November/december 2013 hr inSightSwebsite—thus learning about the company and its products and...

Better recruitment

through gamification

By Sam Parker

in this issue

how Balanced is Your Workforce?upcoming Shifts in the Labor Poolnew Strategies in accelerated Learningimprove recruitment with marketing techniquesreimagine talent Sourcinginnovative Ways to test for culture fitexploiting Social media: going Beyond recruiting

November/december 2013

hr inSightSf rom the eyes of industry leadersmagazine

Everyone’s talking about “human capital” these days: how to find it, how to keep it, and how to increase its effectiveness. At Imprimis Group we understand the value of filling a company with good people, and this issue of Imprimis Group’s HR Insights contains some great suggestions for maximizing the potential of your employees once they’re already on board.

Motivated employees constantly search for ways to improve their skills, and forward-looking organizations provide plenty of such learning opportunities. In “New Strategies in Accelerated Learning,” for example, Shawn Hunter examines some of the latest research on learning and practice. His discussion of visualization, interleaving, distributed practice, and other techniques offers ideas for improving the effectiveness of employee training programs.

When evaluating employees’ skill sets to determine gaps in their training, however, don’t rule out unusual approaches that could yield valuable data. Crowdsourcing is one possibility, and though it’s known mostly for its fundraising applications (think Kickstarter), it can yield great benefits when applied in an HR setting, as Eric Mosley points out in “The Changing Face of Performance Reviews.” By using the power of social recognition to reward and influence employee behavior, he writes, organizations can develop performance reviews that provide useful data and positive reinforcement—and don’t fill employees and HR managers with dread.

In “Exploiting Social Media: Going Beyond Recruiting, “ Val Grubb reminds HR managers and staffers not to rest on their laurels once they’ve landed great talent with the help of social and mobile solutions. Instead, she writes, organizations should use use such technology to increase employee engagement with the organization and communication across all sectors of the company.

And don’t forget some of the legal pitfalls affiliated with recruitment and hiring! Fortunately, Ann Kontner is here with “Do You Need to Update Your Employment Application?” to offer some guidance in that department. Our regular column Ask the Expert, too, addresses some of the tricky questions particular to staffing.

As the staffing market becomes increasingly complex (and crowded) companies are looking for ways to get an edge on their competition. At Imprimis Group we know how to help organizations stand out from the crowd through excellent staffing. From interview to hire, from training to evaluation—we have expertise in all of these staffing areas and more. Let us bring our knowledge and experience to work for you!

Best regards,

Valerie FreemanCEOImprimis Group, Inc.

from theceo

N O V E M B E R / D E C E M B E R 2 0 1 32

featureS

dePartmentS

4 cover Story Better recruitment through gamification By Sam Parker

7 new Strategies in accelerated Learning By Shawn Hunter

10 exploiting Social media: going Beyond recruiting By Valerie Grubb

12 the changing face of Performance reviews By eric mosley

Workforce management15 improve recruitment with marketing techniques

By Dana Jordan

16 how Balanced is Your Workforce? By Lois melbourne

17 innovative Ways to test for cultural fit By Leslie Caccamese

18 reimagine talent Sourcing By michael George

compliance issues20 do You need to update Your employment application?

By ann kontner

ask the expert21 do any potential legal issues exist with requiring applicants

to take a personality test prior to inviting them in for an interview? What (if any) employment documents am i required to keep on file for temporary employees we have on staff? By randall Schauer

Water cooler chronicles22 upcoming Shifts in the Labor Pool

By mike mckerns

recipe of the month22 exploring new traditions for holiday meals:

Pumpkin ravioli in Sage-Butter Sauce

4

16

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HR INSIGHTS 3

Better recruitment through gamification


hr inSightSPublisher & EDITORIAL DIRECTORS

Mamu Media, LLC

Editor in Chief Mike McKerns, SPHR

Managing Editor Addy Fillman

Contributing Editor Marsha Brofka-Berends

Associate Editor Lindsay Brockway

director of Sales Robert S. Herbein III

Contributing Writers

Leslie Caccamese

Michael George

Valerie Grubb

Shawn Hunter

Dana Jordan

Ann Kontner

Lois Melbourne

Eric Mosley

Sam Parker

Randall Schauer

Design & Production

The Office of Kristian Bjørnard:

Kristian Bjørnard & Alex Dougherty

f rom the eyes of industry leaders

N o v e m b e r / D e c e m b e r 2 0 1 34

The buzzword in recruitment today is “gamification.” Everyone’s talking about it, but few people fully understand what it is.

Basically, gamification is the use of game mechanics for problem solving outside of traditional gaming. You may enjoy taking over Atlantic City in Monopoly or ridding the sewers of pests in Mario Bros., but on their own those games are played for enjoyment (and, perhaps, bragging rights if you defeat your friends). With gamification, games have real-world implications.

One well-known example of gamification is the web-site Freerice, which launched in the fall of 2007. Site visitors answer questions in different subjects (e.g., English vocabulary, chemistry, multiplication tables), and for each correct answer the site’s advertis-ers donate ten grains of rice to the U.N. World Food Programme. The healthy living app Fitocracy also uses game thinking and mechanics to create real-world results. In this case, participants engage in fitness activities to earn points and badges—as well as accolades and sup-port from other members of the Fitocracy community.

Gamification has spread beyond encouraging charitable work and helping people reach personal goals, however, and is now a mainstay of the business world. Recruiters and employers make great use of it in their hiring practices, particularly to engage candidates, to assess potential talent, and to train new hires. It’s long been used in training (for example, countless employees and students have honed their keyboard skills with the games in Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing), but it’s a relative newcomer to the hiring process itself.

Marriott International is one company that successfully uses gam-ification to discover and hire candidates. With its Farmville-esque game, My Marriott Hotel, on Facebook, the hotel chain can connect not only with active job seekers, but also with qualified candidates who happen to be on Facebook and aren’t even thinking about job hunting. My Marriott Hotel is a turn-based time-management game that requires players to multitask a number of common hotel service industry activities and appeals to a crowd already familiar with this popular genre of game. The hiring team pays particular attention to players who succeed at the game’s higher level problem-solving and decision-making challenges, which highlight the skills recruiters seek when hiring for management positions.

By Sam Parker



HR INSIGHTS 5

The public sector, too, has started to gamify its recruitment pro-grams. For example, the Swedish Armed Forces evaluates candidates via a specially designed website where teams of four people play games that test problem solving, lateral thinking, concentration, time management, and teamwork under pressure—all skills critical to a successful career in those military organizations. Similarly, the UK Government Communications Headquarters recently used an online puzzle to recruit hackers and invited those who did reasonably well to apply for a job.

In all of these cases, the games attract potential candidates and invite them to engage with the organization. They test the skill sets of potential talent, thus giving recruiters valuable insight about candidates by identifying their strengths (and weaknesses). Gamified recruitment tools can also help an organization promote its brand and increase candidates’ positive impressions of an organization by making them feel special about “winning” or being “chosen.”

Want to give gamification a try? It does entail a lot more than sim-ply putting a company-branded game online. But with these tips you can create an effective gamified recruitment tool in no time!

· First, identify your target audience. What candidates do you want to attract? (This step is critical to any recruitment process, whether or not it involves gamification.)

· Next, develop content that attracts candidates and evaluates them for the skills you want your employees to have. Your content must engage prospects to succeed, so your game needs more than simple badges, leveling-up opportunities, and snazzy game dynamics. Using game mechanics for the sake of gamifica-tion alone isn’t fun—or productive—for anybody.

