Horizon Point Consulting

Author: Lorrie Coffey

What Does Your Candidate Experience Say About Company Culture?
I follow a number of HR groups online. It’s a great way to expand my HR knowledge, see how different companies manage their HR functions, as well as to share my own knowledge and experiences with others.

Recently, while scanning through one Facebook group, I came upon a question that stood out. “Do you think it’s ok that managers are consistently late for interviews and leave candidates waiting for 15-20 minutes?”

Reading through the comments, many respondents addressed the base issue- No, you shouldn’t make a habit of being late for interviews. But none addressed the impact that doing so could have on the organization and its reputation, or in other words, how candidates viewed the company’s culture.

The candidate experience is critical to any organization in order to hire and retain top talent. And it starts as soon as a candidate clicks on a job posting. Here are some questions to ask yourself about your candidate experience and how it reflects your company culture.
1. What does your job posting say about your company culture?
2. Is your application process quick and simple, or do you require candidates to fill out screen after screen of information that you can probably pull from their resume?
3. Once an application is submitted, do you send a “Thank you for your application” response? How quickly do you review and respond to applications? Do you notify candidates in a timely manner if they are not selected?
4. When the candidate arrives for an interview, how are they greeted and are the interviewers prepared for the meeting? Are candidates left waiting on a regular basis?
5. If, after the interview, you decide you like the candidate and want to continue to move forward, do you give them a tour and introduce them to other employees?
6. You’ve made an offer and they’ve accepted. Now what? Is there contact between the time they accept the offer and their start date? That may include sending them pre-hire paperwork, providing them with their orientation schedule, or simply having a few members of the team they will join reach out to introduce themselves.
The candidate experience is a great reflection of an organization’s culture. If the experience is a great one, candidates will think highly of the organization and want to join that culture. If the experience is a bad one, you will not only lose that candidate to another organization (maybe even a competitor) but you’ll earn the reputation of a company that doesn’t value candidates, and in turn, employees.

Does your candidate experience reflect your company culture?
March 7, 2019
Employee Health Clinics: A Creative Solution to Climbing Costs

Healthcare costs have risen an average of five to seven percent each year for the last five years. With costs steadily increasing, employers are starting to look for creative solutions to combat this steady climb in costs. One solution many employers have adopted is Employee Health Clinics.

What is an employee health clinic?

It is when an employer or group of employers work with local health care providers to create a health clinic specifically for use by their employees and dependents. The employer usually pays a monthly fee per employee, often between about $50 to $100. Some employers opt to charge employees a small copay for visits between about $5 and $15; much less than they would pay through their health insurance provider to see a doctor. In addition, the employer usually pays or splits the cost of lab work and prescription fees with the employee and those services are obtained by the health clinic at wholesale rates.

How can an employee benefit from an employer health clinic?

As noted above, visits to the employee health clinic are often at no cost or low cost to the employee and their dependents, including lab work and prescriptions. Clinics are usually set up onsite at the employer or in a nearby location. This helps to minimize the time away from work needed to seek medical care, thus encouraging employees to seek care when needed. Many employer health clinics also provide wellness care and have staff on-call after hours.

How can an employer benefit from establishing a health clinic?

By creating the convenience of an onsite or nearby health clinic, employees are more likely to seek medical treatment because they don’t need to take time off to do so. Clinics are often open before and after work hours and/or have staff on-call after hours. For an employer, this helps reduce absenteeism and increase productivity. Preventative care offered by the clinics can help to further reduce these problems for an employer, as well as also help to reduce the number of major health care claims to their primary insurance provider. This allows employers to cut their overall healthcare costs by reducing the annual premiums paid to the insurance company.

Employer health clinics can also help to manage minor worker’s compensation injuries and illnesses, working closely with the employer to get employees back to work faster and determine light duty assignments available when needed. This helps to reduce an employer’s overall worker’s compensation claims.

Many health clinics also provide wellness education including biometric testing, flu shots, and wellness seminars.

Employer health clinics are usually staffed with nurse practitioners or physician assistants, which helps to control the costs incurred to run the clinic. Some clinics have a full-time or part-time physician on staff or on-call as needed.

January 31, 2019
Is Your Training Program Legendary or Lackluster?

“An investment in knowledge pays the best interest.” – Benjamin Franklin

As I discussed in my recent post Five Elements of a Great Onboarding Experience, having a great new hire orientation can be critical to making a great first impression and getting a new hire successfully onboard with your organization. While many companies have worked hard to create that great first impression, they fall short on the long-term impression they give employees by failing to create a continuous training program.

I’m currently working with a client to help them set goals for the coming year. In meeting with their leadership and other employees, one theme stands out to me- they lack training opportunities. They conduct annual reviews and set goals with employees, but fall short when it comes to providing training to help those employees meet their goals.

So how can an organization successfully design a training program?

First, conduct an analysis of each job to determine what skills are needed for that role. Create a competency matrix that details each role and the skills needed for entry-level, intermediate level, and expert level mastery of that role. Then compare roles and see where skillsets overlap. This will help you to determine what training will have the greatest impact on your staff and yield the greatest return on your investment. It may also help you define career paths within your organization.

