human resources

Tony Schwartz: Want Productive Employees? Treat Them Like Adults

The Hired Guns on March 25, 2013

This article originally appeared on HBR.org and The Energy Project. It is reprinted here with the kind permission of the author.

For more than a decade now, I’ve struggled to define what fuels the most sustainably productive work environment — not just on behalf of the large corporate clients we serve, but also for my own employees at The Energy Project. Perhaps nothing I’ve uncovered is as important as trust.

Much as employers understandably hunger for one-size-fits-all policies and practices, what motivates human beings remains stubbornly complex, opaque, and difficult to unravel. Perhaps that’s why I felt so viscerally the shortsightedness and futility of Marissa Mayer’s decision to order Yahoo employees who had been working from home to move back to the office, and Hubert Joly’s to do the same at Best Buy. Read More →

What We’re Reading: A Google VP Steps Out, A New Take on Job Vacancies, and #CoffeeMugMurder

The Hired Guns on September 28, 2012

Happy Friday, Guns. Here’s a look back at the week that was:

Google parted ways this week with Dave Girouard, VP of their burgeoning Enterprise business. Girouard will head up UpStart.com, a crowdfunding site that helps young professionals and recent grads start their own businesses. via Wired.com
There are 20,000 real estate brokers in New York City. The Gray Lady talks to three new agents about what made them want to join such a crowded field. via NYT
In the brave new world of the 21st Century, your current skills are never enough. via NYT
With 3 million open jobs in the US, why is unemployment so high? It’s easy to point to a lack of skills in the available workforce, but Wharton School professor Peter Cappelli blames the employers themselves. via PBS
There’s still time to sign up for Joel Schwartzberg’s public speaking class this Wednesday! via The Hired Guns Academy
Nancy Grace is the #QueenOfHashtags via Gawker

Survey: Job Vacancies Are Hard on Those Left Behind, Too

The Hired Guns on June 28, 2012

According to a recent Careerbuilder survey, some companies believe that job cuts have left their organization a little too lean and mean.

Some 34% of employers believe that unfilled jobs have left the remaining staff overworked, resulting in lower-quality work. Roughly the same number of employers surveyed believed that the job vacancies caused a loss in morale; 17% thought the vacancies led to higher turnover.

And 23% of employers also believe that their companies suffered a loss in revenue because of those vacancies.

Why Good People Can’t Get Jobs

The Hired Guns on June 5, 2012

There are still lots of unemployed or underemployed workers out there, but many companies say they just can’t find the right employees to fill openings. What’s behind this seeming paradox?

To get some answers, The Wall Street Journal talked with Peter Cappelli, a professor of management and human resources at Wharton, who just wrote the book Why Good People Can’t Get Jobs. He argues that some companies are obsessed with getting people with the perfect experience and stats, so they end up with no one: “for every story about an employer who can’t find qualified applicants, there’s a counterbalancing tale about an employer with ridiculous hiring requirements.”

Cappelli also lays the blame on overly rigid screening software, which is rejecting people who might actually be qualified: “applicants rarely talk to anyone, even by email, during the hiring process,” so there’s no way to clear up confusion over experience, job titles, job-history gaps, or anything else.

Job Hunting: How to Negotiate Vacation Time

Jim Hopkinson on April 25, 2012

Jim Hopkinson, our Salary Coach, is back to help you stay productive as well as get paid — this time he covers questions from those who want a decent amount of time off as well as a good salary — a sometimes-thorny proposition.

If someone already knows the salary range being offered and is thrilled with the amount, but wants more vacation time instead of more $$$, would a company be willing to give someone 10/12/14 days more vacation time (over what’s standard for a new hire) over the person negotiating/asking 10K-20K more in salary? I assume the company always expects someone to counter-offer their first offer? Read More →

The Salary Tutor Answers Your Questions

Jim Hopkinson on April 5, 2012

Last month, Jim Hopkinson taught a Hired Guns Academy class about negotiating your salary effectively. He’ll be teaching for us again, but until then, you can still learn from his ample experience. Below, he answers questions from the Hired Community about dealing with counteroffers and other potential salary complications.