· Offer rewards to encourage participation. Participation (or “participaction,” as I like to call it) doesn’t happen without incentivization. For a successful gamification effort, you’ll need to give your participants rewards for playing. Some reward types suggested by game designer Taghd Kelly include:

▷ Validation: Through validation, participants gain bragging rights among their peers. The Swedish Armed Forces, for example, lets players post their high scores on Facebook and

encourages them to challenge their friends to beat those scores. If secrecy isn’t a factor at your organization, invite your participants to share their results with friends on Facebook, Twitter, and other social media sites. Social sharing will boost your employer brand visibility and get your message out to potential candidates.

▷ Objective completion. The successful completion of the game (i.e., winning), objective completion is one of the best rewards a company can offer, because participants can earn it only after investing a fair amount of time on the company’s website—thus learning about the company and its products and services, as well as being exposed to its messaging and branding. LinkedIn’s “Profile Strength” bubble (which appears on a profile page) is a great example of this kind of incentive, as users can fill it in completely only by exploring and using different aspects of the site.

▷ Prizes. These vary from industry to industry. In recruitment, of course, the best prize to motivate candidates to engage with gamified content is a great new job.

The most important thing to keep in mind about gamification, however, is make it fun! Gamification offers new ways to find and evaluate candidates, but it works so well for recruitment (and training, too) because it injects some levity into the process. Job hunting is already a stressful process, and anything that makes it more enjoyable is a surefire way to increase candidate engagement.

Gamification is effective because it creates a win-win situation in recruitment: the process becomes more entertaining (and less stress-ful) for job seekers, and employers get new ways to reach and assess new talent.

Sam Parker is the resident blogger and social media manager for Jobcast, a social and mobile recruiting application that builds branded career sites within Face-book Pages to attract passive candidates and build Facebook talent communities. To read more of Parker’s articles, visit the Jobcast blog (www.jobcast.net/blog). She can be reached via LinkedIn or by e-mail at [email protected].


Bobby Brown is one of the few freestyle skiers on the planet who can execute a switch double misty 1440, a fantastic move that entails skiing backwards off a ramp, spinning sideways in the air three times while holding one ski, and landing backwards. It’s an astonishing feat to watch—and a maneuver that was totally unheard of only a few years ago.

But this remarkable stunt didn’t spontaneously emerge from Brown’s skis just at that moment. Like everyone else, Brown started on the bunny slope. He began with small jumps and worked up to flipping on trampolines, leaping onto airbags, and jumping into water. After years of work, he finally had the skill to perform a switch double misty 1440.

Brown’s amazing feat is just one example of the power of prac-tice when learning new skills. No one becomes an expert in a field overnight. Consistent—yet varied—situational practice builds both the skillset (ability) and mindset (belief) to foster innovative new capacities. Both individuals and organizations can reap the rewards of practice, and HR managers would do well to give careful thought to how to incorporate practice and learning better in their training programs.

Here are a few techniques companies can use to introduce and promote such accelerated learning among employees.

Practice incrementallyAuthor Daniel Coyle has examined environments such as sports academies, music conservatories, and behavioral clinics to try to understand how the best coaches work and how the most skilled musicians, athletes, and business professionals practice and learn.

In his latest book, The Talent Code, Coyle writes about his visit to the Shyness Clinic in Palo Alto, California, which focuses on helping patients with extreme shyness build new habits that develop what the clinic calls “social fitness” through constant, incremental practice and situational experience.

Patients work to overcome their social anxieties through deliber-ate practice of increasingly difficult social behaviors that move them closer to the edge of their social abilities and fears and eventually expand their tolerance for risk. In one simple exercise, patients approach two people daily in a public place and simply ask them the time of day. They then graduate to tasks such as asking a store manager where the restroom is, and later might go out to lunch and make a special request (such as mayonnaise on the side) with their order. For a final exam, a Shyness Clinic patient might be asked to go to a supermarket and intentionally drop a whole watermelon on the floor, then apologize to, and work with, the store employees to clean up the mess. Someone suffering from acute shyness might find such a scene an appalling thought. Over time, though, the clinic’s patients build the social and emotional capacities they need to deal effectively with incidents like this in the future.

The clinic staff didn’t hand out watermelons to patients the first time they walked through the front door of the Shyness Clinic.

By SHawn Hunter

neW StrategieS

acceLeratedLearning

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HR INSIGHTS 7

Instead, the staff helped the patients learn the skills they needed to be able to drop a watermelon in a supermarket. By that same token, companies must realize that they can’t expect employees to perform tasks beyond their current skill sets without giving them the training and support to learn them first.

reframe challenges as self-DirecteD QuestionsPreparing for a challenge by psyching oneself up (“I’m going to nail this!”) can help a person develop the self-esteem and confidence needed to meet a particular goal. However, reframing the challenge as a self-directed question focuses her on the content and quality of the effort (for example, “How will I do in this presentation?”), makes her more likely to think carefully through how well she knows the material, and helps her conceptualize an intended outcome. When someone is preparing to give an important presentation, for example, a self-directed question can help him rehearse the opening and remember to make eye contact and relax.

A recent psychology study suggests that reframing self-talk from the indicative to the interrogative (from “I will” to “Will I?”) helps people develop a stronger motivation toward the goal, the outcome. In one experiment participants were asked to solve word puzzles. Those who asked themselves “Will I?” before the tests solved 50% more puzzles in the allotted time than those who told themselves “I will.” In short, the study’s authors found that “the interrogative form used in self-talk can lead to goal-directed behavior.”1

A self-directed question forces thoughtful reflection and affirma-tion of one’s capabilities. By teaching employees to rethink their ap-proaches to certain situations, companies can encourage innovative thinking, creative problem-solving—and confidence building, too.

Distribute PracticePeople often try to amass learning in a concentrated time—a be-havior known as cramming. Cramming doesn’t stick, however, and it doesn’t allow the deep saturation of ideas and terms obtained by distributed practice in which learning sessions are spaced over an extended period of time. The research bears this out: in one study comparing those two types of learning, for example, students who studied new vocabulary words in ten-minute increments over three successive days had a 35% higher retention rate than those who stud-ied the words in only one thirty-minute session.2

Rather than expect employees to learn a bunch of new infor-mation in a single, prolonged sitting, give them opportunities for distributed practice. Instead of one four-hour-long workshop, for example, try offering a few shorter sessions instead. When learners focus on a subject, take a break from it, then revisit the information, they often see it with renewed vigor and insight—and remember and understand it better.

interleave new iDeasOften when working to gain new skills or master new ideas, people block their practice to create intentional repetition in an effort to deeply embed the concept or skill. Today’s demanding and complex work environments present numerous distractions, making block learning even more difficult. New research suggests, however, that interleaving complementary (yet different) concepts throughout a practice regimen can accelerate and enhance the learning experi-ence. Interleaving has its roots in the tech industry, where it refers to combining multiple data streams by alternating them. (For example, think of a single file that contains both audio and video.) In learning studies, interleaving refers to teaching new knowledge by presenting different elements in alternating streams.

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In an experiment studying the effects of interleaving on motor skill development, for example, baseball batters were asked to im-prove their ability to hit three types of pitches: the fastball, the curve-ball, and the change-up. The first group practiced hitting each type of pitch in blocks of fifteen, and the second group practiced hitting the different pitches in an interleaved sequence in which the pitches appeared in a defined order (e.g., fastball, curveball, change-up) multiple times. In a final performance evaluation in which the pitches came in no predictable order, the second group handily outperformed the first group.

