workplace solutions firm Life Meets Work, Inc., was referring are the employees who work remotely, a part of the workforce that is increasing day by day.

Recognizing the need to address the challenges that come with either managing people who work remotely or working remotely oneself, Cavanaugh led a highly interactive – and highly engaging – session in which she provided eight tips for managing and working with remote teams.

Eight Tips for Managing People You Can’t See

1. Identify and Acknowledge Discomfort.Regardless of your management style, you’re bound to feel a level of discomfort when managing people you can’t see. The solution? “We have to arm ourselves with knowledge and information to get more comfortable.” Of course, this requires some introspection. Consider your management style. (Do you tend to be more trusting or more controlling as a manager?) Then identify the challenges to that style, and finally, explore the various skills or tactics you can you use to fill the gaps.
2. Evaluate Remote Work Requests Objectively. Remote work requests should be handled like any other business decision, says Cavanaugh. “It’s not about ‘Is this a good enough reason?’ It’s about ‘What does the business need?’” The following factors should come into play:
1. Needs of business
2. Nature of position
3. Individual work style
4. Department restrictions/limitations
5. Individual performance
3. Say either “Yes, and…’ or “No, and…”Always give a reason for your decision. If you say no, explain why, especially if it has to do with the individual’s work style or performance (Cavanaugh suggests saying something along the lines of “I’m not comfortable with this for these reasons, but if you improve in these areas, we can revisit this in a few months.”)On the other hand, if you say yes, make sure you explain any concerns you have going into it, and establish ground rules (e.g. “If we find in a few months that business needs aren’t being met, we may have to revisit this decision.”).
4. Agree Upon and Document Team Values.  Create a “Virtual Teams Agreement,” a physical document – to be reviewed every six months – outlining a certain set of behaviors that everyone on the team helps create and agrees on.For example, the agreement should take into account all the ways your team interacts (e.g. “How often do we need to respond to emails? Check voicemails? Have meetings where everyone is physically present? Are conference calls mandatory? What’s optional?”) and ways to hold each other accountable.A VTA will not only create mutual understanding over expectations, but it will also “eliminate any feelings of jealousy over ‘why does she get to work remotely and I can’t?’” Cavanaugh says.
5. Harness Technology. From project management software to CRM tools, to micro-blogging sites (like Twitter and Yammer), to Wiki’s, there are so many resources today that enable remote teams to work together–it’s just a matter of picking your poison (so to speak).“Every team has preference over which technologies they like.  Have that conversation with your team” to find out their preferences – and don’t be afraid to mix it up.
6. Set Goals and Track Performance. Make sure you clearly communicate deadlines and projects. Everyone should know who is responsible for completing which part of the project when in order to “ensure everyone’s on same page.”One thing Cavanaugh suggests is utilizing is flash reports, short reports employees submit each week (or maybe or even every day) outlining three pieces of information: What they accomplished this week, what obstacles they encountered, and what they’ll do next week. Flash reports not only set expectations, but they hold people accountable for finishing their goals.
7. Communicate Deliberately. “When we can’t see each other, we can’t read body language,” Cavanaugh says, and that can be dangerous, because body language tells us so much. We do not always know when someone is being serious or sarcastic in an email…but we also tend not to ask.  For that reason “we have to have those conversations we do not want to have.”
8. Build a Strong, Cohesive Team. “People want to be participating in something bigger than themselves,” Cavanaugh says. For this reason, it’s important to build a sense of community by promoting teamwork. Team building among remote teams is certainly not an easy task, but it’s not an impossible one, either. It just requires a little innovation.For example, Cavanaugh suggests building a PowerPoint, wherein each person has a section in which they can talk about anything they want – from recent accomplishments to vacation plans.

Do you work with remote teams? What management tips have you found work for you?

“Who here is hiring right now?” Nancy Newell asked the attendees of SHRM 2011 in Las Vegas this past week, before quickly answering her own question: “Every hand should be up. We’re always looking for great talent.”

To help the human resource managers and recruiting professionals in her audience do just that, Newell, SPHR and a principal at nth degree consulting, led the audience in a session called, “Beyond Behavioral Interviewing: Asking the RIGHT Questions, Evaluating the Answers.”

Newell discussed the following strategies for what to do – and what to avoid – when it comes to finding the right candidate through behavioral interviewing.

Do This: Look beyond interview skills.
Not That: Mistake a good interviewer for a good candidate. Candidates today are more sophisticated than they used to be, Newell told the crowd. They know what interviewers want to hear.  “They’re good at interviewing, because a lot of them have had a lot of practice at it.” Someone who has been in the workforce for five, 10 or 20 years, however, will have rusty interview skills. That doesn’t necessarily predict what sort of employee that person will be.

Do This: Gather information during the interview.
Not That: Evaluate information during the interview. The interview process is your data-gathering process. The assessment should come after the interview. “If you find yourself evaluating during interview, I’m not going to tell you not to do it, but I want you to be aware of when it happens,” Newell said.  Everyone has biases, Newell admitted, but theses biases create “a filter that isn’t necessarily there, and that precludes you from making an accurate assessment for how this person will live in your organization.” You can’t always help it when your biases come out, but be able to recognize them for what they are so you can move on and focus on the purpose of the interview: gathering information.

Do This: Ask about past behavior.
Not That: Ask about potential behavior. Asking about specific past behavior will give you the most accurate predictor of future behaviors – and the more recent, the better.  A question that begins with “Tell me about a time when…” for example, is much more predictive than “What would you do if…” which tends to lead candidates to say what they think you want to hear, rather than give a real-life example that provides insight into their skills, personality and work ethic.

Do This: Get the information you need up front.
Not That: Give the milk away for free. Ask the questions first, then talk about the job and the company. Start by coaching candidates through the interview process, explaining the format and that there will be time for questions at the end. But don’t lead them by talking up front about the job and the organization, which enables them to give you the answers they know you want to hear. Remember, what you say and when you say it matters.

Do This: Consider the skills and competencies needed for the job.
Not That: Consider ONLY at skills and competencies need for the job. “There’s more to a job than skills and competencies. There’s a whole team to consider,” Newell said. When interviewing candidates, consider what skills are needed to round out the team, which skills will work best with the manager, and which skills will work best for your organization’s customers. Also, be sure to consider the skills you’re willing to train them on, so you don’t waste time asking about those. In short: hire for cultural fit as well as skills and competencies.

Do This: Ask the same questions of every candidate.
Not That: Apply the above rule to follow-up questions. “If we aren’t measuring candidates by the same yardstick,” Newell said, meaning asking the same questions of every candidate, “we have no reliability or predictability in the interview process…the yardstick doesn’t measure anything.” Follow up questions, however, can and should be different. Don’t be afraid to “pull the thread” to get the entire picture. Not only will you be able to ensure the behaviors your candidates talk about are consistent, but you’ll also be able to see whether or not their initial responses were genuine.

Finally, do this: Accept that there’s no “magic bullet” to getting the right answers from candidates and ensuring the right hire. If you invest the time, energy and discipline into the process, you’ll reap the rewards in the long term. According to Newell, “It’s not an easy process, but it’s so worth it.”

“The foundation of business is changing under our feet, and we need folks who are adaptable to – even thrive on – engineering and stewarding that change.”

In the following Q&A, Amber Naslund, VP of Social Strategy for Radian6, discusses her new book, The Now Revolution: 7  Shifts To Make Your Business Faster, Smarter, and More Social, which she co-authored with social media strategy consultant Jay Baer. On July 12, Naslund will host a free webinar, Social Media for Small Business, to discuss how businesses can apply the lessons from her book to their own social media and recruiting strategies.

What gave you the idea for The Now Revolution? Jay [Baer, co-author of The Now Revolution] and I talked at great length about how many books there were about social media marketing, but how few there were about how to adapt your business to what social media has brought about. We wanted to write something that looked at social business from that angle.

What does ‘successful adoption of the social web’ mean to you? Successful adoption is unique to every business and its goals, to be sure. But in general terms, it’s embracing the cycle of listening, responding, participating, and storytelling, while putting in place the internal pieces to make social media not just an add-on, but an integrated part of each piece of the business.

Is there a difference between a company’s culture and its employment brand? Often there is, but ideally there isn’t. The brand is often the appearance we like to create for external observers. But if we do our jobs really well, the culture is expressed and represented by the brand, and the brand carries over internally as well as externally. It’s no coincidence that the companies that do social well have a strong cultural foundation; social media is a window into corporate culture unlike we’ve seen before.

Employers often argue that they do not have the time and resources needed to adopt a social media strategy. How do you respond to that? Make no mistake: social media does take time and resources. Without a doubt. So that’s a valid concern. But we keep thinking about social media as an “and” instead of an “or”. Auditing what we do already and finding the things that aren’t working anymore or that have run their course can free up people, time, and budget to put toward progressive ideas like social media.

Are businesses that do not have a social media presence doomed to fail? Fail? No. But there’s no question that they’re missing opportunities. And if their customers, partners, and peers aren’t driving them to adopt it now, they soon will.

You recently said that companies need to start ‘hiring a different breed of person.’ Can you expound on that? More than ever, we need polymaths. We need people who excel across disciplines and are capable of being more generalists than specialists. They need to embody strong and diverse character attributes, not just sets of functional skills. Mindset and work ethic are as critical as they’ve ever been, along with a capacity to innovate even in the most traditional of roles. The foundation of business is changing under our feet, and we need folks who are adaptable to – even thrive on – engineering and stewarding that change.

Finally, if readers can take only one thing from The Now Revolution what do you hope it will be? That we have to get away from a focus on the tools and tactics, and move toward an understanding that, as Jay says, the goal is not to be good at social media. The goal is to be good at business, and social media can support that.

Want to know more? Join CareerBuilder and Amber Naslund for a free webinar: Social Media for Small Business. Learn what you need to know now to grow your business by leveraging new social technologies. Tuesday, July 12 at 1 p.m. CST. Register today.

Confession: Short of an in-depth Google search, I couldn’t recall a single piece of advice the speaker at my college graduation gave my classmates and me on that fateful day in May so many years ago.

Granted, the speaker wasn’t a celebrity like Stephen Colbert (no offense, whoever you were), but save for a few witty lines, I still doubt I’d remember much. I’m not proud of it, either, because I bet that advice would still apply to my professional life today.

With that in mind – and in honor of graduation season – I picked out a few takeaways from some of my favorite celebrity commencement speeches this year to see how they apply to professionals of all levels – not just new graduates.

Leadership Advice from 2011’s Celebrity Commencement Addresses

“There are few things more liberating than having your worst fear realized.” – Conan O’Brien

O’Brien discussed his own professional disappointment over having his worst fear realized – getting his dream job of hosting The Tonight Show abruptly taken away from him – and using it as a jumping off point to try “a lot of silly, unconventional, spontaneous ridiculous and seemingly irrational things.” The result, he said, was “the most satisfying and fascinating year of my professional life.” He continued by saying, “if you accept your misfortune and handle it right, your perceived failure can become a catalyst for profound reinvention,” a belief that applies to anyone in any aspect of life – both personal and professional – before closing with, “Work hard, be kind, and good things will happen.” Amen, Coco.

“Be open to collaboration. Other people’s ideas are often better than your own.” – Amy Poehler

Poehler reminded the crowd at Harvard’s commencement ceremony that they all owe their successes to the people in their life who helped them get there. Her next piece of advice holds true for anyone at any level of their career – but perhaps especially for those who are actively hiring and interviewing people to add to their teams: “Find a group of people who challenge and inspire you. Spend a lot of time with them, and it will change your life.”

“Cultivate in them the faith to carry on, and they will take care of the rest.” – Tom Hanks

Though Hanks was advising the graduates of Yale on how to help war veterans make an easier transition to civilian life, he could have easily been telling managers how to lead their employees. He emphasize the need to work together to improve and unify the nation, mirroring the need for employers and employees to work together for the benefit the overall organization.

He also reminded all present for the speech that, even in the face of circumstances beyond our control, our success is determined by how we approach those challenges: “Each new day fear is…lurking in the darkness on the edge of town. Your rising from bed every morning will give fear its chance to grow stronger just as it will afford faith its chance to blossom. You will make the choice to react to one or create the other.”

“You are not the most important person in the scene. Everyone else is.” – Stephen Colbert

Colbert equated the first lesson he ever learned from doing improv at Chicago’s Second City to life, reminding the crowd at Northwestern that great improv scenes happen when everyone on stage works to make their scene partners look good. “Try to love others and serve others and hopefully find those who love and serve you in return,” he later said. The same applies to leadership: If you treat your employees with respect and work to help them succeed, they’ll return the favor.

“There are no mistakes.” – Tina Fey

Like Colbert, Fey relayed the lessons she learned in improv comedy to the Fieldston 2011 graduating class, suggesting that they apply these lessons to life. Also like Colbert, Fey could easily have been speaking to talent managers when she advised them to view mistakes as opportunities.  “I think the idea of living in a world where there are no mistakes – there are only choices, and we move forward from our choices – is a pretty great world to live in.”

Tina Fey at Fieldston from Cyber Shepherd on Vimeo.

What 2011 celebrity commencement speeches were your favorites?

Editor’s Note: This five-week series is dedicated to examining the five most common Ps of a typical marketing mix and assessing how they relate to recruitment. Today’s post focuses on price; the remaining concepts – people, placement and promotion – will run in sequential order every Tuesday over the next few weeks. For a look at the assessment of product, check out my post from last week. 

A number of factors contribute to the final price of a good or service, including the cost of materials or labor to produce the final product, overhead and distribution costs, and desired profitability. Other things like discounts, commission, and marketing costs to acquire a customer impact the bottom line as well. To learn from marketing, consider what it will cost a candidate to accept your job offer.

Seldom is a career opportunity a perfect match for a candidate. In most cases, there may need to be a trade off of desired benefits or a minor sacrifice of one benefit for another. Most job seekers bargain with the variables when deciding whether they will apply for a job. For example, a job may require a longer commute but offer greater advancement potential. Or, a company with a stronger brand reputation may offer a smaller starting salary than a lesser-known company.

Understand the price a candidate may have to pay to accept a particular job so you can proactively emphasize the redeeming qualities of the opportunity that offset costs. Don’t overlook how helpful it can be to share information about the realities of a job. For example, say you know your target talent has between five to eight years of experience and prefers urban living; but your job is in a suburb that requires relocation or a 50 to 60 minute commute. Address it!  While it’s unrealistic to include this type of detail in a job advertisement, social media is the ideal forum to elaborate on things beyond essential qualifications and job functions. Seek out employees who have a reverse commute and get them to share their perspective on Facebook. They can give details about taking public transportation and shortcuts they’ve found that make the commute manageable. Whatever the topic, this is just one of the ways to remove obstacles that could prevent your target talent from applying to and accepting your job.

Try this exercise: Before you can effectively anticipate the costs that might accompany a job or working at your company, you must fully understand the profile of your target audience. As you’ll learn later with the remaining Ps, the nuances that define your ideal candidate are incredibly important in the placement and promotion of your recruitment message. Make a list of observations about your current workforce. What similarities exist among your staff? Are these characteristics among departments or do they change as you move from entry-level to senior leadership positions? While this may seem simple at first, the patterns you observe can start to shape how you seek out and tailor your message to attract the right fit for a specific job.

Bottom line:  Nearly every decision – from purchasing a product to accepting a job – involves trade-offs. Resist the nature to be arrogant about what your company can and cannot offer a potential applicant. Seek out information, both about your ideal candidate and the specific position, to understand what financial and personal costs might affect your ability to attract and retain the best people for the job.

What other ways do you think price impacts recruitment? Share your thoughts below!

Information Age business leaders make critical decisions daily in an ever-changing world. They have access to more data than ever before, which is only accelerated by Internet search, social media and mobile technology.

Harnessing this information can offer companies great insight into the habits, preferences and behaviors of their current employees, job candidates and competitors. Data can answer some of your company’s biggest questions, such as:

• Where do the job candidates who have the skill sets to drive the long-term success of my company live and work?
• What are the best, most cost-effective ways to engage my employees?
• How strong does my employment brand compare to those of my competitors?
• How do both candidates and current employees perceive my company?
• Why are candidates applying for positions with my competitors instead of with my company?

Announcing Data Not Just for Data’s Sake - Thursday, June 23^rd – 1:00 p.m. CST

Join talent intelligence and recruitment experts Will Emmons and Jason Lovelace for this free webcast, as they review the latest talent intelligence available today and assess how leaders can use this data to make smarter business and hiring decisions and gain a competitive advantage.

Learn more or register for free for this exclusive webcast here.

Presented by:
Jason Lovelace, Area Vice President, CareerBuilder, LLC
Will Emmons, Area Vice President, CareerBuilder, LLC

Related Posts:
A Recruitment Strategy Without Data Isn’t A Strategy At All
The Secrets to Their Success: What Smart Companies Understand About Talent Intelligence

The woman in the grey sweatshirt stood up in front of roughly 100 others at Borders Books’ Chicago State St. location and tearfully told Howard Schultz, CEO of Starbucks, that she’d closed her store and driven all night from her store in Ohio to see him speak in person. “It’s an honor and a privilege to be in front of you today,” she said, her voice breaking with emotion.

She, like many of us, was at Borders to see a Q&A discussion between Schultz and CBS2’s Bill Kurtis on Schultz’s new leadership memoir, Onward: How Starbucks Fought for Its Life Without Losing Its Soul (and perhaps get a book signed or a photo taken with the man who has changed the way many people think about coffee). After the woman thanked Schultz for all that he’d done for her and her employees, Kurtis asked her why it was that she drove so far to see him – why Schultz? “He’s an inspiration, and he’s honest,” she replied, as if it was the most obvious answer in the world.

It’s hard to argue with the fact that Schultz and the Starbucks brand have a die-hard following – and as I sat listening in awe to the woman who traveled all night from my beloved home state of Ohio to see Schultz and express her gratitude and devotion to Schultz and Starbucks in such a personal way, I realized I was seeing the power of the Starbucks brand in action. Here was a company that, more than most any others, had built up nearly impenetrable company and employment brands, gained a legion of loyal fans, customers and employees, and grown to a massive 16,000-store, “there’s a Starbucks on nearly every corner” giant. But, as Schultz would point out, things weren’t so rosy just a few years earlier.

Flashback to 2007

“I could sense, or small, that something wasn’t quite right,” Schultz said as he addressed the overflowing crowd of fans and curious onlookers before him. He was referring to February 2007, a time when, he said, he became concerned about what was happening at Starbucks – or rather, what wasn’t happening. Little by little, Starbucks had been losing some of the signature traits it had been founded on.

In 2000, Schultz had stepped down as CEO (or, as a Starbucks employee would write it, “ceo”– they have used lowercase job titles since their early days) and became chairman, moving away from day-to-day operations to focus on global strategy and expansion. In the years that followed, store growth accelerated and stock prices soared as sales and profits increased every single quarter – until they suddenly didn’t. By 2007, things were taking a turn for the worse. “Starbucks had begun to fail itself,” Schultz said.

Bitter times

Over time, the company had been expanding the brand beyond its core into various media like music, books, and film. In addition, every quarter, there was more intense pressure to maintain annual revenue and profit increases of at least 20 percent – an ambitious goal that Schultz admits he was complicit in promoting. Amidst battle cries of “More growth!” the team had lost sight of what the Starbucks experience was really all about. Starbucks, he pointed out in his book, has always been about so much more than coffee. “But without great coffee,” he wrote, “we have no reason to exist.”

So, on Valentine’s Day 2007, Schultz sent an email to Jim Donald, the CEO of Starbucks at that time, warning of the commoditization of Starbucks (the email was aptly titled The Commoditization of the Starbucks Experience ), hoping to unleash an honest conversation that would prompt everyone to reexamine the path they were traveling. He stressed a need to get back to Starbucks’ core and make the changes necessary to evoke “ the tradition, heritage and passion they all had for the true Starbucks experience.” Unfortunately, he said, the email leaked, and the next thing he knew it was all over the Internet – and the public was in a furor. Starbucks – and Schultz himself — received a lot of criticism for his opinions, even from Starbucks’ own employees, and as he says, it undermined what he was trying to accomplish.

Online conversations took on a life of their own, and while the company was struggling to figure out how to create balance between growth and a need to preserve what the company was really about, Schultz realized that they could no longer use their stores and website to communicate and control the conversations – the public was really in control of what was being said.  Coincidentally, soon before Schultz’s email went out, three big communication changes had occurred: a week earlier, Apple had introduced the iPhone; four months earlier, Google had bought YouTube; and five months earlier, Facebook had opened up to the public.

Times were changing, and Starbucks was forced to either change with them or get left behind.

Back to the grind(s)?

Toward the end of 2007, as the situation reached a breaking point, the board decided Schultz needed to return as CEO. So, in January 2008, he did. It wasn’t his original intention, and it wasn’t an easy decision. In addition to having to tell Donald he was taking over, he was re-immersing himself in a company that was increasingly becoming viewed as one of the poster children of the recession (i.e. “save money, don’t drink at Starbucks”); people were being encouraged to look elsewhere for coffee easier on the pocket.

As he jumped back into his role as CEO, Schultz said, he realized that the issues he’d brought up in that now-infamous email back in 2007 were even larger and deeper than he had then thought. This was through no fault of people working there, he said — it was due to the fact that Starbucks was rewarding the wrong things. Factors like speed of service were praised, rather than keeping focus on the customer and the quality of the product.

Schultz’s reaction?

On February 23, 2008, “I closed every store to retrain 115,000 people – I said we were going back to the roots of the company.” Of course, the media frenzy that ensued from this decision brought many to believe that the end of Starbucks was near – that they were no longer relevant. Schultz admits it was a bold decision to retrain every single employee. His explanation? “It was honest, it was authentic, and it was necessary.” The company lost $6 million that day. And as he said, Starbucks still had a long, long way to go in solving their mounting problems – but this was a start.

Starting over, he said, involved metaphorically asking the question of employees, What does it mean not to be a bystander? “From this point, we had to create, attract and create new customers.” Gone, he says, was the time that Starbucks could do no wrong — that the company was on a “magic carpet ride” – and that profitability and likeability would happen automatically with every move the company made. Gone was the time that Starbucks was leading the conversation — now, they had to find a way to take part in the larger conversations that were happening.

Later in 2008, one month after Wall Street’s meltdown and a few weeks before Starbucks would announce significantly reduced profits for the fourth quarter, Schultz decided to get all of the store managers together — all 11,000 of them — for a leadership conference. They’d always done the conference in Seattle, and even though nearly every major city wanted to host them, Schultz said they chose a place very much in need of assistance: New Orleans. Despite the odds, Schultz knew it had to be done, to start rebuilding trust between Starbucks and its employees and invest in Starbucks’ continuing transformation — and New Orleans was the right place to do it.  Not only did they have a week-long meeting with interactive galleries, roundtables, and panels, but they also did service in the 9th Ward and helped to rebuild some of the city’s most devastated neighborhoods.

“I’ve always loved this company,” Schultz said in Onward. “Love is why I had some back as ceo and why I feel so personally responsible for its failure and success. Yet somewhere along our journey, the love our people had for Starbucks had blurred. New Orleans had brought it back into focus, and once again our values stood in stark relief… because of everything we experienced in New Orleans, it was apparent to all of us what it meant to love something — and the responsibility that goes with it.”

Moving forward

What’s happened since Schultz and the Starbucks team took major risks to turn the Starbucks experience around? Well, instant coffee (Via), for one. And Starbucks’ performance in the Q3 of fiscal 2009 marked its first earnings growth since Q1 2008 — the company earned $152 million, compared to its loss of nearly $7 million just a year earlier. As Schultz remarked in Onward, “for the first time in a long time, I felt as if we were winning.”

In July 2009, after riding out the December 2008 choice to make 401(k) retirement plans discretionary instead of automatic in light of a weak economy, Starbucks was again able to match the 401(k) contributions of eligible employees, which, to Schultz, “would not make headlines or mean much to shareholders, but for me… was as important as anything we were able to accomplish all year.”

In fiscal 2010, Starbucks revenues increased to a record $10.7 billion, and its operating income increased to $1.4 billion, up from $562 million in fiscal 2009. What’s next for Starbucks is anyone’s guess, but as Schultz says that every company must push for self-renewal and reinvention, constantly pushing the status quo, it appears he will continue to do just that.

Q&A with Howard Schultz & Bill Kurtis

After Schultz gave his initial thoughts on Starbucks’ journey over the past few years, Schultz sat down with Kurtis to answer some questions about what the Starbucks brand really means, his ideal employee, and more.

Q:  How do you define success to your employees?

A: “’Howard Schultz is not going to serve any customers — it’s you,’ is what I tell employees.” Schultz tells store managers they are responsible for what takes place in their stores, and that “The essence of what they do every day is the difference between success and failure.”

The greatest reason for the enduring relationship Starbucks has with its people and its customers is due to the values of the company, Schultz said. “We’re not perfect; we’ve made mistakes, and we’ll make some more.” “The last 12 months has been the most successful in Starbucks’ history,” Schultz said. “However, we did not leave people behind.” Part of that decision not to leave employees behind while striving to be financially successful involved keeping 401(k), cash bonuses, and benefits. Starbucks was, after all, the first U.S. company to offer both comprehensive health care coverage as well as stock options to part-time workers.

Which leads us into another question…

Q: Why are you not willing to cut the price of coffee?

A: “We will never – and I mean never – turn our backs on our employees,” Schultz replied.  The company wasn’t willing, he added, to get cheaper coffee or cut health care benefits for each of Starbucks’ employees to cut coffee prices. The premium price is tied into having the best quality beans and treating their employees well.

——————————–

Q: What will be the future role of businesses on a macro level?

A: As social services continue to lessen in government, Schultz said businesses will have to do more to provide a safety net for people, as well as provide a safety net for people to serve their communities. Social requirements of the business world are changing, and people expect more from the businesses they patronize. People have become more cost conscious, environmentally aware, health-minded and ethically driven — and are holding businesses to higher standards. Seismic changes with social and digital media, he added, are changing the way businesses must communicate with their customers; people are making buying decisions based on companies they trust and those that align with their values.

——————————–

Q: What is the Starbucks brand?

A: Schultz admitted this was a tough question to answer, as the brand really means so many different things. Instead of spitting out a textbook definition, Schultz said he wanted to explain by telling the story of Courtney, an employee in the Queen Anne, WA store. The story goes like this: Schultz walked into a Seattle store one day, and an employee there told him he was in the wrong place, and that he really needed to get to the Queen Anne store as soon as possible. When Schultz asked him why, the employee said, “You’ll know why when you get there.”

So, Schultz got in his car and drove to the Queen Anne store – a store where a long-time employee with special needs and past behavioral issues, Courtney, worked. When he walked in, customers were laughing and chatting, and he noticed that they had thrown a birthday party for Courtney. Schultz says this was such a testament for him as to the emotional relationship between the staff and customers at Starbucks. “You can’t invent or describe it,” he said –“you just know it’s real.”

Starbucks, he added, is defined by those who wear the green apron and what they stand for.” In corporate America, there’s been such a fracturing of trust; for whatever reason, there’s a lot of cynicism and unwillingness to believe.” Consequently, people are hungry to work for a company that’s larger than themselves, he said, a company in which they can find their unique place. Many people go from job to job with bad experiences, becoming increasingly cynical, and when they start working at Starbucks, expect the experience to be the same and are in disbelief that it’s actually different – that the employees and the experience is actually for real.

——————————–

Q: Who is your ideal employee?

A: “We want people to join Starbucks who have like-minded values. We need happy people – we’re a people company that serves coffee, not the other way around,” Schultz said. He added that while Starbucks is creating organic, fair trade coffee, people come into the store for a different reason. “The human, emotional experience our people create is why customers come in – it’s more than just for a cup of coffee.”

——————————–

Q: What leadership qualities do you look for?

A: Again, Schultz stressed that like-minded values are key. He said that when he returned as CEO, he had 11 direct reports, and he asked them all the same question: “If you don’t believe we can do this, or you don’t believe in me, this isn’t going to work – we’re going to have to have a private conversation.” In the next six months, he said, nine of the 11 people left the company. He needed people who believed in the dream; who believed in the business – and that candor left him with those who did.

Schultz said that as far as employee qualities, it’s important to have:

• People who trust one another
• Those who leave their egos at the door.
• Those who understand that success needs to be shared.

And to not have: People who do a great job of managing up but not managing down.

——————————–

Q: What is Starbucks’ biggest win in the last couple of years since you came back on board?

“Instant coffee,” Schultz said without hesitation. Why? “Because we were able to bring quality to instant. Great companies and entrepreneurs have to continue to push for innovation. People thought when we added instant coffee, it was the beginning of the end. But really, we did it to prove to themselves that they could replicate the taste of brewed coffee – and we did.”

——————————–

Q: What advice would you give to someone who wants to take a leap of faith to pursue his or her dream?

A: In addition to getting a mentor, Schultz advised, “Dream big, then dream bigger. You have to put yourself in a position to win, and surround yourself with people who’ve done it before — with those with experience and the skill set to complement you.”

