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Tag: telecommuting
It’s always better to be prepared than surprised.
By definition, being strategic requires that you look forward — identifying trends, opportunities, and threats. With the December lull looming, now is a great time to plan for the future. I’ve listed the “top 10 talent management trends” I foresee that require your attention. keep reading…
Negotiating the conditions of employment, hedging one job with another, being wary of accepting full-time jobs that put at risk other work or that compromise skill — those are becoming the normal patterns for accomplished professionals.
Individuals are finding new freedoms and exploring their own capacity and taste for change and entrepreneurism. Some organizations are looking for ways to adapt to all of this without endangering their own success, but it may be that these two different needs are not compatible. We will find out over the next 10 years or less. Certainly manufacturing firms and companies where hands-on work is required will not be able to be flexible enough to these changes. They will face friction between the workers whose jobs allow them to be virtual or part-time or flex-time and those whose work does not.
Here are some of the issues, paradoxes, and changes that employers, candidates, recruiters, and human resources are faced with. keep reading…
Telecommuting can attract and retain employees. It can even save you money. But not all employees or companies are cut out for virtual work.
Providing the tools and technology are easy. The tough question an employer must answer is: how do we hire and manage the right teleworker?
Like employees who fill every other job, some workers are natural fits, while others seem to be the square peg forced into a round hole. Telecommuting requires different skills than working out of an office, even if the job responsibilities and requirements are exactly the same.
Recent research out of Global Integration Inc. identified the traits of successful virtual workers and telecommuters. The most successful virtual workers are self-reliant and self-motivated. That sounds like the perfect fit for an ambitious introvert, but the “lone wolf” tends not to perform very well on virtual teams. keep reading…
It’s a fundamental law in recruiting that you “are limited to hiring individuals who have applied for a position” (even direct sourced candidates will at some time will be requested to acknowledge application). Assuming you want an applicant pool that is bulging with superior talent, a logical question would be, ‘What factors restrict qualified individuals from applying?’. Prior to the most recent global economic meltdown, most recruiting professionals guessed that the top factors were pay, benefits, and employer reputation, which are important, but one factor has always trumped them: geography.
95% of the Qualified Candidates Are Not In Your Backyard
While there are pockets of industrialization that attract a greater percentage of highly educated and trained professionals, the vast majority of talent remains dispersed around the world. If your organization forces only local talent to be considered, there is no way your organization can claim to be hiring only top talent. Such an approach dictates that your organization is missing out on a huge group of qualified applicants (the 95% that exists elsewhere) simply because:
Restricting recruiting to only local communities can have dramatic effects on results. For example, if you are the head coach at the college basketball powerhouse University of North Carolina, and the team was restricted to recruiting only players who currently lived within a commuting distance of the campus, how many months do you think it would take until the team would begin its slide into mediocrity?
If you want to have a strategic impact as a recruiter, you need to recommend any low-cost action that would dramatically increase the size of the qualified candidate pool: remote work. keep reading…
Bill Wall was faced with two choices: take a job he didn’t really find interesting, although he was well-qualified to do it, or continue to try and build up his fledgling Internet design company. In the end he was able to do both by convincing the boss-to-be that he could do the majority of his work virtually and by agreeing to a lesser salary.
Negotiating the conditions of employment, hedging one job with another, being wary of accepting full-time jobs that put at risk other work or that compromise skills — those are becoming the normal patterns for accomplished professionals. keep reading…
Every year I try and predict what trends and topics will dominate our thinking, conversations, and technology in the coming year. Last year my three predictions were pretty much on target: Simplicity in sourcing, the rise of social networks, and internal redeployment. I am not sure how much redeployment actually took place, but it must have been significant as key positions remained filled even when external hiring was slow.
Sourcing remains a topic that I am interested in. It seems to me that the need to conduct in-depth Internet searches and apply Boolean logic to searches is no longer relevant in the majority of cases. Cold calling and other traditional methods of locating people will never go away, but are less significant. Two occurrences have changed the game. The first is social networks whose mass adoption, personalization, and ease of use have put them first in the sourcer’s toolkit. Second, jobs are being redefined and replaced with an emphasis on broader skills and on the ability of candiates to take on a variety of roles. This opens the door to more candidates, except in narrow technical areas where specific skills and training are required. A third minor factor is the recession and the short-term surplus of candidates. This will evaporate as Baby Boomers retire and more people start to work for themselves, but this will be an evolution over the next five years.