Cognitive learning also benefits from interleaving. A group of art students that looked at six paintings by a single artist in succession before moving on to the works of another artist did not learn as well as a group that studied an interleaved sequence of paintings by differ-ent artists. On the final test, the second group had a much higher suc-cess rate than the first group (59% versus 36%) in correctly matching previously unseen paintings with the names of artists on a list.3

Companies can implement interleaving, too. Instead of focus-ing training on one topic at a time, for example, they can introduce employees to multiple, related ideas in an interleaved sequence. As a result, employees will be much more likely to understand the new information—and leverage it for the organization’s benefit.

visualize successManchester United forward Wayne Rooney is widely regarded as one of the greatest soccer players in the game today. He’s been passionate about soccer from an early age (as a kid he played nonstop—in the streets, in the house, in the backyard) and has worked hard to hone his skills. Part of that work includes visualization, which refers to mentally recreating the sounds, images, feelings, etc., from a particu-lar situation and rehearsing them repeatedly in one’s mind.

At a young age, Rooney taught himself how to visualize playing soccer, and he still uses that practice technique to this day:

I lie in bed the night before the game and visualize myself scoring goals or doing well. You’re trying to put yourself in that moment and trying to prepare yourself, to have a “memory” before the game. I don’t know if you’d call it visualizing or dreaming, but I’ve always done it, my whole life . . . you need to visualize realistic things that are going to happen in a game.4

Actually practicing a new skill is the ideal way to learn it. But visualizing that practice yields benefits, too—and is nearly as good as real practice itself. In one well-known experiment, the Australian psychologist Alan Richardson divided ninety students into three groups. He instructed the first group to ignore basketball completely. The second group went to the gym five days a week and practiced their free throws for twenty minutes each time, with the goal of im-proving their shots as much as they could. He asked the third group to go to the gym five days a week and visualize shooting free throws for twenty minutes (also with the goal of improvement)—to develop a pre-shot routine, to “see” and “feel” the ball bouncing and then leav-ing their hands, to “watch” the ball arcing to the basket, and to make adjustments to missed shots. One month later, when all three groups

went to the gym and shot one hundred free throws, the results proved the value of visualization: the first group showed no improvement, but the second and third groups had near-identical (24% and 23%, respectively) improvement rates.

Visualization has applications outside of sports, too, and has made inroads into the corporate world as a training technique. Teletech, for example, uses simulations to train call center operators. The com-pany’s vice president for learning and leadership development, Rich Herbst, is a former F-14 pilot who spent thousands of hours practic-ing in simulators and on airfields before he actually landed an F-14 on an aircraft carrier:

I had done it so much that it was like it was kind of like muscle memory. And so you stop thinking about the stress of what you’re doing, and training takes over. And so I think in the best types of training that you have, regardless of what it is that you’re doing in life, you can get yourself to a place where you’ve learned it so well that when you experience it in real time.5

Whether someone is landing a small plane safely on the deck of a ship bobbing in the ocean or interacting with a client, practice through visualization can help that person succeed. By developing training programs that incorporate visualization, companies not only reduce costs associated with traditional, hands-on training, but also help their employees learn much-needed skills.

focus on outcomesIn order to succeed in today’s competitive market, individuals and companies need to perform at the top of their game. Training can help employees learn and develop new skillsets, but training alone isn’t enough. To maximize the effectiveness of a training program, HR must explore and incorporate innovations in learning and prac-tice techniques. With the right approach—and plenty of practice—anyone can learn how to perform at his or her full potential.

1. Ibrahim Senay et al. 2010. “Motivating Goal-Directed Behavior through Introspective Self-Talk: The Role of the Interrogative Form of Simple Future Tense.” Psychological Science, 21 (4). 499 –504.

2. Kristine C. Bloom and Thomas J. Shuell. 1981. “Effects of Massed and Distributed Practice on the Learning and Retention of Second-Language Vocabulary.” The Journal of Educational Research, 74 (4). 245–248.

3. Doug Rohrer. 2012. “Interleaving Helps Students Distinguish among Similar Concepts.” Educational Psychology Review, 24. 355–367.

4. David Winner. 2012. “Wayne Rooney: Beautiful Game. Beautiful Mind.” ESPN The Magazine, May 16.

5. Interview with the author.

Shawn Hunter is vice president and executive producer for SkillSoft. Over the past decade he has filmed and collaborated with hundreds of leading executives and thought leaders to assemble a unique and comprehensive video learning library (a product originally conceived and developed by Targeted Learning Corporation, a private company that Hunter cofounded with his father and that SkillSoft acquired in 2007). He is also the author of Out Think: How Innovative Leaders Drive Exceptional Outcomes (2013). He can be reached at www.shawnhunter.com or at [email protected].—»—»—»

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HR INSIGHTS 9

While company leaders were still tentatively dipping their toes into social media, HR had already dived in headfirst and was swimming comfortably in those waters. In recent years, using social media for recruiting candidates has rapidly become standard HR practice in hiring. In fact, a 2013 study by the Society for Human Resource Management found that 77% of employers now use social networks to recruit—an increase from 56% in 2011 and 34% in 2008. Unfortunately, many companies’ use of social media is limited to recruitment, and according to a 2012 survey by SilkRoad 75% of HR leaders believe their companies are falling behind in leveraging social media to improve internal and external communication.

Clearly, there’s plenty of room for HR to further exploit social media to meet the needs of employees. For example, some companies have started expanding its use in nontraditional applications, such as developing talent and cultivating better communication among employees. Taking a look at how other companies are changing the playing field and exploiting social media to its maximum potential can reveal useful ideas that HR leaders can bring to their organiza-tions—and maybe also inspire them to create their own innovations.

let’s Play a gameGamification is the latest trend popping up in companies and HR de-partments. In short, it’s the practice of adding gamelike features (such as point scoring, rewards, and badges) to products, services, or prac-tices that don’t usually involve games. Through the encouragement of participation in company loyalty programs, for example, gamifica-tion can help organizations achieve real business goals. This trend is sweeping through the business world to the point that the technology research firm Gartner predicts that 70% of global businesses will be managing at least one “gamified” application or system by 2014.

How can HR executives use gamification to their advantage? For starters, it can hugely influence talent acquisition, the cultiva-tion of company culture, and the encouragement of efficient job performance.

Xerox, for example, has gamified its management training through an application called Stepping Up, which requires participants to learn and practice job skills in activities called quests. Because some quests are completed cooperatively and users’ progress is shared

on the company’s private social network (powered by Yammer), this gamification fosters a high level of social interaction among employees.

At Target, gamification takes the form of an application that makes cashier work more enjoyable and gives employees more con-trol over their performance through immediate feedback. Manage-ment has determined optimum times for scanning items at checkout, and for each customer transaction the register screen immediately indicates whether the cashier meets those time goals. Target’s gami-fication isn’t focused on turning everyday tasks into a game but is de-signed to align employee behavior with company goals and objectives.

break the ice—virtually Although intranets have been around for some time, their full potential to build internal communication remains largely untapped, especially in large companies. If there’s a captive audience at an orga-nization (i.e., the employees), why not target them? Connecting with employees via an intranet is a great way to acquire referrals for open positions, introduce new training classes, and learn about colleagues in different offices.

By posting slide decks and other company data to its social intranet, for example, the infrastructure software company TIBCO helps new employees assimilate into the company. TIBCO also encourages new hires to post messages introducing themselves and to learn more about their coworkers. In a similar vein, when I was working for one company, its intranet spread the word about an employee-organized triathlon team to benefit one of the company’s preferred charities—thus fostering communication, encouragement, and teamwork across different elements of the organization.

Instead of merely sending out updates and company information via e-mail (and hoping employees actually open and read them), or-ganizations can also use social media tools to poll and solicit feedback from employees. Facebook can serve those functions (especially if an organization maintains a company page on that site), and blogs,

exPLoiting SociaL media: going BeYond recruiting


BY vaLerie gruBB

YouTube channels, and online forms allow employees to share their experiences about working at the company. Social media can also be used to communicate corporate updates to the public (Twitter and Facebook in particular come to mind here).

reDefine face-to-face meetingsThe rise of globalization has made it more difficult to meet with colleagues in person. But plenty of technology makes “face to face” interactions not only possible but convenient, easy, and inexpensive. Applications such as Google Hangouts, Apple FaceTime, and Skype enable employees to see each other and work together—even when they’re sitting 3000 miles apart. They also accommodate people who have flexible schedules or work from home.

