SilkRoad Talent Management Blog for Human Resource Professionals

A Lesson in Kindness and Compassion

By Ginger on April 11th, 2012

Yesterday, as I was making my daily rounds on Facebook, I saw a friend and coworker’s post about a boy named Caine and something to do with an arcade. The video was 10 minutes long and typically, unless there is a four-legged animal playing the staring role or it’s something I should watch for work, I pass on anything longer than three or four minutes. But her comment made me take look.

I think you should all take a moment to watch the below video. It’s such a sweet story and wouldn’t this world be a lot better of a place if there were more Caines and Nirvans? (Instead, before I posted this, I spent 30 minutes researching this to see if it was a huge scam. I spent that time trying to cover my bum, hoping that nobody would, five minutes after posting, leave a comment, with link to Snopes, saying the whole thing was a ruse to get more people to the shop, which was actually an underground meth lab. *sigh* See what I mean??) Anyway – watch the video – think about it and think about how you can incorporate a little more kindness and compassion in both your personal and work life.

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Posted in Just For Fun, Uncategorized

Healthcare HR Growing Pains

By Ginger on March 21st, 2012

With the adoption of health information technology (HIT) and the promotion of a nationwide health information exchange, healthcare organizations are finding themselves with changing HR needs. HR has to ensure its hospitals, nursing homes and managed care providers are staffed with qualified employees and address the ongoing demands HIT implementations have on their workforce. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the U.S. will add 5.6 million healthcare and social assistance jobs through 2020. As one of the fastest growing sectors, here are four tips for healthcare HR practitioners to alleviate the growing pains:

Go social: According to Bersin & Associates, healthcare organizations spend 13 percent of their external budgets on print and billboards to reach their desired candidate – more than any other industry. While many healthcare HR departments have been slow to adopt social recruiting and networking into their strategies, the influx of new jobs in the next eight years will force them to evaluate antiquated strategies. Social recruiting will allow healthcare organizations to target and reach top talent across multiple Web 2.0 platforms. By leveraging networks, referrals and shared resources, HR can find quality candidates – and have quality candidates seek them out.

Stay ahead of the learning curve: Healthcare technology and patient data are growing exponentially, requiring specialized skills and competencies from new employees. With an aging population that will make up more than 25 percent of the U.S. workforce in 2020, the move from paper to electronic records will also impact the amount of training and development they’ll need. How can healthcare HR effectively manage the entire learning process across multiple skill levels and disciplines? A learning management system (LMS) can provide healthcare organizations with the ability to centrally manage, track and quantify all learning activities. HR can streamline the creation and management of all types of training events based on the needs of its students, including web-based, instructor-led or on-the-job training.

Manage compliance with ease: The adoption of electronic health records presents a number of new and challenging compliance requirements, most notably with HIPAA. How can HR ensure that its workforce understands how to apply HIPAA to their daily requirements in a new digital age of electronic health records? With a learning content management system (LCMS), just-in-time learning can be applied to compliance-based training. This ensures that employees receive training not only when it’s needed but when it’s required – year-round. In addition, HR can schedule, track and manage the entire training process to ensure certification, licensing and documentation are current. If you’re interested in learning more about just-in-time learning for compliance-based training, check out our recent blog post.

Let self-service do the work: With a workforce on an upward projection path, the automation of core HR functions will be essential for healthcare organizations as they grow their workforce. A human resource management system (HRMS) provides HR with a system of record for its people, compensation structures, positions and employee performance. The automation of these processes allows employees and managers access to HR data and information. Self-service alleviates the time commitment once required of HR to manually complete such tasks. For example, using a HRMS, an employee can make changes to their health benefits or review their job history. As the healthcare industry continues to grow, a HRMS will provide organizations with streamlined core HR and empowered employees.

If you’re a healthcare HR practitioner, let us know what other growing pains you’re feeling. We’ll happily address them in an upcoming blog post.

Posted in Core HR, HR Compliance, Social Media, Training & Development

Going Straight to the Source {Recruitment Source Effectiveness}

By Thomas on March 14th, 2012

Have you ever wondered where companies find their most qualified candidates and new hires? The answer may surprise you.

In response to feedback and questions received around candidate sourcing, during last year’s SilkRoad Connections conference, we reached out to all of our OpenHire customers and asked if they would be willing to include their data (anonymously of course) in a research project to determine the most effective recruitment advertising sources across multiple industries and position types.