Second, create a formal training program based on the competency matrix. Once you determine what training will give you the biggest ROI, you need to start designing that training. You may need to use internal and external resources. When designing the training, determine what method of training will be most successful. For example, the client I’m working with commented on training that had been provided previously where employees were required to sit through hours of classroom training but were never given hands-on experience with what they learned, so the training was not effective. Also, consider how you can measure the effectiveness of the training once complete.

Third, use the competency matrix to define career paths and create a succession plan. Look at the roles in your organization, the skills needed for each role, and determine what makes sense for a path of promotion. Then assess the employees currently in those roles for possible promotions when they come available. If you have an employee you think would be great to move up, have a conversation with them to gauge their interest. Some employees do not want to move up into management roles, and that’s ok. But it’s best to know that at the beginning instead of spending time training and prepping someone to move up only to have them turn it down when an offer is made, or worse, have them feel obligated to take the position and then not be happy or successful in the new role. Once you have a succession plan designed, you can start working with those employees that would be good candidates for promotion and help them start obtaining the skill set needed to move into that next role.

While it’s important to create a continuous training plan for your organization, it’s also important for leaders to understand that training doesn’t have to come in the form of a formal program. Some of the most important skills I’ve learned in my career have been through impromptu training opportunities. As you’re completing a task, ask yourself “is there someone that could benefit from learning what I’m doing or understanding what I’m working on?” If so, ask them if they have five or ten minutes to shadow you in your task.

I encourage you to ask yourself “What have I taught someone this week?”

January 15, 2019
Change Management: Celebrating the Small Victories
Change is never easy. I remind myself of this daily as I navigate some major changes in my personal life. And my experience has been a great reminder of why change is often viewed so negatively. It’s the unknown. While they say the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results, the thought of changing that pattern and not knowing what the result will be is often petrifying.

I recently started working with a client who is experiencing a great deal of change in their organization and as a result, is seeing a decline in employee morale. As part of the change management process, I have begun meeting with managers on a weekly basis. While part of the goal of these weekly meetings is to talk through issues or concerns they may have, the primary goal is to help them focus on the positive and then find ways to share those positives with employees.

I start each meeting with one simple (yet difficult) question. “What went well this week?”

The natural reaction to this question is to try to think of major accomplishments, but when experiencing change and a decline in morale as a result of that change, employees need steady reassurance that the change is having a positive impact on the organization. Without that reassurance, morale will continue to drop. By showing employees the positive impact change is having, even if a small impact, you’re easing their anxiety over the change and gaining their buy-in.

So, after watching the managers struggle during that first meeting to answer my question, I gave them some guidelines:
- Think smaller. It doesn’t have to be a major accomplishment to be worth celebrating. Instead of waiting until the completion of a project to celebrate the work done, set milestones along the way and celebrate when you hit each mark.
- Celebrate the now. If it’s progress today, celebrate it. Even if it falls apart tomorrow. Deal with tomorrow then, but today it’s a small victory and deserves recognition. And there’s always that chance that it won’t fall apart down the road.
- Tie wins back to change. If the win was a result of a change that employees viewed negatively, acknowledge that the win was a positive result of that change.
- Decide how to share with employees. Is it a win that everyone should know about, or just a specific department? And how will you communicate it to them in a way that will ensure they receive it?
Even though we have only met a few times so far, I have seen a shift in the managers as well. The first week they were hesitant to claim any wins, but during our most recent meeting, they walked into the meeting with a few to share.

So, ask yourself what went well this week and have you shared that with your employees?
December 20, 2018
Top 10 Recruitment Quotes

10. “Recruitment IS marketing. If you’re a recruiter nowadays and you don’t see yourself as a marketer, you’re in the wrong profession.” – Matthew Jeffrey, Global head of sourcing and employment brand at SAP

9. “If you think it’s expensive to hire a professional, wait until you hire an amateur.” – Red Adair

8. “Great vision without great people is irrelevant.” –Jim Collins, Good to Great

7. “Hire character. Train skill.” –Peter Schutz

6. “If each of us hires people who are smaller than we are, we shall become a company of dwarfs. But if each of us hires people who are bigger than we are, we shall become a company of giants.” –David Ogilvy, advertising executive

5. “Do not hire a man who does your work for money, but him who does it for the love of it.” –Henry David Thoreau

4. “Hiring the right people takes time, the right questions, and a healthy dose of curiosity.” –Richard Branson

3. “Hiring people is an art, not a science, and resumes can’t tell you whether someone will fit into a company’s culture.” –Howard Schultz

2. “What is a modern recruiter? Someone who is honest first, knowledgeable second, consistent third, humble fourth, helpful fifth, and personable sixth.” –Steve Levy, Principle: Recruiting, Talent, and Social Media Consultant at Outside-the-Box Consulting.

1. “Nothing we do is more important than hiring and developing people. At the end of the day, you bet on people, not on strategies.” – Lawrence Bossidy, Former COO of General Electric

December 6, 2018