These social platforms also facilitate cross-cultural mentoring opportunities by allowing employees from locations around the world to pair up yet still meet “face to face.” And if an organization’s communication needs involve more than a conversation, applica-tions such as WebEx and Zoom make it possible to train employees in remote offices or conduct video conferences.

Promote collaborationA number of social technology tools exist to promote collaboration among employees. Microsoft’s Yammer (used by 85% of Fortune 500 companies), for example, is a private enterprise social network that promotes knowledge sharing and collaboration across teams within organizations. Chatter (from Salesforce), too, allows employees to comment on projects, provide updates, and communicate with colleagues. And collaboration tools aren’t limited to use within organizations: many allow the creation of external networks so non-employees (such as suppliers and customers) can communicate with an organization.

leverage connectionsThe average American has roughly 600 relationships (both offline and online), and as we shift from a “knowledge” economy to a “social” economy, the value of who we know is surpassing the value of what we know. A number of new technologies have emerged to track—and leverage—social relationships, and the current star player on the corporate field is Klout. A person’s Klout score is a number between 1 and 100 that represents his or her influence in social media avenues (with a high number indicating high influence). Depending on the qualifications sought for an open position, HR managers may treat influence as a key factor when comparing candidates, especially for sales or business development positions.

exPlore the Possibilities!With so many social media options available today, it’s easy to see that in the world of human resources, “the times they are a-changin’.” Instead of prioritizing face-to-face interaction, companies are turning to communicating and working via social media channels. By tak-ing advantage of all that social media has to offer, HR is leading the transformation of the workplace into an exciting, open, and virtual environment.

Valerie Grubb of Val Grubb & Associates Ltd. (www.valgrubbandassociates.com) is an innovative and visionary operations leader with an exceptional ability to zero in on the systems, processes, and personnel issues that can hamper a company’s growth. Grubb regularly consults for mid-range companies wishing to expand and larger companies seeking efficiencies in back-office operations. Her expertise and vibrant style are also in constant demand for corporate training classes and seminars. She can be reached at [email protected].

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HR INSIGHTS 11

According to a recent Globoforce/SHRM survey, 45% of HR leaders think annual performance reviews fail to appraise employees’ work accurately, and 42% believe employees are not rewarded fairly for their job performance. A more recent Globoforce study (our semiannual Workforce Mood Tracker) yielded supporting data from the employees’ perspective: 51% of the employees surveyed say they see reviews as inaccurate, and 53% don’t find them motivating.

Employees, it turns out, know a lot about what motivates them. They also know the most about what is really happening in an orga-nization. So imagine a scenario in which the employees themselves create the performance review narrative and celebrate each instance of good performance as well as the inspirations, extra effort, creativity, and determination that distinguish high-performing employees. By aggregating thousands of those moments across the workforce, HR professionals and executives could identify the behaviors that lead to higher profits, customer satisfaction, and achieved goals. Instead of simply assigning numerical ratings to employees, performance reviews would reveal the secrets of full productivity.

As HR and executives get serious about fixing the flaws with the current system of performance reviews, they will reshape those reviews to combine crowdsourcing with today’s social technologies. Over time, an untrusted system would become trusted—simply by including crowdsourced observations by employees.

the Power of crowDsourcingWhat is crowdsourcing? Briefly put, it entails soliciting ideas, prod-ucts, or other contributions from a large group of people. Combining the efforts of many minds can yield more powerful and more accurate results than those obtained by even the best minds working alone. In the case of employee performance reviews, crowdsourcing allows many people—not just one manager—to assess an individual’s performance.

Crowdsourcing is rapidly being adopted as a cornerstone of per-formance management for the following reasons:

· Crowdsourcing is accurate. Decades of research confirms that many people acting together make more accurate assessments over time than one person acting alone.

· Crowdsourcing is trusted. People rely on crowdsourced as-sessment systems (such as Amazon, eBay, and the iTunes store) because they know that if many people like a particular product, chances are they will, too.

tHe CHanGinG FaCe oF PerFormanCe reViewSBY eric moSLeY


· Crowdsourcing supplements expertise with genuine experi-ence. Zagat, Yelp, TripAdvisor, and the like have supplanted many professional critics because consumers know that the opinion of the crowd is often more reliable than the opinion of one person.

· Crowdsourcing is effective in business. Like any other organi-zations, B2B companies crave “likes” on their Facebook pages and top rankings from users in online forums. Anyone who answers a questionnaire from a business research company that ranks B2B services in HR is participating in crowdsourcing.

With all these attributes, crowdsourcing is the performance review method of the future. What have been missing until now are a technology platform and a set of rules to combine the functionality of performance reviews with the wisdom of crowds.

the engine of social recognitionSocial recognition combines a technological platform and set of rules by which employees recognize and give feedback on great perfor-mance in a constructive and specific way. It combines ranking with narrative, just like the traditional performance review. With real-time, inspired (rather than solicited) feedback from employees’ peers, it creates a detailed and authentic view into who and what is driving your business.

Where does this leave the manager? In the performance review of the future, the manager is still accountable for group performance. Crowdsourced social recognition provides a narrative that doesn’t diminish the manager’s authority; on the contrary, it empowers the competent manager to understand his or her employees better, to celebrate achievement, and to spot problems early on.

As a company compiles a database of crowdsourced performance feedback, analytical software will reveal hidden social dynamics in the organization. Executives can then identify quiet but influential in-dividuals—“hidden influencers”—and groom them for more formal leadership roles. Similarly, HR can reward creativity and engagement with higher pay and better opportunities and also target high-poten-tial employees early to mitigate flight risk.

oPerational consiDerations for social recognitionFlexibility is a key asset of crowdsourced social recognition, as imple-mentations vary with company size, complexity, and culture, as well as the nature of the employee’s work. With many employees distrib-uted around the globe, for example, an airline might choose a simpli-fied, mobile implementation. Or a highly concentrated software development group might connect social recognition more closely to compensation than a sales group would.

Even with many possibilities for customization, however, all implementations of social recognition for the purpose of perfor-mance management share the following qualities:

· Individuals nominate individuals for tangible reward. To achieve broad participation and relevance, social recognition mo-ments should include a tangible reward, appropriate to the value of the achievement cited and approved by the manager. A system that awards only free “badges” or “like” notices has much less impact than one that bestows tangible value. Rewards that offer a buying experience (such as gift cards or credits on web shopping sites) are more memorable and have greater impact than cash prizes.

· Social recognition is inherently positive and must remain so. Recognition implies positive accounting of positive behavior, and it is not the crowd’s job to criticize or reprimand one of its members. In both coaching and critique, healthy organizational response to crowdsourced performance reviews should follow the standard rule for managers: “Praise in public and criticize in private.”

· Majority participation magnifies the value of crowdsourcing. A strong social recognition program is one that achieves at least 80% participation among the workforce, a level that studies have shown to significantly improve morale and strengthen company culture. At that level of participation, managers have recognition narratives to add to the traditional reviews for most employees, and large data sets reveal hidden organizational insights.