And from the look of things, Schultz isn’t done dreaming quite yet.

Memorial Day weekend, the unofficial kick-off to summer, is upon us. Grills will be dusted off and fired up; burgers, brats and corn on the cob will be prepared; bikes will be ridden down ridiculously long paths; swimming pools will be cannonballed into; bathers will be sunned; time with family and friends will be had; and… work will be done?

A new CareerBuilder study of more than 5,600 workers shows that many employees are excitedly taking the fishing rods out of storage, only to sadly put them back hours later in an Arrested Development George Michael-type moment. Due to financial constraints and demanding work schedules, many workers are giving up their vacation plans this year by either choice or necessity (see a snapshot here). Twenty-four percent of full-time workers, in fact, reported they can’t afford to take a vacation this year, up from 21 percent in 2010.  Another 12 percent reported they can afford a vacation, but don’t have plans to take one this year.

Despite these sour numbers, the majority of workers are still planning to take some time away from work — the physical “work,” at least. Three in ten workers plan to take work with them on vacation. Thirty percent said they will contact work while on vacation, up from 25 percent last year.

On the flip side…

While some workers are stuck pretending their vacuum is a jet-ski this year, more than one-third (36 percent) of workers reported feeling more comfortable taking a vacation than they did in 2010. The economy is healing in various ways, and some people’s wallets are also healing enough that vacation is now an option. Twenty-six percent of workers are planning a vacation of 7 to 10 days, while 11 percent expect to be gone 2 weeks or longer. On the more conservative side, 24 percent are planning for a 3 to 5 days for vacation or a weekend getaway. And many (including CareerBuilder’s own VP of HR), say traveling across the world or just setting up camp in your house — and away from your office — is good for your health and may translate to better work while in the office:

“Taking advantage of vacation or paid-time-off benefits is critical not only to your well-being, but to your overall job performance,” said Rosemary Haefner, Vice President of Human Resources at CareerBuilder.  “Workers who set aside time for R&R tend to have less burnout, more creative energy and higher quality output.  While financial challenges and heavy workloads may make vacation planning difficult, it’s important to find time to recharge away or at home.  It can ultimately translate into a more gratifying work experience that benefits you, your family and your employer.”

So, how can employers turn the vacation outlook from bleak to beachy? Here are Haefner’s tips for helping your employees — and you — take better advantage of time off:

1)  Encourage them to give plenty of notice. Twenty-four percent of workers reported they have had to work while their family went on vacation without them — which is the furthest thing from “fun.” Let your employees know it’s helpful if they coordinate schedules with family, friends and co-workers as early in advance as possible, to more effectively plan vacations before/after big projects and events. Advance notice also gives the vacationing employee, as well as his or her colleagues, plenty of time to prepare and adjust work loads accordingly. Set expectations as far as whether employees want or need to be contacted while on vacation, stick to what you both agree upon, and communicate that to the team as well.
2)  Don’t take them on a guilt trip. Twelve percent of workers reported they feel guilty that they’re not at work while they’re on vacation. Your organization’s vacation benefits are there for a reason — and by setting a positive tone and stressing that vacation is time for employees to enjoy themselves and forget about work as much as possible (and following through by not emailing and calling them while they’re away), you can ease that sense of guilt and show employees that they can, and should, feel good about taking time off work to relax and spend time with family and friends. The work can wait, and if you help them prepare effectively, their time out of the office will be virtually obstacle-free.
3)  Consider discounts — and if you have them, spread the word. Many employers offer discounts on personal entertainment and travel for employees that may make vacation plans more affordable — do you? If not, it’s worth looking into options for business-wide discounts; your employees will appreciate the perk and get better use out of their travel time, and you will be providing a valuable benefit that will not only make current employees happy, but will also help attract future employees to your organization.
4)  Make sure they’re covered. Don’t punish your employees who have scheduled a vacation by abandoning them — instead, give them a hand. Buddy them up with other co-workers to cross-train on responsibilities and keep track of upcoming deadlines, key contacts, and placement of important information to help everyone function more efficiently when someone is out of the office. Think broadly and evaluate how one person’s absence affects other employees who work with them; ensure that any involved parties are kept abreast of project shifts.
5)  Use ‘em or lose ‘em. Sixteen percent of workers reported they gave up vacation days in 2010 because they didn’t have time to use them. Remind employees that vacations don’t have to be an around-the-world trip; even a day off here and there can be a refreshing break from the office grind — and is better than no vacation time at all.

I would also add: Be realistic. If an employee misses 40 hours of work while on vacation, it’s not practical to expect them to make up that entire 40 hours of work once they return. Help employees prioritize what needs to get done before and after they’re gone, so they don’t feel so overloaded (and can actually enjoy their time off). Consult with them on what work is most important, and what can be eliminated or put off until they return and catch up. Some projects or tasks may be able to be jump-started early in anticipation of a vacation; others may be able to wait.

If you’re communicating with your employees and setting up expectations upfront that both parties agree upon, there won’t be surprises later — and employees won’t have to spend all year turning their cubicle into a beach resort and wishing the water cooler into a daiquiri machine.

Wikipedia defines frienemies as “either an enemy disguised as a friend or a partner who is simultaneously a competitor and rival.”   Think about it: In your experience, are recruiting and HR enemies disguised as friends, rivals, or true business partners?

Over the years, I have witnessed many organizations in which HR and recruiting are indeed frienemies. In other words, the relationship on paper is good, but there is an undercurrent of something you can’t quite put your finger on. I’ve often wondered, “Was that a dig just now?” as someone offered a comment that could have really been either a compliment or a jab.

Let’s examine the differences between friends and frienemies in more detail:

Friends…

• Protect one another’s interests
• Respect each other’s differences
• Value one another’s contributions
• Support and reinforce the efforts of the other
• Respectfully disagree
• Encourage direct communication

Frienemies…

• Shift the focus off the other person’s accomplishments
• Devalue the other person’s function
• Downplay the other person’s contributions
• Undermine the other person’s efforts
• Circumvent direct communications and favor gossip or tattle-tailing
• Plague new ideas with negativity

Frienemies in action

I’ve listened in on many meetings where one party talked about what was wrong with the new hires recruiting had brought on, or a manager mentioned that HR was not responding to some need. Such is the life of “frienemies,” as they just can’t help themselves.  They sabotage you and secretly (or maybe not so secretly) enjoy it.

I’ve also witnessed many organizations where these two parties work powerfully in tandem. High levels of accountability and consistency are hallmarks of this type of environment, so it’s no surprise that these organizations happen to be the highest performing ones.

The potential for conflict between HR and recruiting is high, even though they often share a reporting structure. This is due in part to fundamental differences between the two groups:

1. Each focuses on different skill sets.
2. Often they are blended into the same hierarchy, typically under an HR umbrella, implying that greater value belongs to HR.
3. HR may have more authority than recruiting.
4. Recruiting is typically more operations-focused.
5. HR is about administration and compliance.
6. Recruiting is about selling an employment value proposition and company culture.

Most of the time, someone who is really good at HR rarely favors recruiting, and vice versa. This is because recruiting is more sales oriented, where HR is more administration oriented — and these are completely different skill sets.  There is no good or bad; they are just different.

I will confess that I have my own biases. I started out strictly dedicated to talent acquisition. I would have made a terrible HR generalist. The thought of having to handle compensation and benefits was enough to send me into the fetal position in a corner. And here’s the key: You don’t want me doing that work — it’s not what I’m best at. The value I bring to an organization is in selling their employment value proposition to the market and figuring out who should work for them.

How can HR and recruiting work better together?

Organizations that are most effective understand and value the differences between HR and recruiting.  They don’t elevate one and cripple the other; they work in partnership. What does that look like in real life?

• At an organizational level, this means that how we bring people into an organization matches how we evaluate their performance over time. It means that the promises we make on the front end are fulfilled post-hire. Both departments have to work together to ensure a consistent process and experience, from the first time we speak with a potential candidate through the last day of employment.
• Day to day, it boils down to how a recruiter and an HR generalist each does his or her job. When a recruiter is hiring a new employee, he or she thinks about the fit for the long haul. The recruiter doesn’t set unrealistic expectations for an employee that creates employee relation problems later. The recruiter thinks it all the way through and supports the efforts that happen after the offer is accepted.
• From an HR perspective, the generalist coaches the manager to separate management and hiring issues. They don’t allow the recruiter to be surprised by sudden staff changes or a change in the urgency of the need. They sound a warning when the manager is about to make a decision without involving the recruiting department that impacts how talent is brought on board.

Both functions working together can be a powerful engine to move an organization toward their performance goals. Being frienemies is a handicap, and undermines both efforts. It can unknowingly encourage operations to dismiss or even ignore all of recruiting and HR’s efforts.

It’s a choice you must also make. Have you chosen to be  “frienemies” with your recruiting or HR colleague — or true business partners?

Building an integrated recruitment strategy is a much different task today than it was three years ago. Human Resources executives have had to quickly adapt to a changing marketplace in which search engines and social media are becoming more effective platforms to source the best talent.

But how can organizations use those platforms most effectively? And more importantly, how do they utilize business intelligence to map out a recruiting strategy that takes account of a rapidly evolving market for hard-to-find skills?

Announcing Your Company in 2020: Capturing Talent to Fuel Future Growth

Recruitment strategy experts John Smith and Hope Gurion discuss the how’s and why’s of adapting to the ever-changing recruitment landscape, including practical, easy-to-apply tips and advice.

Presented by:
John Smith, Senior Vice President, CareerBuilder, LLC
Hope Gurion, Chief Development Officer, CareerBuilder, LLC

Related Posts:
Recruiting for Tomorrow Today by John Smith
Doing More With Less Through Talent Pipelining by Hope Gurion

I remember once walking across my college campus and noticing several groups of people snickering. I looked up to find the target of their stares: A girl walking ahead of me. She was wearing a flouncy miniskirt (which was very cool at the time) and she was completely unaware of the attention of the groups of people around her — attention brought on by the fact that the back half of her skirt was accidentally tucked into the waist of her underwear for the entire world to see.

Similarly, many organizations today are completely unaware that they are exposing their hiring “underwear” to the world.

There’s no real “getting away” from the public eye now; just ask any celebrity who just been caught picking their nose in public, only to have a picture of it published in the media that very day. Still, companies need to be much more aware of what is going on around them and how their actions are viewed by others before getting out into the public eye.

The Internet power shift

Candidates and employees have more power than ever before to use social media to reveal and comment on company behavior that used to stay locked behind company doors. Bad behavior is coming to light more often. And I think it’s a positive change; it’s time for us to be held accountable for proper hiring practices. Too often, we have swept poor hiring tactics under the rug, and those in authority didn’t really care about their actions, as there were no immediate or tangible consequences.

Are you a manager who is notoriously rude during interviews? Do you ask inappropriate questions?  Are you just plain lame in an interview setting? Or has your company asked someone to come in seven times for interviews, forcing the candidate to use up his or her entire vacation time, and then refused the candidate a  job offer?

It’s time to ask ourselves how this behavior would make us feel if we were in a candidate’s shoes, particularly in our current economy, as many people looking for jobs are frustrated, worn out, and looking  for a place to vent their frustrations. Turns out they don’t have to look very far — candidates with even just a little savvy can create YouTube videos, tweets, or blog post rants bemoaning their experience in seconds.

How much would it change the game if, in addition to candidates having the ability to spread negative company experiences, specific managers’ reputations were available to savvy candidates (typically the ones we most want to hire)? I propose that they already are. Anyone can do Google or LinkedIn research and find people to speak with, profiles, articles, and more that reveal how the manager truly behaves. We just aren’t thinking about that in a grand sense yet. I think we should.

I like the idea of candidates asserting themselves a bit and owning the fact that they are a primary decision maker in our hiring process. We should be partnering with them to find ways to make the process better — not inciting people to poison the candidate market from which we need to hire.

I’m not trying to tell you the sky is falling. Individuals have a remarkable way of being reasonable when a company makes a mistake or admits its flaws. It’s those who have been abused that we need to worry about. As the old adage goes, “no one will sue someone they like.” I think the same is true for potentially embarrassing rants and raves online. Good and reasonable people with whom we have positive relationships are not likely to scold us in public. The best managers and companies — those who embody a great place to work — will build fan clubs of people who want to work there now or in the future (including people who didn’t get the job for which they just interviewed.)

Transparency brings an unfamiliar level of accountability when it comes to hiring people. It may feel uncomfortable, but in the end, it’s going to make the whole process better for everyone.

After all, it’s always a smart idea to turn and check the mirror before you walk out in public.

SPECIAL GIVEAWAY: See how you can get a free copy of one of two best-selling leadership books! See contest details below!

GUEST CONTRIBUTOR: Authored by Lisa Orrell. Orrell is known globally as The Generation Relations Expert. She is the author of the top-selling books Millennials Incorporated and Millennials into Leadership. In the second part of this series, Orrell shares nine ways to teach your Millennial employees how to adopt a leadership mindset now – regardless of their current position within your organization.

In the leadership workshops I conduct for Millennials, one of the key points I emphasize is that even an entry-level management position IS a leadership role. I also explain to them the need to understand the difference between a leadership mindset and a manager mindset from Day One of their first professional job. After all, they are judged on everything they do and say – and everything they don’t do and don’t say – from the very beginning of their career.

As their supervisor or employer, your goal should be to help your employees understand this concept; however, I know many upper managers who still struggle with it themselves, so it’s important to remember the following (which you can then pass on to your employees):

Even if you just manage one person, you are also a leader. Yes, you may be considered a “manager” on paper, but you are leading, too. And even though your current position may not be one that “sets direction for the entire company or a department,” you are still a leader. Furthermore, even if you currently don’t manage anyone, you can take on leadership roles (e.g. heading up a project, volunteering to plan a company event, etc.).

Regardless of the type of management roles your Millennials assume, cultivating a leadership mindset is critical to their success early on. Successful managers are also successful leaders, and successful leaders experience employee retention and loyalty.

I realize not every Millennial in your company wants to be a senior executive or “lead” the whole business. But to not embrace some fundamental, effective leadership qualities – which will make their employees happier and more productive – is to BE LAZY, in my opinion.

You’ve probably heard the saying, “People don’t leave companies; they leave managers.” Be sure to share that with your Millennial employees and emphasize that your goal is to help them avoid being a young leader employees choose to leave.

To further illustrate this point, consider the following key differences between a manager mindset and a leader mindset. Share these with your Millennial employees as well, as you work with them to adopt leadership into their personal management styles:

1.       Leaders seek employee commitment – Managers seek employee compliance

2.       Leaders are proactive – Managers are reactive

3.       Leaders create change – Managers maintain the status quo

4.       Leaders take risks – Managers are risk-averse

5.       Leaders are passionate – Managers are controlling

6.       Leaders create loyal followers – Managers have subordinates

7.       Leaders use personal charisma – Managers rely on bestowed authority

8.       Leaders give credit – Managers take credit

9.       Leaders understand what motivates each employee – Managers stick to a one-size-fits-all approach

Managers who choose not to embody important leadership qualities suffer – as do their employees and their companies as a whole. Shortsighted managers tend to focus on process and procedures, not people and vision, whereas leaders focus on the latter first.

Groom your Millennial employees to blend solid management skills with strong leadership qualities, and they will have a much better chance of succeeding in any role, at any level, within your organization.

If you missed the first part of this three-part series on preparing your Millennial employees for leadership, you can read about 6 Ways to Retain Your Gen Y Future Leaders now.  Soon to come: “12 Problem Solving Tips to Teach Your Gen Y Future Leaders,” ths final part of this series.

Want to win a free copy of Millennials into Leadership or Millennials Incorporated?

WHAT DO YOU BELIEVE IS THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN A LEADER AND A MANAGER?  Answer this question for the chance to win one of Lisa Orrell’s best-selling leadership books.

HOW TO ENTER: In the comments section below, simply submit a one- or two-sentence answer to this question: “What’s the difference between a leader and manager?” Ten (10) lucky winners will be drawn at random to receive a copy of one of the books of their choosing: Millennials into Leadership or Millennials Incorporated.

Update: The time period for this giveaway has expired.

Workplace bullying has been getting a lot more attention in the media lately after some high-profile bullying cases have come to light — but the issue is unfortunately not a new one. After all, the Workplace Bullying Institute has been around since the early 1900s for a reason, and many states have been in the process of trying to pass legislation against workplace bullying since 2003 (none yet with any success). But for as long as workplace bullying has been happening, it doesn’t appear to be stopping. A just-released CareerBuilder survey among 5,671 U.S. workers reveals that more than one in four (27 percent) workers have felt bullied in the workplace, with the majority neither confronting nor reporting the bully.

The most common bully? The boss.

According to survey results, 14 percent of workers felt bullied by their immediate supervisor, while 11 percent felt bullied by a co-worker.  Seven percent said the bully was not their boss but someone else higher up in the organization, while another 7 percent said the bully was their customer.

Bullying reports by gender and age

• Comparing genders and age groups, the segments that were more likely than others to report feeling bullied were women, workers ages 55 or older (29 percent), and workers age 24 or younger (29 percent).
• Women reported a higher incidence of being treated unfairly at the office.  One-third (34 percent) of women said they have felt bullied in the workplace, compared to 22 percent of men. Of course, this doesn’t mean fewer men are bullied, necessarily — just that fewer men report it. And, according to research by organizational behavior and leadership expert Denise Salin, women are more likely than men to self-label as a target of bullying.
• Workers ages 35 to 44 were the least likely to report feeling bullied, with only one in four doing so.

Bullying can come in a variety of forms, and what one of us considers crossing the line might make another cringe or blush, and a third person accept as simply “part of the job.”  When asked to describe how they were bullied, workers pointed to the following examples:

• My comments were dismissed or not acknowledged (43 percent).
• I was falsely accused of mistakes I didn’t make (40 percent).
• I was harshly criticized (38 percent).
• I was forced into doing work that really wasn’t my job (38 percent).
• Different standards and policies were used for me than other workers (37 percent).
• I was given mean looks (31 percent).
• Others gossiped about me (27 percent).
• My boss yelled at me in front of other co-workers (24 percent).
• Belittling comments were made about my work during meetings (23 percent).
• Someone else stole credit for my work (21 percent).

Since bullying comes in so many forms, it’s often difficult to define bullying by one specific action. The Workplace Bullying Institute, however, defines workplace bullying as “repeated, health-harming mistreatment of one or more persons (the targets) by one or more perpetrators that takes one or more of the following forms:

1. Verbal abuse.
2. Offensive conduct/behaviors that are threatening, humiliating, or intimidating.
3. Work interference, i.e. sabotage, that prevents work from being done.

Salin describes bullying in the workplace as a “form of negative interaction that can express itself in many ways, ranging from verbal aggression and excessive criticism or monitoring of work to social isolation or silent treatment.” It’s sometimes an accumulation of many minor acts, adding up to a pattern of maltreatment. The person on the receiving end of the bullying feels unable to defend him or herself successfully.

What are companies doing to combat this workplace bullying?

Twenty-eight percent of workers who were bullied brought the situation to a higher authority by reporting the bully to their Human Resources department. While 38 percent of these workers stated that measures were taken to investigate and resolve the situation, the majority of workers (62 percent) said no action was taken.

Of those who didn’t report the bully at all, one in five (21 percent) said it was because they feared the bullying would escalate. And with so few companies taking action on bullying complaints, reporting the incident may be an increasingly unattractive option to employees, because not only will they have to worry about the bullying getting worse, they will also have to fear making the culprit aware that his or her actions will not be disciplined by the company, essentially giving the person a green light to continue the bullying behavior.

Various sources from Salin’s research on workplace bullying also show that bullying seems to be prevalent in organizations that support, accept or allow such behavior, or where employees feel that they can “get away with it” or where it is accepted as part of a “tough” climate.” Even worse, new employees and managers can become socialized into treating bullying as a normal feature of working life.

The cost to your employees – and your business

Bullying is not only harmful for the employees experiencing it, but it also has a significant impact on the workplace environment as a whole. Bullying affects morale, motivation, work performance and productivity, and can also lead to higher absenteeism, health care costs and turnover — not to mention the psychological toll it takes on your employees. Some employers have realized the importance of taking steps to prevent bullying or make employees aware that they have a strict no-tolerance bullying policy, not only for the obvious reason of protecting their valued employees, but also because it’s good for business. Many employers, however, only seem to deal with the issue after it happens — if they deal with it at all.

Does your organization thrive on competition to the point of intimidation? Do you look the other way when an employee’s behavior seems to upset another employee? Or do you cultivate a culture of respect? While organizations can’t necessarily be blamed for bullying behavior, employees can certainly draw conclusions about acceptable or encouraged workplace behavior from the way they observe their organization treat its own employees and handle conflict.

By taking a soft stance on bullying, employees will view your workplace as tolerant of the practice, and will be less likely to come forward for help when they become a victim. What can you do to better protect your employees?

Six steps toward a bully-free workplace

In an article she wrote for the Scandinavian Journal of Management, Salin references many tips that various experts have found to be effective in helping to prevent or lessen the occurrence of workplace bullying.

Consider the following 6 steps:

1. Foster a supportive culture, and encourage open communication with both peers and leaders.
2. Introduce a specific, zero-tolerance anti-bullying policy to employees to increase general awareness of appropriate work behavior. The content of the document is very important; simply having one is not enough. It should cover the definition of what is regarded as bullying and what is not, as well as a statement of consequences of breaching your organization’s standards. It should also clarify who to report to, list specific contact persons and clearly explain the procedure for making and investigating informal and formal complaints.
3. Incorporate staff from all levels of your organization to help develop your policy, and increase awareness and acceptance of it throughout the organization — having a written policy is not enough. Policies are not just for the potential victim of workplace bullying, but are also helpful for managers, to give them advice and guidelines about how to deal with bullying. In turn, having a policy may make managers more willing and competent to react appropriately to a situation.
4. Include skills to identify and deal with bullying during management training; any action taken to increase leader competence in dealing with bullying is of utmost importance.
5. Spread knowledge of both the definition of workplace bullying and your organization’s policy at all levels, so that situations that could escalate into bullying can be quickly identified (and hopefully dealt with before the level of intensity increases). Increasing awareness may also encourage more employees to feel empowered to combat bullying by refusing to take part or refusing to silently watch it happen.
6. Increase the perceived cost to the perpetrator in order to deter potential bullies from taking action by making it clear that there will be serious consequences.

These are some steps your organization may choose to take to help curb bullying in the workplace — but I’d like to hear from all of you. What is your organization’s stance on workplace bullying, and what measures have you taken to prevent it? How have you dealt with bullying situations that have arisen?

It’s dangerous — and often inaccurate — to generalize generations’ workplace preferences and behaviors. Many hiring managers, however, are still clinging onto generational stereotypes, particularly of the oft much-hyped Millennial generation (those workers born between 1980 – 1995) — stereotypes that Millennials themselves have moved well beyond since first entering the workplace in the last several years.

In How the Recession Shaped Millenial and Hiring Manager Attitudes about Millenials’ Future Careers, Alexandra Levit and I examine various research initiatives to determine how the attitudes of Millennials toward their career paths have changed as a result of the economic downturn, how these attitudes compare to the way hiring managers view Millennials’ career paths, and what hiring managers can do to better understand this generation of workers. Many of our report conclusions have been drawn from The Future of Millennial Careers research study, which was commissioned by the Career Advisory Board, presented by DeVry University, and conducted by Harris Interactive among 500 Millennials age 21-31 either employed or planning to seek employment, and 523 hiring managers age 18+ who interact with Millennials at work.

While Millennials and hiring managers can generally both agree that Millennials tend to have certain commonalities, like digital comfort and impatience with certain established processes, there is also much disparity between how Millennials view themselves and how they are viewed by their bosses. This can result in a frustrating situation for both parties — but by learning to truly understand Millennials, hiring managers can create a smoother workplace environment for the multiple generations currently working within it, as well as improve one-on-one relationships with their valuable Millennial workers.

Pre-recession to the present

The oldest Millennials blazed into the workplace in the early 2000s, many of them unabashedly demanding flexibility, seamless communication and desirable assignments right away — and from this, many employers formed their opinions on Millennials right then and haven’t since wavered. However, the recession appears to have caused a shift in Millennials’ attitudes toward achieving immediate career success, as watching hiring freezes and mass layoffs occur, or being affected by them themselves, caused many Millennials to recognize that having a good job was not just a given, but instead something that must be earned. Now, as the economy is picking itself back up post-recession, Millennials have a much different idea of what they need to do to succeed, and more of them are taking the initiative to prove their worth to employers on a daily basis while honing their soft skills in the long term.

Millennials and hiring managers: Different worlds?

While the recession appears to have pushed many Millennials to form more realistic expectations about career advancement, many hiring managers don’t yet see a change in Millennials’ expectations and are still of the belief that Millennials are driven by unreasonably high pay in return for minimal effort. Many hiring managers remain very cynical of the efforts Millennials are making, and believe that this generation continues to have a sense of entitlement and unrealistic expectations of their own career growth and success.

Millennials also believe doing work that is personally meaningful to them and achieving a sense of accomplishment are just as important as earning a high salary for a successful career. In fact, 30 percent of Millennials identify meaningful work as the single most important measure of a successful career. Millennials are also feeling a need to pursue higher education, obtain transferable skills, and hold a variety of jobs in order to get ahead in their careers. Mistakenly, however, hiring managers commonly believe Millennials’ desire to earn a high salary primarily drives their job and career decisions. Forty-eight percent of hiring managers rank high pay as the number one way Millennials measure their career success. In contrast, only 11 percent of hiring managers say Millennials consider meaningful work as the number one measure of success.

Let’s take a closer look:

Disparity in Education

Millennials: Seventy-nine percent of Millennials responded that they had completed at least some college to date, and 65 percent ranked education among their top three preparation activities for getting ahead in the workplace (40 percent of all Millennial respondents ranked “getting the proper education” as the most important choice they could make to prepare for future careers).
Hiring Managers: Meanwhile, only 28 percent of hiring managers cited “getting the proper education” as the most important method for future success (though 55 percent did place it in the top three). Preferable to education was “learning transferable skills” — 62 percent of hiring managers listed this as one of the top three steps Millennials can take today to prepare for the next 15 years. Nearly two in five hiring managers (39 percent) said “setting goals with managers” should be in the top three.

Why? With the passing years, more and more young people are getting advanced degrees. Because managers used means other than getting higher degrees to get ahead in the workplace themselves, however, they may not view education as a key step for Millennials to advance their own careers. And, as managers have more work experience than Millennials, they are able to view the career path from a different perspective as far as ways to achieve workplace success.

Tips for managers: Investigate the learning opportunities available to your employees and make specific recommendations as part of each individual’s development plan. Help your employees set realistic and achievable goals for their future, and provide a path for building transferable skills in their daily roles that makes sense to both you and them.

Disparity in Millennials’ career motivations

Millennials: Millennials equate a successful career with doing meaningful work; in fact, 71 percent reported this as among the three most important factors defining career success. Nearly a third (30 percent) believed it was the most critical factor.

Hiring Managers: Only 11 percent of managers reported that meaningful work was the most important factor contributing to Millennial success, while almost one-half (48 percent) of managers said high pay was in fact the most critical factor in defining career success.

Why? Older generations grew up in a different time, when work rules were defined and enforced by the employer, and the primary purpose of work was to provide a paycheck, not to feed the well-rounded employee who increasingly struggles with work/life balance in a technology-driven world. Though pay is still important to many employees, work expectations have shifted over the years as our culture has evolved, and employees want different things from their “work life.”

Tips for managers: Match your Millennial employees with a mentor who is able to help guide their career path and offer advice along the way. In addition, be open to your workers’ proposals to create a work environment that is meaningful to them and enables them to do their best work, such as telecommuting or flexible scheduling, if they have presented clear advantages to the organization in saving time and money and effectively addressed any concerns you may have. In the long run, it may result in a situation beneficial to both your organization and your employee.

Key challenges for Millennials

Millennials are currently faced with two key challenges:

1. They must overcome the pervasive stereotypes managers have about their generation.
2. They must identify and address areas that impact their ability to work effectively in the professional world.

As older generations tend to hold opinions of Millennial employees that sharply diverge from the attitudes Millennials have about themselves, it’s important for managers to work with the various generations in their workplace to set a positive example and work to increase understanding of this generation. While research showed us that Millennials and their managers agreed that compared to older generations, Millennials are more likely to exhibit an inability to receive criticism as well as ineffective communication skills, these weaknesses must be viewed as a learning opportunity for both parties.

Moving forward, together

Millennials and their managers have come a long way in understanding one another – though there’s still a long road ahead. That road, however, is more quickly paved by each group doing their part to move forward and understand the other.

Millennials, for example, must be proactive in seeking mentorship from senior leaders, setting goals with their managers, and participating in company-sponsored training opportunities.

In addition to the tips mentioned above,  managers can also start taking steps to better understand and effectively work with Millennials:

• Give timely and constructive feedback.
  
• Keep an open mind and learn from young professionals.
  
• Teach by example to set expectations.
  
