Jun 15

Fair Criminal Record Screening Standards Act

By Rebecca Callahan Recruitment Comments Off

The City of Philadelphia recently announced a new initiative aimed at setting limits on employers requesting criminal records of applicants. Set to go into effect July 1, 2011, the new Fair Criminal Record Screening Standards Act (FCRSSA) is designed to aid former criminals trying to secure employment at companies with 10 or more employees operating within city limits. While similar legislation exists in Hawaii, Massachusetts and Minnesota, this law is the first of its kind in Philadelphia.

The FCRSSA stipulates the employers may only inquire about criminal arrests during the standard pre-screening process and cannot bring up prior convictions on the application or during interviews. This law requires that employers determine whether or not an applicant’s prior convictions have bearing on the job opening. Similarly, at no time can employers ask or take action against candidates for past arrests without conviction.

Before going into effect, employers have until June 17, 2011 to update applications and the hiring process and train hiring staff on the FCRSSA. After July 1, companies found in violation may be fined up to $2,000 per incident.

This new law presents detailed restrictions for companies looking to fill openings without discriminating. Careful preparation and ample training are crucial for fair practice and spotting qualifications instead of convictions.

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May 19

New Measures in Veteran Hiring

By Rebecca Callahan Recruitment Comments Off
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The U.S. Department of Labor’s Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs announced a proposed rule to strengthen affirmative action requirements for veterans protected under the Vietnam Era Veterans’ Readjustment Assistance Act of 1974 (VEVRAA) on April 26, 2011. Those protected include veterans: disabled, Vietnam-era, active duty and those recently discharged as well as anyone who served during a war, campaign or expedition.

The proposed rule clarifies mandatory job listing requirements, which a contractor must provide job vacancy and contact information for each of its locations to an appropriate employment service delivery system. The rule also proposes requiring contractors to engage in at least three specified types of outreach and recruitment efforts each year.  The rule would require that all applicants be invited to self-identify as a “protected veteran” before they are offered a job. Increasing data collection on job referrals, applicants and hires, and stabling hiring benchmarks to assist in ascertaining the effectiveness of affirmative action efforts are also proposed.

Clearly, this is a complicated area for government contractors as they’ll be required to maintain written action plans, train their managers, monitor compliance and meet other requirements. Working with a trusted experienced partner – such as SourceRight Solutions – will help ensure alignment and reduce audit risks.

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Apr 19

2011: The Year of Growth

By Rebecca Callahan Recruitment Comments Off
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At SourceRight Solutions, 2011 is off to a great start. We’re definitely seeing growth in certain market sectors, especially IT and financial services. More professionals have opted to become part of the contingent workforce as “free agents,” which has created a highly qualified talent pool to fulfill the uptick in exempt hiring requirements. In fact, we’re seeing an increasing trend in recruitment process outsourcing towards exempt-level hiring – a sharp contrast since historically RPO was more transactional – and now we’re being called into situations where our full range of skills and tools are being leveraged to source hard-to-find, passive candidates.

To oversee this growth, companies need to commit resources – whether internal, external or both. All of us witnessed organizations letting their recruiters go during the recent downturn. Many of our clients are now turning to us not only to help recruit but to also be part of broader strategic discussions with their hiring managers. Leveraging your MSP/RPO partner to counsel on how talent is developed and where the next wave of talent is coming from is becoming more commonplace.

Also becoming more frequent is the use of interim executives. An interim executive can fill the gaps created by winnowed-down management teams or newly created initiatives.  The interim executive can also lay the groundwork for someone within the company to assume the responsibilities. This free agent-driven “knowledge transfer” approach has enormous benefits as companies gain the benefits of senior talent – including C-level – with considerably more experience than could be brought on staff. While images of grey haired sages might come to mind, the reality is that many of these interim executives are far from retirement age and possess unique entrepreneurial skills.

There’s also a new position being created within many forward-thinking organizations: the Global Talent Acquisition Leader. These individuals are responsible for overseeing organizational talent acquisition strategy, effectiveness and spend.

In closing, we anticipate growth in improving the management of “blended” workforces across all categories of talent—full-time, part-time contingent, contract, and alumni—by using integrated infrastructure, tools, and analytics to strategically optimize the resourcing and management of talent globally.

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Mar 08

Is Your Online Reputation Reinforcing your Recruiting Efforts?