· Social recognition creates a parallel narrative of performance. Just as the traditional review creates a paper trail of an employee’s performance, the collected social recognition of any individual creates a narrative of accomplishment. The system must preserve that narrative and relate it to others for maximum value. For ex-ample, a successful product launch can be understood both as the sum of many employees performing their assigned tasks (mea-sured in traditional parameters) and as the sum of many employ-ees doing their jobs better and more creatively, thus improving processes and inspiring more harmonious teamwork (captured in recognition moments). In the long run, social recognition can create a narrative history of the company.

the broaDer benefits of crowDsourcing Performance reviewsAll performance reviews are designed to improve individual perfor-mance. Collectively, a good performance review system will improve the company at large—for example, by making managers accountable for their staff’s growth and productivity, or by encouraging trusted, mature, and respectful dialogue between manager and employee. To some extent, the traditional system can accomplish these tasks. The crowdsourced social recognition model, by contrast, creates a wide variety of collective benefits, including the following:

· Crowdsourcing increases accuracy and fairness across the system by eliminating the single point of failure. Employees who contribute to the system by recognizing each others’ achieve-ments bypass the “us versus them” dynamic of top-down perfor-mance reviews. For managers skilled at reviewing, crowdsourcing increases the availability of actionable information.

· Crowdsourced performance reviews magnify managers’ accountability. Managers must take crowdsourced input into account when reviewing performance. If an employee is widely recognized for his or her talent at coaching others, and the manager hasn’t noticed that behavior, coaching becomes part of the review’s discussion. Similarly, the absence of teamwork awards within a department can tip off HR to investigate the department’s apparent lack of teamwork, especially in light of a manager’s claims to the contrary.

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HR INSIGHTS 13

· Crowdsourcing reveals otherwise invisible flows of social power and influence across the organization. The collective mosaic of reviews among a department’s members can tell HR or executive management that a particular manager is a rising star, even if he or she has a subdued public style. Network patterns of awards given and received can likewise spotlight employees with talents (such as determination and customer focus) that don’t appear on resumes.

· Crowdsourcing broadens responsibility for improving performance. Those expected to participate in reviews via social recognition (i.e., everyone) are implicitly responsible for noticing and rewarding productive behavior, thus improving performance. Those who participate reinforce their personal stake in the criteria of awards, including promoting company culture and keeping an eye on progress toward the right goals.

cultural contributions of crowDsourcingIn my latest book, The Crowdsourced Performance Review, I write:

The holy grail of performance management is a culture that creates and sustains high achievement. A healthy company culture is a deliberate, self-regulating, self-perpetuating set of values and behaviors known to every employee. Leaders in every successful company speak of its culture. Culture is what inspires people to do things they wouldn’t do in a dif-ferent environment.

Culture is a powerful company asset but also a fragile one. It must be nurtured with trust, constant reinforcement, and universal buy-in. The traditional performance review system, however, creates too many cynics today—and cynicism is poison to company culture.

As everyone increases their monitoring of attributes that define the organization’s culture, all participants become highly sensitive to the right values and behaviors, and the environment repeats and rewards those attributes. Social recognition is thus a values-propaga-tion system as well as a measurement system.

Social recognition helps create a “positivity-dominated work-place,” in which everyone is invested in promoting possibility, op-portunity, achievement, security, risk-taking, and any other traits that define a company culture. Business research consistently links these qualities with strong financial performance.

the traDitional review anD the crowDsourceD review can work together

A modern performance review should preserve some elements of the traditional review. Because of its longevity, the traditional review has certain attributes and dependencies that can’t be discarded easily:

· Generations of managers have grown used to its forms and routine.

· Businesses are subject to legal requirements in hiring, assessing, and firing employees, and traditional review systems are designed to produce an audit trail documenting the company’s interactions with an individual.

· The annual review forces reluctant managers to provide at least minimal feedback to employees.

· Jobs that have little contact with other employees (e.g., a quantita-tive data analyst working as a single contributor, an airline book-ing agent working from home) need more consideration than the crowd can typically provide.

When an organization combines the single inputs of the tradi-tional review with the distributed inputs of the crowdsourced perfor-mance review, a new model for performance reviews appears. Rather than presenting an either/or choice between models, the new method of performance management fills the gaps in the flawed traditional review. The cultural movement of crowdsourcing and advances in Web-based data analysis make this new, hybrid model not only pos-sible but compelling.

looking to the futureCrowdsourcing performance reviews through social recognition es-tablishes trust, relates actions to outcomes, and encourages engaged, accountable, and positive employees. By implementing crowdsourc-ing as part of the performance management cycle, HR and executive leadership can gain a powerful new approach to issues such as succes-sion, loyalty, and workforce alignment to company values.

The wisdom of crowds has already begun to revolutionize con-sumer and B2B decision making. Now is the time for HR and other leaders to bring the wisdom of the employee “crowd” to the crowd it-self. By crowdsourcing and adding social recognition to performance reviews, companies can bring performance assessment forward from yesterday’s inadequate model to a shared, trusted, and data-rich 21st-century workforce management system.

Eric Mosley is the cofounder and CEO of Globoforce, a leader in innovative prac-tices in managing company cultures. He is the author of the recently published book The Crowdsourced Performance Review and the coauthor of Winning with a Culture of Recognition. Mosley can be reached at www.globoforce.com.

Crowdsourcing your performance reviews through social recognition establishes trust, relates actions to outcomes, and encourages engaged, accountable and positive employees.


improve recruitment with Marketing Techniques By Dana JorDan

As a marketing professional at a company that produces technology for human resources professionals, I’ve realized that marketing and HR have a lot in common. Although marketing focuses on products and services, and HR focuses on employment opportunity, at the end of the day they’re both selling something. Certain techniques have revolutionized the field of marketing, and HR can gain an advantage in recruitment by embracing some of those same practices.

· Mobile: It’s estimated that by 2015 more people will access the Internet via a mo-bile device than via a desktop computer. It’s therefore important to mobile-opti-mize your career site to provide a seam-less experience for job seekers searching on mobile devices. Make it easy for can-didates to find relevant jobs, regardless of how they’re accessing your career site.

· Search: Search engines index millions of pages of job-related data, so do your candidates a favor and make it easy for them to find your opportunities. Make sure your jobs and career sites are search-engine optimized so they show up on page one search results, allowing candidates to come straight to your career site (thus cut-ting out the job board middleman).

Autom ation: Nurture your candi-dates through automated communication campaigns that target them when the time is right. If you’re using a robust sourcing solu-tion, build talent pools to which you target

“drip” e-mail campaigns that use logic to send communications at determined intervals. You can also set logic to send communications to certain pools when a relevant opportunity opens up.

Marketing has learned how to use technol-ogy to improve its results. By taking a page of marketing’s playbook, HR, too, can leverage technological innovations to increase and strengthen its recruitment efforts.

Dana Jordan served as the interactive producer and information/UX architect at iCIMS, Inc., a leading provider of Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) talent ac-quisition software solutions for growing businesses. To learn how iCIMS can help your organization, visit www.icims.com.

First, let’s take a look at the foundation of marketing. Known as the marketing mix or

“the four Ps,” this list identifies the four criti-cal areas of marketing:

Product: A good or service that satis-fies a consumer want or need. Price: The amount the consumer pays for the product. Promotion: The methods of communi-cation used to provide information about the product. Pl ace: The distr ibution channels through which consumers access the product.

Here’s the HR version of this list: Product (Opportunity): The posi-tion, culture, and employment brand of-fered to candidates. Pr ice (Va lue): The compensation package extended to the right candidate. Promotion (Com mu nication): The methods of communication used to recruit and source candidates. Place (Recruitment Channel): The channels through which opportuni-ties are broadcast.

cover the basics with ProDuct anD PriceBecause hiring managers and budgets usu-ally dictate job descriptions and salaries, you may not have much control over the primary

“product” and “price” variables. You do, how-ever, have control over your company culture,

your employment brand, and some of the pe-ripheral benefits of working at your organiza-tion (e.g., job perks such as game rooms and free food).