• Implement two types of training into your organization: The first, a session or course on inter-generational dynamics that provides Millennials and their managers with concrete strategies to build a better sense of community within their teams. The second, soft-skill training provided by the organization for Millennial hires that includes instruction on 1) assimilating into a new workplace culture; 2) working with team members assertively and diplomatically and how to receive and process feedback; and 3) approaching a supervisor to seek mentorship and set long-term career goals. This type of course would also help Millennials combat misperceptions about their generation and teach them strategies (like reverse mentoring) that use their digital comfort, ability to multi-task, and multiple other strengths in a positive way.

As managers become more open and tolerant, and Millennials continue to adjust their expectations and make visible and appreciated contributions to organizations, we will continue to see a wider understanding of the Millennials generation – as well as the great additions they can make to a rapidly changing work landscape.

Read the full report here for more statistics, thoughts from both Millennials and managers, and advice on managing the Millennial generation, or listen to my recent discussion with Lisa Johnson Mandell.

About The Career Advisory Board
Established in 2010 by DeVry University, the Career Advisory Board is a panel of leading career experts and authors from business and academia who provide actionable advice for job-seekers. The Career Advisory Board generates proprietary research and commentary, and creates tools, insight and resources to prepare job-seekers for success. Its members include executives from CareerBuilder, Cisco, DeVry University, Hewlett-Packard, IBM and Microsoft Corporation as well as nationally recognized career experts.

GUEST CONTRIBUTOR: Authored by Lisa Orrell. Orrell is known globally as The Generation Relations Expert. She is the author of the top-selling books Millennials Incorporated and Millennials into Leadership. In the first of a three-part series, Orrell discusses not only how to better manage and retain your Millennial talent, but also how to groom them to be effective leaders.

Why do companies – large and small – spend so much time worrying about how to retain Millennials (a.k.a. Gen Y)?  It’s basically a matter of math.

According to the Employment Policy Foundation (EPF), our country is at the beginning of a labor shortage of approximately 35 million skilled and educated workers, which is estimated to continue over the next two decades – especially now that Baby Boomers are starting to retire at an estimated rate of 1 every 8 seconds.

Out of necessity, Millennials – many of whom may only have one to three years of career experience – are moving into management roles much sooner (and younger!) than the generations before them did – and are expected to perform in these roles successfully.

While it’s entirely possible to groom this next generation of professionals to be effective leaders, you must first be able to retain them (otherwise, grooming them for leadership won’t even matter!). For the first of this three-part series, I’d like to share six effective tips to help employers and managers effectively retain Millennial talent.

6 Ways to Retain Your Gen Y Employees:

1. Constant Contact: A recent survey of over 1,000 Millennials showed that over 60 percent of them want to hear from their managers at least once a day. That message is pretty clear: They want to communicate with you often so make it happen or they will leave! Unfortunately many older generations tend to operate differently. Oftentimes, they have a hands-off approach to management, but this style clearly does not work well with Millennials.
2. Praise Culture: We all need praise from our employers, but Millennials tend to need it more often than older generations. If they are not feeling “valued” on a regular basis, they will leave. So many well-known companies are shifting to a “praise culture” to retain them…and it improves retention of their older employees, too! Get creative and have fun with this. I know of one company that actually appointed a “celebrations assistant” in their office and one of her tasks is to throw confetti on employees (in their cubes or offices) whenever a manager tells her an employee had done something exceptional. I realize this strategy may sound a bit extreme to you, but this company is obviously seeing an ROI (or the confetti wouldn’t be happening).
3. Rapid Advancement Alternatives: Millennials feel that “paying their dues” is just occupying space for no good reason. So if a Millennial employee is truly qualified for a promotion, many companies now offer it to them versus giving the position to someone who has simply been at the company longer. But what if they’re not qualified to move up the ladder yet and getting antsy? Find creative ways to give them more responsibility, such as letting them do one or more of the following:
   1. Start, or write for, the company blog
   2. Set-up, or participate in, your company Fan Page on Facebook or other social media presence
   3. Contribute to the company e-newsletter
   4. Research and set-up a new software solution that improves productivity for your company (or department).

   You don’t always have to give them a raise or promotion to keep them happy; being creative with increased responsibility can work great! Millennials have fast minds and get bored quickly, but it’s your job as their employer to help eliminate the “boredom” factor.

4. Cubicle Shackles: Millennials have a very hard time understanding why they need to sit in a cubicle 8-10 hours a day. They want the flexibility to work anytime, from anywhere, and many companies are revamping their policies to provide more flexibility, using flex time as a “perk” to attract Millennials to their workforce. The upside? Employees from all generations respond favorably to this flexibility and employers actually find that most employees become more productive…and tend to put in longer hours!
5. Mentor Programs: This is key! Millennials have grown up with a lot of guidance from their parents, society and teachers. Now, they expect this type of handholding at work. So, heed this advice! If your company, large or small, doesn’t offer a formal (or informal) mentorship program, create one. I recently spoke with three Millennials who actually quit their jobs within one year because their employers had promised mentorship, but never delivered. Mentorship truly means that much to them.
6. Leadership Training: There is a resurgence of Leadership & Management training programs happening because the Millennials want it, need it and are demanding it. In the past year, my Millennial Business Boot Camp and Get a Grip on Leadership workshops have become, hands down, my most requested presentations – that’s how important leadership training has become. Unfortunately, MANY companies still do not offer these types of programs, much to their own detriment. It’s only a matter of time before their Millennial employees leave to pursue organizations that do offer these programs.

Finally, it’s important to remember that Millennials’ wants and needs aren’t much different from those of older generations; they just have a lower tolerance threshold than generations before them. A Boomer may put up with a job for five years even if he or she is bored or doesn’t feel valued, but a Millennial may only tolerate it for five months…or until the current job market improves.

In the next few weeks, I’ll be posting parts two and three of this series, to address tips and best practices for preparing Millennials to be successful leaders in your organization.

For more information about Lisa Orrell, visit: www.TheOrrellGroup.com.

“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.

GUEST CONTRIBUTOR: Authored by John Thedford. Thedford is CEO of La Familia Pawn and Jewelry, a chain of high-end pawnbroker shops with locations throughout Central and South Florida, and he is the author of Smart Moves Management: Cultivating World-Class People and Profits. For more information, visit www.lafamiliapawn.com.

A company without good employees is like a shark without teeth … very ineffective and bound for extinction. Here are some strategies that can help you hire and promote the best people for your business.

Being a business owner requires a strong commitment to success and attention to detail. Tasked with many responsibilities, entrepreneurs have to maintain a vigilant focus on the key processes that drive their operations. Based on my own experiences, I believe the trickiest part of running a company is the hiring process. Why? Because people are complex creatures with unique attributes, and hiring the right employees is imperative to the success of your endeavor. In other words, when it comes to hiring, the stakes are high.

The “right” people are the core of your strength. Inversely, the “wrong” people will make you weaker and less effective. In the end, you’ve worked hard to start your business, and you need to create an environment where everyone functions on the same page and works toward the same goals. How do you accomplish this? Take hiring — and the development of superior talent — very seriously, and have a process in place that gives you the best chance of hiring and retaining employees who will help you realize success.

A Strategic Path to Success

Through trial and error, I’ve learned that business success isn’t a model; it’s an equation of compatibility and chemistry among employees, customers and investors. Creating a strategic path based on this philosophy will pay major dividends because an engaged employee will provide exceptional customer service and make so much money for themselves and for the company that your shareholders will marvel at the outcome.

Ask yourself a simple question. Who do you want representing your business? Remember that you’re looking for specific attributes, and you need someone who fits comfortably into your company culture. An Ivy League graduate with the wrong skill sets for your particular venture brings little value to the table, no matter how well-educated that person might be. And a bad hire can be costly; the industry rule of thumb suggests that hiring the wrong person costs you three times his or her annual salary. A $50,000 employee costs you $150,000; a $150,000 employee costs $450,000. That’s for starters. There’s also lost opportunity cost … plus lost business, potential customers and momentum. And now you’re back to square one, looking for a replacement.

In order to avoid these setbacks, it’s important to understand that a successful hiring process begins with a clear understanding of the critical traits that are required to get the job done. Those who seek to complete the type of work required to operate your business possess a set of core competencies that define and highlight their thoughts, feelings and behaviors. Once you determine which specific attributes best suit your needs, you need to learn how to identify them when selecting new hires or promotable candidates.

Identifying Core Competencies

Each business requires its own set of core competencies that management feels will help maximize growth and profitability. The key is that everyone involved in the hiring process understands the selected competences, asks the right questions to gain better insight into the thoughts and tendencies possessed by candidates (both new hire and promotable), and makes the right hiring decisions that will ultimately strengthen the overall staff.

At La Familia Pawn & Jewelry, we’ve developed our own set of core competencies that fall into the following categories: intellectual, personal, interpersonal, management and motivational. Based on a comprehensive interview and a temperament questionnaire that we require every candidate to complete, we feel confident determining if a person possesses the right mix of desired traits. When analyzing motivational competencies, for example, we want to consider the following factors:

• Energy — Exhibits energy, strong desire to achieve and appropriately high dedication level.
• Passion — Exhibits dynamism, charisma, excitement and positive “can-do” attitude.
• Tenacity — Demonstrates consistent reward of passionately striving to achieve results.

Specific interview questions we include to help determine if a candidate possesses these motivational competencies include:

Energy

1.     How many hours per day have you worked, on the average, in the past year?

2.     What motivates you?

Passion

1.     How would you rate yourself (and why) in enthusiasm and charisma?

2.     Describe the pace at which you work – fast, slow, moderate – and the circumstances under which it varies.

Tenacity

1.     What are the challenges you have faced and overcome?

2.     What will references say is your general level of urgency?

By developing your own set of core competencies, you can begin to incorporate hiring strategies that give you the best chance to hire the people you need in order to succeed. And once you get these individuals into the fold, you need to hold it all together with strong leadership and a positive, motivational work culture.

While at HRPA 2011, Canada’s conference and trade show focusing on HR issues and trends, I stopped in to check out Howard Wallack’s session, 10 Global HR Trends for 2011 and What You Need to Know to Manage Them. Wallack is the Director of Global Member Programs for Society for Human Resource Management, and in his discussion at HRPA 2011, he drew from several studies and surveys (EIU’s Global Firms in 2020, IBM’s Working Beyond Borders, BCG/WFPMA’s Creating People Advantage 2010, and more) and gathered input from SHRM’s Global Expertise panel to determine the 10 most prevalent global HR trends for the rest of 2011.

The business world is becoming increasingly global, yet as Wallack mentioned in his presentation, there aren’t HR standards across the globe right now. Inconsistent economies and policies add complications to an already complex mix; for example, while low job growth is an issue in the U.S. and Canada, it’s not an issue in Asia, where places like China, India, Singapore and Thailand are all currently experiencing at least 9 – 10 percent growth. The U.S. is less friendly than Canada when it comes to immigration, which can present a challenge. In addition, employee engagement is driven by very different factors around the globe: In Asia, employees want titles and learning opportunities, compensation and benefits comes down the chain; in the U.S., health care coverage is most important, then compensation, then responsibility. With that said, let’s take a look at what Wallack says are the most noticeable trends for the rest of this year:

10 Global HR Trends for 2011

1. The importance of globalization and integrating markets: Companies will become larger and more global in the next 10 years, handling operations in more countries than they do today.
   —We’re living in an increasingly border-less world.
2. Talent management: Finding and retaining quality talent continues to be essential to business sustainability. Finding and retaining quality talent continues to be essential to business sustainability, though its importance in relation to other challenges differs by location. (AUTHOR UPDATE: Respondents from Brazil and Sweden rated this issue in the BCG/WFPMA study as being of lesser importance than other top-10 HR challenges relative to respondents from 15 other countries. And when polled further to rate if there were no/some/high/very high talent shortage or skills gaps across 12 different specific industries/sectors, the Brazilian and Swedish respondents rated it uniformly as “No” across all the industries.)
   —There are more contingent workers, and the rationale behind work force investment is changing and moving in multiple directions. 

   —Most industries and countries are to experience a widening talent gap, notably for highly skilled positions and for next generation of mid and senior leaders.

3. Working virtually across functions and geographies will intensify, with implications for intercultural communication, business ethics and organizational effectiveness.
   —Localizing management of overseas operations is key, but a global outlook is just as important as local knowledge. 

   —Businesses need to find new ways to connect people to each other and to information, both internally and externally.

   —The expectation of having an “always-available” employee varies around the world.

4. Global employee engagement is tentative; companies that have implemented multiple layoffs have eroded a sense of security in the global work force.
   —There is a disconnect between what companies currently have to offer employees and what employees really value. 

   —Retaining valued talent is more important, but the drivers to retain that talent are different depending on the type of market (growth opportunity is paramount in growth markets; new or challenging responsibilities is paramount in mature markets).

   —The gap in creative leadership, executing for speed, and managing ‘collective intelligence’ must be addressed.

   —Employee engagement has suffered; companies are now trying to restore pride and trust.

5. The economic crisis and fewer existing business opportunities create a high demand on the global HR function to demonstrate greater adaptability.
   —HR will be an important link between corporate headquarters and overseas operations. 

   —HR is conducting too many initiatives, with mediocre outcomes.  Companies need to reboot their HR function and boost resources devoted to HR.

6. Economic uncertainties fundamentally change motivators that attract and retain employees.
   —There is a disconnect between what companies have to offer employees and what employees really value.
7. Human capital protectionism may continue to increase in many countries in non-tariff, nationalistic forms.
   
8. Global mobility of high-value workers continues as multinational companies restrict new hires and relocate talented employees from within their existing work force.
9. Companies that originate in emerging economies will continue to succeed in the global marketplace.
   
10. Increased demand for HR metrics may bring about a widely accepted set of analytic measures and methods (global standards) to describe, predict and evaluate the quality and impact of HR practices and the productivity of the work force.  However, globalization is also driving impetus toward the use of more metrics with greater cultural sensitivity.

How can HR do more to manage these trends?

First, Wallack says, as an HR professional, you must make sure your organization understands what globalization means to you, your company and your business sector — you must be the the one to advocate full understanding of what the drivers are. It’s important, too, to keep in mind that globalization means different things to different people across the world. Ernst & Young describes globalization in The New Mindset as “the level of a country’s integration with the world economy through the exchange of goods and services, movement of capital and finance, movement of labor, exchange of technology and ideas, and cultural integration.” Martin Wolf, in Why Globalization Works, sums it up more simply as, “economic integration across borders through markets.” And every person you ask will probably define it a bit differently.

A “global mindset” is often defined as a way of seeing the world and the globalization of markets, organizations and individuals. Developing a more global mindset enables your organization to be more effectively tackle functional, organizational, and cross-cultural boundaries and move forward.

Wallack offered some ideas to help organizations adopt a more global mindset:

• Global mobility: Deepen your employees’ knowledge pool by offering short-term, focused opportunities for individuals to work in new markets and geographies.
• Develop global leadership pipelines: There is a growing expectation for leaders to have work experience outside one’s country of origin; simply having an education that includes global topics is no longer enough. Travel is a strategic management development tool.
• Get involved in efforts to create global HR standards.
• As there is a higher demand on the global HR function to demonstrate greater adaptability, provide HR managers more exposure to and rotations in global business that they need to be effective internationally. Make HR the link between corporate headquarters and overseas operations.
• As far as talent management: Include nationalities and experience in your efforts to diversify talent in other functions and other industries. Increase the span of responsibilities and decision-making of employees.

You can find more information about Wallack and SHRM’s global work here.

Which of the global HR trends mentioned above (or others not mentioned) are you seeing in your own organization?

If you’ve been in the human resources profession for more than, well, a day or two, you’re probably familiar with the following employee complaints:

• My boss plays favorites
• My boss doesn’t follow through on what he/she promises
• My boss doesn’t listen to concerns
• My boss doesn’t provide regular feedback
• My boss doesn’t keep me motivated
• My boss doesn’t help me develop
• My boss only provides negative feedback

That’s because these, according to a new CareerBuilder survey on management, are the most common gripes that employees have about their bosses.

Although these complaints can often be attributed to a clash of personality types or poor communication between workers and their supervisors, these leadership issues may also arise when an employee feels ill-prepared for a management position, which, according to the survey results, is pretty often. One-in-four managers polled said they weren’t ready to become a leader when they started managing others.

According to Dennis Kravetz, author of “Measuring Human Capital: Converting Workplace Behavior into Dollars,” it’s not surprising that some managers feel this way. “Any supervisory job is dramatically different from a non-supervisory role,” he says. “For example, non-supervisory engineers need to have a variety of technical engineering competencies, accountants need technical accounting competencies, etc. Employees are trained for this at the college level and their performance at a non-supervisory level is based on how technically competent they are in their field.”

On the other hand, Kravetz says, the competencies that make for a successful manager — like developing others, handling conflict and scheduling work — are primarily people-based. “The net result is that these people are often lost in the job of new supervisor,” he says.

Indeed, it seems that the areas most managers struggle with are primarily those that are people-centric. According to the survey, managers reported having the most trouble with the following:

• Dealing with issues between co-workers on my team – 25 percent
• Motivating team members – 22 percent
• Performance reviews – 15 percent
• Finding the resources needed to support the team – 15 percent
• Creating career paths for my team – 12 percent

Again, Kravetz says these results are to be expected. “[Management]  literally is an entirely different job with entirely different competencies. As a consequence the new supervisor focuses on only the technical engineering and accounting work and they forget about being a supervisor and the many people issues that come up. This produces unhappy employees, and senior managers who are unhappy with the new manager,” he says.

So how can you ensure that your first time managers are competent? Here are a few tips.

1. Analyze leadership capacity before the promotion: Prior to offering a promotion, analyze the employee’s leadership skills by conducting a “simulation interview,” Kravetz says. “These interviews ask candidates how they would handle a number of hypothetical situations on the job that pertain to supervising others. You can’t fake the answers — you either know how to resolve staff conflict on a work team or you don’t.”

Another great way to create a pipeline of management material? “Look for a demonstration of these competencies in project teams and other types of teams from people who are not supervisors.”

2. Use leadership training: Just because someone initially struggles with a management role, doesn’t mean they don’t have the potential to be a great leader. They just need to develop the right skills. If your company doesn’t already offer them, push for leadership training programs, says Rosemary Haefner, vice president of human resources at CareerBuilder. “Good management skills can positively impact productivity, performance and overall employee morale. We see more companies investing in management training programs to develop today’s and tomorrow’s leaders,” she says.

If your company doesn’t yet have a formal leadership training program in place, use outside resources to assist employees. “Identify open-enrollment courses offered by independent contractors, or local universities as part of continuing-education efforts and encourage new supervisors to enroll,” Kravetz says. “You can also bring in professional management coaches.”

Does your company offer leadership training programs? Do you think they should be mandatory? Let us know in the comments section, below.

As any good employer knows, the key to running a successful business is people.  People are what got your business where it is today, and they are the determinant of your future success.  As you begin to think about how you plan to rebuild and grow your organization following this time of economic uncertainty, the people you bring in to your organization will inevitably play a crucial role in that strategy. 

What you have to keep in mind, however, is that today’s market has drastically changed – thanks in part to things like advances in technology and changing job seeker demographics. The harsh truth is that if you want to remain competitive in this market, you can no longer rely on “business as usual” when it comes to your recruitment efforts.  What you need is a more proactive approach to recruitment. You need a strategy that not only brings in qualified applicants, but keeps them engaged and interested in opportunities with your organization. You need a strategy that keeps you top of mind with top talent. In short, you need talent pipelining. 

A talent pipeline is a community of qualified, interested candidates with the skills and experience that meet your organization’s unique needs. With a talent pipeline in place, you get to take control of the recruitment process.  You don’t have to go back to square one and wait for applicants to come in every time you have a hiring need – you already have an existing database of relevant applicants at your fingertips.

Why Talent Pipelining? Why Now?
Historically, when people had hiring needs, they would put an ad in the local newspaper, post a job on the internet, visit a career fair or ask for employee referrals, then simply wait for the candidates to flow in. This reactive approach, however, is no longer sufficient. Here are four reasons why you need to start building a talent pipeline today.

1. Recruitment is – and always has been – an ongoing effort. Even if you are not hiring right now, you should constantly be on the lookout for ways to attract and engage top talent. Consider how much time, money and frustration you would save if you already had a pool of qualified, relevant and interested applicants on hand once a hiring need does open up. This is one of the major benefits to building a talent pipeline. The effort you put in now to recruit for the future will lead to fewer hiring mistakes and a greater return for all involved in the hiring process.
2. The way candidates search for jobs has changed. Today’s job seekers are more resourceful than ever. They know what they want in an employer – great benefits, flexible work options, career development opportunities – and they know how to get it. In addition to job boards and personal referrals, job seekers use social and professional networking sites, online referral programs and talent communities to research prospective employers. They also want to be wanted: They crave constant engagement and interaction with prospective employers. This is where you as an employer have to be resourceful and proactive in your recruiting efforts, utilizing every tool at your disposal to connect with job seekers – from your company careers site and employee referrals to social media and mobile marketing .
3. The competition for top talent will only get more intense as the job market opens up. Research shows that employees tend to leave organizations following times of economic or organizational change, and employers are already seeing signs of this phenomenon today: A recent CareerBuilder survey showed that 40 percent of employers worry about losing workers as the economy improves. Think about it: If you’re competing for candidates against a company that has already built a relationship with those candidates, who do you think has the advantage when it comes to getting those candidates in the door? Building a talent pipeline helps you stay front of mind when you find yourself with a need to hire, keeping valuable candidates from slipping through the cracks, and giving you an edge over competitors who do not put forth the same effort to engage candidates. 
4. Recruitment resources are still lean. Talent pipelining enables employers to save overall time and costs associated with hiring. Think about it: How often has an immediate and frantic need to hire led to a regrettable hiring mistake? How much money goes down the drain in lost productivity when hard-to-fill positions remain open? Even if you have staffing agencies to help sort through irrelevant applications and screen candidates, consider how much you could save if you simply didn’t need to rely on them at all? You don’t – not if you already had a pool of qualified, interested candidates at your fingertips, sourced from your talent pipeline.  Fortunately, new technologies and social media tools, as well as the increasing popularity of mobile, provide employers more opportunities than ever to get in front of job seekers and keep them engaged at very little cost.

Engagement: The Crucial Next Step
It’s important to note that building a talent pipeline is not just about getting candidates interested in opportunities with your organization, but about keeping them interested for when future opportunities open up.  This next step – engagement – is often where employers run into trouble.  It’s not enough to simply build a pipeline, but to keep candidate engaged so that a month, six months or even a year down the road, when you are ready to hire, you know you’re hiring the right people.  

The strategies by which you go about building that your talent pipeline will vary based on your organization’s unique needs, but the engagement factor must always be there. Not only will you save time and money overall, but you will end up with a better quality of people, turning out a better quality of product and service.  Simply put, building a talent pipeline is one of the best investments your organization will ever make.

John Smith is a Senior Vice President at CareerBuilder, LLC, where he is charged with developing recruitment strategies for CareerBuilder’s Fortune 500 clients.

Join CareerBuilder Senior Vice President John Smith and Chief Development Officer Hope Gurion on Tuesday, April 26 at 1 p.m. EDT for Your Company in 2020: Capturing Talent to Fuel Future Growth, an exclusive webcast about adapting to the ever-changing recruitment landscape. Click here for more information or to register.

“The world is in midst of an emotional meltdown,” according to Dr. Judith Orloff, author of the New York Times bestseller Emotional Freedom: Liberate Yourself from Negative Emotions and Transform Your Life.

Citing recent reports that levels of anxiety, insomnia and stress are on the rise among workers worldwide, Dr. Orloff told me in a recent phone interview that she believes we can attribute many of these troubles to technology.  People are so overwhelmed with the variety and quantity of technology available today, says the Assistant Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at UCLA, that they’re suffering from “techno-despair.”

Techno-despair refers to the feelings of depression, insomnia and anxiety that stem from an ever-increasing reliance on technology. While Dr. Orloff doesn’t deny that technology offers a lot of benefits – from enabling us to “catch up with 100 friends on Facebook” instantly to providing us real-time news and information – it can also lead to many problems when that technology breaks down (or simply doesn’t work the way we expect it to).  

“We’ve become addicted to instant gratification,” Dr. Orloff says. And it is this addiction that leaves us even more vulnerable to feelings of impatience, anxiety, nervousness or depression when we can’t get what we want – right when we want it.  Not only does research increasingly suggest that reliance on technology can affect our mental health, but Dr. Orloff has also witnessed it firsthand – especially in the workplace. “I’ve seen people go into panic attacks because files disappear, and they don’t know how to deal with it,” she says.

Fortunately, Dr. Orloff says there is an antidote to this techno-despair: patience. Patience is the key to increased satisfaction, higher productivity and lower stress at work.  Of course, patience comes in short supply these days and, like any other workplace skill, must be learned and practiced. Dr. Orloff was kind enough to provide the following tips, adapted from Emotional Intelligence, her latest book, to help employers and employees learn patience and fight this new workplace phenomenon.

7 Ways to Fight Techno-Despair at Work
Adapted from the book Emotional Freedom

1.  Find opportunity in disappointment. Are you wanting that report…yesterday? Are you frustrated by the seeming ineptitude of a coworker who can’t learn the new software? Ask yourself, “How does this setback help me?” Disappointments viewed through this lens cultivate patience, leading to unexpected rewards.
2. Know your tech tolerance. Machines, like people, have energy — and some people are more sensitive to tech energy than others. If you notice that you get easily stressed out by the buzz of computers, or your email alert, or even just the ringing of a phone, you may be highly sensitive. Drink water, go outside in the fresh air, and take a break.
3. Laugh it off. Injecting levity into a frustrating workplace situation is the quickest way to counteract impatience and techno-despair. If there are tech glitches in your big sales presentation, make a joke or put a humorous spin on it. Instantly, you’ll feel less negative.
4. Note what’s working. When we’re impatient, we tend to focus on the negative — the employee viewing YouTube instead of working, the unread emails overloading our inbox. Changing your attitude changes your mood. If you feel negativity creeping in, focus on something positive — something that’s going really well at work.
5. Go with it — temporarily. Did your computer crash right in the middle of composing a report — and you didn’t save it? Like a long line at the store, sometimes you just have to go with it. Accept that there’s nothing you can do about it this time around. Watch what happens to your stress level when you do.
6. Take a micro view. One reason we get impatient and frustrated at work is because we’re trying to grasp too many pieces of information at once — projects, deadlines, to-do lists, meetings, strategies, policies, emails, tweets, texts, and so on. Try focusing on one specific issue at a time, say, getting the most out of this morning’s meeting, or catching up on five emails.
7. Stop pushing. Sometimes we’re so impatient to finish a project that we multitask to save time, get overwhelmed, and end up finishing the job poorly — or not at all. Try this: Stop pushing yourself for one day. Relax into your job. The patient tortoise always beats the frantic hare.

Judith Orloff, MD is the author of the New York Times bestseller Emotional Freedom: Liberate Yourself from Negative Emotions and Transform Your Life and the international bestseller Second Sight.

Simon Sinek was one of the keynote speakers I was most interested to see at HRPA’s 2011 Annual Conference and Trade Show, Canada’s conference and trade show focusing on HR issues and trends — and he didn’t disappoint. Sinek has a way of getting people’s attention when he enters a room — and I can attest to the many HRPA attendees (including myself) focusing intently on his words as he began his Start With Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action keynote on that still-early Thursday morning.

Don’t hire  people who need what you have, but who believe what you believe. This was one of the points driven home by Sinek over and over again. As he says, “people who don’t believe what you believe work for your money” — and their time with your company likely won’t last long. People who believe what you believe, however, will work for you with their blood, sweat and tears.

Sinek teaches leaders and companies how to inspire their people—by finding the purpose, cause or belief that drives them. I’d like to share some highlights from his keynote speech, but I recommend that you also watch his TED talk (below).

On Starting with “Why”

All the great and inspiring leaders and organizations in the world all think, act and communicate the exact same way, Sinek says — and it’s the complete opposite to everyone else.  All companies function on three levels: 1) What you do, 2) how you do it, and 3) why you do it. The problem, he says, is that most organizations don’t know “why” their organization exists. The “why” does not mean “to make money” — that, he says, is a result. The “why” is your purpose, your cause, or your belief. He calls this concept of what, how and why The Golden Circle. The Golden Circle theory explains why some organizations are able to inspire — and others aren’t. Innovative companies are not defined by what they do; they are defined by why they exist.

As Sinek pointed out, Steve Jobs is brilliant at giving context and talking about why Apple’s products matter. Inspiring companies work from the inside out — the “why” drives them. Rationally speaking, he says, Macs aren’t better, but people will defend the brand and culture to the death because Apple inspires people through the way they talk about their company. Lehman Brothers , on the other hand, was very good at what they did, but there was no sense of community and trust, and that made all the difference.

On how we hire

On the importance of the HR profession Sinek says, “If you don’t understand people, you don’t understand business.” Why do we care more about someone’s resume and about how much money they’ve made for our competitor, Sinek asks, than in what they believe? How do you know a candidate is not passionate about interviewing but about working for you?