By Rebecca Callahan Recruitment Comments Off
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Today’s technology-savvy job candidates can easily research a company’s culture, values and vision. Therefore, how your company is portrayed online is more crucial than ever. The ability to access social networking sites, blogs and other online communities means potential employees can scrutinize and make decisions about your company in advance.

Here are several solid tips to help your company improve its online recruiting brand:

Be consistent

Are your online messages clear, consistent and compelling? This includes your website, Facebook pages, LinkedIn company profile, tweets, blogs and, of course, e-newsletters. Disparate communications vehicles shouldn’t mean disparate messaging – plus all of these online venues should engage candidates by speaking directly to them.

Define your voice

Are you a young, informal, innovative company? If so, the online persona should reflect this personality.  Is your company a Fortune 500 with considerable business history? Your voice should convey the organization’s corresponding gravitas.

Reach your target audience

Who are the candidates that you want to attract? Highly specialized engineers or experienced sales types? Once you’ve determined with whom you want to communicate, you can tailor your communications to where they can be found online and which topics interest them.

Engage

Remember that the purpose of many online communities is to interact with others. Determine the most appropriate way to insert your organization into the discussion and ensure that your contributions provide value to the audience.

If evolving your online recruiting brand isn’t your talent acquisition function’s core competency, leverage internal resources within your Marketing department for access to branding expertise — and external partners such as your recruitment process outsourcing (RPO) provider who can bring real-time experience in social media practices, as well as up-to-the-minute recruiting techniques.

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Feb 08

Shifting to Company-Branded Talent Communities: Part 2

By Karen Turner Recruitment Comments Off
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In the second part of this two-part series, we’ll review the relationship between talent communities and the candidate experience.

The Candidate Experience

Despite the proliferation of Facebook and LinkedIn, companies have come to realize that these ready-made social networking sites aren’t necessarily the most effective avenue to communicate and collaborate with active and passive talent—they just aren’t as dynamic or personal, and it’s harder to keep the talent interested and coming back.  With client-branded talent communities, it’s easier to put the candidate at the center and truly focus on the talent as the exact target.  The talent receives emails about jobs that they may be a fit for; are able to interact in real-time chat and discussion boards with company recruiters, current employees, alumni, and other community members; and are one of the first groups of people to hear about exciting company news and events.  They may update their skills, resume, and desired opportunities at any time to keep them current, can showcase their portfolio for the company and other members to see, and can even upload video recordings of themselves and push them through social media channels to get one-on-one personal advice from recruiters or their own personal networks.  The most innovative companies realize that their workforce is already inherently grouped together in niche classifications and their community messaging should be too.  Whether they are candidates seeking traditional employment, alumni, interns, project teams, independent contractors or free agents, each group has its own interests and needs that must be met and the most effective talent communities address these needs online as well.

Keeping Candidates Engaged

Of course, it’s easy to get caught up in the notion that once an online talent community is built, candidates will be racing to join in an effort to align themselves with the company.  But smart organizations know this isn’t the case.  First, candidates must be found and directed to join the talent community.  A valuable sourcing activity to locate these candidates is simply participating in other communities where potential candidates are already involved and engaging in discussions with them.  Utilizing the latest search engine technologies is also a great sourcing tool, with the goal of redirecting the natural search activities of high performers.

Once the candidates have been located, and even if the messaging has been determined and the methods have been put in place, there is still one more variable: the messenger.  Just as recruiters do in real life, online relationships must be built upon mutual trust and communication.  Rapport must be established through regular, open dialogue with the candidates, even when they are not actively seeking a position at the company.  Because ultimately, it is much easier to find a qualified biopharma team leader for a new project when there are several participating in an online talent community then starting from scratch with traditional online recruiting efforts like job boards and resume searches.  It’s imperative that an online talent community adds value for the candidates, and consistently enriches their job-seeking experience.  Encouraging discussion and participation and engaging in dialogue with candidates is essential to any successful community.

Relationships are Key

Talent communities are a thriving and fundamental piece of the recruitment puzzle.  However, the relationship building skills valued in experienced recruiters are still vital to attracting and motivating successful candidates seeking traditional employment and also free agent talent, particularly at the more senior levels.  So despite increasing reliance on social networking, don’t lose sight of the importance of personal connections, as it is these connections that ensure successful recruiting strategies and talent communities.

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Feb 03

Shifting to Company-Branded Talent Communities: Part 1

By Karen Turner Recruitment Comments Off
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In this two-part series, we’ll examine the importance of talent communities, especially as they relate to advancing the candidate experience.