I have an exciting new job offer and am in a bit of a quandary. I want the new job very badly but wish that the base were a little higher. Even though I desperately want out of my current company, I was thinking about going back and asking for a counteroffer so that I can get a bump from my new company. Good idea? Read More →

NPR’s #PubJobs: A Case Study in Recruiting with Twitter

The Hired Guns on March 22, 2012

Writing for MediaShift, NPR’s director of talent acquisition, Lars Schmidt, lays out a successful Twitter strategy he used to publicize and fill openings at the company.

First, he promoted the use of the hashtag #PubJobs for any jobs in public media — wherever they were. By also getting American Public Media and local public-radio and -TV stations on board, Lars not only helped fill NPR’s own openings but also helped get “great talent in the system” in general.

Since the launch of #PubJobs last June, the hashtag has appeared in over 700 tweets by 130 unique contributors. Roughly 60% of them were retweets, which Lars believes points up the “virility” and “visibility” of the campaign. And as far as ways to use social media to get the right people to keep your company in mind, it definitely beats asking applicants for their Facebook passwords ….

Bullet Points: Where the Recruiters Are

The Hired Guns on March 15, 2012

For a recent study, the social-recruiting company Bullhorn Reach analyzed the way the 35,000 recruiters on its network use the “big three” of social media (LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook). It’s probably no surprise that LinkedIn is the runaway favorite, used by 98% of the recruiters who have connected their Bullhorn account with any social-media account at all. Twitter and Facebook are used by only 42% and 33% of the recruiters, respectively. Whether or not this means that recruiters are hunting in the wrong place remains to be seen, but we bet that you’ll see more and more recruiters at least trying to prospect more on Facebook and Twitter in the future.
The Daily Herald of Everett, WA, considers a job interview on Skype a real downer: “Because of the awkward nature of the on-screen interaction and lack of flow in the conversation, Skype is a good tool for employers who want a cost-saving way to rule out candidates. However, the job candidate is almost always at a disadvantage.”
“There is only one thing you need to measure when it comes to being a perm or search recruiter… How many of your candidates are sitting opposite your clients.” [Greg Savage]
Ex-Goldman man Greg Smith may have made “muppets” famous, but the New York Times points out that lots of businesses have less-than-kind terms for their customers.

Bullet Points: Avoiding Bias When Hiring

The Hired Guns on March 1, 2012

Why do married men earn more than bachelors? [Jason Collins]
“Businesspeople have long joked that meetings make them brain-dead, so it is nice to find a group of scientists in white coats telling us that it is actually so.” [FT]
“How do you deal with potential bias you’re not even aware of if you use your gut instinct in hiring?” [HR Capitalist]
To mark the end of his tenure, the creative director of BBDO NY posted a video of himself riding his bike through the halls, complete with a schmaltzy soundtrack.
LinkedIn gets evaluated by the Motley Fool for its long-term investment prospects.

LinkedIn’s Recruiting Revenues May Soon Eclipse Monster’s

The Hired Guns on February 23, 2012

It’s been a banner year so far for LinkedIn, with its stock up an amazing 46% since January 1 — a big jump in its revenue accounts for much of this new sexiness to investors.

For the Forbes contributor Josh Bersin, though, the “real story” is the fact that LinkedIn is now the “fastest growing public provider of corporate recruiting solutions.” So if there’s anyone out there who still thinks that LinkedIn is just a more-boring Facebook for suits, it’s time to get with the program. Read More →

Bullet Points: Oracle’s Play for Taleo

The Hired Guns on February 9, 2012

In a deal worth nearly $2 billion, Oracle intends to buy Taleo, which makes cloud-based “Talent Management” software used by HR departments in 5,000 companies worldwide. The purchase is seen as a move against SAP, which recently bought a Taleo competitor.
The bad first impressions that new employees get during onboarding may linger for a long, long time. [Ere.net]
Helicopter parents are keeping a close eye on their little darlings’ entry into the workplace. But how are companies supposed to deal with it? One consultant goes deep: “You don’t want to block the energy of the parent…. It’s like jujitsu. You just want to channel it in a certain direction.”
In what’s starting to feel a lot like the first dot-com bubble, there are simply not enough great programmers to satisfy Bay Area startups: “Top programmers are like a race car,” says one developer. “Once you get them you don’t want to lose them and you want to get as many as you can.” That’s caused headaches for the talent agency GitHire, which is a startup itself.