On engaging employees

During his talk, Sinek asked how many of us loved our job. Ninety percent of people don’t, he said. Ninety percent! Now imagine how many of your employees that equates to. Although it may seem like common sense, it’s important to remember that people who come to work excited about their jobs do better work, and as Sinek points out, it’s cyclical: Happier employees will treat their kids and spouses better, and then their kids and spouses will be happier, and they will come to work the next day happier and treat their colleagues and customers better.

How can you help employees love what they do a little more?

On roaming the halls

Are your executives roaming the halls to talk to employees? If they aren’t, Sinek said, they can’t hear or see the impact of their decisions. And even if it’s not a “physical” walking of the hallway, are your leaders out there in the online world, listening to what employees want? Are they reaching out to employees and asking what matters to them? We’re detached from the impact of our decisions; we use polls and hire outside companies to find out what employees think — instead of simply asking them.

Sinek used the example of Stanley Milgrim’s shock experiment from the 1960s to illustrate the danger of people being separated from seeing the impact of their decisions. If leaders can’t see or hear how their decisions are impacting their employees, how many of them will stop themselves from making decisions that negatively affect or hurt those employees before it’s too late (or know that they are hurting employees in the first place)?

On being a great place to work

• Take great people and help them to do extraordinary things.
• Hire those who believe what you believe and wake up every single day and compete against yourselves.
• Worry about doing what you do better and how to do it better next week, and next month, and something remarkable will happen.
• Stating what do you in company vision statements = who cares? Sinek says your company vision statement should be about why you do what you do; it should be about what you believe.

Fortune’s best companies to work for aren’t doing anything differently, Sinek says — they make the list because people WANT to be there. To lead means you have to have followers, a follower is someone who volunteers to go where you’re going. Somebody who chooses to be a part of whatever is it you’re building — not because they have to but because they want to. Employees want to surround themselves with the people and products and brands that prove to the outside world who they believe they are.

Do your employees want to go where you’re going?

Coca-Cola doesn’t do it. Neither does McDonald’s, for that matter. Or AT&T. In fact, none of today’s most recognizable – and successful – brands wait until their sales are down to increase their marketing efforts. They know that the key to creating long-term customer loyalty – through good times and not-so-good times – is staying top-of-mind with consumers and standing out among the competition.

This concept is no different from recruiting.

Smart companies do not wait until they have a need to hire to begin recruiting talent. For them, building a talent pipeline – a database of qualified candidates upon whom they can quickly and easily call upon when hiring needs do arise – is a constant, high priority effort.

Today, human resources departments and staffing organizations are faced with the unenviable challenge to deliver high quality candidates with fewer resources at their fingertips to assist them.  The need to “do more with less” has become today’s business mantra.

Fortunately, talent pipelining provides the perfect opportunity for companies that want to get more return out of their recruitment efforts using the fewest resources. Talent pipelining is a more proactive approach to recruiting, requiring companies to think about their future hiring needs and create a plan to recruit candidates based on those needs.

While the time and effort required up front may seem daunting, building a talent pipeline pays off huge dividends in the end, ultimately saving you time and costs associated with time-to-hire. Consider, for instance, how much time you would save if, instead of starting from scratch any time a position opens up, you already have a pool of relevant, qualified candidates from which to pull. Or – and perhaps more importantly - consider the hiring mistakes you could avoid by eliminating the pressure to make a hasty hiring decision.

Unfortunately, most companies either do not have a talent pipelining system in place or, for lack of time and resources, fail to utilize their current systems in a way that delivers the most benefit.  Below, I’ve outlined four steps for creating a talent pipelining system that will truly help you do more with less.

Four Steps to Creating an Effective Talent Pipeline

1. Make the commitment: Creating an effective talent pipeline begins with making a commitment. Employers need to get buy-in from everyone involved in the hiring process. It’s important that everyone sees the value in being proactive and cultivating relationships with candidates that could be valuable in the future.
2. Assess your current process: It is crucial that you objectively evaluate what about your current process is working and what is not, in order to ensure you are getting the most value. This is where data intelligence comes in.  Data intelligence, such as talent surveys, provide valuable insight into all kinds of candidate behavior, from how they search for jobs to what they value in an employer to what motivates them to apply –or not apply – for certain jobs over others. This intelligence informs employers as to where to allocate their recruitment dollars most effectively.
3. Practice constant engagement: It is not enough to simply collect resumes and connect with candidates, but you must keep them engaged. With the rise of social media, the opportunities for engagement are limitless. For example, post content such as photos and video on your company’s career site or social networking pages that keeps them informed about the culture of your company, and encourage them to ask questions about the same. Or provide links that let them opt-in to receive information about upcoming career fairs or available opportunities that arise via e-mail. And don’t forget to recruit your current employees to refer candidates and act as brand ambassadors. Whatever means you use, the goal here is to keep candidates interested, informed and excited about opportunities with your company.
4. Create a measurement system: The only way you’ll know for sure if your pipelining system is working is by constantly measuring your results. Some questions to consider: How often do candidates apply to our opportunities? How many candidates turn into successful hires? Where did these candidates come from? Understanding where your talent is coming from will help you focus your recruiting efforts and build the most effective talent pipeline.

In a recent CareerBuilder survey, employers named finding the right talent to fill open positions as one of the greatest hiring challenges they face today. As the economy recovers, the job market opens up, and hiring needs increase, this challenge will only grow. The time to start building your talent pipeline is now. Waiting until you have a hiring need is simply waiting too long.

Hope Gurion is the Chief Development Officer at CareerBuilder, LLC. She is in charge of identifying and growing new business ventures for the company.

Join CareerBuilder’s Chief Development Officer Hope Gurion and Senior Vice President John Smith on Tuesday, April 26 at 1 p.m. EDT for Your Company in 2020: Capturing Talent to Fuel Future Growth, an exclusive webcast about adapting to the ever-changing recruitment landscape. Click here for more information or to register.

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.

Behavioral interviewing, for those not familiar, is a method of questioning that requires the respondent to answer with a story of how they handled a specific circumstance. It’s designed to get the candidate to reveal how they responded to a real life work situation so we can understand how they might respond to a similar situation if they were hired.

What are the inherent pros to this interview style?

1. We get real-life examples to help us assess how someone will perform in the future. I love behavioral interviews —I never tire of hearing the stories people tell and what they did or didn’t do to solve a problem. There is always something we can learn from what a candidate states or doesn’t state in an interview answer.
2. We can get into deeper detail than other interview questions. With a couple of probing questions beyond an initial response, you can reveal some important details about a candidate that may not come out in other interview formats. For example, you can get specific details about a candidate’s real contribution to a project, or find out how they dealt with an unpredictable circumstance.
3. The focus storytelling enables almost all candidates to interview more effectively.   Let’s face it: Interviewing is scary for most people. Some people will always be better storytellers than others, but it’s in every human’s DNA to be able to convey a story. Even candidates who are naturally shy or introverted —tendencies that inhibit their ability to sell themselves — can come alive when you ask them a behavioral interview-style question. It is much more comfortable and easy for a candidate to tell you a story than respond to a firing squad of questions.

Behavioral interviewing isn’t a perfect method, however — it has weaknesses which often become all too apparent when it comes to the actual asking of the questions.

Consider the following to keep your behavioral interviews on track:

1. Questions must be designed with behavior in mind. Behavioral interviewing is certainly the best predictor of future behavior, but if we don’t design the questions correctly, the information we receive may not enable better decision making. Even if you think your behavioral questions are designed perfectly, consider whether they will elicit the behavior you are seeking to measure.
2. Don’t ask leading questions. If you tell the candidate what you are trying to discern before you ask the actual question, it’s like giving them the answer on a test. For example, making a statement like, “Team work is very important here” before you ask a question about a candidate’s work experience on a group project is a bit leading. They already know what you are assessing.  Try to stick to questions without leading with qualifying statements.
3. The interviewer must still control the interview. Asking this level of open-ended questions (questions that require a thoughtful answer beyond a simple yes or no) can send you “down a rabbit hole” in many situations. Candidates are nervous in interview situations and have a tendency to ramble on or focus on details that are not relevant to the information you are seeking. You must be able to re-focus the discussion and stay on track.
4. The storytelling technique is another excellent way for an interviewer to relay information to a candidate. Candidates, like anyone else, have a tendency to hear what they want to hear as opposed to what you intend them to hear. If you want to make a point they will remember, consider telling anecdotal stories that will help a candidate truly understand what the position is about and what kinds of results you are looking for.

All in all, behavioral interviews are still one of the greatest leaps forward in the history of recruitment, but that doesn’t eliminate the responsibilities that come along with conducting this type of interview. When using behavioral interviewing techniques, be direct and upfront to ensure a quality interview.

What challenges have you found with behavioral interviewing – and how have you addressed them?

Jennifer Way is a human capital management consultant with more than fifteen years of global recruiting experience. She specializes in serving high volume recruiting environments with innovative solutions that address three areas: executive/strategic recruiting, recruiting process, and recruiting technologies.

How many alarm clocks would it take to demonstrate the number of times your employees have been late to work — or that you’ve been late yourself? Is it commonplace — or out of place — at your workplace?

A new CareerBuilder survey on worker lateness shows that 15 percent of workers are late to work at least once a week, though that number is down from 16 percent in 2009 and 20 percent in 2008. It appears the recession has been a likely cause of the downward trend in lateness — though it hasn’t made it disappear altogether.

For the most part, surveyed workers shared a variety of “standard” reasons for being tardy:

• Thirty percent said they were delayed by traffic.
• Nineteen percent said they were late because of a lack of sleep.
• Nine percent blamed bad weather for their tardiness.
• Eight percent said there was a delay in getting their kids to daycare or school.
• Other common reasons included public transportation, wardrobe issues or dealing with pets.

Other workers, however, offered more creative excuses for being late to work — here are the best of the best (er, worst of the worst?):

• Read between the (facial) lines  | “My Botox appointment took longer than I expected.”
• Feline fury  | “My cat attacked me.”
• The Keanu Reeves Defense  | “I was delayed due to public transportation (employee produced a note signed by “The Bus Driver”).
• No breakfast in bed that morning |  “I didn’t get any sleep because my boyfriend’s wife threw me out of the house.
• Channeling Nicolas Cage  | “My car was inhabited by a hive of bees and I couldn’t use the car for two hours until bees left.”
• D’oh Nuts | “I knew I was already going to be late, so I figured I’d go ahead and stop to get donuts for everyone.”
• “Ready to pull a Britney  | “My hair was hurting my head.”
• Karma Policing  | “My Karma is not in sync today.”
• It’s not me, it’s you  | “I’m not late — the company clock is wrong.”

What’s your attendance style?

Although the excuses above are “outrageous,” that doesn’t necessarily mean they’re not true. Either way, 1) tardiness issues appear to be on a downswing, and 2) most bosses understand that life sometimes gets in the way of work — though 32 percent of employers surveyed said they have terminated an employee for being late. Are you one of those bosses?

As Rosemary Haefner, vice president of human resources for CareerBuilder, says:

“Whether it is a result of fear associated with the economy or just a shift in attitude, workers over the last few years are doing a better job of managing their schedules and getting into the office at the designated time. While workers will sometimes be late due to circumstances out of their control, they need to be aware of their companies’ tardiness policies. Regardless of the reason, workers who are running late should always be honest with their managers.”

Communication counts

I would also turn that around and stress that as a boss, you should be open and communicative about policies and preferences for work tardiness.

• Let your employees know what your expectations are in the case that they are running late to work. Open lines of communication will mean more respect from your employees — and fewer headaches for you. And chances are, if you trust and respect your employees, they will return the favor.
• Make sure employee handbooks and guidelines are readily available to employees — and offer to answer any uncertainties or get employees in touch with the person who is able to answer their questions if you can’t.
• Give your employees the benefit of the doubt – they may be stuck with an ornery puppy, exhausted from being up all night with a screaming child, or going through a rough personal time. While these reasons don’t mean you need to give them free reign to do whatever they want, listening to your employees and trying to compromise a plan that will better fit their lifestyle while still satisfying your business requirements is a win-win in the long run: Better work/life balance = happier employees = better business.

What are the most unbelievable late-to-work excuses you’ve heard from your employees — or that you’ve used yourself? Do you think lateness really matters, as long as employees get the work done, and done well?

Every job seeker should be prepared to answer some tough questions. It’s the part of the interview process that makes job seekers the most nervous. If, however, you calm your nerves by preparing to answer the tough questions ahead of time, you may sail right through the interview.

Dave Fogg, associate director of career services for DeVry University, says, “Be calm and relaxed. Stop and think before you answer the question.” He says that many candidates “don’t know what the hiring manager is looking for. They’ve not thought that far ahead and they are just not prepared for general HR questions. Tell me about yourself … don’t give me a bio.” In order to be prepared, he advises, “Meet with a career advisor and have them do a mock interview. You’re not trying to be perfect in the mock interview, you’re trying to reach perfection for the interview — but we know no one is perfect.”

Start by anticipating basic questions the interviewer is going to ask, and prepare solid answers. This will give you confidence in the interview, and confidence is very attractive to hiring managers. Here are a few basic questions to think about:

1. Tell me a little about yourself. This is not the moment to recall your life history, nor is it the moment to ramble on. Prepare a focused, two- to three-sentence statement about what makes you the best candidate for this job.

Example: “I graduated from [insert college here] with a degree in [insert major here]. Since that time, I’ve been working as a [insert career here] where I have done [insert key accomplishments here]. I’m looking forward to [insert future goals here] and I feel this position would be a great step in that direction.”

2. What are you looking for in your next position? Design your answer to reflect the position for which you are being interviewed. Be genuine, but highlight what you find most attractive about this role and how it fits into your overall career goals.

3. Why are you interested in this position? This is a great opportunity to talk about why you are a match for the position. Use examples from your job history and tie those to the value you would be able to offer if you served in this role.

4. Why did you leave each of your previous positions? Be honest, but remain positive and succinct in your answer. Hiring managers want to understand a job seeker’s career decisions and motivations. The job history should make sense, otherwise there is room to interpret it as a red flag and potential problem.

5. What is your greatest weakness? Job seekers who answer this appropriately can make a positive impression by taking responsibility and explaining their commitment to improve. Select a weakness that allows you to demonstrate what you’ve done to address it. Use a past, present and future statement to explain it.

Example: “In the past, I used to have a problem with time management, so I asked my supervisor how I should be prioritizing my work and took a class to learn how to use my calendar and task lists more effectively. Since then, my time management skills have improved and I’m confident they will continue to do so. For example. …”

Here are five additional strategies that successful job seekers use to prepare for tough interview questions:

1. Before they begin interviewing, they analyze their résumé and job history to identify areas that will be difficult for them to explain. They take the time to develop strong, succinct answers to address each issue so they can be confident in the interview.

2. They know how to use past, present and future statements. They take responsibility for any past mistakes, emphasize what they learned, and state what they should have done or how they would handle things differently now.

3. They remain calm and focus on appearing confident. Rambling answers distract from a job seeker’s achievements and give the impression of nervousness. Speak with a low tone at a measured pace.

4. They are positive and professional. They stay away from comments that blame others, sound defensive or could be perceived as negative. Hiring managers are looking for people who are mature enough to take responsibility for their actions.

5. Their answers incorporate positive examples from their work history. They know that interviewers are more convinced by brief, relevant stories that demonstrate skills, as opposed to someone simply “telling” them they can do the job.Keep these tips in mind and your performance in an interview will stand out over your competition.

Becoming comfortable with your ability to answer tough questions is half the battle. Confident candidates get hired. Employers aren’t looking for perfection. If you effectively convey confidence in your skills and experience during your interview, they will be confident in you.

If you’re asking author, advertising CEO and performance coach Nigel Marsh, the answer would be an enthusiastic (and Aussie-accented) “No.” In Marsh’s TED talk (you can watch the video at bottom of this post), in which he shares his thoughts on work/life balance and asks the oft-raised question, “What does a life well-lived look like?”, he argues that it’s not up to corporations or outside interests to determine employees’ work/life balance — it’s up to the employees themselves.

Work/life balance (or whatever phrase you want to use to refer to the idea) is often on the minds of employers and employees alike, and it’s an idea that continues to evolve as technology seeps into more and more aspects of our existence and workplace/personal lines are getting even blurrier. Marsh tells the story of his own transformation from a “classic corporate warrior” who was eating, drinking, and working too much and neglecting his family, to someone who turned 40 and decided to turn his life around and spend a year at home with his family — to a man who has, for the seven years since, spent his time struggling with studying and writing about striking a balance between “work” and “life.”

Marsh’s observations during the last seven years have led him to make four observations about work/life balance:

1) If society is to make any progress on this issue, we need an honest debate. The problem, Marsh says, is that all of the discussions about work/life balance involve people complaining about the phrase itself. He also argues that discussions around perks like flex time and dress down Fridays only serve to mask the core issue: That certain career choices are fundamentally incompatible with being meaningfully engaged on a day-to-day basis with a young family. According to him, we need to start acknowledging the core issues and thinking about the issue on another level if we really want to see change.

2) We must be responsible for setting and enforcing the boundaries that we want in our lives. We have to take responsibility for the type of lives we want to lead, Marsh argues — not rely on others to do so. In his words, “If you don’t design your own life, someone might design it for you — and you might not like their idea of balance.” Translation for employers: it’s the job of your employees (and, in your own career, yours) to decide the boundaries needed to make work and personal lives work in harmony — and that formula is going to be different for everyone.

3) We have to be careful (read: realistic) with the time frame upon which we choose to judge the balance in our life. We need to elongate balance, Marsh says, without falling into the trap of, “I’ll have a life when I retire” – or of “I’ll do everything in a day.” It’s not realistic — we must find the middle road, Marsh says. We can’t necessarily achieve everything we want to in a day, but at the same time, we can’t wait until our personal lives have fallen apart because of work to find that perfect balance. And speaking of finding that perfect balance…

4) We need to approach balance in a balanced way. We must attend to various aspects of our lives, including the intellectual, emotional and physical. And the great thing is, Marsh points out, it doesn’t always take a major overhaul to strike more of a balance in our lives — small changes can radically transform the quality of our relationships and of our lives.

Which, Marsh hopes, will bring us to a more thoughtful, balanced definition of what a life well-lived looks like.

I want to know — what are your thoughts as an employer? Do you feel responsible for your employees’ work/life balance, and do you think you have the power to make changes in the workplace that will translate to powerful and lasting changes in their sense of balance? Or do you agree with Marsh — that it’s not the job of an employer to be concerned with an employee’s work/life balance, or that, even if it is, there are no changes you can make to workplace rules and perks that will carry enough weight?

Is work/life balance about changing the structure and fluidity of the workplace to more effectively fit into our personal lives, or more about finding ways to increase our dedication to our personal lives so that they work within our given workplace structures?

Is it really up to an employee to find his or her own way (home)?

Watch Nigel Marsh’s TED talk on work/life balance here:

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).

Missing out on the opportunity to catch up on the always-entertaining-for-one-reason-or-another The View, 72 percent of workers go to work when they are sick, according to a new survey released today by CareerBuilder.  Evidently, “presenteeism” and workplace pressures outweigh the desire to see the ridiculous charming banter between Elisabeth Hasselbeck and Whoopi Goldberg, as more than half of those workers (55 percent) say they feel guilty if they call in sick.

(Side note: I can’t help but notice that this 72 percent overlaps slightly with the 29 percent of workers who admitted they have faked an excuse to call in sick in a previous CareerBuilder survey. I’d love to get a peek inside the minds of those who show no remorse at calling in sick when they aren’t, but just don’t feel right about it when they are.)  

While I understand feeling too guilty to take a sick day, is there no shame when it comes to putting your co-workers at risk of getting sick? (Did anyone else not see Outbreak?!) More than half of workers surveyed (53 percent) said they have gotten sick from a co-worker who came to the office sick.

According to Rosemary Haefner, vice president of human resources at CareerBuilder, it’s important for employees to stay home if they aren’t feeling well – for the sake of their health and everyone else’s.  It’s also in managers’ best interest to promote the health of their employees in order to maintain productivity. 

Haefner offers the following tips managers can use to promote a healthy – and productive – workplace: 

• Insist that sick employees go or stay home. If they absolutely must come into the office, let them work in a conference room or away from others so they don’t spread their sickness.
• If you think your employees might be hesitant to take sick days, talk to them – or have HR talk to them – about how their sick days can be used.  Offer to let them telecommute, delegate or call-in if necessary. Do whatever you can to ensure they take care of themselves, get healthy and get back to work as soon as possible.
• Provide healthy resources. Make sure hand sanitizers, hand soap, paper towels, tissues and other cleaning supplies are readily available for employees to use.
• Develop company telecommuting policies – or, if necessary, adjust existing ones –and determine standards for allowing employees to telecommute during this time to reduce the potential for spreading germs.

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.

This post originally appeared on Snelling Staff Services’ Hire Education Blog, an up-to-date hiring resource for employers and job seekers.

Your Clients and Candidates: Closer than You May Realize

It might seem strange to those in the staffing industry to directly compare their candidates to their clients, as many staffing firms view the recruiting and business development functions areas as two distinct entities that don’t impact one another.  Your candidates, however, are much more linked to your clients than you may realize. They are even, in many situations, one and the same: New research released in CareerBuilder and Inavero’s 2010 Opportunities in Staffing Guide reveals that 46 percent of staffing firm clients have also worked with a staffing firm as a job candidate.

If you have worked in the staffing industry for a long time, you’ve probably had the following experience: You have a great candidate (we’ll call him Joe), who is an IT professional focusing on Java. A few years ago, you placed Joe in a contract position with your client. You’ve kept in contact with Joe periodically over the years as he has accepted different positions across the country (like you do with all your great candidates).

One day, Joe e-mails you and says he’s now in the position to hire people himself and is looking for IT staffing help. I hear this story all the time, especially within the IT sector. It’s no surprise that 54 percent of IT clients surveyed in CareerBuilder and Inavero’s study said they once worked with a staffing firm as a job candidate.

What is the key factor in creating an environment that makes clients and candidates want to keep coming back to you? My suggestion is to first focus on delivering an exceptional candidate experience.  If you get this right, the referrals — from both candidates and clients — will come.

The Top Five Drivers for Job Seeker Loyalty and Referrals

The 2010 Opportunities in Staffing Guide identified the top five drivers for job seeker loyalty and referrals. Excel in the following areas and you will be well on your way to creating a unique experience for your candidates that will keep your company and personal brand top of mind:

1.Deliver great service. As you can see by the chart to the left, service was the number one driver for satisfaction with job candidates when working with a staffing firm. What processes do you have in place to ensure that you are providing the best experience and differentiating your firm from your competitors? How quickly does it take you to get back to people when they contact you? What “surprises” do you build into the process to go above and beyond? Think about ways you can make working with you more memorable.

2. Connect people with the best-fit jobs. There is a misconception that job seekers are not satisfied with staffing firms unless they receive a job.  Although attaining a position does drive satisfaction, it is not necessarily the first thing job seekers care about. Stay focused on the interactions candidates have with your staffing firm along the way to that placement. Candidates may very well alter their opinion of you (for better or for worse) as you work to make connections between them and your clients.

3. Be professional at all times. Not many people would argue the point that staffing professionals have a tough job. The stress of the position and volume of communication you receive can sometimes test your patience. Remaining professional at all times, however, is essential to creating a long-term referral network. You might speak to 25 people a day about their job search, but the job seeker on the other end may have only have spoken to you. Make that call memorable — in a good way.

4. Always be responsive in communication. There aren’t many things worse than never hearing back from someone. When someone is in a job search or unemployed, the stress of unresponsive communication is compounded. Job seekers are looking for progress, or at least a realistic view of their chances. Focus on setting proper expectations with your candidates and just say no when you cannot place them.  Hearing “no” is better than silence.

5. Promote your strong reputation. A strong reputation is based on the compiled experiences and interactions a person has had with you or your firm.  Technology makes it easier than ever to share these experiences.  Encourage candidates to share their experience through your referral network, Facebook page, or within review sites — these testimonials will help spread the word about you and your business successes.

Your candidate and client experiences are definitively linked. With the progress of social media and real-time communication, it is easier than ever for people to share both their good and bad experiences.  Focus on providing the best experiences possible for the job seekers you serve. Not only will this create more opportunities for candidate referrals in the short-term, but it will also position you as the “go-to” person when it comes to staffing when that candidate becomes a client.

Access a complimentary copy of CareerBuilder and Inavero’s 2010 Opportunities in Staffing Guide here.

Eric Gilpin is president of CareerBuilder’s Staffing & Recruiting Group. He has more than 10 years of experience in the staffing industry, and is responsible for developing sales teams and strategies to help clients meet their goals and promote the staffing industry overall. With people development and industry awareness as priorities, Gilpin is focused on technology, social media, and product design as key growth drivers for the staffing and recruiting industry.

This post originally appeared on TLNT, an HR blog about “The Business of HR,” with news, insight, and topical information from experts and thought leaders in HR, talent management, and all areas related to HR and managing a workforce.

Post a job, sift through the resumes and interview candidates. Signed, sealed, delivered – you’ve hired someone and they’re ready to work.

It’s hiring in its most basic form, but not so fast – what happens when that candidate doesn’t show up? Or doesn’t fit in with the team? The list of “what if’s” could go on and on.

Unfortunately, poor hires are a common business hazard. So much so, that according to CareerBuilder research, more than two-in-three companies said that a bad hire adversely affected their business in the last year.

The cost of bad hires
The cost of these bad hires is stunningly high as well; nearly one-in-four hiring managers said that one, just one, bad hire cost their business more than $50,000 in the last year, while four-in-10 said a bad hire cost them more than $25,000. With the recession slowly easing and companies beginning to add to strained staffs, losing valuable resources from the fallout of poor hiring choices is something that many organizations simply cannot afford.

One of the resources lost when a bad hire is made is time, plain and simple. Bad hires cost time as the company has to recruit and train another worker.

They’re also a major factor in turnover, which leads to lost time; According to the Harvard Business Review, 80 percent of turnover is caused by bad hiring decisions. In addition, poor hires can have a negative effect on employee morale, which can lead to lost productivity and more.

The CareerBuilder survey of more than 2,400 employers also found that of employers who made a bad hire, 36 percent said they think they made a mistake hiring someone because they needed to fill the job quickly. It makes sense that often when you need help, you need it as soon as you can get it. Hiring the wrong talent for a position, though, can leave you even further behind the second hand.

How to keep hiring on track
With the seriousness for hiring the right candidates so clear, especially as companies finalize recruitment budgets for 2011, many are taking strides to avoid hiring someone who isn’t a good fit. How can you stay on track next year?

Continue reading on TLNT.com

Brent Rasmussen is president of CareerBuilder North America, and in his role, he heads the day-to-day operations of the North American division. An accomplished strategist and industry veteran, Rasmussen drives the innovation, expansion and ongoing revenue growth of CareerBuilder.com the U.S.’s largest online job site, and CareerBuilder Canada. Prior to joining CareerBuilder, Rasmussen served as manager of Business Services for Xerox Corporation.

Note: This post is the last of a three-part series on re-engaging your employees. Click here to read part one: Want to Re-Engage Your Employees? Do This First…or here to read part two: 7 Ways to Inspire Your Employees

If you feel like you’ve been hearing a lot about employee engagement lately, it’s probably not your imagination…

From the recent Towers Watson survey that shows that only 21 percent of workers feel “highly engaged” in their work, to the Hewitt Associates study that shows that employee engagement and morale have declined more in 2010 than in at least the past 15 years - not to mention Corporate Executive Board’s recent finding that a mere 23 percent of employees indicated a high level of “intent to stay” with their current companies this year – employee engagement is basically the ‘HMU’ among talent management experts.

And it’s no wonder, either: It’s not unusual for businesses to see high staff turnover rates following periods of economic depression, so now is the time for employers to focus on ways to retain their top talent.

In my earlier posts from this series, I discussed the first two of workplace management expert Holly Green’s three steps to re-engaging your employees: informing and inspiring. Finally, we’ve gotten to the third part: engaging your employees. Among the benefits of having engaged employees are higher rates of productivity and lower (costly) turnover rates. Plus, they’re way more fun to be around.

Step 3 – Engaging Your Employees

To keep employees engaged, Green shares the following 7 tips to use as a guideline:

1. Answer the question, “Why will we still win?” Once again, consider what winning looks like for your team, and think about how you will achieve that even in the face of adversity or setbacks.
2. Get great at giving feedback.
3. Get great at giving feedback…on a regular basis. Visit with employees throughout the year to check on their progress. Make sure all individual goals remain aligned with company goals.
4. Show and tell. Share stories of how teams are aligned and achieving goals. Highlight team accomplishments and link them to the strategy they support.
5. Write it down and put it up. Create an employee pledge wall or flip chart where people can affirm their commitment by listing one thing they will do differently to support the goals.
6. Get great at getting feedback. To measure employee understanding, commitment, inspiration and engagement, take quick surveys following team or company meetings.
7. Go public. Solicit questions via email or intranet and address them in open forums. Publicly thank employees for raising the issues.

