Whether you are hiring for a HR Manager/Director position, or interviewing to become one, you want the same thing:

-If you are hiring - you don't want to hire a dud.

-If you are interviewing - you don't want to be perceieved as a dud.

See the synergy?  Nobody wants to be the dud.  Funny how things seem to work out...

To that end, my most recent Workforce article is up to help you with the interviewing process for an HR spot.  I'm taking a shot at the best behavioral questions to separate the players from the pretenders in the HR Manager/Director space.

Take a look and let me know what you think.  If you flame, just remember - I'm limited to around 1,000 words in the column, so I gotta make choices... You can always tell me what your top 5 Behavioral questions would be...

Kristina Shevory has a cool article up at the New York Times about employee clubs.  From her article at the NYT:

"Fat paychecks, pensions and health insurance are not enough to recruit and keep employees these days. Companies are again finding that adding a bit of social context to work is crucial to keeping employees happy and productive. That is where employee clubs come in. Workplace specialists say clubs are a way to build camaraderie and help people get to know fellow employees away from work. Companies benefit, too. Clubs help create loyal employees, reduce turnover and improve morale while costing very little."

Interesting stuff.  I should know because she called me last year (found me from the HR Capitalist) and we talked about the challenges for employers who aren't Boeing or Google.  It was good conversation, and we talked about things that cash-challenged companies can do.

We talked for about 30 minutes.  What she quoted me on serves as a cautionary tale.  Here's my quote from the story.  Get ready to channel the Grinch:

"Still, perks can be impermanent. During the technology boom in the 1990s, companies piled on the benefits to attract talent and then promptly got rid of them when the economy soured. Many companies, whether they are battling bankruptcy or are flush with cash, have rolled back benefits, eliminated pensions and increased health care premiums to reduce expenses. Any nonessential perk, like an employee club, is also fair game.

“If they ever existed, the first thing that goes is the frilly, frilly stuff,” said Kris Dunn, vice president for human resources at SourceMedical, a Birmingham, Ala., software company, and author of the blog The HR Capitalist."

Bah Humbug... So my quote is true, but Mercer and the consultants get the fun quotes.  I get the fiscal hawk quote.... The HR person's trying to take all the fun out of the workplace...

Check out the article, it's a good read.  Finding out that Boeing funds over 100 employee clubs at seven locations nationwide is kind of like finding out that a Massage Therapist from Google is now a millionaire from her stock options.

It's hard to relate to from the trenches.... Boeing has a VP of Wine....

Seth Godin weighed in on HR early this week with this take:  Why not change the name of the HR function and then try to be exceptional?

After all, at one point the term "personnel" got stale, and the move was made to migrate to "human resources".

I love Seth's work.  But a name change won't change the issues.  The problem, in the past, was that personnel had a bad name, then the named changed.  Unfortunately, a lot of "personnel" people didn't see the need to raise their games.

Here's Seth's take:

"Like it or not, in most organizations HR has grown up with a forms/clerical/factory focus. Which was fine, I guess, unless your goal was to do something amazing, something that had nothing to do with a factory, something that required amazing programmers, remarkable marketers or insanely talented strategy people.

So, here's my small suggestion, one that will make some uncomfortable.

Change the department name to Talent.

The reason this makes some people uncomfortable is that it seems like spin, like gratuitous double speak. And, if you don't change what you do, that would be true.

BUT...

What if you started acting like the VP of Talent? Understanding that talent is hard to find and not obvious to manage. The VP of Talent would have to reorganize the department and do things differently all day long (small example: talent shouldn't have to fill out reams of forms and argue with the insurance company... talent is too busy for that... talent has people to help with that.)"

Seth's books are exceptional, and they've taught me a lot about the concepts of marketing.  Check out the recommended books on this blog and you'll see many of his works.

So I'm comfortable.  I'd like to deal with the challenge he outlines.

