Positive
Economic Indicators!
Governor
Scott McCallum’s office announced June 20, 2002 the largest 1 month decrease
in Wisconsin unemployment rate in the past 11 years! A May drop from 5.7% to
4.5% kicks off a great start to recovery.
Behavioral
Assessment In Hiring & Promotion Gains Popularity!
Validated
for more than 60 years, Assessment Centers are continuing to gain steam as a
preferred means of hiring and selection for promotion. Personality profiles
and indicator instruments are consistently losing popularity due to legal
challenge in validity and difficulty of useful interpretation, often failing
to reveal how personality traits manifest on the job. Job-Specific role plays,
in-baskets and situational exercises with assessor-candidate feedback sessions
are becoming less costly to administer and score through years of baselining
and economies of scale due to popularity. HRS recommends a thorough check of
your assessor’s credentials and the validation of the instrument. The
HRSAC
has expanded the library, added new partners, validated new tools and
developed new tools for candidate rankings. Call Center, Leadership,
Multi-tasking and Team Skills assessments are among those most popular.
Employee
Summer Vacations are Abundant This Year…
HRS
reports an abnormally high percentage of position candidates seeking
pre-planned (but unpaid) time off this summer. The need to decompress and
"lighten up" compounded with the unemployment factor has caused top
candidates to schedule summer vacations and family travel. HRS corporate
clients are reporting mixed findings with their incumbent teams; some are even
encouraging vacations to improve morale.
Legal
Updates: Re-employment of Returning Military and Employer Monitoring of
e-Communications can be found at our
website
www.HRSteam.com.
Click on Legal Updates
for complimentary resources. Sample policy links can also be found for your
research.
HRS
Expands Partner Network!
Remaining
quite selective in our alliances and strategic partnerships, we are proud to
announce several new and soon-to-be-announced additions to the HRS Independent
Consultant Network. Credentials and bios are available! The "best of the
best" are here. Proven career HR consultants available as specialists or
PT HR Managers to growing companies are included in the network.
Leadership
Training… Roundtable vs. Bootcamp Approach!
As
a corporate training tool, interactive workshops, facilitated workshops and
distance or e-learning curriculum are gaining increased popularity over
traditional classroom style education. Although certainly not extinct or
lacking usefulness, the classroom approach is often less effective with a
diverse group of students at different incoming levels of topic understanding.
Participative professionally facilitated workshops provide immediate
validation of learning, optimize "buy in" and apply learning to
job-specific scenarios. Exaggerated examples of problem situations are a
highly effective tool in retaining student interest, thus enhancing learning.
The 2 hour student listening tolerance can be surpassed with heavier dynamics
and class participation. Visit
Teambuilding
for sample training agendas, handouts and information regarding our 2-hour
on-site speaker roundtable or our 2-day facilitated workshop. Speaker bios are
available and proudly provided!
Internet
Recruitment… Selecting the Appropriate Job Boards
Whereas
a wealth of local and national job boards have "popped up" over the
past several years, the recession caused several to merge, partner or redefine
a target audience. When selecting the appropriate board(s) upon which to
include your paid recruitment posting, consideration needs to be given to the
target audience and overall cost of recruitment. Overall cost includes the
price of prescreening inappropriate candidate response. Targeted specialty
websites may spend your recruitment dollar more wisely than the
"shotgun" approach of the larger or national job boards. For
instance, our growing www.AskHRS.com newly offers paid posting and enjoys
healthy targeted traffic, specifically designed to appeal to the
"quality" candidate who may never find a single recruitment within
the chaos of a larger website. AskHRS discourages visitation by lesser quality
candidates but failing to directly provide employment opportunities for them.
New
CEO Roundtable in Formation!
HRS
CEO, Senior Consultant & professional roundtable facilitator, Jessica
Ollenburg is collaborating with MMAC/COSBE to launch a new CEO Roundtable
group this fall. Please contact Jessica
at our office or Mary Steinbrecher at MMAC, 414-287-4128 with interest or questions.
Behavior-Based
and Multi-Rater Interviewing Pros and Cons
HRS
stands behind these two techniques as outstanding tools toward candidate
selection, but choose your specific platforms carefully! Companies who use
multiple interviews with too much redundancy instill upon the job candidate a
negative message of internal miscommunication and/or disorganization.
Behavior-based interviews which focus upon too many negative scenarios imply
that the position is substantially marked by negative scenarios. Realistic
recruitment needs a balance with internal marketing.
Findings
in Employee Behavior During the Recession…
It
is perplexing the number of candidates who were oblivious to the true impact
of the recession until they quit their jobs without a new job secured.
Although the majority of these candidates have demonstrated a long-standing
immaturity and substandard work ethic, good solid people made some mistakes
and may warrant future employer forgiveness. We have found that a substantial
number of employers failed to properly communicate lagging business demand and
need for temporary changes in the company. In these situations, employees were
not able to understand pay cuts, failure to deliver promised promotions,
supervisor "blow ups" due to increased anxiety, etc. When screening
candidates who made mistakes during the recession, behavioral interviewing
techniques and employment investigations will see the "big picture"
and identify patterns, overall work ethic and probability or recurrence. There
are some candidates out there worth saving, and not being able to pay your
bills snaps some folks into learning and appreciating their next job!
Calculating
Your Firm’s "LIQ"
The
Labor Intensity Quotient is an excellent indicator toward human capital
decisions. Each company owns a unique LIQ and should understand it. What are
the true costs of turnover or poor hiring decisions? There is no "cookie
cutter" model, and more
information is at our website,
www.HRSteam.com.
Future
Newsletters by E-Mail
More
HRS newsletters featuring articles, case studies, essays, surveys and
statistics are now available through e-mail or published at our website.
Although we demonstrate our service by refusing to bombard our mail list
members with unwanted literature and e-mails, we do offer these distributions
4-6 times per year. If interested please provide us with your e-mail address.
Contact us by e-mail at
info@hrsteam.com
or at 414/281-2240. Have a great day!!!
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