As you go through this list, remember that your actions speak to your employees much louder than your words do. So you can talk about winning all you want, but if your own actions don’t reflect that you don’t care about the goals of the company yourself – your employees will not only notice, but walk away with the message that they shouldn’t have to care, either. “The more your behavior is in alignment with what you are saying,” she says, “the more you will inform, inspire and engage your employees.”

You might call Heidi Grant Halvorson the Patti Stanger of success.  After all, there are a few striking similarities between the author of  SUCCEED: How We Can Reach Our Goals and TV’s “Millionaire Matchmaker.”  Much like how Stanger has made a career out of helping people who are struggling to find love, Halvorson specializes in helping people achieve that other seemingly elusive goal: success.  Even Stanger’s own theory on love (“Everyone wants it, but not everyone finds it.”) could be applied to success.

But that’s where the similarities end.  Where Stanger’s expertise is limited to matters of the heart, Halvorson, a motivational psychologist, applies her years of experience and research to helping people achieving success in virtually every area of their lives.

And while Halvorson may not have her own reality show on Bravo (…yet), she is spreading her expertise to the masses another way: With the release of SUCCEED, in which she outlines practical strategies people can utilize to help themselves achieve success.  Success, Halvorson says, is surprisingly easy to come by. It’s simply a matter of understanding the habits that help us in – and, in some cases, inhibit us from – reaching our goals and creating a plan to keep ourselves accountable.

“People can’t always explain why they are successful”
“People are surprisingly bad at understanding their own behavior,” Halvorson told me in a recent phone interview to discuss the book. This lack of understanding creates a problem with much of the motivational advice that is out there today: People who write these books base their advice on theories or beliefs about what makes them successful that, in reality, aren’t necessarily right. “Even if they are right, they can’t always tell you how to do the same.” Not to mention that what works for one person won’t necessarily work for someone else.

Unlike so many other motivational books, which are based on anecdotes and personal experiences, Halvorson, who holds a doctorate in the field of psychology, based the advice in SUCCEED on years of scientific research on the specific behaviors that contribute to success. She says she wanted to write a book that explained, succinctly and “in plain English,” how years of scientific research prove the behaviors that lead to success. “The scientific approach allows you to have confidence in this advice in a way that we don’t have with other people’s experiences.”

“’Not having the time’ to reach a goal is almost never literally true.”
The reasons people fail to meet their goals, Halvorson says, aren’t always what they think they are. For instance, people tend to blame their inability to reach a goal on some inherent inability, such as too little willpower. Abilities like willpower, however, aren’t fixed things. In fact, they’re much like muscles in the sense that they simply need to be exercised in order to grow and gain strength.

In actuality, one of the main reasons people fail to meet their goals is that they don’t take time to figure out exactly which steps they’re going to take to reach those goals. For instance, simply giving yourself the goal to include your employees in more decision-making is not enough to motivate you to act on that goal. You need to specify things like which decisions you’re going to include them in and what role they will play in those decisions.

“When we leave goals in the abstract, without getting specific about the behaviors – down to the level of ‘this is the thing I’m going to do, specifically’ – we don’t reach the goals. Your brain requires that you take that extra step of really putting it into action.”

The second thing that keeps people from reaching their goals is that they let opportunities to act on those goals slip away. “I hear from people all the time say, ‘I didn’t have time.’ But that’s almost never literally true.” The problem is that it’s far too easy to miss the many opportunities throughout the day to reach those goals.  One of the main focuses of the book is how people can apply scientifically-proven strategies for overcoming these obstacles and find the strategy that works for them.

“There’s almost nothing there isn’t a solution for”
If there’s one thing Halvorson wants readers to take away from her book, it’s that there’s almost no goal a person can set for him- or herself that can’t be reached.  No matter the obstacles, Halvorson says, there are proven strategies – surprisingly simple strategies, at that – that anyone can find and implement to overcome them.  “If there’s a goal you’ve been trying to reach – at work, in your personal life, wherever it is – that’s been giving you trouble, you can do something about it.” If this message sounds too good to be true to some readers, Halvorson says to simply look at the research.

“There’s a science to this…It’s really about finding the information about what’s going to work for you and solve your problem,” Halvorson says, adding, “The overall message of the book is optimistic because the science suggests that you should be optimistic.” 

Heidi Grant Halvorson is a motivational psychologist and the author of SUCCEED: How We Can Reach Our Goals which will be published December 23. Stay tuned for the second part of this interview, in which Halvorson discusses tips for engaging employees and managing a diverse workforce.

I’ve been reading more and more articles lately about company executives and key leadership figures making a greater effort to reach out to employees in light of an improving economy — largely because of their hidden fears of employees leaving for greener pastures now coming to life. While it’s worth applauding the effort of a company’s leaders to engage employees and actually spend more time getting to know them and their concerns, the underlying motivation of some is a bit concerning. After all, your employees don’t want to feel like a commodity that’s only valuable in certain economic conditions — and they shouldn’t be made to feel that way.

One anecdote that stood out to me was from a Wall Street Journal article back in April that mentioned executives being asked to “increase the efforts” to talk with workers, as the economy turning around brought more of a risk of losing people.

Ouch.

Now don’t get me wrong — it’s better that these executives are being asked (or deciding on their own) to interact with workers now, rather than not at all.  And positives are coming out of the efforts; one company mentioned in the WSJ article, for instance, increased pay raises in July rather than September, as a result of the CEO interacting with workers and listening to their compensation woes. That’s great — but engaging with employees isn’t a retention tool to turn off and on when it’s convenient for a business; it’s a full-time job. Of course there will be times that leaders need to invest their efforts in other things, but the needs and well-being of employees should never be far out of mind.

Because while there is truth to the idea that many workers plan to leave their jobs as the economy turns around, think of how many of the employees currently plotting their escape from a company could be satisfied and happy if leaders had started consistently engaging them from the moment they walked in the door.

Hey, we can’t go back in time, but we can learn from the past — and hopefully, some leaders are realizing the errors of their ways. Despite shaky motives, the recession may still have taught (and be teaching) businesses that listening to their employees and taking the time to talk with and get to know them better is a positive move for everyone involved. And if the recession has moved some employers to make a bigger effort, well, maybe the end results of that increased interaction will make them realize it needs to be a permanent, genuine shift — not just a “strategy” worked into the “recession recovery plan.”

If your company has been slacking on engaging your employees, there are things you can do to breathe some life into your employees and make them excited to come to work again. Check out Mary’s post about keeping your employees informed, then read about seven ways to inspire them, to help you start thinking in the mindset of engagement and what that really means to employees. And remember that, while some employees may already be spending their free time making collages with their future employer’s company brochures, there are things you can do to revive and reengage other employees who are still willing to give you a chance to make things right.

A Robert Half Management Resources survey showed that 11 percent of employers have learned nothing from the recession — which, as the author notes, is worrisome for 100 percent of their employees. But that also gives us hope for the 89 percent who have learned a thing or two (or 10).

What the biggest lesson the recession has taught you or your company?

So here’s the bad news: your employees are feeling a little burned out these days. But here’s the good better other news: it’s not just your employees.  A recent study by international HR consulting firm TowersWatson shows that fewer than 21 percent of employees surveyed described themselves as “highly engaged” at work, down from 31 percentin 2009. Nearly one-tenth of workers indicated that they were fully disengaged.

The increased lack of engagement comes as no surprise to workplace management expert Holly Green, who recently spoke with me over the phone about how managers can work to re-engage employees. Even managers, Green says, are feeling a little burned out right now, thanks to the extra hours and workloads everyone has had to take on as an effect of the recession.  But before trying to re-engage employees, Green says, managers must take two important steps managers first: inform their employees, and then inspire them.  

Green, who is the author of More Than a Minute: How to Be an Effective Leader and Manager in Today’s Changing World, was kind enough to share some of the ways she helps managers inform, inspire and then engage their employees in today’s workplace.  In the first of a three-part series, below is a checklist for the first part… 

Step One: Inform  – 7 Key Topics
The first key step to engaging employees is to keep them informed. That is, make sure your employees are clear on their goals and the goals of the company. You want to align your employees and get their buy-in, so this step involves taking a moment to consider these goals. Start by discussing with them the following areas: 

1. Mission – Why does your company/team/role exist?
2. Guiding principles – How will you behave?
3. Value proposition – What do you offer key stakeholders?
4. Destination – Where is your company going?
5. Strategic priorities – What are the areas of focus for the organization?
6. Key initiatives – What will you do to get there?
7. Impact – What difference do these efforts make to the individual? The job? The team?

7 Key Questions to Ask Yourself
As you go through the process of informing your employees, keep yourself on track by asking yourself the following questions:

1. Have I provided clarity recently on these six areas?
2. What have I learned in the past 30 days that others on my team may not know?
3. Has something changed?
4. Did I use multiple channels and speak to multiple preferences?
5. Did I keep things positive while discussing the future?
6. What can I do to create ongoing management routines to keep team members informed?
7.  Who can help hold me accountable to do this?

Finally, take a moment to outline the actions you will take to ensure you keep your employees informed on each of these points. Once you’ve clarified your employees’ mission and goals – and how they play into the larger picture, then you’re ready to inspire them.  Check back in to The Hiring Site for part II of this series: how to inspire your employees.

I recently attended a brunch linner lunch seminar hosted by the Business Marketing Association of Chicago which featured the findings of a study called Talent 3.0:  Solving the Digital Leadership Challenge — A Global Perspective. This seminar was particularly interesting to me, because while it’s common to hear about the importance of employees learning about new technologies to stay relevant in a changing workplace, it’s not as common to hear about how the efforts to do so are actually playing out in the real world. The clashes of technologically adept employees versus those who are having a difficult time embracing new technologies are real, and it’s vital that we talk about them now in order to figure out how to move forward.

So, Digital Walks Into a Workplace…

With more and more consumers and clients embracing new technologies, companies across the board are investing more in all things digital — including their platforms, media and employees. And this is great, right? After all, employees adapt to changes in the workplace all the time: that water cooler with 10 confusing options, the new guy who sings Scorpion tunes in his cubicle, the announcement about the new office and the new (huge) commute. So why should adapting to technology be any different?

Technology in the workplace isn’t just a change to adapt to — but a  potential ticking time bomb for many employees. While we all might not enjoy Scorpion tunes, we can easily ask said employee to stop singing them (or don our trusty headphones). We can’t, however, just ask technology to stop affecting the way we work. It’s making its way into more and more aspects of the workplace, it affects the way people do their jobs, and it complicates the already complicated blend of different generations trying to work together as a team. It also puts a spotlight on the fact that some employees are digitally savvy — and some aren’t. Some are willing to learn, and some are fighting it. Some have a wealth of experience in addition to stellar business skills, while others can work their way around digital media in their sleep. How can we all work together to achieve a common goal while juggling our differences in digital expertise?

A Multi-Generational Workplace Meets Technology

As Forrester Research found, the technology generation gap is widening, largely due to Gen X and Gen Y’s rapid integration of mobile and social behaviors. In almost every online behavior, Gen Y leads the adoption curve. Gen X isn’t far behind of Gen Y in terms of adoption rates, though they specialize in maximizing the functional benefits of technology. Both Gen X and Gen Y outpace baby boomers and mature workers in almost everything technology-related.

This can complicate a workplace situation in which many different generations are working together to reach the same goals. Workplaces are more multi-generational than ever, with Gen Y, Gen X, baby boomers, and mature workers all working under the same roof and struggling to make themselves heard. When it comes to technology, many younger workers don’t think their older counterparts can keep up with them, while many older workers think their younger co-workers lack the experience and work ethic they themselves have.

Organizations, meanwhile, are looking for their leaders who possess classic business management and leadership capabilities  to lead the business through cultural and structural shifts — but at the same time, they need to develop future leaders who will have the ability to operate in technology-driven environments. Add to this the need to bring in new employees who already have digital capabilities, and organizations can have a real challenge on their hands.

Real-Life Workplace Troubles

We’re already seeing these complications in real workplace situations. Recently, William K. Marimow, a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner and editor of The Philadelphia Inquirer, was demoted to a reporter position; he was told by the company’s new management that despite Marimow’s national reputation as an outstanding print journalist, he didn’t have the background in digital media necessary to continue to lead the paper.

Some companies, however, are wading through these changes more successfully. The authors of the Talent 3.0 study have created 10 suggestions to help organizations successfully build a digital  workplace and thrive in a digital world.  Below, I’ve touched on each of them:

1. Build a comprehensive digital strategy that is shared broadly and repeatedly across the organization.
As the authors say, “You will never reach your destination if you do not know where you are going, how you are getting there and who is on the bus.” A well-articulated strategy that supports the core strategic drivers of your business will help your organization identify and prioritize new business opportunities and anticipate emerging competitive threats. Make sure everyone’s on board — including the CEO and senior execs.

2. Embed digital literacy across the organization.
They’re not just talking marketing campaigns and flashy e-mails to employees, but about internal communications to employee groups and external communications to vendors, suppliers and shareholders. It’s about doing product and market research and initiating multi-regional, 24/7 real-time collaboration. Your organization needs to work to seamlessly integrate your chosen technologies across most all of your business activities and processes.

3. Renew focus on business fundamentals.
Technology and rapid innovation means competition coming at your organization from all sides, at any time. Technology also brings a demand for more transparency to your products and services, and it’s important to continue to focus on the quality of those. The best digital strategy won’t succeed if you suffer in other areas of your business.

4. Embrace the new rules of customer engagement.
Customers are now in control more than ever before, with multitudes of research at their fingertips. Marketing today is less about pushing your brand messages and more about brand intimacy and building relationships through dialogue with customers. Strive to listen and inspire and remember that even though some interactions may be through digital platforms, respect, relevance and responsiveness are still of the utmost importance.

5. Understand global differences in how people access and use the Internet.
People in different parts of the world access, adopt and consume technology very differently, and successful organizations will prioritize geographic opportunities when executing digital initiatives and building teams, and localize programs where needed to account for cultural and lifestyle differences.

Your leaders must be willing to dive into data and learn about the technology advances that enable these initiatives, as well as help to define the most meaningful issues for your business.

7. Focus on the customer experience.
Putting the customer at the center of your decision making enables you to break down those organizational silos and overcome operational and resource barriers that can hinder your technology-driven initiatives.

8. Develop leaders with skill-sets that bridge traditional and digital expertise.
People with both business savvy and digital expertise are in short supply and high demand. Your organization should, in the short term, focus on building a team with the right mix of skills and a diverse group of viewpoints and approaches who can help you think through your opportunities and challenges.

Experienced senior-level employees who didn’t grow up with digital technologies must be willing to take a leap of faith and invest time and energy into learning about them and the opportunities they bring to your organization, while up-and-coming digital leaders must learn to look outside of their digital comfort zones, collaborate with people across your organization in various functions, and build those classic business management capabilities.

9. Pay close attention to cultural fit when recruiting digital leaders.
Web-centric and Web-enhanced cultures, although similar in many respects, are still worlds apart. Your organization must find and empower leaders who can advance digital objectives, given the pace, values, intensity, structure, decision-making process and role of digital in the business.  “Start-up” workers, used to a free-flowing and highly intense culture, generally have trouble adjusting to a corporate environment with more formal processes and slower decision-making. The same can be said for employees from traditional backgrounds who get hired at a start-up; they often struggle to adjust to the intense pace and fast decision-making start-ups are known for.

As these examples highlight, it’s important to assess candidates’ cultural fit within your organization, which can depend on many factors, including the way your business is organized and the pace of activity and degree of senior-level support for digital initiatives. At the same time, your organization should take a look at itself and identify and address those elements of your culture that stand in the way of the collaboration necessary to drive digital initiatives. How is your organization holding itself back?

5. Understand the motivations of your top talent.
The best digital talent is in high demand, and they are often drawn to a certain type of company culture. To optimize your chances of attracting — and retaining — your best people, it’s important to have  a clear digital strategy, strong C-level sponsorship, and an entrepreneurial culture that values experimentation and creativity and encourages employees to contribute.

I’ve summarized these ten guidelines in this post, but you can read them in full, as well as the complete Talent 3.0 study, here (download the PDF).

What do you see as your organization’s biggest challenge right now in an increasingly digital and multi-generational workplace?

Make that paycheck increases…baby.

The fact is, as the job market continues to pick up, your employees (current and prospective) are starting to get antsy for more cash, and it’s entirely possible they’re getting better offers elsewhere.  According to a recent CareerBuilder survey of over 2,400 hiring managers nationwide, about one third of employers are willing to negotiate salary increases for employees in 2011. So, what’s your story?

If you’re not among this group, hopefully, it’s because you already have a solid compensation strategy that gives you a competitive edge in talent attraction and retention. Either way, you can see where you fall among your competitors when it comes to salary offers and pay raises by checking out the following…

Highlights of CareerBuilder’s survey on employers’ willingness to negotiate salary increases for 2011:

• 31 percent of participants said they are willing to negotiate 2011 salary increases with current employees. 
• Half (51 percent) plan to leave some negotiating room when extending initial offers to new employees.
• 21 percent are willing to extend two or more offers to the same candidate.
• When it comes to industries with the most wiggle room – and willingness – to negotiate salary increases, IT leads the pack, followed closely by retail, sales, and professional and business services.

(Learn more about the survey results here.) 

Salary Negotiation Do’s and Don’ts
So since we’ve raised the subject, here are a few tips on handling employee pay raises (or lack thereof)

DO: Make sure you know of the going compensation rates right now. Check out industry Web sites for your occupational and geographic areas and others that specialize in salary information, such as www.CBSalary.com, or the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. You’ll be able to make informed decisions when it comes to salary negotiations – and ensure that neither you or your employees get the raw end of the deal.

DON’T: Give your employees false hope. If, despite crunching the numbers every which way, a pay raise is simply not in the budget, be honest with your employees, and try to give them an ETA for when they might be able to expect to see their compensation levels go up.

DO: Find other ways to compensate employees. Take a cue from survey participants and find opportunities to round out employees’ paychecks by offering some alternative perks. Among the most popular perks employers are offering right now: 

• More flexible work hours (42 percent)
• Bonuses (29 percent)
• Training (23 percent)
• Vacation time (21 percent)
• More casual dress codes (17 percent)
• Academic reimbursement (14 percent)
• Title change (14 percent)

DON’T: Assume you know what your employees want. Take inventory of your employees’ wants when it comes to certain benefits. Not only will you be sure that the benefits you offer don’t go to waste, but your employees will appreciate that you took their preferences into consideration.

DO: Ditch the “employees will take what they can get” mindset.  Because they won’t. Job seekers are being more and more particular when it comes to accepting job offer, according to a recent survey from Personified, CareerBuilder’s talent consulting arm. Of the 17 percent of unemployed workers who received a job offer since becoming unemployed, 92 percent rejected the offer, with over half (54 percent) saying they did so because the offer was too low.

Feeling unmotivated? Uninspired? Disengaged? You’re not alone. “There’s a lot of valid reason we’re feeling burned out,” says Holly Green, workplace management expert and best-selling author of the book More Than a Minute: How to Be an Effective Leader and Manager in Today’s Changing World.

“It’s because we are,” she says.

I recently spoke with Green about the amount of stress managers are under today to re-engage their employees in an increasingly stressful work environment. If employees think they’re the only ones who need a break these days, Green says, they should think again.   “Managers are feeling the same way. And when you’re burned out, it’s that much harder to think about engaging someone else.”

So rather than add one more thing to the already-overstretched manager’s to do list, perhaps it would be easier to simply know what NOT to do…Green was kind enough to offer the following advice on how NOT to manage your employees.

Top 10 Things Managers Should NOT Do To Engage Employees:

1. Don’t Practice the Halo Effect. This is when a manager assumes that, because someone has one good quality, the person is great at everything, preventing managers from seeing the opportunities for improvement; similarly, managers should also avoid the opposite of the halo effect – the devil effect.
2. Don’t Humiliate or Demean Employees (especially not in front of others).
3. Don’t Withhold Feedback because you assume your employees already know where they need to improve or will “figure it out” on their own. “If you’re going to be a good manager, it is essential that you get good at giving feedback,” Green says. That means both constructive and negative feedback.
4. Don’t Underestimate the Power of Ongoing One-on-One Conversations to build trusting, more productive relationships with your employees.
5. Don’t Assume Your Team Knows What Winning Looks Like. “A manager’s most important role is to clarify what winning or excellence looks like, and then help people achieve it for themselves and the organization – you can’t over communicate in this regard.”
6. Don’t Assume People Understand Your Reasoning behind decisions. By the same token, don’t blame any decisions on “upper management,” “the HR department” or anyone else. Employees see right through that.
7. Don’t Forget That Praise is About Them, Not You. When recognizing employees, pause and consider what the individuals would want to receive and how they would want to receive it.  “For some people, presenting to the senior executive team could be a big perk and considered a reward for a job well done; for others, this could be the worst possible and most stressful of all scenarios,” Green says. Likewise, don’t give lavish public praise to someone who is very private, a Starbucks card to someone who doesn’t drink coffee or tea, or buy a cake for someone with dietary restrictions.
8. Don’t Speak Negatively About Other Team Members, their peers or senior management and leaders.
9. Don’t Give ‘Sandwich’ Feedback. While many managers were taught to give sandwich feedback (saying something good, sneaking in something negative and then quickly saying something good again), this method only “leaves the receiver wondering what the heck was the point,” Green says.
10. Don’t Ever Stop Recruiting. “Folks need to be re-recruited and re-energized – especially after the past few years.”

Anything you would you add to this list? What “habits” have you broken (or would like to see others break)? DO share in the comments below!

What specific traits do you look for in seasonal workers?

For 31 percent of employers who are hiring seasonal workers this year, great customer service skills top the list of most wanted skills in a seasonal worker they’d be interested in hiring full-time. 

For its most recent survey, CareerBuilder asked more than 2,400 hiring managers about their seasonal hiring plans this year. According to the survey of over 2,400 employers nationwise, of those employers who are hiring seasonal workers in the fourth quarter of this year, 40 percent are likely to hire them as full-time, permanent basis.

Industry and Compensation Breakdown
Unsurprisingly, the top five industries where seasonal workers will be most in demand this season are retail; customer service; administrative/clerical support; shipping and delivery; and hospitality.  As for pay plans, while some hiring managers (13 percent) reported plans to increase pay for seasonal workers compared to the same period last year, 14 percent are planning a decrease.  

• 48 percent of hiring managers plan to pay seasonal workers $10 or more per hour
• 9 percent plan to pay $16 or more per hour
• 32 percent plan to pay between $8 and $9 per hour
• 19 percent plan to pay between $6 and $7 per hour

Planning to hire seasonal workers? Check out these tips from an earlier post on hiring seasonal workers. (Or read the full post: ‘Tis the Season: 7 Tips for Hiring Seasonal Workers)

1. Start recruiting for seasonal positions now to get first dibs on top seasonal talent.
2. Implement screening questions in your application process to weed out some of the unqualified applicants and cut through some of the resume clutter.  
3. Make personality a priority when interviewing. You need employees who can stay calm in stressful situations (like dealing with frantic holiday shoppers and tight deadlines).
4. Recruit from college campuses. College students – with their flexible schedules and high energy – make ideal candidates for seasonal positions. 
5. But don’t discount retirees, either. Like college students, retirees have flexible schedules, but they also have years of valuable work and life experience that they can apply to several different positions.
6. Remember to check references. You may be short on time, but it’s in the best interest of your company to ensure that your candidates have references who can attest to their performance, professionalism and character.
7. Hire for the short term, with the long term in mind. As long as these employees are working for you, they’re representing your company, so treat them just as you would full-time employees.

Ah, the awkward conversation. Much like death and taxes, the awkward conversation is something people will do anything to avoid.

…which is perhaps why so many managers are so poor at giving feedback: rather than have a potentially uncomfortable conversation about what their employee needs to improve upon, they avoid it completely. But giving feedback is a crucial skill that every manager needs to practice (in order to get better at giving it). After all, the only way you can expect your employees to get better at what they do is to give them constructive, candid and timely feedback. But, again, giving feedback is a skill that requires practice…and carefully chosen words.

Five Tips for What to Say (and What Not to Say) When Giving Feedback: 

1. Say This: “I noticed that you’ve missed a few deadlines lately.” Not That: “You seem disinterested in your work lately.” When giving feedback, it’s important to focus on an employee’s specific behavior, not the impression you had of it. Telling an employee that he or she “seems disinterested”  or “appears disengaged” is actually a comment about your perception or impression of the employee – which comes across as a judgment - when in reality, the employee’s perceived disinterest could be the result of something completely unrelated to work. Focusing on the specific behavior that led to that impression opens up the door to have a clear discussion about the reasons why, rather than making the employee feel judged, alienated or confused.
2. Say This: “You were effective when you…” or “You could’ve been more effective when you…” Not That: “Good job.”  In other words, feedback that is generic and vague is also useless. Focusing on specific actions has two major benefits: It prevents employees from taking the feedback personally, and it also helps them understand what they should do (or not do) in the future.
3. Say This: “I’d like to offer you some feedback on this report, is that okay with you?” Not That: “Your report was…” Whenever possible, request to give feedback. Not only will your employees appreciate the gesture, but they’ll be more likely to take the feedback into consideration and apply it to try to improve.
4. Say This: “Your presentation was extremely well-researched. Here’s where it could’ve been stronger…”  Not That: “The research you used in your presentation was a little weak in some areas.” Preface with the positive.  Point out what the employee is doing well before delving into areas for improvement. When employees feel like their work is appreciated, they are much more likely to implement the constructive criticism – and to come to you for feedback in the future.
5. Say This: “Tell me, what was your understanding of what I asked you to do?” Not That: “You seem to have misunderstood what I asked you to do.” There’s that assumption creeping back in again, which does little to open up an honest, productive conversation.  Try to really look at your employees’ work through their eyes – and make the effort to understand their approach to their work. It will help you analyze the situation in a way that helps them reach their goals….And, perhaps most importantly, this approach will help you see how you can communicate with your employees more effectively.  

Thoughts? Feedback? Anything you would add?

The American Staffing Association’s Staffing World 2010 conference, taking place at the Venetian Casino Hotel Resort in Las Vegas, NV, is well underway. Throngs of recruiting and staffing professionals have been mingling and networking, attending professional development sessions like keynotes and workshops, browsing exhibitor booths (like CareerBuilder’s — yes, that’s a shameless plug), and generally having a great time while learning more about how to not only adapt but thrive in our rapidly changing workplace. And we want to share some of those learnings with all of you.

New Economy, New Attitudes

We all know businesses are rethinking their strategies, doing more with less, and thinking creatively to get ahead in today’s  economy. What’s worked in the past won’t necessarily work now, and everything from the role of contingent workers to the attitudes of Gen Y in the workplace are shifting. As ASA says on their site, “The “Great Recession’ reset the global economy to a ‘new normal.’” We’re all figuring out how to adjust as the dust settles, and conferences like this are an opportunity to share ideas and push the conversation forward.

Although I’m going to post more videos in a subsequent post, you can find all of CareerBuilder’s videos from Staffing World here and peruse them at your leisure — and be sure to follow along with the conference tweets with hashtag #sw10.

Here’s the first video I wanted to share — it features Bruce Tulgan, keynote speaker at Staffing World 2010 and founder of Rainmaker Thinking Inc. In the video, he talks to CareerBuilder about what we’re dealing with right now: a highly uncertain business environment,  a high-pressure workplace and a high maintenance work force. Although he focuses on what this combination means for staffing firms and talent, much of his advice can really be applied to any business:

What’s your take on what Bruce has to say?

A while back, a friend (we’ll call her Penelope) complained to me that her manager often wouldn’t pay attention to her in one-on-one meetings. As Penelope poured her heart out and told her manager of her work woes and recent successes, her manager busily listened and offered insightful feedback typed away on her Blackberry, checking messages and responding to e-mails (likely nodding occasionally and raising her head to give Penelope an empty smile or concerned furrowing of her brow).

Troubling, yes? At the time, I was shocked, but since hearing this anecdote, I’ve encountered this type of situation many times myself. My question is, when did the “other” things we’re doing become so important that we can’t pay full attention to the person speaking to us — and is it affecting employees in ways we may not even realize?

Phones and disrespect

The other day, Gini Dietrich, CEO of Arment Dietrich, wrote that the use of phones in meetings is extremely disrespectful — and I agree. As she says, phones aren’t allowed in meetings — although it’s never been expressly stated as a “rule.” It’s just part of the company’s culture. It’s clear that the company’s employees have enough respect for one another not to be tapping away on their phones while someone is talking.

How many times have you walked past a table of people eating lunch and every one of them is texting or e-mailing? Although the sight of it always seems ridiculous to me, I’m in no way innocent of the texting-at-restaurants trend. However, in the workplace, work needs to get done (often in a team setting), attention needs to be paid to the matter at hand, and the expectation should be different. Shouldn’t it?

What kind of message are you sending to employees?

