In a nice counter piece to HR being reptiles, new analysis is about to be published in Personnel Psychology that reveals that rather than HR being detrimental to an organization, it in fact adds real bottom line value.Using mathematical analysis of 92 previous studies, researchers have found that human resources activities created a 10% - 20% improvement in employee retention and employee MORE

Have you ever noticed how Americans who are known for being opinionated and valuing straight talk are actually make-no-waves yes-men and women in the workplace?It''s It''s an interesting dichotomy that I hadn''t given much thought to until I read the excellent article in Across the Board magazine by intercultural expert Susan Davidson. In this article Davidson shares many European executives MORE

HR.com’s Marc Miller has released his “Outlook for 2006 Technology,” and he has some observations worth noting. His 10 major points: 1. HR technology software applications will continue to increase in functionality. Applications must address the changing demographics and needs of the aging workforce and the global workforce. Vendors who were in “best of [… MORE

Our Blogswap guest post today comes from Frank Mulligan of recruit-china.com. He presents us with some common sense thinking on data and metrics. Thanks, Frank!One One of the more useful elements of service offerings like Exit Interviews is the hiring metrics that repeated, measured operations will generate.But which hiring metrics?We We can always look to the net for information but checking out MORE

Who are the most influential "movers and shakers" in HR? According to Human Resources (UK) magazine, not HR people.I pulled together some statistics on the top 25 HR Influencers from a Top 100 list published this week.Those with the greatest influence in the HR profession are:80% male; 20% female56% published authors, most of muliple titles (one guy has written over 100 books)44% college or MORE

I have a pile problem. Paperwork piles I mean. Piles crop up around me; on the desk, on the floor, overflowing on tabletops. I have piles of magazines, piles of books, piles of articles, piles of mail, piles of things I am in the middle of working on. You name it, I have a pile for it. When I worked in HR and recruiting, the resume piles alone were overwhelming.For years organized people would MORE

John Sullivan, the great herpetologist.Dr. John Sullivan is at his headline grabbing best this week with a new article likening Human Resources people to snakes. No, I''m sorry, I got that wrong. He''s found HR people''s actions "scarier and more despicable than any real snake I’ve come across." He has always shown his disdain for the profession but in this article he is just downright mean.And MORE

I don''t know what this has to do with HR but I thought it was funny.An "I Look Like My Dog" contest winner over at HRWhatnot.I always start my work day there for an amusing look at things in the workplace MORE

The Recruiting Blog Swap has been running for a month now. It''s been great fun having the opportunity to get to know other bloggers in the Recruiting and Human Resources field. So far I''ve created 4 guest posts as part of the Swap.The first was on "It''s All About the Experience." This blog is about the hiring experience from the applicant''s point of view. I wrote a post about the old fashioned MORE

I recently wrote a guest post on Your HR Guy''s blog about Why I Still Don''t Like Job Hoppers. One of the reasons that I noted is that employees don''t generally contribute much to the organization in their first 6 to 18 months. Job hoppers leave before they have the opportunity to contribute in a meaningful way. New research is beginning to explain why it takes so long before even highly MORE

In May 2006 issue of Harvard Business Review, Hamm advises that a healthy corporate culture is "created and maintained by focusing on the right goals and creating the experience of winning in the John Hamm, a former CEO and current general partner at VSP Capital, reminds us that successful corporate cultures nurture employees'' natural drive and enthusiasm toward creating a winning company. MORE

Someone started a discussion on "Joel On Software" about teamwork in distributed work environments based on my post a few days ago about the psychology experiment on group conflict.One person wrote this:I believe the success of such an undertaking is a function of management''s skill and their own ability to define the parameters of the teamwork. I also believe that most managements are not MORE

HR professionals often discuss the cost of turnover. Some say that the cost is equal to 150% of the employee''s salary. The American Management Association uses the figure of 30% of salary. When I''m doing ROI calculations, I usually use a very conservative 25% so as not to oversell my case. But can you really come up with an average value of what an employee brings to a company based on their MORE

