What Kind of an HR Manager Are You?

Since there have been numerous articles on retention of employees every HR executive should be asking 2 very important and mission critical questions as a strategic partner with your CEO:

• what kind of manager am I?, and
• what kind of managers do I have in my organization? (this includes your CEO too)

As we all know, the biggest untapped opportunity within your organization is how managers and you as a manager shape the way people work together to deliver results. So, what kind of manager are you?

• a micro-manager (you know what this is)
• an arms length manager (macro-manager)
• a cloistered manager
• a secret manager (never tell the staff anything even the need to know stuff)
• a good people manager
• a task master
• an on and on

Well, I extend the challenge to each of you to look inside yourself and ask those 2 very important questions. Then you should reflect to see if your style is getting the best results from each individual, department, group, and business.

If the answer is yes then you win the lottery and you have tapped the greatest opportunity in business by unleashing the energy, creativity, and knowledge of your workforce.

If the answer is no then you really need to reassess how you manage, as well as your managers so you get the best results, return on your investment, employees that are engaged, and limit your turnover.

Your comments and opinions on this post are welcome to wgstevens2@gmail.com

LINE Report Shows Need for Long-Term Talent Outlook

The soft labor market of August 2008 is expected to continue into September with hiring expectations for manufacturing and service sector jobs predicted at their lowest September levels in four years, according to the latest LINE Report. As a result, HR will have to take a longer-term view of finding top job candidates, the experts say.

The Leading Indicators of National Employment (LINE) Report identifies early trends and changes in the national job market. It is a joint effort by the Society for Human Resource Management and the Rutgers University School of Management and Labor Relations, and is released more than a month ahead of the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ (BLS) Employment Situation Report for the same period.

The report looks at four areas—employers’ hiring expectations in the manufacturing and service sectors; the degree that compensation levels for new hires fluctuates for that month; the job vacancy index, and difficulty in recruiting A-level talent to fill strategically important vacancies.
Data for the report are collected through a monthly survey of HR executives at more than 500 manufacturing and 500 service sector organizations. LINE has been measuring the manufacturing trends since 2004 and the service sector trends since 2005.

“All of these indicators are really down” in August 2008 “from any other year we’ve been doing it (LINE),” said Steven M. Director, Ph.D, of Rutgers University’s School of Management and Labor Relations. Director is the principal investigator for the SHRM/Rutgers LINE Report.

Overall, the September employment expectations report shows a continuation of the trend toward a generally softer labor market, according to Jennifer Schramm, SHRM manager of workplace trends and forecasting.

“We’ve got lower employment expectations than we saw at this time last year,” she stated.

When it comes to recruiting for A-level talent, “HR has got to look at it a little bit more long-term, and what we’ve seen long-term is that LINE has accurately reflected the weakening economy over the last six months,” Director said.

Both the service and manufacturing sectors need to take a longer view of their staffing needs. “Even though manufacturing in the U.S. has been declining since 1979 … a lot of manufacturers still have difficulty finding the key people for those strategic roles,” he observed.

Despite that, he added, there is an “increasing difficulty in recruiting people for key positions” in the service sector. This means it’s “probably a good time for HR managers to be opportunistic and cream the market for the best talent” to go beyond filling positions in the immediate future.

To do that, manufacturing has to address how it can attract top talent in what is perceived as a declining sector.

“Your industry or firm has to show growth potential. Make an argument that either your segment [of the industry] has long-run potential or your firm has above-average potential for your industry,” Director said.

Show how your organization is different or how the part of the sector your firm is in is different, he advised.

Tailor recruitment to that A talent by telling them that “you can help us be the exception to the rule and take advantage of those opportunities others may be walking away from,” he said.

“What’s going to limit a firm’s competiveness, the economy’s competiveness, is not going to be the number of raw workers out there,” he said, but how successful organizations are in filling those A-level positions.

Employment Expectations

In a repeat of the August LINE Report, the September LINE Report shows substantial drops in employment expectations in the manufacturing and service sectors. In fact, the expectation is that hiring in both sectors will be at the lowest September levels in four years.