The problem is that many in our profession are still personnel people, focused on transactions.  The move to "Talent" as an identifier in our profession would mean that the bottom dwellers in our profession have caused us to abandon identities twice.  The "Why I hate HR" would simply become "Why I hate Talent Management".

Maybe a better plan is to offer up some professional credentials that transcend the SPHR, and focus on recruiting, performance management, innovation, leadership development, etc.   The high end skills that allow someone to call themselves "Talent".

Then those who have earned it can move to the cool designation.  Those that don't can stay in HR... or maybe personnel....

WOW.  It's been a few years since I supported a big consumer call center as part of my practice, so I had really forgotten about the pain that Intermittent Leave under FMLA can cause employers. 

The desire for maximum flexibility and at times, the avoidance of accountability, can cause Intermittent Leave to spread like a virus through an operating unit of a company.

For me, I thought bad news in this area would be about 3-4% of all employees in a division or company being approved for Intermittent Leave (10-12 employees in a call center of 300 would cause a big impact to scheduling, etc.).

But 42% of all employees?  You're kidding me, right?  Apparently not - from the Tampa Tribune:

"...Case in point is HARTline, the county's(Tampa metro) public transit service. Forty-two percent of the bus drivers have signed up for a benefit the federal law calls "unscheduled intermittent leave." Many of them are using the law to extend weekends and go home "sick" to avoid unwanted assignments.

The law designed to cost nothing is costing HARTline and other employers many millions of dollars. The family leave act was intended to cost little or nothing while providing 12 weeks of job security to help workers through challenges (sic) times - such as bringing home a new baby, recovering from illness, or helping an incapacitated relative.

Some workers, including many HARTline drivers, have discovered that minor ailments also qualify, such as back pain and headaches. A one-time doctor's certification can give a worker a perpetual excuse for going home early, sleeping late, or not showing up at all.

Lawmakers were wrong in thinking that two features would minimize employee abuse and employer expense: One, the worker on leave under the act gets no pay and thus has no incentive to malinger, and two, the law applies only to organizations with 50 or more workers, which seems to be ample manpower to make up lost productivity."

But employers like the bus agency can't make up in the afternoon for a bus that doesn't run in the morning. In many businesses, schedules must be kept.

To keep its buses on time, HARTline is spending $2 million a year on overtime, an agency spokesman says, and 39 percent of that cost is attributed to FMLA absences."

42% of all employees.  Maybe it would be easier for that HR Team to certify the people who don't need intermittent leave....

Ralph Kramden would never approve...

The world of Human Capital Management is littered with reasons you shouldn't try things - liability, technical issues, unresponsive employees or managers, exposure to bad stuff (another way to say liability), etc.

Sometimes you just have to be like Tom Cruise in Risky Business and say "Why Not" (actual Tom Cruise quote from movie edited by censors...).

A great example - the use of social networks inside of companies.  Joel Cheeseman recently waxed about HR's struggle with Web 2.0. (hat tip to Jason Averbook at Knowledge Infuser).  In his article at The Industry Standard, Joel points to a lack of marketing and IT chops among HR people, along with liability, as the main reasons HR can't leverage Web 2.0 to their benefit.

Joel's right about his observations.  But I don't think it has to be that way.  So we're going to run a project in my shop and drop our notes and lessons every couple of weeks for as long as it's relevant here at The HR Capitalist.

The project - establishing a social networking platform inside a company...

Social Networking (think products like FaceBook and MySpace) should have positive impact inside a company.  Linking employees to other teammates they've never met, sharing thoughts, interests and news inside a social network sounds cool.  Surely that translates to increased satisfaction, retention and even engagement - right?

We'll see....

Here's how the project will work.  We're going to launch a social network inside our company, including the ability to set up your own home page, a blog hosted by me with multiple contributors, youtube video capablity, widget functionality, etc.

I orginally tried to do this with Facebook, but got immediately concerned when I saw an existing employee account that had daily derogatory comments about the employee's manager.  Since liability is always on the table, no reason to assume more risk than you have to.

