SilkRoad Talent Management Blog for Human Resource Professionals

Have Skills, Will Work!

By Tracy on December 22nd, 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 Careers, General Human Resources, HR Trends, Onboarding, Performance, Recruiting, Technology

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

By Jaclyn on December 12th, 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.

Posted in HR Compliance, Learning

Flattening the Organization with Social Collaboration

By Deb on November 22nd, 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 Careers, Learning, Performance, Recruiting, Social, Social Media, Technology, Training & Development

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.

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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

Job Listings: Crowdsourcing and Positioning the Ingredients

By Thomas on November 16th, 2011

Attracting the right candidate is difficult, especially when you’re relying on a set of words to convey responsibilities, skill requirements and cultural fit. To be successful, those words have to be accurate enough to pull in qualified candidates. The words also have to come to life enough to engage the end reader – your recruit.

A job description, for a newly created or existing position, rarely captures the true scope of work or responsibilities. This is especially true as companies look to develop employees who have multi-disciplinary skill sets and are able to collaborate cross-organizationally. Even with those skills identified, the words within the job description can rarely stand alone to capture the interest of top talent. But, job descriptions are still a cornerstone of recruiting, which is why we recommend taking them to the crowds – your workforce crowd that is.

Capturing the scope of the position. Sally, the receptionist, has a professional demeanor, knows the entire workforce by name and greets them with enthusiasm every morning. She’s also the graphic design team’s secret weapon when they’re overloaded with work, and is included in the marketing team’s brainstorms because of her creativity. When recruiting a receptionist to fill Sally’s shoes, will your job description list attributes such as “polished” and “organized”? Yes. Would you know to add attributes such as “creative thinker,” “able to contribute to cross-organization” and “Adobe skills desired” to the mix? It’s not likely – unless you spoke with the colleagues who work with her under the radar.

Next time you’re crafting a description to attract the perfect person for the job at hand, consider crowdsourcing the contents. It’s unlikely that any department within your organization is so siloed that they don’t collaborate with people across the company. Tap into the things that the workforce knows and sees every day – the things that a manager may easily overlook or not be privy to. Identify desired skills by looking beyond basic job functions and incorporating the skills that colleagues have deemed as making that person or position successful and intrinsic to the company.

Identifying culture fit. Getting the right people on board is tricky not only because of a shortage in qualified candidates or skills gap, but also culture fit. The difference between a good company and a great company is a committed-to-excellence corporate culture – Jim Collins said so. Culture is also that extra factor that will attract top talent candidates. Unfortunately, culture is also the hardest factor to pinpoint, make tangible and communicate.

That’s where crowdsourcing comes in. Rather than writing down proclaimed company values, ask employees across every level what it is that keeps them with your company. Ask managers to identify A-players and what type of person succeeds within the organization. Is it creative people? Is it well-networked or analytic-minded individuals? By quantifying desirable traits and behaviors, you’ll be able to show and target the right culture.

Sell it. Once you’ve fine-tuned the ingredients of a job post by tapping into the hidden knowledge of your workforce, it’s time to market the culture and attract the next A-player. We know that bringing the words that make up a job post to life is a challenge. Why not overcome that with an engaging and interactive career portal – one that doesn’t rely on snazzy adjectives alone?

A recent study found that 88 percent of Millennials plan to apply directly to the company they wish to work for. Amp up their experience with videos, pictures and blogs that portray a day in the life and make culture visible.

What is your company doing to ensure that recruiting efforts are accurate enough to initially attract qualified candidates and engaging enough to convert recruits to hires?

Posted in Careers, General Human Resources, Recruiting, Social Recruiting

Get The Most Out of Your Holiday Season

By John on November 2nd, 2011

With Halloween under our belts and the remainder of the holiday season fast approaching, many people view this festive time of year as more of a headache than a celebration. Spending time with family and friends and taking time off from work are just a few of the things we get to enjoy during this time each year, but with this time off comes obligations to visiting family all over the country, rushing around for holiday retail sales, buying gifts, attending company parties and deciding where you’ll spend the majority of your time.

The ability to balance work and family life is essential, especially during the holiday season. The holidays are about spending time with family and enjoying yourself. Do your best to keep that in mind and don’t let the stress wreak havoc on your mind and body. Check out Dawn Foster’s “4 Tips for Holiday Season Stress Reduction” and you’ll find some great ways to make the most of your free time and maintain your sanity!

Keeping up with your work obligations can also be a tricky task during the holidays. With so much on your mind and tons of “to do’s” on your plate at home, it seems nearly impossible to strike a healthy balance between your duties at the office and those you have in your personal life. Take some time to review Bobette Kyle’s tips for balancing life and work during the holidays. My personal favorite from her list of seven tips is number four, “Understand what activities are important to you.” Many of us try our best to please other people and keep everyone happy throughout the holiday season. The fact is, it’s a time of year where we are supposed to focus on the things that are most important to us. Prioritizing the events in your life and realizing what is most important to you should be your goal during the holidays. Use these helpful tips from Dawn and Bobette and get a head start on avoiding holiday insanity this year!

We hope you all had an amazing Halloween. Check out this picture of my brothers and me on Halloween of 1990. I’m the cowboy/Zoro/sheriff on the far right! halloweensmall

What did you, your kids and your family do to celebrate and what was your costume? Share with us by commenting below!

Posted in Uncategorized

SilkRoad Connections 2012 is Just Around the Corner!

By Jaclyn on October 28th, 2011

It’s that time of year again! No, I’m not talking about the holidays, I’m talking about the time to start planning for SilkRoad Connections 2012! This time around we’re moving our event to sunny Scottsdale, AZ from June 3-6 at the JW Marriott Camelback Inn. This is a great opportunity for our customers, partners and industry experts to network and learn from each other as well as from SilkRoad product experts. If you’re a customer or partner and would like to join us, please visit our conference site to learn more.