New-Hire Compensation

This index measures whether compensation for new hires is going up or down.
For the manufacturing sector, compensation for new hires fell slightly from 9.5 in August 2007 to 8.5 in August 2008, but it rose in the service sector from 10.2 in August 2007 to 14.2 in August 2008.

Job Vacancies

The change in the number of vacancies in exempt and nonexempt employment sectors that employers are actively trying to fill is an early indicator of the supply and demand of labor.
Job vacancies for exempt and nonexempt positions for both sectors are down substantially for August 2008 from a year ago, noted Schramm.

Recruiting

The recruiting difficulty index measures how difficult it is for employers to recruit A-level candidates to fill positions that are of greatest strategic value to the employers.

The difficulty in recruiting A-level candidates fell for both sectors in August 2008 compared to August 2007, with manufacturing experiencing a “substantial” drop in recruiting difficulty.

Director characterized the drop in the recruiting difficulty index for the service sector as a “temporary, cyclical dip.”

Kathy Gurchiek can be reached at kathy.gurchiek@shrm.org.

Recruiters See Pockets of Hiring Growth, Despite Economic Challenges

While the U.S. unemployment rate reached its highest level in four years in July, search firms continue to report strong demand for executive talent in several industries, indicating that job growth at the top of the market is not moving in lock step with Labor Department data.

According to a recent survey of 147 executive recruiters conducted by ExecuNet, the executive business, career and recruiting network, 71 percent expect at least a 10-percent increase in search assignments received from corporate clients during the next six months. The industries expected to generate the greatest growth in six-figure job opportunities during this period of time include:

Top Industries for Executive Level Job Growth:

• Healthcare
• Energy/Utilities
• Life Sciences
• High Tech
• Business Service

"Despite several well-documented economic hurdles, pockets of growth remain in the executive employment market," says Mark Anderson, president of ExecuNet. "The rapid rise of the energy and utilities sector is particularly notable. Having spent much of the past decade below the radar of many recruiters, companies within these industries are increasingly relying on executive search firms to grow their leadership teams."

The survey also reveals that concerns about the economy’s prospects are indeed impacting the executive search industry’s outlook. Approximately half of all executive recruiters (49 percent) are confident or very confident that the executive employment market will improve during the next six months — down from 64 percent in June.

Introduced in May 2003, the Recruiter Confidence Index is based on a monthly survey of executive recruiters conducted by ExecuNet. Independent analysis of the RCI has confirmed it is a leading indicator of projected executive recruitment activity.

Your comments and input is appreciated. Please send your comments to wgstevens2@gmail.com .

Optimizing Internet Job Postings for Maximum Visibility and Conversion

Over the last ten years, the Internet transformed recruiting and recruitment advertising. Besides networking and personal connections, the Internet is now the leading source of job search and employment placement. However, we are currently undergoing a shift no less radical: the democratization of the Internet through ubiquitous search capability. Because of this shift, recruiting and recruitment advertising will undergo a severe upheaval and transformation within the next few years.

We might think of the first major period of the Information Age as being the generation of information: moving personal and business processes onto the web and producing massive amounts of data. We are now in the second period, which can be understood as the transformation of information extraction and production processes. It is commonly called
“Web 2.0” emphasizing user communication and application-like interfaces. It is more simply just the movement toward information accessibility for both input and output of data. The popularity of Google and other search engines is also rapidly transforming the availability of information. In short, we are just now dipping our toes in the great pool of information that we have been filling for so many years.

As long as the methods for accessing and extracting data and information on the Internet is imperfect, data that is related to other data must reside in the same location in order to be found. Because of this trend, data related to job postings (and data in general) quickly became clustered around a few central sites. For example, people go to Monster.com to find jobs, Amazon.com to find books, eHarmony.com to find a life partner, etc… With the very imperfect data accessing processes available in the last decade and even now, these types of sites are an absolute necessity. However, this is about to change.

When content is more universally and quickly accessible, information does not have to be clustered. For instance, jobs will no longer have to reside in the "same place" in order to be found. With the prevalence of search engines, job search will become increasingly decentralized - because it finally can be decentralized. Information (i.e. job descriptions) can be found on an individual company's website just as easily as through a congested pile of job descriptions in a commercial website. Internet users no longer must travel pathways to find information. For instance to find this article, people no longer go to TalentBar - they just type in Internet Job Postings in Google and look for relevant topics. Therefore for the first time, companies have a tremendous opportunity to finally centralize and host their own job descriptions while still obtaining visibility.