Are Performance Reviews Worth It?

The Hired Guns on October 28, 2011

Chances are that performance reviews aren’t anyone’s favorite aspect of the modern workplace, but that doesn’t mean they’re useless paperwork. In the Globe and Mail, Marjo Johne makes the case for them, quoting a partner in an accounting firm who says that a review “removes a lot of uncertainty amongst employees about how they are performing at work.” Johne also gets some advice on how smaller companies can do reviews effectively. She also notes that in smaller companies, it’s extra-important to make sure that reviews are constructive, with an emphasis on improvement rather than fault-finding.

Related: Evil HR Lady on why formal performance reviews may not always be essential: “start asking for regular feedback” instead.

The Salary Tutor: Did Your Co-worker Steal Your Raise?

Jim Hopkinson on October 27, 2011

Jim Hopkinson, the author of Salary Tutor, is writing a series of post designed to help you negotiate during some of the most important — and stressful — points in your career. A slightly different version of this post appeared on Jim’s website.

The person sitting next to you at work has been acting peculiar. Nothing dramatic . . . after all, you’ve shared the same workspace for years, worked on several successful projects together, and survived a round of layoffs in 2009, coming out fine on the other side.

But it’s the little things . . . Read More →

Bullet Points: New York City’s Twitter-Addicted Masses

The Hired Guns on October 10, 2011

It’s not your imagination: New Yorkers really do love their Twitter. The very chatty city has more users of the microblogging service than any other city. [The Next Web]
Semi-related, perhaps: Twitter still has a ways to go to convince advertisers that it’s a good place for their message. [Business Insider]
Some bad news on the compensation front . . . . “The incomes of U.S. workers, adjusted for inflation, fell even more rapidly since the rebound began in the summer of 2009 than during the recession itself, according to a new study.” [Reuters]
And here’s a groundbreaking approach to the job interview — but be warned, results may vary:

[Via Stuff I Stole from the Internet]

Bullet Points: Cutting Down on the Noise and Human Resource Secrets

The Hired Guns on March 16, 2011

Tony Schwartz, Hired Gun pal and the author of Be Excellent at Everything, writes about what the addicted-to-texting-and-tweeting crowds at SXSW would need to “seize back control of their lives.” Hint: it doesn’t involve more Internet.

You likely already have too much to do, too much information to absorb, and too many choices to make. If so, your challenge is learning to say no far more often — “no” to more projects, more meetings, more emails, more tweets, more Facebook updates, more purchases, more friends, more “likes”, and more fans and followers. . . Prioritization isn’t just what you want to do, it’s increasingly what you ought not to do.

These dirty little secrets of HR make for sobering reading. The bottom line is that they are people too–and some of them are full of foibles. So be prepared by knowing what they might be thinking. [TechRepublic]

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Tony Schwartz: Want Productive Employees? Treat Them Like Adults

Survey: Job Vacancies Are Hard on Those Left Behind, Too

Why Good People Can’t Get Jobs

Job Hunting: How to Negotiate Vacation Time

The Salary Tutor Answers Your Questions

NPR’s #PubJobs: A Case Study in Recruiting with Twitter

Bullet Points: Where the Recruiters Are

Bullet Points: Avoiding Bias When Hiring

LinkedIn’s Recruiting Revenues May Soon Eclipse Monster’s

Bullet Points: Oracle’s Play for Taleo

Are Performance Reviews Worth It?

The Salary Tutor: Did Your Co-worker Steal Your Raise?

Bullet Points: New York City’s Twitter-Addicted Masses

Bullet Points: Cutting Down on the Noise and Human Resource Secrets

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