We’re always looking for great content for our sessions so if you’re interested in presenting, email me at jaclyn.branch@silkroad.com.

Hope to see you there!

Posted in Trade Shows & Conferences, Training & Development

Book Club! Onboarding: How to Get Your New Employees Up to Speed in Half the Time

By Naomi on October 28th, 2011

Check out this month’s SilkRoad Book Club and download your free chapter from Onboarding: How to Get Your New Employees Up to Speed in Half the Time. by George B. Bradt and Mary Vonnegut.

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In this free chapter, the authors cover the logistics needed to make your new employees productive from the start in addition to helpful time-savers, such as using an online onboarding portal to automate administrative paperwork. This dynamic chapter is full of helpful, real-life examples, graphs and notes. Download today to take away key steps to accommodate a successful new hire onboarding process in two parts: through their work needs and their personal needs. It’s easier than you might think!

Click here to download your free chapter and find out how you can get your new employees ready, eager and able to do real work on day one!

Posted in Book Club, Employee Engagement, Onboarding

Identifying Your Information Brokers

By Ginger on October 26th, 2011

In every organization, there’s a select group of influential, high-potential, top talent employees. These are your information brokers. We all want to retain them, inspire them and hold on to them. So how are we making sure we know who they are early on and put them to good use?

Talent Management, a perpetually thought-provoking publication, had an article not too long ago titled Tell Me About It. It explored how a social networking mindset is effective in talent management and identifying your key information brokers. What the article coined as social performance management relies on real-time feedback that shows “how connected, respected and influential an employee is in the business network to identify additional strengths or areas that require development or correction.”

Much like social media influencers have a Klout score, employees have spheres of influence and expertise. And the ability to influence others is undoubtedly in your competency library. This is just a more extensive way of identifying it.

SilkRoad sees this as a next-generation 360 degree performance review, but word choice aside we agree with this theory. An internal social networking community can help a company identify its key players – the ones who others turn to for help, expertise and collaboration. These are also the ones you want to consider for development, promotion, succession planning and mentoring roles.

The best way to identify and put those high potential individuals to work?

Tap into your internal and external network. These are the people that can offer insight on daily performance, and the network should run the gamut from managers and direct reports to colleagues and customers.

The Talent Management article recommends having a social network with functions such as commenting, rating, tagging items and “following” employees. {What’s that? You don’t know where to find something like this? Check out the announcement we made at HR Tech this year!}

For a performance review to truly guide development plans, the content within it must be current, relevant and accessible. Social networks have proven to draw out an inherently high level of engagement and activity in participants who update statuses, share pictures and comment on friends’ walls. By infusing performance initiatives with social mechanics, it is likely that a similarly high level of participation, and subsequently insight, will extend into talent management.

Enable a social learning network. If a platform supports the ability to see an employee’s connections and influence, comment on and rate performance and tag expertise, it has the ability to formalize the peer-to-peer learning networks that many organizations rely on. As is stated in the article, “social networking allows new hires to connect with the right stakeholders, experts and mentors to leverage the power of community and rapidly build competencies and tacit knowledge needed for success in their new jobs.”

Rather than sending out a group email when looking for a specific skill, a social talent network identifies with whom new hires or those undertaking a new responsibility can connect with for guidance, mentoring and coaching.

Attaining top talent might be half the battle, but if those employees’ expertise and knowledge is not being leveraged, shared and imparted on the remainder of the workforce, then they’re not being used to full capacity.

Identifying and developing your information brokers is at the core of talent management. It will help your company tap into unexpected skills, knowledge that you didn’t know already existed within the organization, improve the productivity of the entire workforce and drive engagement through the roof. So if you haven’t already integrated multi-rater, 360 degree assessments, it’s time to start. If you have, it’s time to start thinking about a social tool that enables year-round performance feedback and moves beyond the point of capture to put top talent to good use.

What are you doing to identify and utilize your information brokers?

Posted in Careers, Employee Engagement, Employee Retention, General Human Resources, HR Trends, Performance, Social Media

Happy Boss’ Day!

By Ginger on October 17th, 2011

I had an email in my inbox this morning from a coworker, titled “From Team WingSpan.” I almost put it off until later in the day because I thought it was going to be 1) about a new release that I would have to spend a lot of time reading through or 2) something to do with product engineering that I likely wasn’t going to understand. To my surprise it was this fabulous picture:

Well, look at that – it’s Boss’ Day! Happy Boss’ Day to my boss, Ed, and all the other bosses out there! This is how the WingSpan engineering team showed their boss, Lois, that they care. She looks touched. Well done, Team WingSpan!

Before I started to write this, I thought I should look up the origin of Boss’ Day. I thought, “Hallmark Holiday. NO! I bet we think it’s a Hallmark Holiday, when actually there is legitimate history behind it.” So I did what any other person mildly interested in an unknown topic would do and went to Wikipedia. I’m not even going to bother summarizing it for you. I’m just copying and pasting from Wikipedia.

Patricia Bays Haroski registered “National Boss’s Day” with the U.S. Chamber of Commerce in 1958. She was working as a secretary for State Farm Insurance Company in Deerfield, Illinois at the time and chose October 8 because she forgot that the birthday of her boss, who was her father, was actually on the 16th. Four years later in 1962, Illinois Governor Otto Kerner backed Haroski’s registration and officially proclaimed the day.

Are you kidding me? This woman made a holiday, essentially for her father, but then didn’t even get the date right? Geesh. {I like how they noted that Hallmark didn’t start selling cards for the holiday until 1979.}

Also of interest – Boss’ Day is celebrated internationally. In India, bosses buy their employees gifts. Sonds lovely!

Posted in Uncategorized

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