Human Resource

Some nice stuff coming up about social recruiting and developing a talent brand:

Hiring fails because the hiring manager is in charge, argues The Staffing Advisor. Twenty different hiring managers = twenty variations on the hiring process. Ouch.

To most Hiring Managers, the tasks involved in hiring seem unproductive, uncomfortable, or vaguely legally threatening—like writing a job description, recruiting, selecting people to interview, figuring out what interview questions you can ask, writing up notes from the interview, checking references, and making the job offer. It feels like one mis-step and BOOM you are in litigation.

So you bring in your HR person, but somehow the HR person is just the...shall we say, facilitator. The HR person says "Okay, here's what you need to do first: write a job description." Then the HR person runs an ad and submits a stack of resumes to the hiring manager. It's a mess.

So...

If you want your hiring to work, reverse the roles...the Hiring Manager does not manage the hiring schedule and spends only the minimum time necessary to interview people and make hiring decisions—no more writing job descriptions, reviewing resumes, scheduling interviews, or any administrivia involved with the hiring process —that is left to the experts. (If your Hiring Managers only make a few hires per year, it's simply not practical to try to train them all to become hiring process experts).

Now, from a jobseeker perspective, this is frustrating, because we're always trying to "bypass HR" and so on. However, the up side could be fewer delays and more respect/callbacks from companies if processes become standardized and streamlined.

Any suggestions from either side of the table?

Applause all around for Human Resource Executive Online's story about the right way to communicate bad news to your employees.

Suggested are all common-sense ideas, like "give people as much notice as possible so they can adjust their budgets," and "don't try to put a positive spin on bad news, but don't be gloomy either."

Also worth pointing out is that cutting pay is obviously less drastic than layoffs, but in a company that has constantly tied pay to performance by saying things like "You deserve a raise because you work so hard for the company," cutting pay feels like a devaluation of the worker. Be careful with this, says HRE Online.

Anyway. The key bit, we think, is here:
"Silence communicates, too. In a time of crisis, people need more candid information, not less."

P.S. Can we just say that nothing sucks more than feeling dizzy all last night, then thinking "Oh, at least I'll wake up feeling better" and then waking up feeling THE EXACT SAME WAY? In conclusion, sorry if you missed us this morning. We're trying to catch up now.

Including one webinar coming up this afternoon, so mark your calendars.

Sorry, these are basically always free, but if you act now and sign up for a HR or recruiting webcast...they'll still be free.

Media pros at mediabistro have classes to choose from. We bring you, the HR or recruiting pro, webcasts.

The new owners of HRM Today, the HR social network that sold in August for $4,075, revealed themselves today on the blog.

The Institute for Corporate Productivity (i4cp) bills itself as a "corporate executive and human resource professional resource" in that it already connects execs and HR pros and provides "thousands of pages" of productivity research. In that sense, adding a growing social network to its portfolio makes perfect sense.

Erik Samdahl with i4cp had this to say:

I've been a member of HRMToday for quite some time, and am excited to work with each of you closely to make the best HR social networking site on the planet. I'd love to hear from you regarding ideas on how we can make HRMToday even better: what HR blogs are we missing that should be included on the site? How can we make the HR groups bigger and better? How can we get more people talking and sharing ideas?

What's the next step in the evolution of HRM Today? Only time will tell.

As always, ways to educate yourself and earn some certification/recertification credits follow. Many webcasts are free, too.