Therefore, the time has come for your company to use your website as a recruiting engine. Every company should be asking how they can migrate their job postings to their own site. There are tremendous advantages to hosting your own jobs, including greater prospective candidate knowledge, interest, understanding, and application rate. You may also enjoy greater market awareness, partnership opportunities, etc... as people learn more about your company and understand your employment branding strategy.

Once your organization has decided to take advantage of this new accessibility and transformation of the Internet, there are many considerations to maximum visibility and conversions for your job postings. These include:

Driving traffic to your site: There are many search engines for jobs that can drive prospective candidates directly to your site. You may also consider standard Google, MSN, or Yahoo advertising to drive traffic to your jobs.

Verbiage: Job descriptions should strive for descriptive simplicity - meaning that they should be fleshed out and descriptive, with lots of keyword-rich phrases, but still clear and focused. For instance, if you are writing a description for a Java Developer, your job should contain the word Java many times, all other associated technologies, and associated verbs: program, develop, code, etc... Strive not to get a "job description," but more of a daily action description. It will lead to dynamic, keyword rich text.

Sell your Company: Once you get a candidate to your site, the real work begins. All throughout your site and through your job descriptions, you should develop and propagate your employment branding strategy. Do your strive for excellence, do you want to foster creativity, or perhaps put family first? Drive this message home throughout your website. Offer realistic assessments of your work environment - they will be appreciated, and you will receive more targeted applications.

Keep it simple: You should make it just about as dumb and easy as possible to apply to your organization. How about a big red button in the middle of the page? Companies often offer the candidate a bewildering pathway to application, and then make it difficult to send in their resume. Do not make the mistake of thinking that your most intelligent candidates will "figure it out." The brightest minds in the market are often impetuous multi-taskers who will cruise in and out of your site within one minute.

The Internet has changed dramatically, but Job Posting and online recruitment is still mired in its own initial transformation away from newspapers. The time has come for your company to get ahead of the curve and take advantage of this new accessibility and universality of information on the Internet.

How Does Your Company Become Admired Like Google?

When the big 3 came out this year with the most admired companies in America, guess what, Google was either #1 or in the top 5. So how did it get there and what can you do to get your company in the Fortune, Workforce, Best Places To Work list? Here are some helpful hints and surely you need to read Workforce Management's article on Google and their top HR executive Laszlo Bock. He comments that " if you took out all the dogs and cafes, the culture would remain". That is the most important element.

You as a change agent need to take a good hard look at your culture to determine is it appropriate for your business today rather than some historical remnant from your past successes. Laszlo's main argument for success is that you explain what you are doing or trying to do, employees will be far more engaged and aligned with your business objectives than they would at any company where you simply tell them what to do.

I moved to Atlanta to help change an ailing business at the request of the CEO of the parent. Change the culture and make an impact I was told, I have to put my best employees where they are needed most he said. It was for that challenge and opportunity why I moved here to make change happen. We told employees what to do rather than getting their buy-in and explaining it in detail. So what did they understand about us or the business, virtually nothing. Further, once they understood it put into better prospective how are where their particular job fit in. It took some time and a couple of local presidents but we did change the culture and the business began to thrive as it still is today in a very competitive market.

Don't tell me or your peers that this won't work at your company. You need to provide the following elements for employees to thrive, Google does this and we incorporated these pieces into the business I managed:

• freedom;
• respect;
• connect emotionally to employees;
• leverage assets;
• allow employees to thrive by not over managing them;
• set the stage for powerful communication then communicate, communicate, communicate on levels employees will understand, not HR or corporate speak;
• provide guidance to their core position/job, and tell them if you can do this better, faster, smarter, "just do it" and make sure it is integrated into the way you run your business
• provide a venue for freedom to speak;
• provide a constant flow of information about the business, market, competition so they understand fully the playing field.