The people using smart phones in meetings aren’t always lower-level employees; often, they’re managers and leaders. After all, leadership sets the tone for what’s appropriate and what’s not — and employees follow their lead. If a leadership figure  is habitually texting, e-mailing, or browsing on a phone during meetings, how do you think employees are perceiving that person — as well as the importance of the meeting?

Employees interpret leaders using their phone and not paying attention to what’s being said (even if they say they are) as not caring — and if they don’t care, why should their employees? It’s a poor move for morale, and it’s setting a terrible example as a leader. Plus, the person speaking or presenting likely feel pretty lousy when his or her manager or even the CEO is doing other things rather than listening to this really important thing that affects the organization.

Not a hard-and-fast rule

There are of course exceptions for any employee — your wife’s about to go into labor at any moment;  you are on deadline for a project and are expecting a call or e-mail that you must respond to right away; you’re attending to an emergency work or personal situation. I get it — it happens to everyone, and that’s why I’m not necessarily saying we should have a hard and fast rule of “No phones, no exceptions.” Not at all.

There are times when using phones can even benefit a meeting; you may be able to answer a question instantly with a quick Internet search and move on to the next item in the agenda, or e-mail someone not in the meeting and get a quick answer back that you can share with others present. Or, you may want to jot info into your phone pertinent to the meeting.

What I am saying is that there are times that using one’s phone can be more detrimental than putting it aside — and we must discern between the two.

Surviving in a technological world

There was a time (you may have to strain to remember) when we didn’t have smart phones or PDAs. There was a time when people had to leave others a message on (shudder) an  answering machine. And e-mail — what was that? While technology has made communication in the workplace a million times easier in many ways, it has also made it harder to draw a line where our technological communication must end and our human interaction must begin. It’s far too easy to do and not to think — but by not thinking, we’re doing a disservice to employees. And, as an article on ComputerWorld points out, we may not be as productive as we think while multitasking on these devices; by discussing something off-topic on your phone, you may be giving half your attention to two places but ultimately accomplishing less.

Some technology power users, however, say that it’s impossible — or at least not smart — to fail to answer work-related messages in real-time.  Business happens so fast that if you don’t stop to answer, you might miss something important.

Then again, life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it. (Thanks Ferris.)

What do you think about phones at meetings — and is your workplace culture for or against it?

“Employers are at an advantage in our current economy.”
“Candidates will take any offer you make because they need a job.”
“It’s an employer’s market — candidates can’t expect to make what they used to.”

Heard any of these statements lately? Think they’re true yourself and are abiding by this philosophy — or know a company that is? Well, companies with this mentality may be in for a rude awakening, as the idea that all unemployed workers in our current market will “take anything” just to get a paycheck is a misconception. Evidence of this is shown in the survey just released by Personified, CareerBuilder’s talent consulting arm, among 925 unemployed U.S. workers. The overwhelming majority of unemployed workers surveyed who have received a job offer since unemployment have rejected the offer because the offer was too low. In fact, 17 percent of unemployed workers surveyed have received at least one job offer since they’ve become unemployed, and of those people, a whopping 92 percent rejected the offer. More than half (54 percent) reported that they did so because the offer was more than 25 percent lower than the salary they had earned in their most recent position.

Many unemployed workers are looking for the right job

Although many unemployed workers are eager to start earning a paycheck, not all of them are willing to jump at the first thing they can get. And really, as an employer, would you want them to? I mean, sure, you may need to hire people quickly, but you still need to find quality employees who  truly want to work for your company and are going to stick around. Otherwise, you’re just getting warm bodies who are going to walk right back out that door once they find something better (or with better pay, or prestige, or opportunities, or — well, see below).

Job offers not paying off for other reasons, too

While insufficient pay was the number one reason unemployed workers turned down a job opportunity, workers had other things to say about the jobs they were being offered — and the companies offering them.

Other factors cited include:

• A long commute
• A lower title
• The position was outside of their field
• Little room for career advancement
• A poor hiring process.

“Rather than jumping on the first job offer that comes their way, workers are assessing which opportunities really make the most sense for them in terms of compensation and long-term potential,” said Mary Delaney, President of Personified.

While the above factors are not always in a company’s hands, there are certainly things employers can do to improve the hiring experience for candidates and enrich the opportunities of the job position in question. And while it may be true that a job is better than no job, and desperate times call for desperate measures, and (insert cliché phrase here), many unemployed workers are looking for not just a job, but a job that suits their lifestyle and long-term goals — and they’re willing to wait a bit to find it. And didn’t our parents always tell us, the best things come to those who wait?

How often are the hunters hunting?

Speaking of waiting, some unemployed workers aren’t spending much time looking for jobs; 18 percent reported they spend five hours or less per week searching for a job. While it’s true that some of those workers may also have inflated expectations of what’s out there in terms of jobs, thinking they can get the job of their dreams without much or any effort, this appears to be the exception rather than the rule.

Many are treating job searching like the full-time job it often is: Thirty percent of those surveyed allocate more than 20 hours a week, and 62 percent apply to an average of more than ten jobs per week. The amount of time unemployed workers are spending searching for jobs also trended by education and pay levels; see full details in the press release here.

If you mean it, they will come

Candidates and employees, whether in an up or a down economy, deserve to be treated with respect — and even in a down economy, they still need to know you fit into their goals and have their future in mind. If you’ve tried working the numbers every which way, made sure your compensation strategy is solid, and just can’t pay more than you’re offering, you’ve at least made the effort — and that’s when you can focus on making your company offerings shine in other ways. Start with your employees — the things they love about their job are likely the same things a potential employee will love about it, too. It’s not always about the money — and a candidate may really want to work for you because of the great career advancement you offer or your awesome company culture or your stellar reputation. Everyone is different, and that translates to different motivations. Our own readers on The Hiring Site shared the factors — both abstract and tangible — that make their company special and sell their ideal candidates on the job.

It’s the companies with the “candidates will take whatever they can get” mentality, the ones who take advantage of the situation unemployed workers are in by grossly undercutting what workers are worth, who need to adjust their way of thinking.  Otherwise, they’re going to be left with a lot of empty seats where employees briefly sat before moving on to that job they really wanted.

Thoughts? Completely disagree or see it from another angle?

“We need to look around our environment and say, ‘Is our environment encouraging the best talent possible? Are we choosing the right generational mix of people?’” Meagan Johnson says about the responsibilities managers have today.

Johnson and her father, Larry, are multigenerational workforce experts who recently spoke with me about their new book, Generations, Inc.: From Boomers to Linksters–Managing the Friction Between Generations at Work, and the challenge of managing multigenerational workforces.  One of the unique challenges managers face today, they told me, is learning to work with and manage a new generation of workers they refer to as “Linksters.”

Who are Linksters? A Cheat Sheet

• Also known as “The Facebook Generation,” this group of 15- to 19-year-olds live and breathe technology
• They still live at home and, unlike previous generations, are typically best friends with their parents
• They are more tolerant of alternative lifestyles than their predecessors
• They’re very much involved in green causes and social activism

Despite all they have to offer, however, Linksters are still very young and inexperienced, and managing them requires understanding the environment in which they grew up as well as the unique way in which they communicate. During our interview, the Johnsons shared 10 tips for managing this generation.

10 Tips for Managing Linksters

1. Ride herd on them. They have short attention spans and lose interest if the work is boring. If there’s a way to incentivize task accomplishment, do it.
2. Provide them with job descriptions. Linksters need clear direction about what you expect. This includes basics, such as when you expect them to arrive, number of hours, and duties of the job. They are used to being told what to do, in detail and explicitly.
3. Treat them like valued coworkers. Linksters are used to a steady diet of connection and communication from family friends. If you have a company party, be sure to invite them. Same with meetings, where appropriate.
4. Lead by example. Linksters are still trying to figure out how to act and behave. They will look to older coworkers and managers to shape their workplace identity and demeanor.
5. Orient them to the obvious. Be specific about expectations that may seem obvious. For example, teenagers are used to having their parents cover for them. Make sure they know the consequences of showing up late, taking lunch breaks that are too long, or texting on the job.
6. Welcome them with open arms. Let your people know them Linksters are joining your team and ask everyone to welcome them. Pair Linksters with buddies — good role models with good work ethics. Call Linksters the night before their first day. Remind them of dress code, arrival time, items to bring, traffic, snacks and water, where to park, whom to contact once they arrive, and quitting time.
7. Know what songs are on their iPods. Young people have a language that’s distinctly their own. Make an effort to get to know their culture.
8. Create microcareer paths. If you have a young person manning the cash register, give her other tasks that help her understand different aspects of the business from time to time. This keeps her challenged, engaged, and feeling valued — and sets her up for more responsibility.
9. Reexamine your uniform policy. Part of being young is having a heightened interest in how you look. Are you asking your Linksters to wear embarrassing uniforms? Are they comfortable? Are they outdated? Try to remember what being a teen felt like.
10. Thank their parents. Linksters are young and may still live at home with parents. Invite their parents for a visit, call and express appreciation for raising a great kid, and thank them for helping to get your young employee to work on time, well rested and prepared.

Meagan and Larry Johnson are the founders of the Johnson Training Group, which help companies manage multigenerational workplaces.

Well, it’s official: the recession is over – and has been for quite some time now (shocking how we could’ve missed that), according to the National Bureau of Economic Research, which means now might be the time employers start worrying about the possibility of a talent exodus.  But while employers might be worried about which employees are going to leave their organization, instead, they might want to worry about those employees who actually stay.  

That’s because, according to Peter Barron Stark and Jane Flaherty in their book, “Engaged! How Leaders Build Organizations Where Employees Love to Come to Work,” employees quit their jobs in one of two ways:  The first is physically, where an employee moves on to another job.  Though unfortunate, at least this method is manageable because there’s a definitive next step: hiring a new employee.

The second way an employee quits – the one that “strikes fear into the heart of every manager” – is mentally. Unlike a physical quit, when an employee mentally quits an organization, it’s not always clear what an employer’s next steps should be. You can’t, after all, simply hire someone new, but at the same time, the same old engagement tactics you’ve been doing all along clearly aren’t working anymore, either.  

Stark and Flaherty idenfity five red flags employers can use to identify these disengaged workers who are no longer invested in their work or the company.

Five Signs Your Employees Have Mentally Quit Their Jobs

1. Evidence of a “whatever” attitude. The employee is not confrontational, but clearly is not motivated.
2. Minimal contribution that produces a mediocre level of performance. The employee shows up right on time, leaves right on time, and does just enough to keep his/her job, and no more.
3. Absenteeism. The employee uses up all sick, vacation, or PTO (paid time off) time on a regular basis.
4. Loss of enthusiasm. The employee may have been a motivated contributor, but now withdraws and contributes little.
5. Little or no interest in the future. Whether you are discussing a vision for the future or your office holiday party, this employee is clearly only interested in what’s “here and now.”

Unless employers act quickly to manage those employees who’ve ‘checked out,’ it could literally cost organizations: The Gallup Organization recently reported that, at the end of 2009, more than 25 million people were actively disengaged with their jobs, costing U.S. employers $416 billion in lost productivity.

What Can We Do To Make It Right Again? Salvaging the Broken Employee EngagementIt’s really no wonder employees, especially now, are disengaged: The recession left so many workers with heavier workloads thanks to organizational layoffs and slashing of resources, they’re simply burning out.  One of the first things employers can do to salvage an increasingly overwhelmed workforce is to give employees back control…with flex-time offerings, such as reduced or non-traditional hours and telecommuting, according to a recent Human Resources Executve article.

Speaking of giving back control – and what companies can do to re-engage employees – I recently came across this recent interview with Mark Hirschfeld, co-author of Re-Engage: How America’s Best Places to Work Inspire Extra Effort in Extraordinary Times, in which he identifies the two steps any employer can easily and immediately take to significantly benefit employee engagement:

1. The first is to “listen intently and deeply to your associates about what would be helpful to them in creating a more engaged place to work.”
2. And the second is to “Make sure you follow up on anything you commit to do.”

Hirschfeld’s second tip stood out to me as being absolutely crucial to re-engaging employees. After all, how many times do we see organizations administer employee surveys…only to see nothing come of them?  More often than not, employees understand that leaders can’t realistically act on every suggestion, but according to Hirschfeld, “They do want to have a sense that their opinions matter. The ability to feel genuinely heard can be very empowering, and if employees see actions being taken based on their feedback significant growth can result.”  While getting employee feedback is important for improving retention rates and productivity, it means nothing if employers don’t actually use this feedback to make a noticeable change. Otherwise, it could be even worse for morale.

(For more ideas on re-engaging employees, check out my earlier post on Peter Barron Spark’s presentation from SHRM 2010, wherein he addresses 10 Ways to Get Your Employees to Say “I Love My Job”.)

Have you noticed more employee burnout of late, and if so, what are you doing about it?

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!

So, we’ve slid into September. And what does that mean? Dusting off the ol’ Kate Gosselin Halloween costume from last year and spending the next two months making essential topical changes to it? No. Hmm — weaving homemade baskets out of beautiful golden autumn leaves? Um, no. So what, then?

I can’t believe you didn’t guess: It’s only a few months until companies all over the place hold the dreaded yearly performance review! Well, dreaded to many (most?) bosses and their subordinates. Over the years, the debate has continually resurfaced as to whether performance reviews are a good thing or not, and whether we should keep them.

Unhappier Employees

In the wake of our recession, 29 percent of employees are more unhappy with their employer than in the past, according to CareerBuilder’s 2010 Mid-Year Job Forecast (and many of them plan to look for new jobs once the economy improves). The New York Times points to a recent survey that showed employees are “unhappy about the design of their jobs, the health of their organizations and the quality of their managers.” Businesses will soon face a new challenge, says Jennifer Deal, a senior researcher at the Center for Creative Leadership: Maintaining employee engagement and retention as the job market slowly begins to improve.

Now is an important time to focus on improving the things within your control to keep your best employees happy — and keep them from leaving. Why not start by taking a look at performance reviews, to determine whether yours are working for everyone involved? Can you make them better? Should you eliminate them altogether? Let’s take a look at the views from both sides, and talk about ways to conduct performance reviews that work.

Why Do We Have Performance Reviews, Anyway?

Definition

Wikipedia defines a performance review or appraisal as a “structured formal interaction between a subordinate and supervisor, that usually takes the form of a periodic interview (annual or semi-annual), in which the work performance of the subordinate is examined and discussed, with a view to identifying weaknesses and strengths as well as opportunities for improvement and skills development.”

History

Performance reviews as a distinct and formal management procedure used in the evaluation of employee performance is said to date back to the time of WWII. According to Archer North & Associates, these reviews or appraisals were originally done strictly to figure out whether employees would be receiving a pay increase or a pay cut; employee development was not a factor in the equation. It was thought that pay was the only motivator for employees; the idea that employees are motivated in other ways wasn’t considered. Since then, of course, performance reviews have evolved to include evaluation of employee behaviors, motivation, values, development and more.

Reasoning

Many say since it’s human nature to judge others (and since being in a work environment is no exception), it’s essential to have a formal system in place in order to judge and measure performance of employees fairly, lawfully, and accurately — with the ability to document those judgments.

The judgments that result from performance reviews can have many different ramifications, either directly or indirectly:

• Merit pay increases, bonuses, and promotions (or lack thereof)
• Further training opportunities
• A change in responsibilities
• Feedback on performance improvement.
• In worst-case scenarios, performance reviews can be a means to reprimand an employee — or even terminate employment.

Pro-Performance Reviews

Many companies still conduct performance reviews, whether yearly or on a quarterly or other type of periodic basis, and those in the “pro-performance review” camp say they are necessary for companies’ success. As Scott Stallings, professional golfer, says: You always know you need to improve on something, but you always tend to rationalize your own shortcomings” — and he says performance reviews are a huge dose of reality, showing him how far or close he is to being as good as he knows he can be. He says they’ve improved his golf game.

When done right, performance reviews are meant to assess where an employee is on his or her career path, where they are showing weakness or strengths, and which path that employee needs to take next to improve and become more successful. This success, in turn, benefits the company as a whole.

Right?

Anti-Performance Reviews

Well, some people think these reviews aren’t working as they’re meant to work… or working at all. Those in the anti-review camp say performance reviews are often not being done well, and that they’re ineffective or even detrimental to all parties involved.

Here are some reasons that have been stated:

• According to UCLA business professor Samuel Culbert, who wrote Get Rid of the Performance Review!, The pay raise (or not) has already been determined — so the bosses “come up with a review that’s all backwards.”
• The boss is the one evaluating the employee, after all. Job security depends on what they think! Because of this, it’s easy for an employee to lose sight of what they really want to achieve and just tell the boss what he or she wants to hear in order to get a favorable review (particularly if income or a promotion is tied to the review).
• Forms can be cumbersome and inefficient. The process is such a pain that management hates reviews, and puts them off as long as possible, and the focus becomes about process rather than about improving performance and giving meaningful feedback to an employee.
• The methods of determining salary increases or bonuses isn’t fair — and is often done out of favoritism or arbitrarily. Employees have no insight into the matter, so they’re often left just accepting what their boss tells them as to why they are or are not getting a pay increase — with no clear explanation.
• There isn’t any follow up after the review about things discussed in the review, so it’s for naught. Progress isn’t made, and things continue as they were (or slide downhill because no check-ups or specific plan toward improvement or growth are in place).
• Reviews often only happen once a year (at least the ones that really count), and for the rest of the year, there’s no focus on attaining long-term goals.
• Reviews are counter-productive; according to a study by A. Kluger and A.Denisi in The Psychological Bulletin, 30 percent of the 607 performance reviews they examined ended up in decreased employee performance.
• They’re antiquated. Technology has advanced, and people have altered the way they work accordingly. Performance reviews are a thing of the past; in today’s collaborative environment, focus on individual employee performance in such a structured way no longer makes sense.
• They place too much importance on the quantifiable. Employees do many qualitative things that aren’t tracked specifically in the goals of a review, and that are harder to measure with specific numbers or a multiple choice answer. Without regular observations and coaching from management, these qualities are even harder to measure.
• Alternately, some say they don’t place enough importance on the quantifiable — and managers are measuring more abstract concepts without real knowledge of how an employee is performing in these areas.

What is the Worth of an Employee?

Wikipedia also includes in its definition of performance reviews this idea: “It is the process of obtaining, analyzing, and recording information about the relative worth of an employee to the organization.”

While this definition might be great in theory, the workplace has changed significantly over the years, and that change is only accelerating. Some question, whether we updating performance reviews to match this changing work environment. Do performance reviews in fact determine the true worth of an employee, as they currently stand? Do they accurately cover the ways in which an employee has contributed, and do they give employees a voice? Or do they consider arbitrary values and goals that, when the review has been read and filed away, don’t really mean anything — to the employee or the organization?

A better future for performance reviews

As Mark Goulston stated in a Fast Company article, “The biggest problem for both managers and subordinates when performance reviews are done poorly is that in the end, both people will nod agreeing to some course of action going forward that is not clear to either.”

The key word here seems to be poorly. Most people aren’t complaining that we have performance reviews, but that they’re not executed well and consequently, that problems or inefficiencies arise as a result of them. Aside from saying “we need an alternative” or nixing the reviews altogether, what’s a performance review-stricken employer to do?

What about revamping the performance review and making it better? These reviews should be helping move your company, as well as your employees, forward. Here’s a list of some things to keep in mind when evaluating your performance review process — but I really want to hear your ideas, as you’re the ones loathing (or loving) the use of performance reviews. What else would you add?

Don’t leave them in the dark. Tell employees what they need to do to get to that next step; define what “success” means as far as your expectations of them. If there are areas in which they need to improve (and there should be), give them specific and concrete examples of where they have fallen short in your expectations, and perhaps more importantly, how they can move forward to meet and surpass those expectations in the future.

Set goals together that you both agree upon. Make these goals specific, observable, measurable — and attainable. Find out what your employees are passionate about working on, and help them shape those passions into goals that work for their personal growth and your team and company’s as well. Sometimes, employees are afraid to voice what they want for fear of rejection or disapproval; make sure your employees know you’re open to new ideas. Often, what’s good for an employee is good for your company, too.

Reviews should not be rooted in fear. Employees, now more than ever, need to know their employer is on their side; that they want to support them. Yes, employees need to know what they’re doing that can be improved — but also what they’re doing that’s good. Make sure you tell them.

Communicate on an ongoing basis. Speaking of telling your employees what they’re doing well, be sure to tell them regularly if you notice strides they’re making in their goals for the quarter, the year, or even just that week. In order to do this, though, you have to be communicating with your employees often. That doesn’t mean breathing down their neck to check on the progress on a goal, but that does mean open communication, status checks, encouragement where needed, thoughts on how they can continue to improve or whether they need to go in a different direction as the goal progresses, and praise for what they’re doing right. Another word for this might be “coaching.”

Sound Off

Are we wasting our time with performance reviews and not moving ourselves and each other forward as we should be? Is there a better way, and if so, what do you suggest or what would you add to the list above? Or, do you think things working just fine the way they are?

I know, I know…Walgreens only just started selling candy corn, so while it might seem premature to break out These Are Special Times just yet, it is time to start thinking about the winter holidays, at least in terms of hiring.

If you’re in the customer service, retail sales, administrative/clerical, hospitality, shipping/delivery, inventory, technology or accounting/finance industries, you probably already know you’re going to require extra help during the holiday season, so why not start now? It may seem early, but consider this: How overwhelmed do you become around the holidays – both personally and professionally? Start planning now for the hectic hiring season to avoid having to make any last-minute, hasty hiring decisions – and your holidays will be that much brighter.

Treat yourself this holiday…Follow these 7 tips for hiring seasonal workers:

1. Avoid the Holiday Rush. Remember in the beloved holiday classic Jingle All the Way when Arnold Schwarzennegger and Sinbad’s characters get into a fight over a coveted TurboMan doll? Well, (even if you say you don’t) think of your ideal holiday employee as that Turbo Man doll. While most companies are waiting until November to post openings and seek out top talent, you can give yourself a leg up on the competition by starting your search now – and reaching more qualified candidates before other seasonal employers have touched them.
2. Avoid an Ambush. With so many job seekers competing for one position, you may find yourself getting overwhelmed by the sheer volume of applications coming in – and unqualified ones at that. In order to cut down on time spent mining resumes, consider attaching filtering questions to your job postings to screen out unqualified candidates from the beginning (a service that’s provided free to CareerBuilder clients, btw).  
3. Seek Out Warmth. Personality accounts for a lot with seasonal hires. When interviewing, keep in mind that the candidates will likely have to deal with angry and annoyed holiday shoppers who expect stellar customer service. He or she must be able to stay calm and professional in these situations. Asking behavioral interview questions will help you determine how a person tends to react in stressful situations.
4. Go Back to School.  Whether home for the winter break or staying on campus, college students – with their flexible schedules and high energy – make ideal candidates for seasonal positions.  Bonus: If you like what you see during the holidays, you can probably count on them to return for work when you’re ready to take on extra help during the summer, too.
5. Consider Retirees. There is an extremely large job market for retirees, and businesses are quickly finding that they make excellent full- or part-time candidates. For starters, they’re available in an increasing abundance and, like college students, have flexible schedules. Best of all, they provide years of valuable work and life experience that they can apply to several different positions.
6. Check References – In the best interest of your company, it is important with seasonal hires that you double check their references. Candidates who are available for temporary work should have previous employers listed as references who can attest to their performance, professionalism and character.
7. Think Less Temporary…and More Employee – Finally, while you might be thinking of these employees as temporary, it’s crucial to remember that the impression they give outsiders of your brand isn’t.  Treat them just as you would a full-time employee. You also never know which of these employees you will want to bring on full-time later on, so look for employees who not only meet the qualifications of the position, but who fit in culturally, as well.  Happy hiring, y’all!

What have companies been doing in response to tough economic times? Eating their feelings with lots of ice cream. Well, believe it or not, many companies have been busy digging into social media — and some are finding hidden treasure. According to a new CareerBuilder survey of more than 2,500 employers and 4,400 workers, 35 percent of companies have been using social media to promote their company in some way. Let’s take a look!

Of this 35 percent of companies:

• One-quarter (25 percent) of these employers said that they are using social media to connect with clients and find new business.
• 21 percent are using it to recruit and research potential employees.
• 13 percent are using social media to strengthen their employment brand.

And it’s not just those Fortune 500 companies getting into social media, either. Businesses of all sizes and industries report using social media to promote their companies:

• 29 percent of organizations with 500 or fewer employees
• 38 percent of companies with 501 to 1,000 employees
• 44 percent of companies with more than 1,000 workers

• The leisure and hospitality industry topped those surveyed, with 57 percent in that industry saying they use social media to promote their business. Leisure and hospitality was followed by 48 percent in the IT industry, 43 percent in the retail industry, and 41 percent in the sales industry saying the same.

Managing your company’s social media strategy

So, a lot of businesses — of all sizes — are trying their hand at social media. The bigger question (and the one some of  you may be asking yourselves) is, how are businesses managing all of this? We know involvement in social media doesn’t happen magically; it takes people and time and dedication. And, judging by survey results, there’s no one way of doing it:

• 43 percent of employers report that their marketing department handles social media outreach
• 26 percent say public relations handles it
• 19 percent report that human resources does it.

How many people are involved? (Enter “How many social media experts does it take to fix a light bulb” joke here):

• One-quarter (25 percent) of employers have 1 – 3 people communicating on behalf of their organization.
• 11 percent said that more than six people communicate for their company via social media.
• 7 percent report that 4 – 5 people handle the work.

The most troubling stat? A whopping 57 percent said they didn’t know how many people were involved in managing their company’s social media strategy (and I’m guessing many didn’t know who was doing it, either). While this may be common, it’s important for companies to have a plan before they jump headfirst into social media (and if you’ve already made that jump, it’s never too late to clean up your process). You might want to check out our social media e-book that covers the A to Zs of social media for businesses, and then, when you need a quick refresher, read about best practices for using social media for recruitment.

A word on risks and guidelines

Some businesses are avoiding social media altogether because of potential risks involved, but as research has shown, the perceived risks don’t outweigh the proven rewards — and people are going to talk about your company whether you have a social media presence or not (hint: it’s better to be involved in social media so you can listen, participate and respond). If you have a plan, set realistic goals, and create social media guidelines, you can minimize those risks even further. Social media guidelines not only help you set up and communicate company expectations of social media use to your staff, but also encourage learnings and knowledge about best practices. There’s a full list of companies’ social media policies here for you to reference.

What do workers want?

Workers report that they’re using social media to do more than connect with friends; they’re also using it to research jobs and companies. Want to get inside workers’ heads to find out what they don’t like about your social media use — and what will make them flock to your company’s pages on social media sites? You’re in luck: CareerBuilder’s survey talked to more than 4,400 workers and got all the juicy details:

What workers most want to see on a company’s page on social media sites:

• Job listings (35 percent)
• Q&A or fast facts about the organization (26 percent)
• Information about career paths within the organization (23 percent)
• Evidence that working at the company is fun (16 percent)
• Employee testimonials (16 percent)
• Pictures of company events (12 percent)
• Video of new products/services (10 percent)
• Company awards (9 percent)
• Research or studies that the company has conducted (9 percent)
• Videos of a day on the job (8 percent)

Workers’ biggest turnoffs when encountering a company on social media sites:

• Including the company’s communication reading like an ad (38 percent)
• Failure to reply to questions (30 percent)
• Failure to regularly post information (22 percent)
• Removing or filtering public comments (22 percent)

What can employers take from this?

By knowing what the people potentially interested in your company want, you can start making your company pages more engaging and interactive (some great tips here).You might get some great inspiration by reading about what companies like Old Spice did to engage social media users, or you might take a closer look at your own company story to find a unique way to speak to job seekers on their level and tell your story.

It may also be wise to read up on social media recruitment etiquette to learn how to play nice with other businesses, stay away from the social media traps many businesses fall into, and avoid backlash from candidates and even your own employees (ahem, avoid being one of those businesses thought of in the “workers’ biggest turnoffs” above).  It’s clear that workers don’t want to talk to a boring, “corporate,” faceless brand — so use the information above to hear what they’re saying and inject a little extra personality into your online brand.

With multiple reports lately discussing how employers are having difficulty filling open positions – despite the high unemployment rate – now is the perfect time to invest in an employee referral program (ERP) – whether that entails creating one from scratch or enhancing your current one.

Referrals make up 26.7 percent of all external hires, making referrals the number one resource for them, according to the 2010 CareerXRoads Sources of Hire study. 