As part of our research, we took a deep dive into recruitment source effectiveness. To do that, we worked with more than 700 of our customers to use their 2011 data in aggregate. These organizations ranged broadly in size and included 10 of the Fortune 500 and 50 of the Fortune 1,000. Combined, we gained insights from 222,308 job postings, 9.3 million applicants and 94,155 hires

This is the first study of its kind. Prior research has been less than adequate, based on survey data from relatively small sample sizes. Survey data is often subject to bias; participants are prone to providing anecdotal responses rather than actually digging into their metrics. This research is instead based on primary data drawn directly from OpenHire — no anecdotal responses, no subjective filtering.

{The metrics in this study offer a uniquely accurate measure of source effectiveness because SilkRoad automates candidate source tracking, removing any subjectivity or interpretation on the part of the job seeker.}

Today, we’re happy to share some initial findings from this data. We decided to look first at one of the most important indicators of effectiveness in recruitment — top sources of hire.

Internal employees, employee referrals and company career sites were the leading sources of
candidates, accounting for 55 percent of all hires. We were excited to see all the customers who not only have been leveraging OpenHire to promote internal mobility and to streamline the employee referral process, but all of the customers who have leveraged their company career sites to bring in high quality candidates.

Of the external sources of hire, Indeed.com, CareerBuilder, Monster, Craigslist and Linkedin rounded out the Top five branded external sources of hire. Indeed is the clear leader, generating 72% more hires than the second highest external source.

What’s exciting about these findings for us is that although Indeed offers a paid advertising model to increase the visibility of your jobs, all OpenHire customers are benefiting from organic inclusion on Indeed as part of OpenHire’s free job distribution network.

We believe that by going straight to the source, drawing directly from the data of many of the world’s best employer brands, we can shed new light on source effectiveness. Stay tuned as we continue to dig deeper into this data to share more findings on source effectiveness. You can sign up here to receive a copy of the full report.

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Posted in Careers, HR Trends, Recruiting, Social Media, Social Recruiting

February Book Club

By Jaclyn on February 23rd, 2012

Check it out! Our current TalentTalk book club is live and features Chapter One of Successful Onboarding: Strategies to Unlock Hidden Value Within Your Organization by Mark Stein and Lilith Christiansen. This book is full of strategies to enable you to build a business case for onboarding that will result in numerous gains for your business. Learn the benefits of having a strategic onboarding program at the employee level, not just the organizational and HR level. It’s shocking I know, but with current attrition rates at an all time high, companies are experiencing 75% turnover of their workforce over the course of 5 years. With a structured program, your employees will be more fulfilled, which will increase engagement, retention and productivity.

Download a free copy of chapter one, “The Business Case for Onboarding” here.

Posted in Book Club, Onboarding

Process Integration Is a Central Theme in Talent Management this Year

By Ed on February 20th, 2012

{On 1/26, we held a webinar where we provided a comprehensive analysis of new survey data taken from our 2011 TalentTalk research program. This program involved three surveys taken by 870 professionals between August and November 2011. The surveys were conducted by SilkRoad and an independent research firm, and topics included onboarding, performance and learning.}

The temperamental global economy, rash of natural disasters and financial wariness presented a multitude of challenges for companies in 2011 – leading many companies to relocate, reassign and re-train employees. Luckily in 2012, opportunity will be booming with tools and technologies that promise to transform the human resource industry. So now more than ever, HR and learning and development professionals will be pressured to make an impact on their organization byway of new processes that will enable companies to interact in groundbreaking ways with employees.

In our most recent webinar, The State of Talent Management 2012: Forecast and Strategy, we explored results from a surveyed pool of HR and L&D folks to understand the state of talent management, and to surface the industries shortcomings moving into the New Year. Let’s take a look at a few of the misaligned processes and critical areas for improvement we identified:

Onboarding, performance management and learning and development are generally viewed as one-time events, not a continuous process
- Organizations must move from tactical events to a continuous process and link to a clear strategy, engaging and rewarding employees along the way

A distinct gap exists between talent management and business goals
- Our findings suggest that many professionals lack a clear picture of drivers of expense and revenue in their organizations, and therefore, cannot align their program goals with the business. Benchmarks in talent management are needed to support company objectives

Organizations must integrate and automate onboarding, performance management, and learning and development – employees want streamlined processes
- HR and L&D departments can boost their strategic value and achieve greater operational efficiencies by automating and integrating talent management, especially for distributed/remote workforces

Overall, this year’s report tells a “good news, bad news” story. The “good news” is that professionals are highly attuned to the changes afoot, knowledgeable and committed to their work. The “bad news” is that they are running in place because they lack the resources, technology or management support to perform effectively – let alone explore innovation in their spare time.