I don’t need to comment too much on the importance of social networks. This past year has proved their efficacy as sourcing tools as well as sales tools to motivate and engage candidates. What is going to change this year is the emergence of proprietary networks for specific industries or even for specific organizations, if they are large and employ a lot of people. The Facebook’s and LinkedIn’s will face competition, in a way, from networks that are designed for a specific type of person, role, industry, or geography. These more general networks are already offering this, in a way, through interest groups and pages for specific organizations.
As I wrote last year, I think that over time candidates will find that they are better treated and more completely able to present themselves via social networks than they can with a resume. This is huge as candidate dissatisfaction with recruiting and employee dissatisfaction with employers is at an all-time peak. Social networking offers some hope as a way to alleviate some of this.
The emerging trends I see for 2010: keep reading…
Ah, another recession — maybe the mother of all recessions – is upon us. Predictions for recovery range from a few months to two years, but however long it is it will permanently change how we work and recruit.
This recession is our real introduction to the 21st century. For the first eight years of this century, most things stayed as they were with a few small modifications. The Internet infiltrated relatively slowly into the lives of ordinary people. Traditional work remained central, organizations replaced and added workers according to traditional formulas; travel got more uncomfortable, but remained a requirement for those who worked nationally or globally; and the media remained dominated by movies, DVDs, and paper. Energy and the environment became issues — but primarily only for the educated and wealthy. Few of us could identify really major differences between, for example, 1995 and 2005.
But the differences between 1999 and 2009 will be obvious.
Do you have a strategy for a good life? Can you offer prospective employees a path to develop their own strategy? Have you decided what part work plays in your life and what engages you?
I have been noodling for quite some time over the work/life balance movement. I call it a movement because it really was not even something anyone mentioned or thought about when I entered the workforce in the 1970s. It has come about over the past 15 years and has swept corporate America and the world.
I can’t think of any organization that has not had to change policies or at least address its employees on the issue of work/life balance. Perhaps it emerged because more Gen X employees moved into leadership positions and were more aware of the precariousness of employment and about how quickly corporate can swing from breakneck hiring to layoffs.
But whatever the causes, the issues involved are core to whether people accept offers, stay with an organization, or decide to work for themselves.
Over the past few weeks most recruiters have had to spend some time thinking about their own employment situation and assessing its relative security, engagement, and continuity. They have also had to deal with reluctant candidates, uncertain retirees, and fearful employees. How we think about work is fundamental to almost everything else we do.
The work/life balance movement is based on set of assumptions that aren’t questioned very often, yet are very strange from the perspective of a Baby Boomer such as myself or from that of anyone who has studied or thought about the history of work.
Hiring a Virtual Recruiter/Sourcer
Tom Culligan is considering hiring a virtual recruiter/sourcer but wants some advice on compensation structure for this position. Over the past few weeks, several ERE members agreed that Tom should consider hiring a 1099 and pay on an hourly basis. Hiring a subcontractor would reduce the amount of paperwork and as Donna Hiemer stated, “is a win-win” for both parties.
Problem solved? Not exactly … the conversation turned political and heated up this past week when Amanda Blazo and others recommended using an RPO firm operating in either the Philippines or India. Charles Hillman was left asking, “Why utilize an India based RPO when there are a ton of quality researchers right here in the USA that can do the job.” Jeff Altman responds with a call for patriotism…why aren’t we creating more jobs in the United States? Hope Blaythorne argued that we are in a global economy, and encouraged cooperation with overseas markets. While Josh Letourneau supported Jeff and noted that many of the responses in favor of outsourcing come from outsourcing vendors. According to Josh, “Arguing about whether offshoring is good or bad isn’t going to solve the problem — it’s overall job LOSS that is the issue (which comes in many forms), and I hope we can figure out a solution.”