Build a strong company culture predicat-ed on shared values and a strong mission, and clearly articulate it to potential candidates on your corporate career site and social media ac-counts. Take advantage of images and video to brand these properties and give candidates a glimpse inside your organization. Show candidates what it’s like to work for your com-pany—and how they’d fit in.

stanD out from the crowD with Promotion anD PlaceMarketing has developed a wide variety of tools to promote products. Although HR has adopted some of these methods, it can expand on these tactics by taking advantage of the channels and techniques that are currently revolutionizing marketing: social, mobile, search, and automation.

· Social: It almost goes without saying that HR should take advantage of so-cial networks for recruitment. LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter are all prime loca-tions for finding candidates for jobs, and many tools make it easy to get the word out about your opportunities. Make sure your job postings are social-optimized to allow for easy sharing, and make it easy for candidates to follow you and receive updates from your company.

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HR INSIGHTS 15

is Your Workforce? By Lois Melbourne

How Balanced

Effective human resource management has long required striking a balance between hiring candidates with the best skill sets and delivering opportunities within the current talent pool. The current skills gap complicates things even more: a study by Bersin & Associates finds that, in spite of high employment rates, 51% of hiring companies struggle to find candidates with the right talents. This skills gap is especially prevalent in technical and functional roles, causing strains to both hiring and leadership.

How did we get to this point? In the push toward globalization, companies have been aggressively moving products, operations, and technology into new markets in order to sustain competitive growth. With this shift comes the need to mobilize talent in these markets while also retaining and engaging talent in other core areas of the business.

Understanding the following factors can help you assess the balance of your own workforce—and plot any course changes your organization might need to make in order to stay competitive in the new global market.

1. sPecialization has changeD the nature of workAlthough innovation and transformation provide a competitive advantage, that advantage is driven by employees with deeper knowl-edge and more specialized skills. However, companies typically invest in broad skill-set knowledge, not this level of specialized learn-ing. According to one study, less than 30% of workplace performance draws on knowledge obtained from formal, specialized training, whereas the rest is based on informal learning (such as coaching). In order to meet the global demand for specialized skills, companies must increase their workforce specialization by investing in strategic talent development.

2. contractors are here to stayThe desire to maximize shareholder value puts pressure on companies to cut expenses and drive efficiency. As companies enforce hiring freezes, they still need the work to be done—so they turn to the contract labor force. Although contractors will never fully replace full-time employees, hiring contingent labor saves the employer on benefits costs and other expense areas. Because contractors are, for the most part, short-term employees, this temporary labor solution contributes to workforce imbalance.

3. the skills gaP is growingThe Bersin & Associates study mentioned above found that only 32% of college graduates have “excellent” skills to enter the workforce. Today’s new workers lack skills such as professionalism, creativity, innovation, learning, self-direction, critical thinking, and problem-solving—some of the most sought-after skills in today’s workforce.

The IT sector in particular is feeling the effects of these shortcom-ings. Even though IT job opportunities continue to rise, companies find it difficult to fill those positions with the right personnel. Look-ing at trends in four key emerging technology areas (mobile, cloud, social, and analytics) in which more than 25% of enterprises plan to increase investment in 2013, for example, the 2012 IBM Tech Trends Report found that only one in ten organizations had the skills needed to grow those fields.

4. comPanies exPerience resume overloaDWith all the online job aggregator sites and buzz about social recruit-ing, companies still have a hard time finding the right job candi-dates—mostly because they’re drowning in resumes. For job seekers, therefore, applying online is the equivalent of sending a resume into a black hole. In a 2011 ZDNet article, John Hazard wrote an accurate description of the state of tech hiring: “Finding qualified candidates is now like finding a specific needle in a stack of slightly different needles.”

Plan aheaDTechnology can help employers understand the skills gap and better mobilize their workforces in response to it, as well as help them focus on specialization while continuing to hire and optimize a qualified talent pool. Take advantage of technological solutions on the market that enable you to assess and modify your workforce.

Only 40% of organizations have conducted strategic workforce planning assessments to determine their needs for the next five years. Where does your organization stand? Are you prepared to transfer knowledge from the Baby Boomers (who are retiring at a rate of 6,000 per day) to new talent? Workforce planning offers crucial advantages to those companies looking to survive—and thrive—in the future.

Lois Melbourne served as vice chair for Peoplefluent, the leading provider of tal-ent management solutions designed to support the entire workforce. Visit them online at www.peoplefluent.com. Im

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innovative WaYS to teSt for cuLture fit

the goal: hiring the right PeoPleEveryone knows that high turnover is expensive, time consuming, and bad for morale, but not everyone knows how to assess candidates accurately. Resumes and behavioral interviews offer clues about whether a candidate has the experience and skills to “do” the job, but they often fall short in predicting “how” the candidate will perform as an employee. Most companies would agree that one great candidate is better than three good candidates, and many say that they hire for

“attitude, not aptitude.” But how companies actually put that hiring philosophy into practice varies from organization to organization. Here are a few of the tactics companies use to assess candidate fit with their unique culture.

unusual interview QuestionsAlthough behavioral interviews may be the new norm and can help companies better predict how a candidate might act in a specific situ-ation, they still leave a lot to the imagination. The creative folks at the Kimpton Hotels and Restaurant Group, for example, have taken their interview process one step further: they present some candidates with a bag of random items and ask them to come up with a story that ties them all together. This exercise tests a prospective employee’s creativity and resourcefulness when responding to something out of the blue, and lets Kimpton see his or her personal style in action.

mix anD mingleDuring the interview process many companies now include team members from outside the prospective employee’s department. Several companies have expanded on this practice with the “mix and mingle,” an open house in which candidates meet with current employees as a part of the larger interview process. These events give employers a sense of how candidates will blend in with the current team and the adeptness of their social skills.

try it on for size:One of the best ways to assess if a candidate can do the job is to invite him or her to do it! Hospitals, retailers, and even investment firms have made job shadowing opportunities important parts of the hiring process. Car Max, for example, requires all sales candidates to partici-pate in a job shadow before extending final offers to any of them.

referrals anD rewarDsThe majority of the organizations on the “best companies to work for” lists have formal candidate-referral programs and offer cash rewards to employees whose referrals generate a hire. After all, who better to spread the word about a company’s culture or the nature of the work there than someone who’s already part of the organization? At the Container Store, current employees even recruit from their client base, inviting loyal, enthusiastic customers to apply for store positions.

Pay them to leave!Unfortunately, regardless of how thorough or creative a hiring pro-cess is, sometimes it results in a hire who’s not a good match for the organization. Zappos is famous for handling this situation by inviting new hires to opt out: if at the end of orientation the employee realizes that Zappos is not for a good fit, Zappos will pay him or her $2000 to leave. Employees often know when they don’t fit, but because they desire security they often stay when it’s not in their best interest or the organization’s. Zappo’s practice gives employees a safety net for opting out and saves both employer and employee from an uncom-fortable situation in the future.

Leslie Caccamese is the director of strategic marketing and research at Great Place to Work, where she drives key conversations with leaders interested in building or sustaining great workplaces. She can be reached at [email protected].

By LesLie CaCCamese

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HR INSIGHTS 17

For many managers, filling an open position can be one of the most frustrating (and most protracted) endeavors in human capital management. Regardless of the complexity of the process, the biggest problems managers face arise not from technological issues or inadequate response from recruiters but from poor candidate quality. The key to finding quality candidates lies in careful sourcing of ap-plicants. Although today’s applicant tracking system (ATS) software solutions have improved the recruiter’s ability to track referrals, evaluate specific job board performance, and adjust sourcing to better identify and utilize top-performing sources of qualified candidates, using an ATS does not guarantee results. In fact, limiting your “five-star” sources to only those that feed active candidates (and lead to hires) into your ATS means that you’ll almost never reach passive candidates (better known as “the talent you really want”) through these channels.