Not only are well-structured ERPs one of the best ways to generate new hires, but they’ve also been shown to increase retention, lower costs, boost morale, and essentially make your job easier. Take a look…

The Top 10 Reasons to Build Your Employee Referral Program:

1. More bang out of your budget – A robust employee referral program can help lower your cost per hire.  The 2006 DirectEmployers Recruiting Trends Survey showed that employee referrals produced the highest ROI of any other sourcing method. According to Staffing.org, companies spend an average of 16 cents for staffing for every dollar of compensation recruited, but a study of Lincoln Financial Group, whose employee referral program accounts for 55 percent of all external hires, revealed that the company boasts a much lower staffing cost ratio of 10.9 cents per dollar.
2. The possibility of actually getting through that “to do” list.  ERPs can cut down significantly on the time you spend sourcing and screening candidates, as they essentially outsource this job to your employees, whose own discretion helps ensure you don’t spend time sorting through irrelevant applicants (see #3).  And by holding on to the resumes that don’t turn into immediate hires, you won’t always have to start from scratch when new positions open up (see #4).
3. A better quality of candidates – Who better to recommend candidates who fit the culture of your company than the very people who live it every day? Because your employees already know what it takes to be successful at your company (and because no one in his right mind would refer a candidate who could reflect badly on him), employee referrals eliminate the need to weed out unqualified applicants.
4. Make that a steady supply of quality candidates – While not every employee referral will lead to a hire, a well-designed employee referral program will help you build a generous pool of qualified resumes from which to pull as more positions open up.   
5. Less turnover – Employers with robust ERPs tend to have a lower rate of turnover. One reason for this? Hires produced through ERPs tend to stay with the organization longer because they enter the organization with already established social connections and a better understanding of the culture. ERP hires are also 3.5 times less likely to be terminated than hires produced through other sources.
6. Your employees will have a new appreciation for their job - and yours – ERPs provide employees with a sense of ownership in – and deeper respect for – the hiring process. Employees value meaningful work and a sense of connection to their company even more than they do high salaries, according to the 2009 10th annual Deloitte Best Company to Work For survey. Giving them a chance to participate in the hiring process is a way to foster that sense of connection and the feeling that they are making a positive contribution to the company. 
7. A better-looking employment brand – ERPs turn your employees into brand advocates. If they’re telling friends about job openings at your organization, they are essentially sending the message, “This is a great place to work.” Not every referral will turn into a hire, but it does contribute to the notion that your organization is an employer of choice.   
8. A boost in competitive intelligence — A more indirect – but equally beneficial – result of implementing an employee referral program is that it gives your employees an excuse to proactively seek out and network with other professionals, who can be a resource for gaining knowledge, sharing best practices and, of course, generating more referrals.
9. You’ll stop resenting the time your employees spend on Facebook.  With the widespread use of social networking sites to connect with other industry professionals, your employees today have an even wider range of connections by which to source qualified, trusted candidates for you.
10. Your new employees will pay it forward – According to the American Journal of Sociology, referred workers tend to outperform their non-referral counterparts and are more likely to refer future employees.

If you’re not yet familiar with the government’s recently revised stipulations for hiring unpaid interns, might I suggest pouring yourself a nice glass of Merlot, perhaps turning down the lights and putting on some Al Green, while you sit back and get to know them a little bit better…?

That’s because the Obama administration recently announced that it intends to crack down on companies that don’t comply with the rules regarding unpaid internships, in reaction to recent criticism that such practices unfairly favor privileged students and enable employers to take advantage of free labor.

Six Rules for Employers Offering Unpaid Internships
According to a document on Internship Programs, released in April by the U.S. Department of Labor’s Wage and Hour Division, employers are not required by law to pay their interns only if they meet all of the following criteria:

1. The internship, even though it includes actual operation of the facilities of the employer, is similar to training which would be given in an educational environment
2. The internship experience is for the benefit of the intern
3. The intern does not displace regular employees, but works under close supervision of existing staff
4. The employer that provides the training derives no immediate advantage from the activities of the intern; and on occasion its operations may actually be impeded
5. The intern is not necessarily entitled to a job at the conclusion of the internship
6. The employer and the intern understand that the intern is not entitled to wages for the time spent in the internship.

Why All the Fuss?
So what’s so bad about not paying interns, anyway? You might ask. After all, shouldn’t they be grateful just for the opportunity to get real world work experience, network with industry professionals and get school credit?

In an ideal world, yes. But it seems that far too many employers have interns doing menial tasks that offer little educational experience or quality training.  Other companies, meanwhile, hire interns under the (false) promise that the interns will be offered a full-time position once their internship is complete. Another criticism of unpaid internships is that they favor students from well-to-do backgrounds whose parents are well-connected in the industry (and can afford to work for free) over those who come from lower-income backgrounds.

Unfortunately, many employers that fail to meet the above criteria still manage to get away with not paying their interns.  Illegal practices concerning unpaid internships often go unreported, it seems, because many interns do not file complaints for fear that they will lose their current internship or be branded as troublemakers and endanger their chances of future employment at other companies.

Advantages to Offering Paid Internships
Aside from helping organizations avoid any potential legal problems, offering paid internships offer a number of benefits for employers.  For one thing, paid internships help employers attract a bigger group of qualified individuals, as financial need prevents some highly qualified students from pursuing unpaid opportunities.  Paid internship also help ensure students stick to a time commitment; furthermore, students that are paid as if they are professionals are more likely to act the part, too.

Of course, now you might be asking: Why have interns at all if we have to pay them? In a recent Student Branding Blog post, career counselor Karen Obringer lists the following ways companies benefit from hiring interns:

• Internships enable companies to train potential future employees
• Interns provide new energy to the office
• Interns provide new ideas and technology into the office
• Interns can do the work that the full-time staff haven’t had time to accomplish or even start
• Interns can help evaluate current company practices and offer suggestions of alternate options

Can’t afford to pay your interns? The career counselors at Washington University in St. Louis suggest that employers consider offering an alternative mode of payment, such as transportation reimbursement, free parking, complimentary meals, or free training or workshops.

What are your thoughts? Do you agree that employers take advantage of interns? Do you believe interns should be paid? How do you compensate your interns in other ways?

Last week, I talked about the pros and cons of rehiring former employees, and mentioned that the Hiring Incentives to Restore Employment (HIRE) Act is one of the major reasons employers should be looking at hiring unemployed workers (which could include former employees). But let’s explore further why the bill is so important — both for unemployed workers and the employers hiring them. After all, as a CFO, controller, business owner, vice president of human resources, hiring manager, accountant, or anyone else with a stake in your business’s bottom line, the HIRE Act could have a significant impact on your business.

What is the HIRE Act?

The $17.5 billion legislation, signed into law by President Obama on March 18, 2010, gives a potential tax exemption and credit to businesses that hire unemployed workers. Specifically, the HIRE Act grants businesses that hire workers unemployed 60 days or longer an exemption from the 6.2 percent Social Security payroll taxes for each worker for the remainder of 2010. Additionally, if workers are retained for one year, participating businesses  get a tax credit of $1,000.

The maximum value of this incentive is $6,621 per qualified employee, which equals 6.2 percent of the Social Security FICA maximum wage cap of $106,800.

The goal:

The HIRE Act aims to provide hiring incentives to stimulate the economy, restore some of the jobs lost in the latest economic recession, and put Americans back to work. The average unemployed worker has been unemployed for ten months, so the Act is in effect targeting those job seekers who have been having difficulty finding work for quite some time.  The HIRE Act calls on employers like you to hire unemployed workers and work to retain them.

Keep in mind, recent graduates who are unemployed or working part-time can qualify — so if you’re seeking out new grads or are a start-up looking for fresh talent, you should also be looking into the HIRE Act.

The two major tax incentives of the HIRE Act

No. 1:

Employers who hire unemployed workers this year (after Feb. 3, 2010 and before Jan. 1, 2011) may qualify for a 6.2-percent payroll tax exemption, in effect exempting them from their share of Social Security taxes on wages paid to these workers between Mar. 19, 2010 and Dec. 31, 2010.

• This reduced tax withholding will have no effect on the employee’s future Social Security benefits, and as an employer, you will still need to withhold the employee’s 6.2-percent share of Social Security taxes, as well as income taxes.
• The employer and employee’s shares of Medicare taxes would also still apply to these wages.

No. 2:

For each worker retained for at least a year, businesses may claim an additional retention credit, up to $1,000 per worker, when they file their 2011 income tax returns.

Significant savings

Let’s say you hire an employee and pay them a $60,000 salary. Normally, you would have to pay 6.2 percent Social Security payroll tax, or $3,720. With the HIRE Act, your business wouldn’t have to pay that $3,720, plus you have the potential of an additional $1,000 tax credit if that employee stays with your company for one year.

Finding the right employees with the HIRE Act

Not only are you helping stimulate the economy and employ people who need work, but you are also potentially saving a significant amount of money that will impact your bottom line. Instead of looking at hiring as an expense, the HIRE Act encourages employers to think of  hiring as an investment.

While the HIRE Act helps making hiring “cheaper,” the quality of your new hires is still paramount; you and I both know that cost savings plus a bad hire is actually more expensive in the long run. This is why CareerBuilder is focused on targeting the right people within that group who would be a good fit for your organization.

CareerBuilder currently attracts more than 9 million unique visitors each month who meet the qualifications as set by the HIRE Act. We go even further by helping you find the qualified workers who are the right fit for your particular culture and business needs. After all, you might need one employee or 100 — but it’s important that you find the right employees to stick around and grow with your business.

The Fine Print: Criteria needed for a business to receive benefits of the HIRE Act

• New employee/s must be hired between Feb. 4, 2010 and December 31, 2010.
• The payroll tax exemptions are effective for wages paid between Mar. 19, 2010 and Dec. 31, 2010.
• The newly hired employees must have been unemployed during the 60 days prior to starting work, or worked fewer than 40 hours for someone else during that 60-day period (and the employer must get a statement from each eligible new hire certifying this fact).
• New hires filling positions qualify, but only if the workers they are replacing left voluntarily or for cause.
• Family members or relatives do not qualify.
• Businesses, agricultural employers, tax-exempt organizations and public colleges and universities DO qualify to claim the payroll tax — although household businesses and federal, state and local governments l do not.

HIRE Act — How are businesses reacting?

It’s a bit of a chicken versus egg argument; it’s hard to say at this point whether the HIRE Act is causing employers to hire more, or businesses are catching on to it after they have already hired. Regardless, any businesses are taking advantage of the new legislation. And although the HIRE Act expires Jan. 1, 2011, President Obama is working to extend it. According to a recent report by the U.S. Department of the Treasury:

• From Feb. to May 2010, an estimated 4.5 million workers who had been unemployed for eight weeks or longer were hired — meaning all of the employers who hired these workers are eligible for the HIRE Act payroll tax exemption.
• Newly hired workers whose employers are eligible for the exemption constitute 12.2 percent of all workers who were unemployed for eight weeks or longer since the law took effect.
• If the 4.5 million newly hired employees who are eligible for the exemption are employed for the rest of the year, their employers would be (collectively) eligible for an estimated $5.1 billion in payroll tax savings.

Find out more about the HIRE Act

While we’ve covered a lot of the basics here, you’ll still want to investigate further to find out how your business can qualify. Here are some additional resources:

• Find out more about the HIRE act and what it may mean for your business on the IRS’s website (VIDEO).
  
• Read up on the IRS’s questions and answers page for employers.
• Read the U.S. Department of the Treasury’s recent report on the HIRE Act’s progress thus far.
• Hiring Incentives to Restore Employment Affidavit (PDF; to be signed by new employees who qualify)

“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.

This year, 54 percent of large U.S. businesses that laid off employees in the past year want to rebuild their work forces, but some will have trouble finding the skilled workers they are looking for, according to a recent study by Accenture. Because of this gap, many employers will likely consider an alternate option to gain skilled workers: rehiring former employees.

Employees may be rehired for very different reasons. Maybe they were laid off due to a company’s financial situation, but not because they weren’t a valued employee. Or perhaps they were let go unfairly and a company realized its mistake. Maybe, just maybe, they were fired but fixed whatever caused them to be fired in the first place. Regardless of the reason, the question remains: Is this a positive trend or a recipe for disaster? Let’s examine.

Firing — and rehiring

Firings and rehirings can have a major effect on the employees in question. Since George Steinbrenner’s passing last week, many have commented about his tendency as a coach to treat employees rudely and fire them, then reconsider and hire them back soon after. Most wouldn’t argue that  many of his firings were impulsive. Steinbrenner, who reportedly made 20 managerial hirings and firings in 23 seasons, even admitted he was often unreasonable in his employee dealings.

Other organizations, like the Red Cross,  recently rehired two fired employees who complained about the heat during a blood drive, amid union talks. And an ex-employee who worked for the City of Fort Worth for years alleges she was wrongly fired after whistleblowing — what would happen if she was hired back?

What about rehiring laid off employees?

While it’s true that the decision to lay off employees is generally not a hot-headed game time decision a la Steinbrenner, layoffs still create unrest with laid off employees as well as remaining staff — and can leave a lingering bitterness in both camps toward company leadership. So what happens when you rehire employees post-layoffs?

Pros of rehiring former employees

Aside from the obvious — that rehiring employees is giving someone a job who needs to support themselves or a family, rehiring employees can have many other benefits.

Employee morale – If employees see that their employer is actively working to bring back employees, it can have a positive effect on morale — and it can bring people back together who formerly worked well as a team.

Training – Rehired employees understand the company culture, and employers don’t have to retrain them. Even if company structure has changed somewhat since they left, you’re likely looking at a quick brush-up versus a training overhaul.

New perspective — Time may actually have not just healed all wounds — but may have enabled both the person or people who let an employee go, and that employee, get away from a negative situation, gain some perspective, and learn from mistakes made. Even if the situation ended on a neutral or positive note, time away in which a former employee has had a chance to pursue other interests, hobbies, and skills may benefit not only them and their place in the organization, but also their employer, once he or she is brought back into the fold.

The HIRE Act — What it Means to You

If you’re an employer rehiring currently unemployed former employees — or an employer hiring any unemployed worker in general — you could benefit from a new tax incentive. One of the major benefits to employers who hire unemployed workers comes in the form of two new tax benefits that are part of the Hiring Incentives to Restore Employment (HIRE) Act. The two major parts of the act state:

1. Employers who hire unemployed workers this year (after Feb. 3, 2010 and before Jan. 1, 2011) may qualify for a 6.2-percent payroll tax incentive, in effect exempting them from their share of Social Security taxes on wages paid to these workers after March 18, 2010.
2. For each worker retained for at least a year, businesses may claim an additional general business tax credit, up to $1,000 per worker, when they file their 2011 income tax returns.

Find out more about the HIRE act and what it may mean for your business (video).

Cons of rehiring former employees

As much as rehiring a former employee can have positive effects, things can just as easily swing the other way — making a situation less than happy for rehired employees, employees who haven’t been let go, and company leadership.

Resentment – If things ended on a sour note, rehiring former employees can be complicated — and may not work out well in the long run. Even if an employer did everything they could to ease the stress of the situation, an employee may harbor resentment and bitter feelings, and those feelings may have grown stronger since they left the organization.

Current employee backlash — Employees who watched someone else leave and then come back may become jealous because a rehired employee is now getting work they were handling and returning “without paying their dues” as a new employee would. After all, remaining employees are often the ones left picking up the extra work when a company downsizes.

Short-term success – It’s important to keep in mind that even if an employee is willing to come back, they may only be accepting the job because they really need one (and are still looking for something better). This is where “onboarding” a rehired employee may help (see below).

If you’re going to rehire

If you do choose to rehire laid off employees, there are some things you can do to avoid the potential pitfalls listed above and ensure it’s as smooth a transition as possible.

Claudio Fernández-Aráoz, senior adviser at global executive search firm Egon Zehnder International, offers employers a few tips; namely, to clearly communicate to the rest of the company the reasons for hiring back a former employee; sufficiently brief a former employee about the company’s current situation and present very clear expectations; and to follow up, at least quarterly, with the returning employee to make sure he or she is adjusting well.

Would you rehire a former employee? What pros or cons would you add?

The last thing you might expect to hear when walking into a presentation about how to inspire creativity from your employees is: “Tell your employees to think inside the box”…and yet, that’s pretty much the advice Disney’s business program consultant, Scott Milligan, had for the audience when he presented at SHRM 2010 in San Diego last month. 

“We tell our cast members to think INSIDE the box,” Milligan boasted to the audience of HR professionals during his presentation, “Disney’s Approach to Inspiring Creativity”. (“Cast members,” by the way, is Disney’s term for employees.) After all, he reasoned, how creative is it, really, to tell people to “think outside the box” anymore? (Finally, someone said it!)

The other surprising thing about this idea of “thinking inside the box” is that it seems awfully practical and structured for a company that prides itself on the very idealistic notions of making magic happen and dreams come true, etc…And yet, this structured approach works for Disney.

Thinking inside the box, Milligan said, provides companies guidance and direction, helps them avoid wasting resources and keeps everyone focused.  But what is the box? As Milligan explained it, the box is your company’s organizational identity – who you are or what you intend to be – and it encompasses four things:

• Your Customers – Who are they? What do they need from you?
• Your Vision – What do you want to be?
• Your Mission – What do you want to do?
• Your Essence – How do we want people to feel when they experience your product or service?

Find Your Essence
A lot of companies, Milligan believes, leave essence out of the equation – and that, he explained, is an unfortunate oversight, especially when it comes to recruiting: In order to find the best people, hiring managers and recruiters must understand their company’s essence in order to seek out and identify the very people who share that essence.

As an example, he cited how Disney makes it a goal to create happiness for people. Milligan then challenged the audience to find their own companies’ essence, and look to that when hiring employees. 

(When considering your company’s essence, it might help of it to think of it in terms of how blogger Derrick Daye defines essence: ”…the heart and soul of a brand – a brand’s fundamental nature or quality. Usually stated in two or three words, a brand’s essence is the one constant across product categories and throughout the world.”)

Structure, Not Confinement
Again, while you might think that a company that tells its employees to think inside the box would be fostering a culture of confinement, discouraging creative thinking by setting up rules and restrictions, the box model actually serves the opposite purpose for Disney – and it can do the same for others as well.

“Within that box, companies can expand their identity,” Milligan said, explaining how the box model has enabled Disney to expand its brand identity - from being merely about cartoons to also encompassing live action features and then expanding to theme parks, hotels and resorts and then even on to cruise lines – all while staying focused on the mission to enable “magic” to happen.

What do you think? Does your company think “inside the box” as well? Is essence something that you talk about or communicate at your company? How does it play into attracting and engaging employees?

I recently spoke with Dean Gualco, human resources manager and author of The Good Manager:  A Guide for the Twenty-First Century Manager, a book that focuses on how managers have gone from being respected in society and trusted by their employees to the source of blame for many workplace problems today.

Gualco rallies against this new view of managers, and lays out six attributes that he thinks are essential to being a good manager: Like What You Do, Knowledgeable, Solid Organizational Skills, Work Hard, Make Work Fun, and Be a Good Person.

During our discussion, he also shared his thoughts on everything from why employees view managers’ jobs as less stressful than their own, to the growing tendency to blame managers when things go awry, to the role managers play in their employees’ development, to the one thing managers can start doing today to become better managers.

Below is the Q&A -- simply click the “Play” button within each to hear Gualco’s answer to my question.

Q: What is the most important aspect of being a manager?

Q: Do you think many managers today are unqualified?

Q: What do you think is the most commonly lacking managerial attribute?

Q: Do you have any suggestions for how managers could make work more fun?

Q: What’s one thing managers can start doing today to become better managers?

Q: Why do you think employees tend to view a manager’s job as less stressful than their own?

Q: How can employees and managers work together to understand each others’ roles?

Q: How can managers prevent themselves from becoming less effective due to boredom in their roles?

Q: You mention in your book that it baffles you that many people aren’t in jobs they love. People may argue that they can’t find a job they love in a tough market. What do you say to them?

Q: How can workers stay competitive in their jobs in such a competitive marketplace?

Q: How are managers responsible for their employees staying competitive and continuously learning in their roles?

Q: Have you seen a lot of change in the role of a manager over the last few years, with the recession and a changing market?

Last week, I challenged readers to share the most difficult interview questions they’ve ever gotten – as interviewers. 

From the blunt (“What don’t you like about working for your company?”) to the bizarre (“If you walked into a room filled with jars and I was one of the jars, what would I have to contain to stand out from the others?”), the only thing more surprising than the actual questions our readers submitted were the surprisingly insightful lessons they gleaned from those questions.  

So without further ado, I present The Hiring Site readers’ nominees for the most difficult-to-answer interview questions they ever received from job candidates…and what they took away from the experience:

• “What is your company’s mission statement?” Seems like an innocent enough question, but Christina Thais was still relatively new to her company when a candidate asked her this during a phone interview, causing her to go blank. Another reader, Angie, had a similar experience when a candidate asked her to describe the company’s corporate culture. Since then, Angie writes, she has “taken the time to really think about how to communicate our corporate culture to future candidates.” Lesson learned: Both Christina and Angie’s experience highlight how important it is to ensure your employees understand the company vision, mission and values and constantly look for opportunities to communicate these things. Not only will the constant reminders keep you and your employees accountable for upholding these values and objectives, but the ability to recite these things off the bat is a sign to candidates that you actually “walk the walk.”  
• “What don’t you like about working for your company?” After being asked this question, reader Jessica writes, “I now prepare myself with potential similar difficult questions that may come up during the interview process.” Lesson learned: Alas, you can’t anticipate every difficult question that’s going to come your way, but you can anticipate that difficult questions will come up, and when they do, your best bet will be to simply tell the truth.  After all, if you’re dishonest or bend the truth, you risk the chance of setting false expectations for the candidate. A sugar-coated answer might help you fill the position, but it won’t stay filled very long. [Side note: This is also a good attitude to have if you, like one reader, Bridget, ever get a question like: “If you walked into a room filled with jars and I was one of the jars, what would I have to contain to stand out from the others?” “I’m still not sure how to answer that question,” Bridget writes.]
• “So what’s in it for me?” Another reader, NL, remembers being “appalled” when a potential candidate for an entry-level receptionist position asked this, the second in a line of questioning that began, “Why should I accept an offer to work for this company? Obviously, you’re not Google, with candidates sending you flowers, balloon telegrams or banging on your door to get it in.” Lesson learned: Not only did the candidate’s attitude reveal that she would not be a good fit for the company and that “phone screens are essential!” but it also seemed to confirm what NL already knew: It’s more than okay to not be Google. “Considering that every other candidate had heard about us prior to even applying…we are doing something right.”
• “Will you be keeping in touch? WILL you?”  It’s easy to forget how heavily candidates depend on that post-interview phone call from you…until one of them actually says so. Such is what happened to one commenter, J., who was met with bitter disbelief after promising to keep in touch with one candidate, who had apparently been (falsely) told one too many times by recruiters that she’d be called back.  Lesson learned: The confrontation taught J. ”that a response to a candidate is not a courtesy, it’s an essential part of the process and should never, ever be overlooked or taken lightly. We are dealing with real people with real lives and very real concerns and challenges. Every one of them deserves respect, and a response.” Couldn’t have said it better myself.
• “How many healthy choices do you offer in your vending machine?” When Eileen Hershkowitz received this question as well as many others about various working conditions at her company that promoted a healthy lifestyle, she realized that the candidate was seeking affirmation that her company not only talked about employee wellness, but truly executed that in its culture. Lesson learned: Eileen writes, “The candidate really had a valid point in my mind and made me re-think how important areas such as break rooms, and choices in vending machines and/or cafeterias can affect how your employees view your organization in the commitment to its most valuable resource.” In other words, it’s in the every day things things companies do – not just through quarterly bonuses, annual awards or periodic celebrations – that communicate to your employees that you sincerely value their efforts, support them and want to ensure their success. 
• “What are the specific steps you as my manager take to ensure my success in this position, and what are your procedures for preparing for my termination if I’m not?” After getting this question at the end of a sales position interview, reader James was understandably thrown off guard. After all, not many people ask about the firing process; however, James wrote that it made him consider how his accountability practices play into his goals for his team’s performance.   Lesson learned: “Interviews (especially for sales positions) need to include detailed expectations for success and ‘how’ the candidates will be held accountable for that success so that he/she knows exactly what will be expected of them should they get the job.”
• “Why isn’t anybody that works at your company happy?” Sure, it’s not the most eloquently phrased question, and perhaps a tad on the presumptuous side, but when a candidate  threw this question to one anonymous reader, rather than take offense and immediately dismiss the candidate, the interviewer instead took the opportunity to find out where the candidate had gotten such an impression and clarify any misconceptions about the company. Lesson learned: The interview process provides an opportunity to find out how well your company is executing its employment brand, and give insight into how to better execute it. 
• “What do you do if he (the owner) dies?” Despite its bluntness, reader Brett found this question to be smart once he realized that the candidate was thinking long term, and was concerned about the company’s viability should he be hired. Brett writes that this question “made me start to think – we prep for a lot of things like talking salary & benefits because we think about what we’d want to know… but you never know who’s sitting on the other side of the desk and what their wants/needs are…”  Lesson learned: Brett brings up a good point about the importance of doing the right research to understand candidate attitudes, behaviors and perceptions when recruiting and trying to sell your company to candidates.

The overall lesson?
At the very least, questions like these can give you insight into how an individual thinks and his or her motives for taking a job, as well as a glimpse into their soft skills, what kind of employee they will make and how, if hired, they would potentially sell your company to others, to name just a few additional benefits.

At the most, these questions can help prepare you for future interviews and give you insight into something about your company that needs to be addressed (see “Why isn’t anybody who works at your company happy?” above) – whether it’s better communication about the company mission statement, or the fact that you need to better manage or build your external employment brand.

What about you? Any questions of your own to add to the list? And if so, did you learn from the experience?

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.”

_________________________________________________________________________________________

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

We at CareerBuilder have created this e-book for you, the employer.

• For the small bait and tackle shop owner, as well as the restaurant franchise owner.
• For the small tech firm, as well as the Fortune 500 corporation.

Because while your recruitment needs may be vastly different from every other business, you still do have recruitment needs. And whether you are concerned with getting less application drop-off, building a stronger employment brand, delving into the world of social media, providing more training opportunities for your employees, or a myriad of other challenges, CareerBuilder’s team of experts can help you isolate and tackle the specific areas of concern in your recruitment process and move forward to meet your next challenge with confidence and ease.

Use this e-book to discover our best tips around:

• Recruitment benchmarking
• Talent intelligence
• Compensation strategy
• Employment branding
• Social media recruitment/ social recruiting
• Employee engagement and retention
• Candidate attraction
• Recruitment process optimization
• Employee training
• Succession management
• Employee onboarding
• Interview questions
• …and more!

Download CareerBuilder’s Ultimate Recruitment Guide e-Book, our brand new how-to-hire guide stocked with the latest tips and advice – and designed to address your unique recruitment needs today.

Recently, a colleague of mine over at The Work Buzz answered a reader’s concern that, I suspect, is becoming more and more common in today’s workplace:

What’s the best way to decline a co-worker’s social networking friend request?  

Certainly, there are valid reasons for following or “friending” your colleagues on social networking sites like Facebook, Bebo or Twitter; however, many people believe in keeping their professional and personal lives separate. A perfectly valid and reasonable choice, of course, but it can make for an awkward situation when that Facebook friendship request comes around…

And when said request is from a colleague someone you manage or are superior to, the situation can be that much more sensitive. While you might not feel comfortable having access to information on your employee’s personal life, this concern might not have occurred to your employee, and ignoring or declining their request could send the wrong message.

That said, we here at The Hiring Site decided to look at this issue from the manager’s viewpoint, and give some tips for declining an employee’s social networking friendship request – without damaging the workplace relationship:

• Explain why you rejected the request: Rejecting a friendship request is quick and easy…until your face-to-face with the person you just rejected.  Fortunately, all it takes is a short, simple explanation to alleviate any awkwardness.  Work Buzz blogger Anthony Balderrama suggests saying something that’s light hearted, but gets the message across that you don’t mix your professional and social lives. Try something like, “I prefer to keep that profile separate from any work stuff just to be safe. I don’t want anyone seeing the embarrassing high school pictures. I was so goofy!” Suggest instead that you two connect over LinkedIn, Brightfuse or another site meant specifically for professional networking.“Few people will hold a grudge about a Facebook rejection (if it comes with a good explanation). But careers can and have been ruined by the wrong people seeing the wrong information,” Balderrama writes.
• Be honest: The “I want to keep my personal and professional lives separate line” can come back to bite you if it’s not the truth – especially if the employee you just rejected finds out that you’re online friends with other people at the company.  Maybe for whatever reason, you just don’t want to be friends with that particular employee, but if you’re not honest, that employee is likely to find out you lied to him or her, which is a quick way to kill morale – not to mention your own credibility.

Of course, there’s always the option of just sucking it up, accepting the request, and living with the consequences – but that could also mean being privy to more information about an employee than you may want or feel comfortable with… 

What are your thoughts? Ever had to reject an employee’s friend request – or wished you had rejected it? Share with us (anonymously, if you prefer) in the comments section below!

Can you spot a fake resume? Can’t blame you if the answer’s no…It’s becoming trickier than ever thanks to the rise in Web sites – like CareerExcuse.com and FakeResume.com – that make it even easier for job seekers to falsify information on their resumes. (Check out the recent CBS 2 video expose about CareerExcuse.com, featuring CareerBuilder’s own Jason Ferrara.) 

Add to that the already strained resources hiring managers, HR professionals and recruiters have to verify these claims, and it’s even easier for unqualified job seekers to slip through the cracks.