Without a doubt, this hyper-competitive era demands that organizations change their talent management practices. Our research shows that more transparent, collaborative and agile processes are critical to business success.

Hopefully you can join us for our next webinar on 2/16 that will further speak to the importance of and best practices on measuring and aligning HR metrics to drive business results. To participate, register here.

Posted in Employee Engagement, Employee Retention, General Human Resources, HR Trends, Offboarding & Employee Life Events, Onboarding, Performance, Recruiting, Talent Management Research

Soft Skills: The New Hard Skills

By Tracy on December 14th, 2011

I recently had a conversation with HR Market Analyst, Kyle Lagunas about soft skills in the workplace. We’ve all struggled to define soft skills yet demand them in our organizations. These types of skills are growing in importance, and I even believe they are becoming the hard skills in today’s workplace. Kyle and I discussed at length how to measure soft skills, which he included in a blog post. I’ve included some highlights below from our conversation.

Soft skills have become increasingly imperative to companies that value things such as efficient communication, leadership and collaboration. It’s essential for these companies to provide training programs and advice about soft skills, but HR managers are still struggling to wrap their fingers around the concept since these skills are, for the most part, subjective.

So, how exactly do you measure a subjective skill? I always like to start with identifying what matters most to the organization. If your company is centered on customer relationships, you’ll want employees who are patient and understanding. Once you have that assessment completed, you’ll be able to measure soft skills that matters most. Kyle and I discussed a few key things HR managers should keep in mind:

Determine what you’ll be measuring. Whether you’re utilizing third-party assessments, or you’ve done your own research to identify areas needing improvement, it’s important that your organization clearly defines which soft skills are most important. Your company’s core values (whether stated or inferred) should guide this discussion closely. For instance, if your organization values internal succession then ensuring employees have the right types of leadership development and mentoring would be critical.
Get leadership on board. Without a unified front, rolling out a measurement strategy will be an uphill battle with little payoff. Anyone in leadership should have a similar answer to questions such as: What qualities make a leader successful in our organization? Establish clarity and alignment at the outset, as this measurement process will require buy-in across the board. “Although HR may be starting this conversation,” adds McCarthy, “the strategy really needs to be driven by leadership and managers.”
Keep it simple and focused. In an ideal world, all employees would be organized, active listeners with strong communication, multi-tasking and leadership skills. But it takes time, energy and resources to cultivate these skills within an organization. That’s why it’s best to start small and focus measurement around one or two competency areas. Again, a good starting place is the soft skills most essential to your organizations’ specific goals. For example, if you are in a growth mode, then ensuring sales and customer service teams have strong communication skills would be key.

Now that we’ve determined how to assess soft skills, where do you begin? Kyle and I looked into this as well, and is something I’ll discuss in an upcoming blog post. But for now, how is your organization assessing soft skills? Do you agree – are soft skills the new hard skills? How is your Company adapting in its recruitment and training for these types of skills, or does it have yet to make those adjustments?

For an in-depth look at measuring soft skills and other HR-related topics, check out Kyle’s recent articles at Software Advice.

Posted in Careers, General Human Resources, Performance

Have Skills Will Work

By Tracy on December 12th, 2011

According to a new report from McKinsey, the war for talent never ended. However, we still face record numbers of unemployment and overflowing applicant pools. For HR managers looking to stay ahead of the talent shortage, the long-term unemployed – those who have been out of work for 27 weeks or more – should not be overlooked. This segment is comprised of nearly 5.7 million people of whom 45 percent are aged 55+, double the amount of younger unemployed. In addition, more than half of the long-term unemployed are educated beyond high school. These candidates, while stigmatized for their long period out of work, represent an untapped viable workforce.

With just a few adjustments to your recruiting and assessment strategies, you’ll find that the long-term unemployed make for a competitive candidate.

Recruiting: When reviewing resumes, a change of perspective is needed here, and may soon be required by law. While evaluating a long-term unemployed candidate, you’ll need to look past gaps in employment. In fact, many states have already banned job ads that discriminate against the unemployed and they may soon be a protected class.

Additionally, the government extended tax breaks for those who hired the long-term unemployed in 2010 with an additional benefit this year for companies who retained those very workers. And, the President’s American Job Act proposes a tax credit of up to $4,000 for hiring workers who have been looking for a job for over six months. This gives companies an additional reason to rethink long-term unemployed candidates as tax credits can help offset onboarding and training costs.