In a reimagined talent sourcing effort, recruiters must intimately understand an organization’s current talent supply and future demand, but also actively use social, mobile, and cloud technologies to uncover hidden sources of top talent and networks of referrers. This means more than just maintaining Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn accounts. After all, every one of your competitors is furiously tweeting, regularly updating statuses on Facebook, and constantly scouring resumes and connections on LinkedIn. You should definitely utilize those platforms, too, but winning the talent war requires more creativity.

To find untapped sources of qualified candidates, recruiters must go beyond simply broadcasting job openings and instead start target-ing specific groups such as trade associations and user groups (based on particular skills, interests, or geographic areas, for example) with the type of social media they prefer. In short, employers who want to outwit their competitors and acquire top talent must reimagine the possible by infusing their sourcing strategies with emerging social and mobile technologies.

remarkablehire (social)Because resumes don’t always tell the full story, employers often find it difficult to separate the average from the exceptional until well into the hiring process (or, even worse, post-hire), thus wasting time and resources. RemarkableHire is a cloud-based tool that allows recruit-ers to validate a job seeker’s proficiency in a particular set of skills by tracking and analyzing his professional contributions to online communities that allow his peers to endorse the quality of his work through “likes,” votes of approval, or “follows.” By scanning and col-lating such peer responses, RemarkableHire builds a collective, peer-based view of the contributor’s abilities. Not only can this tool help employers validate the claims made on applicants’ resumes, but it can also uncover hidden experts and industry influencers who might not appear in conventional searches.

unrabble (social)When you discover hidden talent, chances are you’re not alone—which means you must be more agile than your competitors. The abil-ity to collaborate quickly with colleagues about a potential candidate and expedite the hiring process for exceptionally talented people may make the difference between winning and losing a great hire. Along with providing collaboration and candidate-ranking tools, Unrabble also shows the LinkedIn connections between you and a potential candidate, thus enabling recruiters to reach out through mutual contacts rather than cold calls.

instagram (mobile)If you’ve never thought a photo-sharing site could be a talent-sourcing platform, Instagram may make you change your mind. With over 150 million registered users (thanks in part to its purchase by Facebook in early 2012), this relatively new app allows users to snap and trans-form photos, then share them via Instagram, e-mail, and other social media outlets.

Companies are using Instagram to engage with a diverse audience as part of their overall employer branding efforts as well as sourcing of job candidates. Hashtags (such as #dayinthelife or #storemanager-fun, for example) enable employers to showcase open positions and the company brand among interested users, thus building a potential candidate pool.

reiMagine TaLenT

SourcingBy miChaeL GeorGe

WorKforcemanagement


foursQuare (mobile)Most people know Foursquare as a mobile app that allows users to “check in” at places they visit and, over time, receive personalized recommendations and deals based on where they, their friends, and people with similar tastes have been. This type of “location-based” marketing has grown in popularity, as evidenced by Foursquare’s 30-million-user global community, which generates millions of check-ins each day. Businesses are starting to leverage such check-in data to identify and connect with potential employees.

For example, imagine you’re a retailer looking for salespeople who are passionate about your brand. Using the Foursquare merchant platform, you identify a customer who has shopped extensively in your store, recommended you to her friends, and even posted posi-tive details about her shopping experience—in short, she’s already a brand ambassador for your product. The next time she visits your store and checks in on Foursquare, instead of sending a coupon to her mobile device you can send her an invitation to talk with the store manager about working for your business.

swooP (social)Most organizations manage internal employee-referral programs that have little or nothing to do with their online sourcing initiatives. Swoop brings those two efforts together to dramatically improve the quality of referrals received. This social sourcing platform compares your job openings to its database of over one hundred million records, your own ATS, and even your own current workforce to find the most suitable potential candidates.

crowDsourcing (social)“Worker as a service” is the next big thing in talent sourcing. Across

nearly every business function, companies such as oDesk and Elance are bringing the job to the worker rather than the worker to the job. With over half a million clients and over three million freelancers,

those companies are demonstrating the effectiveness of an on- demand, remote workforce. think before you leaPBefore taking the plunge into the world of social and mobile candi-date sourcing, be sure to consider the risks associated with this step.

Whether you’re selling soap or job openings, in the world of social media the consumer is king, and your brand reputation means ev-erything. Your company’s brand strength can be one of your biggest advantages—or disadvantages—online, and how you showcase its key elements (say, in an employee blog that gives passive candidates a peek at what it’s like to work for your company) can make all the difference in attracting great talent. Keep in mind, however, that workplace transparency works both ways: sites such as Glassdoor and CareerBliss give prospective job seekers an unfiltered (and unedited by you) look inside your organization through employee-generated reviews of your business practices, executive team, managers, com-pensation, and more.

Keep in mind, too, that when you embrace new technologies for sourcing, your potential candidate pool becomes everyone—and everyone that everyone knows. LinkedIn has taught us that given the chance (and a good set of tools) most folks will build and elevate their own brand and market exposure. So when someone with the right set of skills and experience unexpectedly shows up in your network, don’t put him in your “pipeline” because you don’t have an open job for him. Instead, connect with him immediately and begin treating him like an active candidate. Odds are if he isn’t interested in working for you, he knows someone who is.

Michael George is the senior director of solutions marketing at Appirio, a San Francisco–based technology consulting company that helps organizations reimagine their business with cloud, mobile, and social technologies. George is an HCM technology industry veteran, having held senior marketing positions at several HCM technology vendors as well as working an independent consultant before joining Appirio. He can be reached on Twitter at @reimaginehr.

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By ann Kontner

Do You need to update Your employment application?

All HR professionals know that having candidates complete an employment application is an essential step in the hiring process. Not only do these applications collect information about candidates’ past employment and education, but they can also be used to inform applicants of the company’s equal-employment-opportunity and at-will employment policies. Even when an employer asks a candidate to submit a re-sume for an open position, the completion of an employment application at the interview meeting should be standard hiring practice for all companies.

Given the importance of this step in the new-hire process, it is recommended that companies conduct an annual review of their employment application form to ensure that it is up to date with federal regulations and HR best practices. A well-designed employ-ment application includes the following:

· A statement that the organization is an equal-employment-opportunity em-ployer that does not discriminate on the basis of any attribute protected by federal or state laws.

· A prominent statement that employment is on an at-will basis and that an offer of employment is not be considered a contract.

· Authorization and approval for the organization to conduct background checks, reference checks, and verification of application information.

· A statement that a criminal conviction listed on the application will not disqual-ify the applicant from being hired, and

that the company will consider the na-ture or gravity of any offense or conduct, the time elapsed since the conviction and completion of any jail sentence, and the responsibilities of the job being filled.

· A notice that falsification of any informa-tion in the application process will be deemed grounds to reject a candidate or to terminate employment if already hired.

When completing the review of the appli-cation form, it is just as important to recog-nize which items should not be included on an employment application, such as:

· Any question that produces a response indicating an applicant’s protected class, such as age, race, national origin, disability, etc. For example, an applica-tion form should not ask for any informa-tion that could be used to determine a candidate’s age, such as his or her high school graduation date.

· Questions regarding the type of dis-charge received from military service. It is acceptable to ask the applicant to indicate dates served, the type of work done, and training received. Although no specific regulation bars potential employers from asking about the type of discharge received (e.g., honorable versus dishonorable), because of disparate impact concerns they should do so only with a good business reason.

· Inquiries about the amount of sick leave the applicant has taken in past jobs. Both the Americans with Dis-abilities Act and the Family and Medical Leave Act prohibit discrimination and

retaliation against applicants who have exercised their rights under those laws.