So, the open platforms of Facebook and MySpace are out for this experiment.  I can't afford a custom private solution, so we're going with a new product on the market called Ning...  Ning allows you to create a social network for free, but the upside for me as a HR Pro is that I can approve anyone who's added - meaning we can "wall it off" to employees only.

That's it for now; I'm configuring it as we speak.  I'll get it launched and provide updates as we move forward with the technology.

With the ill-advised Employee Free Choice Act likely making a comeback in 2009, I feel obligated to revisit the topic of Union membership at least once a month to keep it on everyone's radar screen.

One thing you might have seen over the last couple of weeks is the fact that Union membership actually increased last year.  The U.S. Department of Labor's Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that in 2007, the number of workers belonging to a union rose by 311,000 to 15.7 million.

From the Workforce analysis of the report:

"It represents part of the seismic shift in the makeup of America’s unionized workforce. Today, a union worker is more likely to be a low-skilled, low-paid service worker than a skilled, well-paid manufacturing employee.

“The future of the unions is the $8-an-hour home health care worker,” says David Gregory, professor of law at St. John’s University. The unions may have regained membership with lower-wage service workers, but they cannot regain the dues lost along with higher-paid jobs, Gregory says."

Seth Borden at the Union Free Employer took a look at the trend, the union's own organizing site, and came up with the following take:

"If a job cannot be done from Bangalore or Mexico City (outsourced outside of the U.S), it is in a sector likely to become a significant union organizing target in the next few years.  Health care, construction and education are examples.  We would add hospitality, food service and retail to that list; and, we suspect Mr. Hoffa would add transportation."

Solid analysis from Seth.  So the jobs at Ford and GM are out of reach, and organizing efforts at the new age automakers like Mercedes and Toyota have largely failed.  It makes sense that the growth (in quantity, if not in revenue) would come from lower-paid service jobs.  After all, frustration with wages, career pathing, etc. are going to be highest in those sectors.

Of course, if the EFCA comes back in 2009, it's likely that growth would come from sectors much higher up the food chain.

Educate yourself on the EFCA today if you haven't yet....

Time for a little flag-waving on President's Day...

I'm not a big political person with this blog, so it stands to reason that I don't talk a lot about  Democrats/Republicans, the policies of either party, or the ongoing presidential race. 

One presidential topic that interests me a lot as a HR person is immigration.  But my interest in immigration has nothing to with I-9 guidelines, building a wall on the Mexican border or deportation. 

My interest is more on the Visa side of things.  Doing HR for a software company, we support and sponsor multiple employees in the US Immigration Process.  It's a win/win for us - it expands our pool of candidates available for key positions, and it's obvoiusly good for the employees we support in this fashion.

So, with all the negative stories about the ills of immigration, let's focus on a positive, in a knowledge-based economy.

The crazy thing?  We get so busy in the day-to-day details of running the business that we often forget that the employees we support in the immigration process are often experiencing things in the U.S. for the first time. 

Case in point - this brief conversation I had in our hallway, with an employee whom we sponsor:

KD - Hi, John (name changed to protect the identity).  How are things?  Thanks for sending that email about your son - he seems pretty sharp!

John - You are welcome.

KD - What else is going on?

John - I'm watching the presidential race with great interest.  It's fascinating...

KD - Yes, it makes for great theatre.  Looks like the Republican side is basically done, hard to tell what's going to happen with Clinton/Obama

John - The fascinating thing to me is that anybody can emerge and do something like run for president.  In my country, the ability to lead is predicated more on family ties and the caste system.  Here, it's wide open in comparison.

KD - uh (uncomfortable silence as I realize I can't compare and contrast the US system versus that of his home country) yeah.  It's good to hear a perspective from someone who has experienced another system.

KD - (Thinking to self as I walk back to my office - it's pretty cool to live here...)

