In a difficult hiring market, it is hard to think about adding another layer to your hiring practices that potentially screens people out instead of in. As one hiring manager said to me last week, “I just need people with a pulse.” But one reason why you may be hunting for people that are alive and not much more is because you aren’t hiring the right people to begin with, so turnover is a challenge and a cost to you in more ways than one. If done correctly, assessments can be a valuable part of your hiring strategy. To maximize
Most HR professionals and business leaders today are concerned about finding and keeping talent. If you are going to focus on one, I’d suggest you start first by focusing on retaining talent. Broadly, the best way to retain talent is to create an environment where people have key needs met. These needs are described in Daniel Pink’s book Drive. They are 1) The need to direct their own lives 2) The desire to do better for ourselves and our world 3) To learn and create new things. But given these three things, what are some practices that can actually be
My first job in HR was with a Professional Employer Organization (PEO) in Virginia. It was a great opportunity for me to learn about the HR field very quickly and I loved it. But there was one thing I absolutely hated about my job, and that was having to terminate employees over the phone. We managed clients in the 48 continental states and whenever a client needed to terminate an employee, that task fell to me. Imagine a manager half way across the country pulling an employee into an office and saying “I have HR on the phone to speak
In 2003 I got one of those calls every child dreads. My mother was in the hospital and being rushed into emergency surgery. Turned out she had an allergic reaction to a medication and it almost killed her. She was at work when she started to notice something wasn’t right and within a matter of a couple of hours, her hands swelled up so much that she had to have emergency surgery to cut her hands open to relieve the pressure. She ended up with Stevens-Johnson Syndrome and was in the Intensive Cardiac Care Unit for almost a week. Her
Picture this: There is an employee at your company that you’ve had multiple complaints against. They treat other employees with a total lack of respect and maybe even the treat customers the same way. They have created a hostile work environment in which other employees dread having to work with them, go out of their way to avoid them both in their tasks and just around the office in general, and customers refuse to deal with them. But they are one of your company’s top performers or they have a knowledge base that no one else in your company has.