Also, although it is not unlawful to re-quire an applicant to provide his or her social security number on an employment ap-plication form, because of identity theft and general privacy concerns an employer should instead request this information only when the background check process begins or the applicant is completing tax and benefits plan forms. Employers must always have proce-dures in place to maintain the confidentiality of all personal information.

Companies often use employment appli-cation forms based on templates from books or the Internet. In those cases they should take extra care to ensure that the application conforms to both the employer’s industry requirements and to laws in the state where employment will take place. It is also a good idea to have a labor attorney review all employment application forms to reduce the potential for claims of discrimination because of disparate impact.

A human resources consultant with Steptoe & John-son, Ann Kontner has over twenty-five years of HR experience in corporate compliance, administrative management, staff development, and executive lead-ership skills. Her previous employers include both publicly and privately held corporations and federal government contractors, and she has experience working in both domestic and international markets. She can be reached at [email protected].

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comPLianceiSSueS


Temps

personality

test

Q. Do any potential legal issues exist with requiring applicants to take a personality test prior to inviting them in for an interview?

— A. A number of legal considerations affect free-employment testing

programs. One is the Uniform Guidelines on Employee Selection Procedures of 1978, under Title VII, which requires employers to consider whether a test has a disproportionately adverse impact on any race, sex, or ethnic group. Employers must also take into consideration the Americans with Disabilities Act and whether a test screens out (or tends to screen out) a person with a disability. In that instance, the test must be job related and must be consistent with business necessity, and the employer must provide a specific reasonable accommodation if necessary for the testing applicant. As with any job-selection criteria, pre-employment testing should be carefully evaluated to make sure that it does specifically measure whether an employee is able to perform the essential functions of the position. Further, employers should carefully monitor the results of such testing to make sure that it does not unduly affect a particular group or category of applicants.

Q. What (if any) employment documents am I required to keep on file for temporary employees we have on staff?

— A. Because a temporary worker hired through a staffing agency is not

typically an employee, the record-keeping requirements applicable to employees do not apply to these individuals. I would not keep records such as applications, W-4 forms, I-9 forms, or other employment documents, because they may support a later claim that the temps were in fact employees. I do suggest keeping certain records with regard to these temporary workers for at least two years; if nothing else, they provide a record of the time that those individuals spent in your facility or working on your behalf. Typically such records would consist solely of the billing information from the staffing agency.

Randall C. Schauer is a partner at Fox Rothschild LLP. His labor and employment practice handles the full spectrum of the employment relationship from prehire procedures to post-termination closure, including unemployment compensa-tion and statutory compliance issues such as Title VII, ADA, FLSA, FMLA, and OSHA compliance. He can be reached at [email protected].

We welcome your participation in the hr Insights Ask The Expert forum and encourage you to submit questions to

[email protected].

aSK the exPert

HR INSIGHTS 21

upcoming Shifts in the Labor PoolWater Cooler ChroniCles:

By miKe mCKerns

In August 2013 the unemployment rate dropped to 7.3%. This might seem like great news, especially since the rate had been at 8.1% one year earlier and 9% a year before that. Close examination, however, reveals that recent decline in the unemployment rate re-sulted not from more people finding jobs but from 312,000 people dropping out of the labor force—leaving only 63.2% of Americans (the lowest rate since 1978) in the labor pool.

Among young adults between the ages of 16 and 24, the drop in labor force participation has been especially high. At first glance, this fact might seem cause for alarm. On its own, however it doesn’t tell the whole story. As it turns out, members of this group who remain outside the workforce often do so in order to further their education.

While pondering what this might mean if the economy’s upward trajectory continues over the next several years, I encoun-tered an interesting article titled “An Economy That Works: Job Creation and America’s Future,” by the McKinsey Global Institute. This article predicts a shortage of 1.5 million college graduates in the workforce by the year 2020. These numbers have significant implications for the shape of the future workforce. Let’s put the pieces together.

Take lots of people delaying their entrance into the labor pool in order to pursue more education. Add a huge shortfall of college-educated workers over the next several years. What do you get? One hot commodity.

Some of those young adults who are out of the workforce and in school now are there by choice, because they have planned career paths that include increasing their higher education credentials. Some, on the other hand, are out of the workforce by circumstance: they would rather be working now but haven’t been able to find jobs and instead are in school. In both cases, by work-ing on their educations those people are making themselves into more skilled—and more valuable—future employees.

Economists and HR experts predict that by the year 2020, there will be an increased demand for college-educated employ-ees . . . and not enough qualified people to meet that demand. The young adults who are in school now (or will be starting school in the next couple of years) aren’t numerous enough to fill all of those new positions.

In 2020, those recent college graduates will be in high demand. Businesses that don’t want to be left out in the cold should start strategizing now for ways to attract those rare commodities to their companies. Will your organization be ready?

Mike McKerns is the editor in chief of HR Insights and cofounder of Mamu Media LLC. He can be reached at [email protected].

exPLoring neW traditionS for hoLidaY meaLSAs winter rolls in, people often turn to food to bring cheer to the cold, dark days and

to celebrate the season’s holidays. Roast turkey, baked ham, leg of lamb—these are all some of the centerpiece dishes that grace tables at family get-togethers and holiday gatherings during this season.

After eating the same traditional foods year after year, however, you might be ready for a change. Perhaps health concerns make certain foods off limits, or maybe you’re entertaining a vegetarian guest at your table this year (or have become a vegetarian yourself). Or maybe you just want to look down at your holiday plate and see a change of scenery.

Here’s a main-course dish that draws on seasonal ingredients, won’t keep you in the kitchen (and away from your guests) all day, and is showy enough to take the place of honor at any winter celebration. It’s so delicious that your guests will be clamoring for the recipe. Whether you decide to share it with them—or keep it a closely guarded family secret—is up to you!

nutritionaL info Per Serving: Calories: 421 cal

Fat: 17 g

Dietary fiber: 3.25 g

Sugars: 2 g

Protein: 14 g

Yield: 8 servings (about 40 ravioli) Time: about an hour

What you’ll need:1 15-ounce can of cooked pumpkin

(Note: be sure you don’t use pumpkin pie filling by mistake!)

1 cup of grated Parmesan cheese2 tsp ground nutmeg1 tsp ground cinnamon

salt & pepper2 12-ounce packages of

wonton wrappers1 egg1 stick of salted butter 2 T chopped fresh sage

Directions: 1. Fill a large pot or Dutch oven with water and put it on the stove on high

heat; when it reaches a boil, salt the water generously. While you’re waiting for the water to heat, put together the ravioli.

2. In a medium-sized bowl, combine the pumpkin, cheese, and spices. Mix well, adding salt and pepper to taste.

3. In a small bowl, beat the egg with 1 T of water.4. Place a wonton wrapper on a clean surface. Brush the edges with the egg

mixture, then put 1 T of the pumpkin mixture in the middle. Lay another wonton skin on the top, pinching the edges together carefully to seal them. Repeat until all the filling is gone or you run out of wonton wrappers.

5. Boil the ravioli until they are fully cooked (about 6 or 7 minutes), then drain and set aside.

6. While the ravioli cook, prepare the sauce: in a small skillet over low heat, melt the butter and cook until the milk solids drop to the bottom of the pan and turn a medium-brown color.

7. Add the sage to the butter and warm them together for about half a minute.8. Toss the cooked ravioli with the sauce and serve immediately.

Some time-saving tips:• The filling is traditionally enclosed in squares of egg-based pasta, but

wonton wrappers make a good substitute when you’re trying to keep it simple (and keep your kitchen tidy!).

• For a less-hectic holiday dinner, put the ravioli together in advance and freeze them. On the day of your dinner, all you need to do is cook the ravioli and prepare the sauce—and eat them, of course!

Image by D

Leonis/Bigstock.com


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