If you look back on the posts over the last several months, the consistent theme is leadership, talent, how to sit at the table and be heard, and make an impact. If Google wants to continue to be as successful as it has been, no matter who heads the HR group these elements will stay in place and as keepers of the culture, will continue to nurture this type of environment.

Your comments and suggestions are important to me and readers of this blog, please send me your comments to wgstevens2@gmail.com

Social Networking Woes

With the rise in popularity of social networking websites, such as MySpace (www.myspace.com ), Linkedin (www.linkedin.com ), and Facebook (www.facebook.com ) as well as an increase of personal information being posted on Internet blogs and message boards, employers need to think about the implications to their business. While it’s impossible to ban employees from using social networking websites, you can restrict the type of information employees post.A policy related to online postings should be designed to protect the company’s image, trade secrets, clients, and staff. But, how far can employers go to protect themselves? Where do you draw the line between an employee’s privacy rights and the company’s right to protect its business? A policy on social networking should be written to address legitimate business concerns, such as the dissemination of confidential information or the bullying and harassment of co-workers. It should not attempt to control an employee’s private life and off-duty activities that have no affect on the company.

Below are some important points to address in a social networking policy:

1. Confidentiality. First and foremost, a policy on social networking should prohibit the dissemination of confidential company information, which may include customer information, internal policies and procedures, product information, financial records, and trade secrets. It’s recommended that upon hire you have employees sign a confidentiality agreement so that your staff is aware of what types of information is considered confidential as well as the importance of confidentiality to the company.
2. Company email addresses. Employees should not be permitted to use company email addresses in their personal profiles or when writing and posting blogs and comments. This will serve to distance the company from the individual posting information online.
   Access to employee profiles. Request, but don’t require, that only friends rather than the entire public, view and access employees’ online profiles, blogs, and video uploads. Most social networking websites have privacy protections that can restrict assess to such information. This is another way to protect the company from its affiliation with the information posted by an employee.
3. Co-worker information. The use of a co-worker’s name as well as the company’s name should be banned, unless otherwise authorized. The policy should also indicate that employees are prohibited from revealing personal information about their co-workers, such as their phone number, address, and related personally identifying information.
4. Harassment. There should be a provision that states employees are prohibited from bullying, harassing, and discriminating against co-workers while at work and when posting information on social networking websites, including information provided via pictures, blogs, comments, videos and messaging.
5. Image. Employees indicating the company they work for, whether by posting pictures of themselves wearing a company uniform or by mentioning it in a blog or personal profile, can negatively affect the company’s image should a client or customer disagree with the employee’s postings. Information that has the potential to tarnish the company’s image should be prohibited. This includes information in the form of written comments or pictures that allude to an employee’s illegal activities, sexually explicit information or photos, racist or discriminatory remarks, and defamatory or derogatory comments about co-workers, bosses, or the company.
6. Social networking on work time. Of course the policy should also address the act of social networking while on work time. Blogging, posting comments, and reading others’ profiles should be banned during an employee’s scheduled shift. You may even consider blocking employees’ access to these websites.
7. Disciplinary action. Although your policy most certainly should include disciplinary procedures should an employee post prohibited information, sometimes you will have to take what you find online with a grain of salt. There is a certain level of anonymity on the Internet and you will need to determine if the information you’ve discovered was in fact posted by the employee. Basing an employment decision on doctored photographs or blogs written by the employee’s friend, could present a problem if you first don’t do some investigating. As with any disciplinary situation, provide the employee an opportunity to share their side of the story before rushing to any conclusions.

Although outright banning employees from social networking while off duty is not permitted, employers can enact measures in order to protect themselves from the posting of unscrupulous information about the company. By clearly defining the types of information considered to be confidential, prohibiting employees from indicating their affiliation with the company, and forbidding employees to post information about clients, customers, and co-workers, you are taking the first step toward protecting the company’s reputation and the employees who work for you.

What Does Your CEO Think of You?

I am sure if you read all my postings you get the sense that strategy, talent management/development, and being in the forefront of your business is the most important aspect of human resources. That said, what does your CEO think of you?