Transferable Skills Assessment: Many long-term unemployed workers are applying for jobs that fall under new industries or positions than they’ve previously held. This doesn’t mean they aren’t qualified, it just means HR needs to take a closer look at what transferable skills they bring to the table. Being able to identify how these skills are relevant to your position is imperative when evaluating a long-term unemployed candidate.

Transferable skills can be divided into three areas – working with people, working with things and working with information. The Recruiters Lounge defines them as follows:

Working with people skills happen when people sell, train, advise and negotiate.
Working with things skills occur when people repair, operate machinery, sketch, survey, or troubleshoot.
Working with data/information skills involve budgeting, researching and analyzing.

When reviewing the resume of a long-term unemployed candidate, you’ll need to look deeper into prior jobs held and recent work or volunteer experience. While they may not be up to speed with the latest versions of software or industry regulations, they may score the same, or even higher, on transferable skills testing as currently employed candidates. The majority of the long-term unemployed are at the top of the age bracket and have acquired desirable soft skills from their years in the workforce. While out of work for six months or longer, many have taken to volunteering or consulting to keep their people skills sharp. Others have kept their networks up to date and can bring valuable contacts and resources to your company. Some have even returned to school for training in a new career or to keep their existing skill set current. These activities have kept their skills sets fresh and should not be overlooked in lieu of recent formal work experience.

For positions that require hard skills, i.e. programming, accounting, finance, etc., early assessment of skills is a necessity. You’ll want to take a look at specific knowledge sets, certifications, and education required for your open position. By understanding any potential skills gap early on, you can incorporate training and learning into your development plans. The long-term unemployed are eager to return to the workforce and many are willing to take on additional training to make-up for lost time.

Personalized Onboarding: Once you’ve hired a long-term unemployed candidate, returning to the workforce and adapting to a new corporate culture can be very exciting. With unemployment rates above 8 percent since 2008, many long-term unemployed have not been exposed to recent advancements in the workplace. Internal and external policies and regulations have changed, along with new technologies. With personalized employee portals, you can tailor the onboarding experience to meet the needs of your newly hired long-term unemployed worker. This way, they can get acclimated to your corporate culture, policies and procedures starting on day one.

If your company has hired the long-term unemployed, then you already know that their loyalty, engagement and commitment levels are much higher than currently employed new hires. They are taking advantage of training and learning opportunities to upskill themselves as well as integrating themselves into their new corporate culture. They’re not afraid to work or to work hard. Many are casualties of the down-turn who’ve been forced on the sidelines until the market rebounds. This doesn’t mean they’re not qualified for your open position, it just means you need to look at their skills and experiences through a different lens.

How is your company assessing long-term unemployed candidates?

Posted in Onboarding, Recruiting, Social Recruiting

Year-End Compliance: It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year – if You’re Automated

By Deb on November 30th, 2011

With 2011 quickly coming to an end, many companies are entering into their year-end compliance review period. For some, it’s a mad dash to complete training sessions, track down signatures, create spreadsheets, document the past year’s events and fill-out a mountain of paperwork. It can be a huge gamble as failure to comply with state and federal regulations can result in hefty fines, penalties and litigation. Yet many companies take on this risk by managing compliance requirements and activities manually. However, for those that automate compliance-based training through just-in-time learning, year-end compliance reviews and audits can be as easy as pushing print.

When companies apply just-in-time learning to compliance-based training, employees receive training not only when it’s needed but when it’s required – year-round. How is this done?

Align training content with internal and external requirements. With a Learning Content Management System (LCMS) compliance-based training content can be stored centrally across the organization. Employees can access it through an online portal, ensuring that no matter where they are located they can complete their required training. Content can be customized to meet both individual job and company-wide requirements without losing core compliance-based training lessons. This ensures consistency in learning and that all employees are documented with the required certifications, licensing, etc.

HR will work with compliance officers to develop compliance-based training content to meet both internal and external requirements. For example, a factory manager may be required to attend an instructor-led OSHA course then pass an online test to be certified. Other companies may require documentation for completing on-the-job skills tests and assessments.