Where do you stand on this issue? We would love to hear from you…
Unethical Competitors
Who knew recruiting could get so ugly?
Laura Nyp has a competitor who sends her great candidates who “ditch their interviews at the last minute without any warning.” Jill Gilliland, Paul Lipman, and Joseph Ray offer some simple advice that many others echo … stop working with them! Joseph Ray and Pam Claughton recommend doing your homework on both the client and the candidate. The reputation of a client can turn off a candidate before the interview process. Tracy McKenn and Jim Cargill want to know more … Is Laura sure the competitor is sending these candidates? What would be the motivation? How long have they been working together. We would love to hear an update, Laura!
Employer-paid Benefits
Tami Heyden wants to know what potential candidates would look for in a benefits package. What are the pros and cons of employee vs. employer-paid benefits? Peter Raloff’s company offers 80% of employer-paid benefits plus three weeks of vacation time … not too shabby for the D.C. area. However, Scott Robinson and Pam Claughton feel that companies can do better. Scott had a candidate who accepted a job where the employer paid 100%, in addition to country club membership, company cars, and flex time. Hmmm….are they hiring? Pam feels that 100% coverage is a “huge selling point.”
I Am Sensing a Freaking Out
Maureen Sharib is … from people in the industry. Times are tough and Maureen is noticing dramatic cuts in departments. I have been talking to companies that are “going back to basics” and cutting anything that doesn’t fall under recruiting basics (i.e, campus recruiting). Jim Constantine and Karla Baierl warn us of the negative impact of the media. “Keep your head down, deliver great value, and ride it out!” is Jim’s advice to staying afloat. Amanda Blazo would agree with Jim and shares a positive story in the construction industry. Maureen concludes by reminding us that “those recruiters that don’t embrace the fact that we’re in a sales business are gonna have a hard time.”
Monday’s Question of the Day
The discussion last week about keeping recruiting costs down is still hot this week … what’s your strategy?
WorldatWork surveyed more than 2,700 organizations; members are employed in the HR, compensation, and benefits departments of mostly large North American companies.
This week:
“. . .we can say that Muad’Dib learned rapidly because his first training was in how to learn. And the first lesson of all was the basic trust that he could learn. It is shocking to find how many people do not believe they can learn, and how many more believe learning to be difficult.”
-Frank Herbert, Dune
This quote from the well-known science fiction novel Dune underlines the difficulty many people have in learning. Learning means change, examining what we are now doing, and being open to explore what we could do differently.
Very few of us have ever learned to learn and most of us live in fear of learning. This fear has roots in embarrassment, fear of failure, fear of ridicule, our society’s worship of “book” learning over experiential learning, the desire to be like everyone else, the need to be liked, and many other needs and fears.
Children have the wonderful gift of total trust that they can, through interaction with their environment, learn. They experiment, test, challenge, and in the process, learn. Their natural curiosity and excitement over piecing together the world as they discover it is a wonderful thing to witness. Yet, somehow as we go through our formal schooling that innate belief in our own ability to learn, and most of our curiosity, is taken out of us.
Our organizations reflect this as well. Only a few are true learning organizations that invent the future and do so regularly. One that comes to mind is Apple. Perhaps fueled by Steve Jobs and his seeming less-ruthless focus on perfection, it remains youthful and exciting, even now that it is into middle age. It has programmed into itself the ability to take risks, be bold, and go where others are afraid to go.
Recruiting remains a transactional and traditional function for most of us. Not much learning, and consequently change, has taken place despite huge changes in how organizations design, manufacture, and sell their products and services.
Talent remains local. Competencies reflect yesterday’s needs. Sourcing is still a reactive process based on templates designed in the past. And hiring happens the same way it did 50 years ago.
If you want to be a mover and shaker in this profession, you have to learn to learn. You have to take some chances and do things differently.
Corporations around the world are missing an opportunity both to help their employees during their economic struggles and to build their employment brand image as an employer that cares. The foundation of this opportunity is the current surge in gas prices and other economic factors that are heavily impacting almost every corporation’s workforce.