I am a big Jack Welch fan, and a student of his management processes. He has said on many occasions that "the head of human resources should be at least as important as the CFO". So do you think your CEO feels this way about you? I have been lucky over my many years in human resources to hear my CEOs (yes, that's plural) say that about me. I was very lucky in my early years to have a CEO mentor and boss, Willard Sweetser, who was a true believer in HR and utilized me to the max as well as be open to my innovation on talent management, hiring, and cross functional teams in the late 70's. The list goes on in Oak Ridge with Henry A. Morgan, a ex US Navy Trident submarine commander to Mike Wisner, the wiz bang innovator from Chicago who never let me out of his sight to my latest CEO Ian Melville. All were instrumental in growing the business with HR at their side to manage the talent, succession planning, and help to run the business.
So again, what does your CEO think of you?

Corporate and Individual Social Responsibility

In today's world we have seen fundamental and multifaceted disruption to our planet's environment. More since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. This disruption presents profound social and environmental opportunities for change and great challenges to every individual, business, community, and country as we see this global economy continue to be transparent.

You continually hear conversations with CEOs, heads of state and, communities from every part of the world what can we do or this is what we are doing socially as a corporation, individual, etc. Globalization is creating multiple levels of competition (some new, some old) creating new forms of innovation and seamless integration of technology, business and society than the world has ever seen. Aggressive innovation will prevail, innovation that changes an organization from top to bottom and that engages each employee at all levels intimately with a broad societal ecosystem of businesses, communities and countries.

The most visible impact as we note above is a change in the corporation itself. So how do you operate your business, community or country? Today's focus on the environment offers new hope for progressive globalization. We cannot be oblivious to all this, if we are we will not achieve the benefits or navigate through this disruptive change by operating status quo. Here are some tip on social and corporate responsibility from an environmental prospective:

• integrate the environment with your business or community
• form a social or responsibility committee focusing on giving back
• pick a key cause and get employees to buy into it
• save water campaigns through automatic shut offs faucets and insta-flushes
• get your employees involved in the community and provide them the time off for this volunteerism
• paperless campaigns both home and in the workplace
• build a bridge between the business and community that benefits both entities, that is is there sustainable development
• contribute to the arts and be a corporate patron
• lend your employees expertise, skills, and knowledge to schools and universities as well as non-profit groups.

The nature of competition and the forces of innovation are shifting the frontiers of science, business and technology continuously. Expertise today is not static. To be competitive, any individual—like any company, community or country—has to adapt continuously, learning new fields and new skills. This is true within any given job, and it’s true across the span of an entire career. This should be shared with the local community and helps the environment

All this requires a new relationship among the company, employees and society. Empower your employees to make decisions and to act. A company, family or individual to make this a great planet for our children should be measured by three key things:

• contributed hours of volunteerism
• how much has the company or individual contributed year over year
• has this effort made an impact and can it be measured - sustainability

So, I ask you as an individual, corporation, community, and global inhabitants of this planet are you doing your social responsibility or CSR(for corporations).

Your opinion counts so please email me with your ocmments at wgstevens2@gmail.com

Giants of Enterprise

I just finished a book entitled " Giants of Enterprise" by Richard S. Tedlow. It summarizes the rise of 7 great business innovators and the enterprises they built in the last century. It included Andrew Carnegie (USS), George Eastman(Kodak), Henry Ford(Ford), Thomas Watson, Sr.(IBM), Charles Revson(Revlon), Sam Walton(Wal-Mart), and Robert Noyce(Intel). What I took away from this great read was that each of these giants had one key thing in common. They did not take their markets for granted and in some cases created a market that did not exist before, or at least not on a mass scale. That key take-a-way is - THEY DID NOT TAKE ANYTHING FOR GRANTED AND THEY LOOKED BEYOND THEIR IMMEDIATE MARKET AND COMPETITION. What I mean is they went farther that just differentiating from their competition, their mantra was to bury it.

If you look at the posting I published earlier in July called Adapt of Die on July 8th, it accentuates what this book was all about. If you do not change you will be left in the dust. All business leaders need to think broadly about where their business is going, have a solid strategic plan, be able to adjust along the way, and most of all have the right people in place to execute against the strategy.

I highly recommend this book to all product business leaders, marketing managers, and of course CEOs.