And that's the strength of immigration into our country.  Talent, we don't have enough of, coming to Amercia and loving it.  Telling their family of the wide open political system (at least in comparison) and the positives of the U.S.  Whether it's war, the economy or political mudslinging, there are countless distractions that cause much handwringing and make us question whether we are going to make it.

Leave it to someone without citizenship rights living among us to put it all in perspective.

Recruiting is selling, simple as that.  Especially when you are seeking candidates who don't have to take your offer...

When the talent you are pursuing has options, the whole recruiting process is Marketing 101.  The employment brand on your website, first contact with the prospect, follow-up, selling the advantages of the position and your company, etc.

And when it's time to make the offer?  That's closing time, baby!  Time to wrap all the advantages up in a package and make the candidate feel like they can't afford not to take the offer.

Or, you could just take the offer package professionally prepared by your friendly HR team, email it to the candidate without calling, and hope they accept.  Preferably without them calling you to accept.

But I digress....

My team works with hiring managers throughout the recruiting process.  When it's time to make the offer, we do a professional package, forward it to the hiring manager, and ask them to call the candidate to make a verbal offer.  The documents are to be forwarded to the candidate after the verbal offer is made.  All designed to put our best foot forward - and to increase the probability of an accepted offer.

So imagine my surprise when I got the following email from a manager once we gave him an offer packet for a tasty new hire:

"Offer forwarded to candidate's email address, will let you know the response".....

I wish I could say this has only happened once.  No mention of the verbal offer via phone call that's supposed to happen before.  You know why?  Because the manager in question put the "I" in introvert.  He didn't make the call to make the verbal offer because he didn't want the interaction.  It's not something he's good at, so he skipped it.

And that's OK.  Not everyone has "closer" in their DNA.  Those who don't are skilled in other areas...

I've always been a little stubborn in this area.  My theory is that HR doesn't need to be all "command and control".  If an employee is going to work for a manager, I suspect they'd like to see the offer coming from the manager.  If I was the manager, I'd want them to know the decision to hire was mine - thus setting up all the good things that can happen in the employee/manager relationship.

But then I get an email like the one above from a manager, and I again realize that a lot of people don't want the responsibility.

So maybe I'll compromise and encourage managers to make the verbal, but step in do it on behalf of those who want nothing to do with it.

I'm getting full of compromise in my old age....

There's nothing cool about layoffs.  Whether you are an impacted employee or an HR person charged with holding meetings, there's not much positive to be found.

Leave it to Web 2.0 to liven up layoffs.  Or to take it to the next level of desperation.  All depends on your perspective.

Ryan Kuder lost his job at Yahoo on Tuesday. He was senior manager of integrated campaign strategy at Yahoo.   The Web 2.0 twist?   He Twittered how he was feeling throughout his last day.

For my 1.0 friends, Twitter is a free social networking and micro-blogging service that allows users to send "updates" (or "tweets"; text-based posts, up to 140 characters long) to the Twitter website, via short message service, instant messaging, or a third-party application such as Twitterrific.

Updates are displayed on the user's profile page and instantly delivered to other users who have signed up to receive them.

Ryan apparently loves Twitter, because he Twittered throughout the day he was laid-off.  I don't know whether to laugh or cry, but I'm erring with the mantra "transparency is good".  From the rundown at Valleywag:

"Lots of whispered conversations. Like people are afraid to ask who's gone. about 4 hours ago

Dear Blackberry, What great times we had. I'll miss you. At least until tonight when I stop on my way home and buy an iPhone. Love, Me about 4 hours ago

Oh...and my badge. He's going to take that too. Will I be able to get a latte for the road still? about 4 hours ago

I'm going dark in a few minutes. The HR guy is on his way over to confiscate my laptop. about 4 hours ago

Last free triple non-fat latte from Beantrees. Sniff. about 3 hours ago

Signing off from Yahoo!. Fade to black... about 3 hours ago

Celebrating unemployment with a giant margarita at Chevy's. 5 minutes ago"