It’s almost impossible to pick up a newspaper or magazine and not read about the economic conditions that are putting a strain on almost everyone’s budget and way of life.
Rather than ignoring it or hoping it will go away, look upon it as a chance to “turn lemons into lemonade” and to further strengthen your employment brand image.
It has been common for corporations to offer benefits to their employees to ease their commutes or to help save the environment. However, the recent dramatic rise in gas prices provides corporations with an opportunity to really amp up their offerings, and to demonstrate to those they wish to attract and retain that the organization “cares” about them.
In fact, one study by Dr. Wayne Hochwarter, of Florida State University, found that high gas prices led to more stress on the job, thus impacting employee performance. In his research, Dr. Hochwarter found that one-third of the employees surveyed said they would quit their job for a comparable one closer to home.
Research by outplacement consulting firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas found that 34% of employers had potential candidates who turned down jobs because of long commutes and added nearly 8% of employers report turnover caused by high transportation costs.
Acting now provides an opportunity to build your employment brand because the combined topics of gas prices, food prices, and the mortgage crisis are hot in the media. As a result, any bold action by a corporation is likely not just to be viewed positively by employees and potential applicants but also by those covering consumer confidence and spending in the media.
Efforts by employers to help workers cope with these economic factors will likely be written up in the press and in business publications. Not only would you be helping your workers, but you will also be building employee loyalty while getting free PR to further strengthen your employment brand image. It’s an opportunity that won’t last long, so it shouldn’t be missed.
Many firms have already been recognized for excellence in these areas, including Google, Intel, Oracle, Microsoft, Cisco, Nike, and HP. There are many actions to consider, and I’ve separated the various options into broad categories below.
The first group of options is relatively cheap, but they can have a significant impact on the amount of money your employees need to pay in commute costs. 12 “drive-less” options include:
Will flexible employers be the ultimate winners in the war for talent now that gas prices are in the stratosphere? Employers offering transportation subsidies, telecommuting options, and virtual office arrangements may be wooing the best and the brightest candidates right now, even without the highest salaries and biggest relocation budgets in the marketplace.
“It isn’t unusual to find employees driving 50, 75, even 100 miles each way to work and that can cost them $5,000 a year just in gas,” says Chuck Wilsker, president and CEO of the Telework Coalition, a Washington DC-based organization that supports telework options.
“When telecommuting is an option, it eliminates the geographic recruiting boundaries and increases the pool of prospective candidates. I have heard of specific situations where employers have been able to offer 15% less salary, simply because the employee will no longer need to absorb the daily commute cost.”
Employees who commute 30 miles or more to work are likely to turn-over at higher rates now that gas prices have sky-rocketed, according to Wilsker, and it will only get worse when the job market and the economy rebound. If more firms begin offering telecommuting options to appease employees, the competition for top talent will literally have no boundaries, since proximity to the office will no longer be a major recruiting criterion.
In addition, with no ceiling on gas prices projected anytime soon, Wilsker says that commute costs are starting to concern highly skilled employees, not just hourly workers. In the past, employees making $150,000 to $250,000 might not have considered long commutes when weighing an offer, now they are now thinking about it long and hard before accepting.
Known colloquially as MOOF, Microsoft’s Mobile Out Of Office is literally going out on a limb to show companies that workers like the idea of telecommuting.
The company built a tree-house office in a park in London, and the software giant‘s message is that corporate decisions don‘t always need to be dictated within the confines of four walls and harsh fluorescent lighting.
In the United Kingdom, Microsoft research shows that nine out of 10 British workers desire an out-of-office setting — with 75% saying this flexibility is a huge factor in deciding whether to accept a new job opportunity.
While completing the research for the third edition of my book, Hire With Your Head (Wiley & Sons, June, 2007), I found out a lot has changed. The thing that stands out most is the profound increase in workforce mobility in the U.S. labor market.
Company loyalty has declined. Changing jobs for short-term and superficial reasons is on the rise. Turnover is on the increase. Accepting counteroffers is now acceptable and expected.
Tech workers get an average of 23 recruiter inquiries a week -- yes, a week, says a survey from TEKsystems, a global IT staff... more »