It wasn’t that long ago that “just-in-time” hiring was standard, but so was the sub-standard quality of hire and engagement issues that sometimes came with it.    Thankfully, the emergence of Web 2.0 diminished these issues and allowed companies to apply basic internet tools such as blogs, wikis and Twitter to their recruitment strategies, enhancing their recruitment efforts and helping many gain a competitive advantage. The success of these early Web 2.0 adopters convinced them and others to eagerly follow this by utilizing social networking sites, podcasts and videos, which provided additional communication channels for driving brand awareness and creating collaborative relationships with their employees, prospective employees and alumni.

Recently, forward-thinking executives who are responsible for talent acquisition are discovering more innovative ways to exploit the dynamic Web 2.0 phenomenon to attract and motivate passive candidates.  Building upon the success of the original broad social network communities, organizations are now creating proprietary talent communities for active and passive professional candidates – and even their current employees – providing an interactive and relevant experience for a defined audience.

Why Talent Communities?

In the physical world, people join groups to find others with whom they have something in common, such as Toastmasters, Weight Watchers and wine tasting clubs.  An online community is built on the same premise, with the distinction of being online.  And because they are not stunted by the limitations of a physical environment, online communities can have an infinite number of members.  This is one reason why they are desirable talent communities.  Companies have the opportunity to interact with current and prospective employees—communicating active or future job opportunities.  By building this talent community, the company stays connected to the talent and in a sense, creates a talent pool or pipeline of candidates.   For the company, attracting candidates is easy.  Candidates become a part of the communities because they all have one interest in mind – learning more about the company and possibly engaging with the company in some capacity.  Futuristic companies, realizing that the world of work is changing, build the talent communities for all categories of talent—traditional employees, free agent talent, independent contractors, consultants, interns, alumni and any other groups of talent specific to their company or industry.

In our next post, we’ll delve into this topic further, specifically by looking at how it relates to the candidate experience.

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Jan 27

Demand for professional skilled workers is on the rise

By Bonnie Tichman Recruitment Comments Off
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In 2011 the talent war will heat up for the college educated.

Check out this video, featuring surprising facts about U.S. employment trends and predictions, particularly for recent grads and the college educated overall.

Jan 24

The Blended Workforce: Agile, Efficient—and Risky: Part 2

By Rebecca Callahan Contingent Workforce Management, Recruitment, Recruitment Process Outsourcing Comments Off
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The blended workforce is playing a growing role in business, and that is making compliance with employment laws a more complicated—and critical—challenge. In this second post in our three-part series, we’ll examine how to take a broader perspective on this situation.

Because of the complexity of compliance rules, regulations, and enforcement efforts, when dealing with the blended workforce, the right course of action is not always clear, and it can be easy to get things wrong. For example, companies are usually familiar with the need to ensure that independent contractors and contingent workers are not treated as full-time employees. Yet, the IRS estimates that as many as half of the approximately 10 million independent contractors in the U.S. are classified incorrectly and should be considered employees. You don’t want to join the list of companies that have faced lawsuits challenging their classification of and treatment of workers, which include major organizations such as Wal-Mart, FedEx and Starbucks.

In this charged environment, traditional compliance efforts will not always be enough. Instead, companies and their HR professionals should use a number of tools and techniques to strengthen their compliance capabilities and programs.

First and foremost, companies need to take a big picture approach by recognizing that compliance is a multifaceted issue that they will need to address with a comprehensive approach—something that is lacking at many companies. Too often, employers simply don’t have clear corporate policies about how to manage a blended workforce, especially when it comes to compliance issues. Or, they may have some policies in place, but those policies differ across the company or are not enforced consistently.

In moving from a piecemeal approach to an effective, companywide compliance program, employers can start by conducting an operational analysis and risk assessment. This should identify gaps in compliance processes, areas needing improvement, and any issues that might trigger audits. It should include a review of all existing independent contractor relationships across the organization and examine those relationships in light of current state and federal regulations. As much as possible, it should determine the dollar cost of any current violations that it uncovers.

To be effective, a comprehensive compliance program needs to be based on a clear, horizontal view across all types of workers, including regular employees, independent contractors, and contingent workers. But getting that view can be a challenge, because the information it requires is typically spread across a variety of systems in a variety of places. Traditionally, companies have had to piece that information together manually, undertake a time-consuming and expensive integration effort, or go through the cost and disruption of implementing new systems. In our next post, we’ll take a closer look at the role of technology as it relates to people and processes.