Forbes has a slide show of previous Apprentice candidates and what they are doing now.Remember, Tana and her quest for a Bedazzler? She is now their corporate spokesperson.The much loved Troy from season one still runs the same mortgage company but has landed a deal with a financial firm that has helped him grow exponentially. Young Andy from season two was actually hired by Trump a few months MORE

There is a fascinating article in Business + Strategy magazine that links neuroscience, psychology and business management practices. It points out that many standard business practices such as punishment and rewards and performance feedback run counter to the way our brains function.The articles gives a fairly scientific but very readable overview of various brain structures and how they MORE

I thought I''d share some HR Q&A today. These are real questions from real HR people.Question: This is the first time I have worked for a start up company. I have asked for a mission statement (there is none). I have asked for more direction of where the company is going (it is still being talked about). Is this unusual? How can HR align if there is nothing to align to???Beth Beth C.: They don''t have MORE

Big discussion on an absurd question. Should Recruiting secede from HR?That''s That''s like asking, should accounting secede from the CFO''s area. Recruiting is about hiring the right people which is the centerpiece of HR''s job. I''d go as far as to say it''s the core competency of anyone in Human Resources.Now, when I was a third party recruiter and thought (mistakenly) that I knew something about HR, I MORE

Some very practical business advice from Patti Danos, a business book publicist who specializes in workplace titles:Know and Understand the Power of NoFrom saying ''no'' to new business that doesn''t feel right to saying ''no'' to a client request that doesn''t gel strategically to saying ''no'' to timelines proposed by others that compromise my work-life balance, I''ve learned that there''s as much power MORE

Did you read in the Washington Post about the alarming trend of college and high school students taking "cognitive enhancers" - pills obtained legally or illegally to boost their concentration?A A recent survey of 7th through 12th graders reported that, 2.25 million kids of middle and high school age are using stimulants such as Ritalin without a prescription. This equates to 10% of all kids in MORE

There aren''t too many novels with HR Managers as main characters. I just ran across a new work of fiction, called A Woman in Jerusalem by A.B. Yehoshua which stars an unnamed Human Resources manager. Apparently the HR Manager is called in by the boss to help solve the mystery surrounding an employee''s death.According to this review on AmazonIn A. Yehoshua''s "A Woman in Jerusalem," a local MORE

Are you up on the latest trends in incentive rewards? According to a recent survey 40% of people chose travel as their most desired incentive and 23% chose a shopping spree. Electronic gadgets were selected as a reward of choice by just 4% of people surveyed.Travel has always been a hot reward. When I was a recruiter in the mid to late 1980s, we had contests for travel to places such as Aruba MORE

Great article called Fix Your Spelling over at HRWhatnot.It includes steps for fixing your spelling (keep a "cheat sheet"), spelling rules (prefixes never change the spelling of the root word), common mistakes (a lot and all right), misused words (ironic), bankrupt expressions (in point of fact) and a spot where you can add your own misspellings.I am sure I am going to refer back to this article MORE

Here''s an unusual use of exit interviews that even Nobscot Corporation never dreamed of. According to this article, The Sedgwick County Jail in Wichita has begun conducting exit interviews with prisoners a few weeks prior to their release. The goal of the program according to Captain Glenn Kurtz is to assess the prisoner''s needs. I''m not sure if they are talking about their needs while they are MORE

I received the following e-mail at my Evil HR Lady e-mail. Dear Hiring Authority,My name is [SPAMMER] and I am a Recruiter in Boston. I have several strong candidates who would be a great fit for your posted Administrative position and I would love to share their resumes with you.Each has been pre-screened for communication, presentation and Computer Software skills and all are wonderful!Because MORE

