Today at 2 pm EDT/11 am PDT is the third episode of TLNT Radio.
You can listen to it live from the web or you can dial in to (818) 572-8036 to listen to the show or to ask a question. You can also follow the show hashtag on Twitter by searching for #TLNTradio. After the show airs, the archive will be available shortly after the end of the show.
During last week’s episode, we put a bow on our coverage of the SHRM Annual Conference in Las Vegas. We also talked about LinkedIn cutting off API access with BranchOut’s Mike Del Ponte, and, discussed Humana’s decision to not hire smokers in Arizona with TLNT contributor Fran Melmed.
This week, we’ll be talking about the new jobs report, managing performance with author Dick Grote, and HR technology consolidation with Ed Newman.
Last week, ERE’s John Zappe covered the disappointing June job numbers (ERE is the parent company of TLNT). He wrote:
Expectations that the seesawing U.S. economy might be stabilizing were cruelly dashed this morning with the release of official numbers showing a mere 18,000 jobs were created in June. The unemployment rate climbed to 9.2 percent from May’s 9.1 percent.
It was the third consecutive month the unemployment rate rose, while June’s jobs growth was the lowest since last September when the economy lost jobs. The jobs growth was also far lower than economists had been expecting. Even the most conservative estimate pegged June’s job growth at 40,000, according to Bloomberg.
If CareerBuilder’s 2011 hiring report that John Hollon covered earlier is going to come true, we’ll have to see a reversal of this trend. We’ll see talk about this and more at the beginning of the show.
Next, we’ll be talking to Dick Grote, a noted author and consultant in the area of performance management. One of his recent posts on TLNT about managing raise requests really hit home for me:
Obviously, the best solution to this problem is to develop some kind of compensation policy so that matters of compensation are not handled in a one-off, spur-of-the-moment fashion.
But the manager who gets the request may not be in a position to determine what the company’s policy will be, particularly if the company is a small owner-operated firm and that manager isn’t the owner. Having to say, “You’ll have to talk to Mr. Jones about that” lets everyone know that the manager has no power or authority in the really important areas.”
Of course, raise requests are just one area of performance management so we’ll cover that as well as his latest book How to Be Good at Performance Appraisals: Simple, Effective, Done Right.
There has been a lot of consolidation in the HR technology space and much of the commentary has focused on the positives. And for the most part, the value of many of these purchases as well as strengthening areas of weakness have been good for the companies making the purchase.
One of the people who has looked at this differently is Ed Newman of Accidental Entrepreneur. One of his recent posts really touched on a concern I was wondering about as well:
We have seen an evolution from individual niche products for each functional discipline to a set of Tier 1 vendors that have put the pieces together to offer the whole enchilada with Taleo, SuccessFactors, and Cornerstone forming the top three. But this quest to produce the single integrated suite can be problematic for them. Being flexible and nimble in each functional discipline is what allowed these vendors to compete with the large HRMS products. If they build the single integrated platform, aren’t they becoming the same behemoth they used to compete with?”
We’ll be talking more about what these acquisitions mean for the broader software market and how it impacts HR business leaders as they make the next jump in technology in the coming years.
You can catch it below or on the show website.