Create a deployment schedule and development plans. Once the compliance-based training content is developed, HR will work with managers and compliance officers to implement a deployment schedule, specific to both the training requirements and individual. With the LCMS, HR can schedule, track and manage the entire training process to ensure certification, licensing and documentation are current. It can be customized to track effective and due dates; certification, activation, recertification and reactivation periods; and completion criteria. The system can also capture employee and supervisor signatures, creating an audit trail that can easily be retrieved.

With the LCMS, managers can create personal development plans, incorporating both internal policies – and job advancement requirements – along with external requirements. The employee is assigned training that is required, competency-based, training-activated and/or a qualification for the job, along with a schedule of required completion and mastery due dates. By using just-in-time learning, the management of all these requirements is automated and event-triggered.

Automation of communication and reporting. Once all the elements are in place, HR can use the LCMS to send automated notifications about the status and due dates for recertification, licensing, etc. It also allows HR to push out new training sessions as updated requirements are made to both internal and external regulations.

With the LCMS tracking key dates, status reports are generated for each employee. HR can quickly assess if there are any potential liabilities with expired certifications, missed training or failed exams. Audit reports can be generated providing the necessary documentation for your company’s compliance activities.

As 2011 comes to a close, is your company prepared for a compliance review or audit? If not, we recommend adding compliance-based training through just-in-time learning to your New Year’s resolutions.

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Posted in Uncategorized

Flattening the Organization with Social Collaboration

By Thomas on November 23rd, 2011

HR’s first big leap was from paper to automated, SaaS-based admin. That evolution, along with the rise of Web 2.0 empowerment and the ever-looming war for talent, paved the way for employee experience. It pushed talent up to the top of the corporate totem pole – with more widespread adoption of the school of thought that people are the competitive advantage. It opened up time for companies to focus on the engagement and development of talent. And, it played into the changing needs of employees – autonomy and higher sense of purpose and contribution.

It’s time for the next iteration of management innovation, and that change is undeniably tied up in social and collaborative technologies.

Social tools are everywhere – Chatter and Yammer for enterprise collaboration, Facebook for keeping up with friends or your favorite brand, Google+ for curating conversations and information sharing with specific crowds. And now, a whole flight of tools has entered the talent management sphere – facilitating everything from communication to social learning to identifying leaders.

Organizations are always looking to get more out of the workforce – stretch employee contributions, tap into new ideas and create competitive advantage. By connecting the right people and information at the right time, these social tools can help eliminate hierarchy and job limitations, and increase collaboration, productivity and results.

Fact 1: Today we accomplish as much in 11 hours as our grandparents did in 40 hours.

Fact 2: 73 percent of executives, 73 percent of millennials and 64 percent of general knowledge workers agree that social platforms will fundamentally change the way people share, connect and learn at work and with companies according to a Jive study.

It’s no secret that technology is benefiting employees by socializing work and increasing their access to information. As a result, it’s benefitting employers in the sheer amount of work being completed. By flattening the organization and distributing meaningful work and impactful contributions across a company, social technology can uncover new ideas and business value in unexpected places. What else can it do? We’re thinking in terms of core HR functions:

Identify leaders, influencers and points of gravity. Look at who’s talking to whom. Track the people who are included in the most conversations and are turned to for guidance. These are the people who are core to your organization and help others function at their best.

Support social, peer learning. Look at who’s asking who what and what content is being shared. Social tools create a self-service network for employees to quickly and efficiently tap into their colleagues for learning. It also helps employers identify areas to focus future training sessions on.

Plan for hiring needs. Look at what people share and advise on, as well as what questions go unanswered. This helps employers understand what to look for when replacing employees, or in creating new positions for gaps of expertise.

Even with the benefits laid out, companies are slow to become a social organization. Out of the 78 percent of executives who believe a social strategy is critical to the future of business, only 17 percent think their company is “ahead of the curve” with adequate adoption.

We want to know –are you using social at work? How do you plan to use it in 2012 and beyond?

Posted in Social Media, Social Recruiting, Technology

November Book Club!

By Ouida on November 18th, 2011

Check out our latest book club addition Best Practices in Planning and Performance Management: Third Edition where author David A. J. Axson provides a complete framework for building best practice management processes! Enjoy your free chapter from David’s book, “What Is Performance Management?” which takes an in-depth look at the elements of performance management and how you can better suit your practices to accommodate our ever-changing business environment.

Best-Practices-in-Planning-and-Performance-Management

Download your copy today and learn how you can stay on top of your performance management challenges and maintain a successful, competitive workplace! Click here to download your free chapter right now!

Posted in Book Club, Employee Retention, General Human Resources, Performance, Succession Planning

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