I am participating in the Blog Swap, an experiment concocted by those creative folks over at Recruiting.com and Job Syntax. As part of the blogswap, I will be providing guest posts once per week on other blogswap participants'' blogs. Likewise, I will publish one guest post per week here on this blog. The first guest post for the Nobscot Weblog has been written by Colin W. Kingsbury, Chief MORE

Of course, except in extenuating situations, you should give notice before you quit. But, this is an extreme example of an employee who stormed off when things didn't go his way. Top tenor Roberto Alagna has stunned opera-goers at La Scala in Milan by storming off stage in the middle of a performance after he was booed. The Franco-Italian singer, who was playing a leading role in Verdi's Aida, walked off minutes into the second night of the opera house's new season. MORE

More disturbing news in the area of racial stereotyping. Researchers have recently concluded that when victims of capital crimes are white, black men are more likely to receive the death penalty if they have physical characteristics that are perceived as being stereotypically black.The study was conducted by researchers at Cornell, Stanford, UCLA and Yale. Photographs of convicted criminals MORE

There''s a funny post on HR Whatnot''s blog (Whatnot at Work) about using bonobos, primates that are even closer to humans than chimpanzees, to fill workforce shortages. It includes a link to a video of a bonobo playing pacman on the computer. The post is located here.Be sure to bookmark their blog. They have lots of interesting and amusing workplace related posts updated daily MORE

The Answer: 465 men and 35 women. The question: What are the numbers of men and women Chief Financial Officers in Fortune 500 companies. Just 35 women out of 500 top positions even though women make up the majority of graduates receiving accounting degrees and the majority of new hires at CPA firms. This from the June issue of CFO magazine by senior writer Alix Nyberg Stuart. In this well MORE

When is towel service in the locker room an employee retention tool? When employee feedback tells you it''s something that employees want. Kudos to Lisa Brummel, Senior Vice President of Human Resources at Microsoft for spending the last year gathering feedback from employees. In an email to employees she said, "Maintaining and strengthening the employee experience is one of the highest priorities MORE

Before it was Dubs, but now we’re on Jason’s list of five talent management vendors to watch in 2006 Just catching up on some light reading. MORE

Our second guest post from the Blog Swap comes from Tod Hilton. Tod shares with us an insider''s view on a company and employee retention issue that I blogged about earlier. I don''t want to give it away though so I''ll just say - Welcome, Tod and thanks for the great post. A quick little intro for those of you tuning in to the Big Bad Recruiting Blog Swap. My name is Tod Hilton and I will be MORE

Both large and small companies are moving toward more distributed workforces. A small juice company was recently touted in Business 2.0 Magazine for having growers in California and Mexico, processing in Washington, bottlers in California, warehouse in Wisconsin, customer service in Philippines, accounting in India and headquarters in San Francisco. I can remember back in the early 1990s when the MORE

I''ve never been a big fan of GE Jack Welch inspired "rank and yank" forced ranking and termination of the bottom x percent.This article emailed to me today (thanks HRDan!) looks at why, from an evolutionary standpoint, managed survival of the fittest HR policies that focus on the individual are doomed to failure. It uses for examples a chicken experiment that ended up unwittingly selecting for MORE

According to psychologist and author Stephan Poulter, success or failure in the workplace is closely related to the kind of father you had while growing up. In his new book, Dr. Poulter tells us that time-bomb or explosive fathers raise children who are very intuitive and good at reading people. He suggests that these children may grow up to become excellent personnel managers or MORE

The small business trends blog has a list of the top technology trends for small business. One of them (they aren’t numbered) is hosted applications. The author points out that: While traditional PC based applications have a role to play, hosted applications, that you can access over the Internet is becoming more widely available. With […]. Uncategorized SaaS Small/Medium Sized Companies Software as a Service MORE

Have you noticed how the most effective employees are the ones who have the best relationships with other employees across the company? These employees with high "social capital" can speed a vendor contract through the legal department or get IT to fix a nasty bug in the HRIS without delay. I have been thinking about this after reading new research on how the loss of social capital through MORE