In fact, a 2008 CareerBuilder survey on lies job seekers tell found that 38 percent of employees had embellished their job responsibilities at some point, while 18 percent had lied about their skill sets. Other common lies surrounded information about employees’ start and end dates of employment, academic degrees, previous employers and job titles. 

6 Ways to Avoid a Hiring Mistake:
Here are some more steps you can take to protect yourself from being the victim of a fake resume (adapted from Workforce Trends and Volt.com): 

1. Perform a standard background check on things like work history, residences, dates of employment, etc. Look for discrepancies between what the candidate submitted and what the reports reveal. 
2. Check for red flags: Unexplained gaps in employment, a reluctance to explain the reason for leaving, and unusual periods of self-employment can be a tip off to false employment history. Always check references, including clients, for self-employed work history. Because even references can be fake, check the web sites of previous employers and use the phone numbers found online for employment verification.  (Can’t find a previous employer’s web site, even after you’ve “Googled” it? The Better Business Bureau or the local Chamber of Commerce are good resources to check, too.)
3. Utilize social networking sites. Social networking profiles contain public information that may help you verify certain information such as a candidate’s work history or education credentials.  (Just be aware of the possible legal ramifications of using social media to screen applicants.)
4. Test their skills. Knowing that employers use keyword searching to find and qualify their resumes, applicants may include keywords for all skills required for the job – regardless of whether they have them or not. Find out if they’re embellishing by asking specific technical questions about the skills they claim to have and actually test their computer skills.
5. Be fair. Remember that mistakes and misunderstandings do happen. If you find a discrepancy, give the candidate an opportunity to explain.
6. Use common sense. Trust your intuition and experience. If something doesn’t seem right, follow up on it.  

Lesson Learned: Readers Share Their Own Fake Resume Stories
In the comments from a previous post on lies job seekers tell on resumes, many readers shared their own experiences in dealing with false resume information. Here are some of their stories:

• “Several years ago I learned a very important lesson: be wary of people who claim a previously outrageous salary from a “now defunct company” but are willing to work for less because they “like your company.” We hired my Executive HR Assistant who ended up spending the first two weeks of her job with us surfing for a new job online. We do have internet management software that blocks job sites, but as she was HR she needed access to these sites for our own recruiting efforts. It does monitor the sites visited though, and that’s what tipped us off. Additionally, she had five different versions of her resume stored on her company computer. All of them had her working for us for over one year, when she had only started 10 days previously. However, the reference name and number she included for our company was not us.  The funny thing was though, all of her business references and previous employment history checked out before we hired her; except the most recent one that “went out of business.” When checking references, look the company info up online and call directly. Don’t use the info the candidate supplied unless you have to, then take it with a grain of salt.” – Nathan
• “I was ready to hire the perfect candidate when I decided to run a background check. We don’t normally run one for every position but this position had access to cash so I’d required it. The letters of recommendations from previous employers were actually letterhead he stole from the companies. And if that wasn’t bad enough, he submitted a list of company contacts and personal phone numbers. Everyone on his list turned out to be one of his friends who covered for him on the initial phone conversation telling us what a great employee he was. Digging deeper we found at a previous job in another city he was told to resign his position or he would be turned over to the police for theft. His explanation was that if he told me the truth, he probably wouldn’t have got the job. After that experience, I run background checks on anyone and everyone that works in the office and/or drives a company vehicle.” – John
• “We had a person claim a very high-level position at a major corporation. It was actually true, but we couldn’t figure out why he wanted to come work for us in what was a huge step down for him. A few days later his name was in the paper – he had had *ahem* inappropriate activities with a board member of the company he was working for, in the parking garage. Which had been caught on tape….” – PJ
• “I received four applications with the exact same resume…The only difference were their names at the top.” – Colleen

What’s So Wrong with a Little White Lie?
I also want to mention, however, that a few readers of that post actually came to job seekers’ defenses – arguing the point that there’s little harm in embellishing resume information if experience and performance trump what’s on paper….Would you agree? 

Or do you, like other readers, believe that if job seekers are willing to lie about one thing, they are probably willing to lie about other things, too?

What are your thoughts? Do you forgive “embellishments” on resumes, or is any white lie a deal breaker?

As a society, we are willing to quickly forgive (or at least forget) some mistakes, yet when it comes to others (cough Tiger Woods cough), we’re still unsure where we stand. In the world of candidate interviews, the balance between what is acceptable and what is not can often be shaky — particularly in our current economy, with competition and pressure for jobs is at a high. With that in mind, we’re a bit sympathetic to the “most unusual” and interview blunders listed below. Everyone makes mistakes, and by examining our weaknesses in interviews, maybe we can all learn something — and become more polished  (candidates) and more prepared to handle tricky situations (employers).

The candidate interview anecdotes listed below are some of the results from a new CareerBuilder survey of more than 2,700 hiring managers.

Candidates’ most unusual interview blunders:

• Candidate wore a business suit with flip flops
• Candidate asked if the interviewer wanted to meet for a drink after
• Candidate had applied for an accounting job, yet said he was “bad at managing money”
• Candidate ate food in the employee break room after the interview
• Candidate recited poetry
• Candidate applying for a customer service job said, “I don’t really like working with people”
• Candidate had to go immediately to get his dog that had gotten loose in the parking lot
• Candidate looked at the ceiling during the entire interview
• Candidate used Dungeons & Dragons as an example of teamwork
• Candidate clipped fingernails

On another note, while some of the behaviors listed below wouldn’t fly in any interview (like, clipping fingernails — unless you’re applying for a nail technician job!), some of the behaviors below, when examined more closely, actually may make sense for some types of jobs — or should at least be given the benefit of the doubt by an employee.

What can employers learn from these examples?

1. When possible, give candidates the benefit of the doubt.

Candidates applying to your jobs are human, and like anyone else, they may do things you deem “weird” or “unusual” but that they see as normal. If you’re interviewing a really strong candidate, and they suddenly break out into poetry or impromptu beat-boxing, think about the implications on your business. Could this be a really creative candidate who just needs the right role and mentoring to thrive and help take your business to the next level?

Or if a candidate’s looking at the ceiling, might he or she be thinking hard or simply very nervous during interviews? Again, depending on the role at hand, these behaviors may simply not be acceptable (outside sales, for example), but if the candidate seems like a great candidate otherwise, what about getting him or her in a different setting or on the company floor and observing the interactions or ideas that come about? The candidate may surprise you

2. Consider that a candidate may in fact know something you don’t.

Using Dungeons & Dragons as an example of teamwork, although mentioned by an employer in the survey results as an “unusual response,” is actually not that far-fetched. It’s been reported that playing video games may lead to a lucrative tech job, for example, and that playing games like World of Warcraft can be great breeding grounds for real-world leadership skills. Whether it’s an affinity for video games or something else, a candidate’s ability to relate subjects he or she is passionate about to their job role may be worth a listen. Don’t be so quick to write the candidate off — he or she could be your next star employee.

3. Candidates have personal lives, just like you — and sometimes situations happen that are out of a candidate’s control.

A candidate’s dog got loose from its leash while waiting in the parking lot, and Concerned Candidate #1 must attend to his or her pet. Hey, it happens. We all have families, pets, and other personal things to attend to, and sometimes those things unintentionally cross over into our personal lives. A situation like this is more about how the candidate handles it. Does he or she handle it with grace and humor, apologize, and try to make up for the blunder? If so, you may consider letting Concerned Candidate #1 — if not Fido — into your office on a more permanent basis.

4. Sometimes candidates are hungry.
That, however, does not excuse swiping food from the break room, as one candidate did, according to the survey. But candy at the reception desk may do the trick.

One of our colleagues over at CareerBuilder’s job seeker blog, The Work Buzz, recently wrote about whether writing “To Whom It May Concern” as the salutation to a prospective employer on a cover letter is the kiss of death for a potential employee.

I think what’s most interesting about this question is that, as evidenced in the post’s comments section, both those in the position of hiring and of being hired have quite a varied opinion on which salutations are acceptable on a candidate’s cover letter — and whether it even matters.

For instance, “promytius” said the resourcefulness of finding out the correct person to address a cover letter to can be construed as “nosy,” while “To whom” or “Dear Sir/Madam” reflected respect for the hiring manager and education of the individual who wrote it.

“Denine” made the point that sometimes employers list the company as confidential in their job advertisement — and in that case,  it’s not only both undetermined and difficult to find out who the employer is, but it’s a red flag to the candidate that trying to find out and get in touch with a particular person at the company is not welcome.

“Mark” said there’s a reason employers use software applications and why job sites often give employers the ability to make contact information confidential — they don’t want to be directly contacted.

For “Lee,” heading formalities are not the issue, but that his company is really looking for proper spelling, ease of reading and proper grammar. And impressed with a candidate addressing him by name? Not so much: Lee said if a candidate finds out his name, he would assume the candidate knew someone within the company and was getting inside information.

“Dawn” said that oftentimes she feels at a disadvantage, because not only is a phone number or e-mail address not provided, but the company name is also kept private. With no information to go by, what is the correct way to address you, employers (assuming we are talking about situations in which cover letters are part of the application equation)?

With all the disagreement, how are candidates to know the correct way to address a cover letter — and avoid having it tossed into the nearest trash can?

How do you want to be addressed on a cover letter? Is there a difference between “To Whom it May Concern” or a candidate doing his or her research and addressing you by name?  And does it even matter, or are you focused on other aspects of the candidate’s credentials?

None of us likes getting rejected. In the past, many of you have cited “not enough time” as a reason you don’t send job rejection letters or e-mails. The reality is, we’re all under various types of constraints in our jobs, and while some things are prioritized, others fall by the wayside. Communicating with candidates, however, is a vital step in the recruitment process — and one that you should not be dismissing. But how can you achieve this important piece of communication without taking a chunk of time out of your work day?

The problem is twofold:
1) Candidates say there are not enough employers following up with them (particularly post-interview), which creates dissatisfaction among candidates.
2) Employers say there is not enough time to respond to all (or, in some cases, any) candidates whom they don’t choose to hire. So what gives?

Why should you care?

• Respect. No one wants to wait in agony for the possibility of bad news. Candidates shouldn’t have to chase you down to find out whether they landed your open job; they have applications to send out and interviews to go on! Think of the rejection like a Band-Aid, and give candidates the bad news rather than putting it off and dragging it out.

• Reputation. While today’s candidates are selling themselves to you, you’re also selling yourself to them.  Your employment brand and company image is at stake. Keeping the lines of communication open will help you build and maintain relationships with candidates who may become your employees at a later date. And even if they don’t become your employees, reputation is a powerful thing. If you don’t give candidates the respect of knowing whether or not they can cross your open job off their list, they might tell a friend. Who tells a friend. And before you know it, candidates may start to avoid applying to your company. Customers may also see your lack of communication as a sign of how you will work with them. A little communication can go a long way in how candidates — and customers — see your company.

• Organize and save time. Aside from reputation, keeping this piece of communication in your recruitment process can actually help you organize your process and save time. Why field tons of calls or e-mails from irate candidates who haven’t heard back from you? Why put them through the agony, and why go through it yourself? For not a lot of effort, you can get a big return.

Who has the time? Yes, time is an issue. But with the right tools, you can spend as much time as you have (which likely isn’t much) to get your message out there. If you do have the luxury of time, you can go the extra mile with candidates — but in my experience, making even a small effort is better than making no effort at all.

“It’s important that employers not lose sight of communication with candidates, which is so necessary, particularly in our current economic environment,” said Rosemary Haefner, vice president of human resources for CareerBuilder.

“While employers are facing many challenges in the recruitment process, they must remember that candidates are facing a unique set of challenges as well. By facilitating candidates’ job search process, employers are not only making the process less cumbersome for the people applying to their jobs, but also building a strong reputation and a culture of respect.”

Options:

• My Letters: My Letters is a free CareerBuilder Job Posting tool that enables you to create and save up to 20 different automatic response letters to send to job seekers after they submit an application to your job. With My Letters, you can get necessary information out to candidates quickly, easily, and effectively.  Create letters concerning the job position, needed candidate information, interview status, to alert of next steps in the process, to thank candidates, and more — and automate many parts of the recruitment communication process, without losing touch with candidates.

• Snail mail: While the heart may swoon at an ink-stained, handwritten letter sent the old-fashioned way, it’s not always the best option for your candidates. With that said, however, getting a response of some kind out, even if it is not as timely as e-mail, is better than nothing; at least candidates receive some kind of confirmation and closure. They can then either cross you off their list entirely or keep your company in mind for future opportunities (depending how open you keep that door in the letter, of course).

Tips for the best rejection letters or e-mails:

1. Be candid but gentle. Remember, this is a rejection — be respectful of candidates’ feelings and wish them success in future endeavors.
2. State a clear reason for the rejection; For example: “We have selected other candidate/s whose credentials were better suited to this position.”
3. Be honest. If there are other future opportunities and you will keep the resume on file or want a candidate to reapply in future, say so. If not, don’t. Don’t promise to keep a candidate’s resume on file if you have no intention of doing so, and if you do, state a specific time frame (six months, for example).
4. Be personal. Personalize the letter with the candidate’s name, position, and, if possible, a remark — or at least your signature.
5. While this is a rejection letter, it is still nice to compliment a candidate if warranted – “although your background and qualifications are impressive, we have chosen someone else for this position.”
6. Don’t send a postcard; this isn’t a “hello” from your Caribbean vacation, and it reeks of impersonality. A letter format is more appropriate. Plus, if you go the e-mail route, your costs are even more minimal.
7. Do not say who was hired for the position in question.
8. Respond to candidates in a reasonable amount of time.

You can check out examples of rejection letters here and here.

“There have been many signs over the past few months that point to the healing of the U.S. economy, especially the continued decrease in the number of jobs lost per month, a trend that will hopefully carry over into the new year,” said Matt Ferguson, CEO of CareerBuilder. “Although 20 percent of employers plan to add headcount in 2010, up from 14 percent last year, they still remain cautious in regards to their hiring. We’re headed in the right direction but should not expect to see actual job growth until at least Q2 2010.”

The encouraging news regarding the economy may be easing hiring fears, as employers signal an increase in their plans to hire in the new year, according to CareerBuilder’s 2010 Job Forecast. While employers continue to closely monitor the progress of recovery for the U.S. economy, they are beginning to consider hiring strategies designed to preserve the health and growth of their businesses for the future. CareerBuilder surveyed more than 2,700 hiring managers and human resource professionals nationwide across industries.

HIRING IN 2010

Full time – Twenty percent of employers say they plan to increase their number of full-time, permanent employees in 2010, up from 14 percent in 2009. Nine percent say they plan to decrease headcount in 2010, down sharply from 16 percent in 2009. Sixty-one percent don’t plan to change staff levels, while 10 percent say they are unsure.

Part time – Eleven percent of employers plan say they plan to add part-time employees in 2010, up slightly from 9 percent in 2009. Eight percent say they plan to decrease their part-time help in 2010, down from 14 percent in 2009. Sixty-nine percent plan no change in headcount, while 13 percent are unsure.

Hiring By Region – Employers in the West are planning to increase their headcounts more in 2010 than the other regions of the country. Nearly one-quarter of employers (24%) in the West say they plan to add full-time workers in 2010, compared to 21 percent in the Northeast, 20 percent in the South and 16 percent in the Midwest.

While plans to decrease headcounts in 2010 are down sharply across all regions, employers in the Northeast still plan to trim headcounts by 10 percent, followed by an 8 percent decrease in the South, Midwest and West.

Hiring By Industry – Comparing selected industries, hiring is expected to increase in information technology, manufacturing, financial services, professional and business services, and sales in the coming year. Thirty-two percent of IT, 27 percent of manufacturing, and 23 percent of financial services employers plan to add full-time, permanent employees in 2010, followed by 22 percent of employers in professional and business services and 21 percent in sales. Health care employers are also planning to expand staffs at 21 percent followed by 18 percent of transportation employers and 15 percent of Retail.

Hiring By Job Type – When asked which areas employers plan to hire for in 2010, one-third pointed to technology followed by 28 percent in customer service. Nearly one-quarter (23 percent) plan to add sales people, 18 percent will add research/development, 17 percent in business development, 15 percent in accounting/finance and 14 percent in marketing.

Compensation - Even as companies continue to watch their spending, they still plan slight increases to salaries in the coming year. Fifty-seven percent of employers report their companies will increase salaries for existing employees in 2010, down from 65 percent in 2009. Thirty-six percent expect to raise salaries of existing employees by 3 percent or more, while 11 percent anticipate increases of 5 percent or more.

Twenty-nine percent of employers plan to increase salaries on initial offers to new employees, down from 33 percent in 2009. Nearly one-in-five (18 percent) employers will raise salaries on initial offers by 3 percent or more while 7 percent anticipate increases of 5 percent or more.

HOW EMPLOYERS PLAN TO MOVE FORWARD IN THE NEW YEAR

Companies are looking to the future and making up for lost ground caused by the recession. The following are 10 trends for 2010:

1. Replacing Lower-Performing Employees

Employers are taking advantage of the large number of top talent in the current labor pool to strengthen their work force. Thirty-seven percent of employers say they plan to replace lower-performing employees with higher-performers in 2010. When asked to grade their current work force, 25 percent rated them an “A”, 60 percent a “B”, 15 percent a “C”, and 1 percent a “D.” Less than one-half of a percent felt their current staff was a failure.

2. Emphasis on Social Media to Strengthen Brand

The economy required companies to make some tough decisions about their businesses, which had a negative impact on their brands. Close to four-in-ten employers (37%) plan to put a greater emphasis on

social media in 2010 to create a more positive brand for their organization. One-in-five employers plan to add social media responsibilities to a current employee, while close to one-in-twelve (8 percent) plan to hire someone new to focus or partially focus on social media.

3. Rehiring Laid-off Workers

Companies needed to scale their businesses to market last year and four-in-ten employers say they were forced to lay off workers. Among those who had lay-offs in 2009, thirty-two percent of employers now say they plan to bring back workers with three-in-ten either doing it now or planning to do so in the first six months of 2010.

4. Flexible Work Arrangements

Companies plan to continue providing employees with greater flexibility in hopes of maintaining a better work-life balance. Thirty-five percent of employers say they plan to provide more flexible work arrangements in 2010, compared to 31 percent last year. These arrangements include:

• Alternate schedules – come in early and leave early or come in later and leave later – 73 percent
• Telecommuting options – 41 percent
• Compressed workweeks – work the same hours, but in fewer days – 32 percent
• Summer hours – 18 percent
• Job sharing – 13 percent
• Sabbaticals – 6 percent

5. Cutting Perks and Benefits

Even as companies look to the new year and toward growth opportunities for their businesses, many are still choosing to trim perks and benefits. Thirty-seven percent of employers say they will cut perks and benefits in 2010, up from 32 percent who said they trimmed in 2009. Perks and benefits employers plan to trim in the new year include bonuses, medical coverage, suspended 401k matching and office perks such as coffee, tea and condiments.

6. Rehiring Retirees and Postponing Retirement

Companies understand the intellectual capital mature workers bring to their organization and 27 percent say they are open to retaining their workers who are approaching retirement. Sixteen percent say they are likely to rehire retirees from other companies in 2010. Additionally, one-in-ten are likely to provide incentives for workers at or approaching retirement age to stay on with the company longer.

At the same time, workers have expressed interest in postponing retirement. Thirty percent of employers report they have received requests from workers approaching retirement age to stay on with their company, up from 22 percent last year.

7. Freelance or Contract Hiring

While employers still plan to be cautious regarding the number of full-time employees they add in the new year, many will turn to freelance or contract employees to help keep their businesses moving forward. Three-in-ten employers anticipate hiring freelancers or contractors in 2010, up slightly from 28

percent in 2009. Six percent expect to employ more freelance workers or contractors than last year, while 15 percent expect to hire the same amount and 10 percent plan to hire fewer.

8. Green Jobs

Employers will continue to turn some of their focus to the environment in the new year. Eleven percent of employers say they plan to add “green jobs” in 2010, the same amount who said they added them in 2009. “Green jobs” are positions that implement environmentally conscious design, policy and technology to improve conservation and sustainability.

9. Bilingual Recruitment

Employers have identified having a diverse work force as an important measure of success as they begin to rebuild their businesses after the economic downturn. One area they plan to focus on is building a bilingual team. Nearly four-in-ten employers (39%) said they plan to hire bilingual candidates in 2010 and half said that if they had two equally qualified candidates, they would be more inclined to hire the bilingual candidate.

10. Business Travel

While employers are inching away from cost containment and more into growth, one area they still plan to save money on is business travel. Forty-three percent of employers say that in their organizations there will be less business travel in 2010 than in 2009.

Download the full report here

While it’s true that many companies have been forced to make difficult business decisions this year, many employers still plan to reward their employees for hard work with holiday perks like bonuses, gifts and parties — even if these perks are scaled back a bit. These results are from CareerBuilder’s recent survey about workplace holiday giving among more than 3,000 hiring managers and HR professionals. We’ve got the lowdown on what businesses are doing about bonuses, gifts, and the oft-infamous work holiday party.

Bonuses:

• Nearly three in ten (29 percent) employers plan to give their employees holiday bonuses this year.  Among that group, 16 percent are planning to give the same amount as in previous years, while 11 percent plan to give less.
• Twelve percent of employers say they will not be issuing holiday bonuses even though they have in previous years.

Gifts:

• More than a quarter (26 percent) of employers plan to give holiday gifts, with 15 percent planning to spend the same amount for workers as in previous years.  Eight percent plan to spend less.
• Another eight percent say they are not planning to give holidays gifts in 2009, even though they have in years past.

Parties:

• Almost half (49 percent) of employers are planning a holiday party for their employees this year.  Of that group, 30 percent plan to throw the same party as in previous years, while 18 percent are planning something on a smaller scale.
• Eleven percent of employers don’t plan to have a holiday party in 2009 even though they have in previous years.

“After a challenging year, some organizations are cutting back on the holiday perks that they may have offered in previous years,” said Rosemary Haefner, Vice President of Human Resources for CareerBuilder. “Even though holiday bonuses, gifts and parties may be trimmed back this season, employers are doing what they can to reward their workers and get their staffs in the holiday spirit.”

So with cutbacks more prevalent in the workplace,  how can you make your employees happy this holiday season? What do they really want?

Here are some alternative workplace gift-giving ideas:

• The gift of financial preparedness. Help employees be realistic in their holiday budgeting this holiday season. Workers often need to budget more carefully around the holidays, so let your employees know upfront and early whether or not they can expect a bonus this season. This way, they will be able to gauge whether they’ll have that extra money for a plane ticket — or whether they’ll have to stock up on canned soups for dinner this season. Give your employees the gift of preparedness; their pocketbooks will thank you.

• The gift of giving. Volunteering is a great workplace activity all year ’round, but if you’re looking for an alternative to the typical (and pricey) holiday bash, I can’t think of a better way than helping others in need by donating time to local charities.  Volunteering with your team or company still allows you to be out of the office in a social setting while fostering your holiday spirit, giving back to your local community, and making the holiday a bit nicer for someone else. Sites like VolunteerMatch let you search for volunteer opportunities in your local area. Read more tips about finding a charity here and here, find an extensive list of charities here, and check out the Better Business Bureau’s “Charities and Donors” section for more resources.

• The gift of fun. Even if your company holiday party is canceled, you can still  celebrate the season with your employees with some warm drinks and hot food. Office potlucks are a great and budget-friendly way to have a low-key celebration in the office with your employees. Even better, as commuting after work hours can sometimes present obstacles for employees, you can host a potluck breakfast or lunch during the work day. As an alternative, screen a movie of your employees’ choosing, pop some popcorn and provide sodas, and have a low-key but entertaining in-office party.
• The gift of appreciation. While material gifts are nice, sometimes nothing is better than getting a bit of recognition for work well done, whether it’s for a single project or an entire financial quarter’s worth of blood, sweat and tears. As we have learned, 79 of employees who quit their jobs cite a lack of appreciation as a key reason for leaving. Remember to say “thank you” to your employees this holiday season! Even small gestures, like a  card or letter with your sincere words of thanks can mean a lot to your employees. Spontaneity of gestures can also be a nice change in the work routine; grab your employees coffee and bagels unexpectedly one morning — or dream up your own creative way to say “thanks.”
  
  
• The gift of friends and family. While employees may enjoy coming to work, they may in fact be longing to spend more time with loved ones outside the office, especially around the holidays. Yes, businesses are busier than ever, often juggling fewer people and more work — but your employees will enjoy and appreciate even a small break from the grind. Consider letting them leave a bit early one afternoon, or offer a flexible work option for a week or two, like coming in early/leaving early, or working four 10-hour days so they can take a long weekend. Different options will work for different types of businesses — but employees will savor the gift of more time with loved ones — and they’ll likely come back more refreshed, relaxed, and focused post-holiday.
• The gift of choice. One final idea: Ask your employees what they want this holiday season! Let them know that budgets are tight, but that you want to celebrate with them and show them your gratitude for their work and dedication. Let them brainstorm ideas, and pick one or implement them all.

What are you giving your employees this holiday season?

It may sound a little dramatic, but a well-crafted job posting can mean the difference between life and death finding mediocre candidates and finding extraordinary candidates. 

Job postings that are easy-to-read, detailed and clear tend to generate better candidates, simply because candidates are more likely to read the posting in full (which, let’s face it, isn’t always the case) and recognize whether or not they’re truly qualified for the position. 

Even those candidates who may not be able to apply for the position in question might find information about the company or the benefits you offer that compel them  to seek out other positions with your company.  What I’m getting at is…job postings are also a major employment branding opportunity. 

The next time you write a job posting, use following tips to strengthen the quality of your job postings – and improve the flow of quality candidates.

1. Remember That Key Words Are…Well, Key. The more keywords your job posting contains that are relevant to the position – and that job seekers might use to search for jobs – the easier it is for search engines to find it – and the higher it will appear in organic search results. Look at your job posting and consider where you can substitute key words that a job seeker might use to search for the position.  (Instead of saying, “The person in this position will be required to…” for example, say, “The Marketing Manager will be required to…”) Just don’t let the posting get so bogged down with key words that you lose the message – or all control of normal human language skills.
2. Don’t Be Shy About Showing Off The Goods.  While not exactly the same thing as stage time on “America’s Got Talent,” a job posting does provide a platform for employers to show what makes them special – one they should take advantage of.  As you consider what information to include, consider this 2009 survey by CareerBuilder , which found that the most important attributes job seekers valued most in potential employers were: stability and longevity in the market; good career advancement opportunities; a good work culture; and the ability to offer flexible schedules.

   Also, when and wherever possible, include logos and/or slogans in the job posting, which can increase applications by 13 to 21 percent. Doing so adds credibility of being an established, professional company, and not a recruiter—as some job seekers are leery of working with a third party—or a questionable entity. It also helps job seekers remember you when looking for future job opportunities.

3. Bring Up The Elephant In The Room. According to a 2008 CareerBuilder survey, 24 percent of job seekers said failure to include a salary range was a major source of aggravation, so if you want to hold job seekers’ attention, be sure to reference compensation information whenever possible—even if it is only a salary range.  At the very least, let the job seeker know that you understand pay is a vital piece of information by having a benefit statement such as: “Great pay—higher than industry average, commensurate upon experience, bonuses paid each quarter, opportunities for additional commissions.”
4. Don’t Be Vague (It’s Almost As Annoying To Job Seekers As That Other Annoying Thing). The same 2008 survey found that unclear job titles in job postings were a major turnoff to applicants. While you want your job posting to stand out amid others, a job title like “ONE OF A KIND OPPORTUNITY!!!” or “Make lots of money!” is unlikely to generate much interest, as the smartest job seekers will recognize this as a marketing ploy. 
5. Mix It Up A Little. Wonder why applicants with fewer than five years’ experience keep applying when you’ve clearly stated that five years is the minimum amount of experience required? Well, maybe you’re not being as clear as you think…If you’ve crammed your entire job posting into one lengthy block of text, most applicants are probably skimming your job posting for relevant key words – at best. Break up the job posting up into categories (such as “qualifications” and “responsibilities of the role”), and utilize bullets (to list required skills, the roles of the job, and company benefits, for examples). The easier the job posting is to read, the more likely a candidate is to read the posting in full and recognize whether or not he or she is truly qualified for the position.   
6. Proofread. Forgive me for putting what seems so obvious in here, but even the best writers slip up every once in a while. Given that this is your first point of contact with a potential job candidate, you want to make a good first impression.  Don’t rely on yourself to catch mistakes, either. Pass a copy of the job posting on to a colleague to check for errors that you might have missed.
7. Double-Dip.  If applicable, associate your job posting with multiple industries to increase visibility. If you are a pharmaceutical company wanting to recruit a sales manager, link your posting to multiple industries, such as sales and marketing, healthcare and pharmaceutical.Many professions can be cross-posted, such as public relations, accounting, Web design and programmers, just to name a few. Doing so allows candidates to pull up your job posting in more searches. Just, again, make sure the industries you associate your job posting are relevant.

Any tips of your own you’d like to share?