Here’s a little known,and utterly unreliable fact about HR: 11.15 surveys of HR professionals and others who kind of slip in there are distributed on average every week.
On average .56 make it into posts on ERE. I calculated all this by Googling “surveys” on ERE.net for the last year, dividing by 52, then multiplying by 20, which I guess is about the number of survey announcements my colleague Todd Raphael and I get each week.
Some of these are interesting. A few are even important.
This week, Roundup brings you a collection of surveys. You decide which category each belongs in.
First up is a survey from IIC Partners, the global executive search firm, which discovered that 80 percent of senior executives think they are almost irreplaceable. Now that’s not exactly the point of the survey, or how IIC put it, but it is one way of looking at the results.
What IIC was getting at was succession plans. In asking about them, one of the questions was how quickly the senior executive could be replaced. Not too quickly said 8 out of 10 of those senior executives, even though 6 out of 10 of their companies have a succession plan in place. Sooner or later, most of them conceded, they would be replaced. For 20 percent, though, that process would take at least a year and probably more.
Yeah Verbs!
Since we’re on roll seeing things differently than the survey writers, consider this week’s CareerBuilder survey about the best and worst words to use in a resume as ranked by hiring managers and HR people.
“Hiring managers prefer strong action words that define specific experience, skills and accomplishments,” said Rosemary Haefner, vice president of human resources at CareerBuilder. “Subjective terms and clichés are seen as negative because they don’t convey real information.”
Our interpretation is that HR people don’t like adjectives. They like good, strong verbs like “Achieved” (52 percent), and “Improved” (42 percent), and “Trained/Mentored” (47 percent). Even better if they are also truthy.
Math Madness
With the NCAA basketball tournament starting next week (aka March Madness), the cost to employers will reach into the billions for the lost productivity. Challenger, Gray & Christmas, the outplacement firm, did some back of the envelope figuring to come with a loss of at least $1.9 billion for the first week.
How did they figure that? By multiplying one surveyed set of results, by average earnings from the BLS and tossing in a guess of an hour lost time per worker filling in office pools. Add in some numbers from another survey of video streaming time spent watching the games, and the number ups by $660 million.
Using another survey, CG&C says “77.1 million workers will spend an hour or more (of their workday) either filling out brackets, chatting with co-workers about the tournament or watching games.” This survey gets the number up to $1.9 billion, not including video streaming, which may or may not be included in the survey used to in this calculation.
Green Data
We’ll end this with some survey data about the wearin’ ‘o the green (Monday is St. Patrick’s Day, but you knew that):
- Average per person spending on St. Patrick’s Day type stuff: $35.
- 30.6 percent of us will visit a bar or restaurant to celebrate.
- The beer tab for the day: $255 million.
- Only 5 percent will attend an office party.