Jan 20

The Blended Workforce: Agile, Efficient—and Risky: Part 1

By Rebecca Callahan Contingent Workforce Management, Recruitment Comments Off
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The blended workforce is playing a growing role in business, and that is making compliance with employment laws a more complicated—and critical—challenge. In this three-part series, we’ll examine the issues created by this trend and what steps should be taken to maximize productivity and mitigate risk.

The use of free-agent workers has been growing for some time, and today, the blended workforce—a mix of permanent employees, consultants, independent contractors, and contingent workers—is becoming the norm among U.S. companies. These workers not only let companies control employment costs and keep headcount options open, they also provide heightened flexibility and rapid access to specialized skills. These qualities can be crucial in an era of changing technologies, markets, and business strategies—and it seems that the blended workforce is here to stay.

In the wake of the recession, companies have understandably taken a cautious approach to hiring. But they still need people to create products and serve customers as demand picks up. The result is a gap between growing demand and slow hiring—and to fill that gap, many companies are turning to independent contractors and contingent workers.

As the blended workforce becomes an increasingly familiar part of the business landscape, it brings with it a growing set of challenges in terms of compliance with employment laws and regulations. As HR professionals know, complying with the rules can be difficult enough with a traditional full-time workforce and a blended workforce only makes matters more complex. Navigating this landscape is not easy, and it is not getting any easier. U.S. government agencies are scrutinizing labor practices, looking for businesses that don’t classify, pay, and treat their employees and other workers appropriately. What’s more, developments on a number of fronts indicate that this scrutiny is likely to increase in the months and years ahead. For example:

  • The IRS announced early in 2010 that it would conduct 6,000 random audits over the next three years to look at employee classification issues, and the 2011 federal budget includes a $25 million “Misclassification Initiative.”
  • In the U.S. Congress, a number of bills designed to strengthen compliance detection and enforcement have been proposed, while at least a dozen states have strengthened employee classification rules and ramped up enforcement.
  • Concerns about illegal immigration are leading to more audits of I-9 employees, or foreign workers eligible to work in the U.S. So, too, is a heightened focus on security, with the Department of Homeland Security also performing I-9 audits—and having the ability to come on-site without notice to interrogate employees.
  • Recent changes at the Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs (OFCCP)—the Department of Labor organization charged with ensuring contractors’ compliance with nondiscrimination laws—are leading to more thorough audits focused on diversity. In 2011, the OFCCP will be looking closely at the hiring of the disabled and veterans coming back from Afghanistan and Iraq.

In our next posts, we’ll review how to take a broader perspective on this situation and how to utilize the latest technologies to glean valuable business intelligence.

Dec 15

When It Comes To Recruiting, a Bigger Pond Doesn’t Necessarily Mean Better Fishing

By Rebecca Callahan Contingent Workforce Management, Managed Service Programs, Recruitment Comments Off
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In an economy that has the highest unemployment rate in history, this statistic surprised me:  the number of available jobs has risen twice as fast as actual hires over the last year, according to aWall Street Journal analysis.

And in this economy with double-digit unemployment, how can employers be posting more jobs, but not hiring candidates? It’s because the candidate pool may be larger, but the challenge still lies in finding the right person.

High-quality talent is out there, but employers may not be looking in the right place to find it.To attract innovators, organizations must use innovative sourcing techniques. Recruiting strategies should be designed to reach active and passive candidates, contingent workers, and non-traditional workers – from retirees to overseas talent – while at the same time providing the workflows and processes to narrow the field by identifying the best of the best.

This requires a multi-faceted recruiting approach. Traditional methods still work and shouldn’t be abandoned. However, the impact of online recruiting and social media is undeniable: its reach extends from 60-year-olds who have built their following on Facebook to younger adults for whomtext messages and mouse clicks are as natural as breathing.

Even with these trends, many organizations aren’t utilizing social media effectively. The Emerging Workforce Study shows less than a quarter of companies have a formal social media strategy. Of those that do, only 22% use social networking to recruit talent.

That’s a significant missed opportunity. To be at the cutting-edge of recruiting and attract the most desirable workers, organizations must embrace and leverage social media. And that involves much more than trolling LinkedIn or posting a Facebook page. Similar to the current talent pool, the Internet is a big place. To find best fit candidates, your social media strategy should reflect this.

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