Recruiting is Heating Up in 2005…Are You Prepared?

A recent survey by the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) put the share of gainfully employed who are actively looking for new work at 35%, with 47% of workers saying they were "very likely" to kick their job searches into high gear as the economy improves.

Similarly, CareerBuilder’s “The Pulse” survey found that four in 10 workers planned to change jobs in 2005, and of those, 24% planned to make the move within the first six months of 2005. With this upswing in the job market, its time for HR professionals to put proactive recruitment at the top of the 2005 agenda.

Employers Group brings you instant recruitment help for any budget through our recruitment partner, Decision Toolbox. Whether you need an assessment of your current recruitment efforts, innovative tools to help you write and post effective recruiting ads and quickly identify the most qualified candidates that have applied to your opening(s) and/or you require an extra pair of hands but don’t have the budget (or desire) to pay a search fee, Decision Toolbox has the solution for you.

Decision Toolbox has filled thousands of positions for large and small companies nationwide, across virtually all industries, disciplines and levels – including our own openings here at Employers Group. The job market is on the move, and the smart employers will be prepared!

For more information about recruitment solutions through our partner Decision Toolbox, call Employers Group at 1-800-748-8484.

Recruiting in a New Economy

Kim Shepherd, President of Decision Toolbox (see above article) will be presenting EG’s March briefing series: “Recruiting in the new Economy.” Catch Kim and learn about recruiting trends in 2005 and beyond, at a location near you:

March 8, 2005, 9 a.m. – 11 a.m.
University of Phoenix Building
3870 Murphy Canyon Road
San Diego, CA 92123

March 10, 2005 9 a.m. – 11 a.m.
University of Phoenix Building
301 E. Vanderbilt Way
San Bernardino, CA 92408

March 15, 2005 9 a.m. – 11 a.m.
San Francisco Regional Office
120 Montgomery St. Suite 1050
San Francisco, CA 94104

March 17, 2005 9 a.m. – 11 a.m.
Los Angeles Regional Office
1150 S. Olive Street, H-1177
Los Angeles, CA 90015

March 22, 2005 9 a.m. – 11 a.m.
Orange County Regional Office
3070 Bristol Street, Suite 640
Costa Mesa, CA 92626

To register for this briefing, contact EG’s Member Services Center at (800) 748-8484.

Consulting FAQ's

Q: What are the Cal/OSHA requirements for posting the Annual Summary of Work-related Injuries and Illnesses?

A: The annual summary of last year's work-related injuries and illnesses is Cal/OSHA Form 300A. It must be posted from February 1 through April 30. Employers with 10 or fewer employees and some low-hazard establishments in the retail, services, finance and real estate sectors are normally excluded from the requirement.

The summary is completed from the information on the Cal/OSHA log, Form 300. In addition, it includes information about the company, the average number of employees and the total hours worked. An executive of the company must sign the Form 300A, certifying that the information is accurate. The executive must be an owner of the company, an officer of the corporation; the highest ranking company official working at the establishment; or the latter's immediate supervisor.

This year's form has been revised to reflect that Cal/OSHA Forms 300 and 300A have been revised for 2004 in order to add a new column to report hearing loss.

Form 300A must be posted in each establishment in a common area where notices to employees are customarily posted. The employer must ensure that the posted annual summary is not altered, defaced or covered by other material. Employees who do not report at least weekly to a location where the annual summary is posted must receive a copy of the form.

Q: What is a BFOQ?

A: BFOQ stands for bona fide occupational qualification. "Bona fide" is a Latin term meaning "good faith". Something that is bona fide is real or genuine and characterized by good faith, sincerity and a lack of fraud or deceit. Federal and state laws that prohibit discrimination on the basis of certain characteristics may allow it where such a characteristic constitutes a bona fide occupational qualification or BFOQ.

A BFOQ must be reasonably necessary to the "essence of the business" and the individuals excluded would not be able to perform the job safely and efficiently or they cannot be evaluated on an individual basis in determining what qualifies as the essence of a business. . Age, religion, race, gender or ethnicity may be bona fide occupational qualifications, but only in very narrow circumstances.

For example, race may be considered in a police department assignment to do undercover work with gangs whose members are all of one race. However, race is not a BFOQ for police work in general and probably not for any other assignment. Another example is that age can be a BFOQ for airline pilots and retirement may be made mandatory because it is not possible to know which individuals over a certain age are at risk for heart attacks through routine medical exams and public safety cannot be compromised.

FREE Briefing about State-Funded Training

Want to learn how your company can take advantage of state-funded training through Employers Group? Attend a free informational program. The program will be held at:

New Horizons of Los Angeles in Culver City on March 18, 2005,
from 9-11 a.m.

Come get YOUR questions answered and see what training your company can receive compliments of the State.

Register for this FREE EVENT by calling Employers Group at 800-748-8484. The address will be provided when you call. Seating is limited.

Training by Request
Vote for the training you want delivered!!!

Extremely Low Cost Public Workshops! Members pick the course, Employers Group delivers!

This spring give your employees’ a fresh start! Employers Group is offering you an opportunity to pick a soft skills topic that will be delivered in your area. Whatever topic the most members from your area select, that is the topic Employers Group will deliver! The cost will be $30 per seat to cover materials and registration. The training will be 3.5 hours in length. Because this is a specially priced program at an unheard of price, the maximum enrollment from an individual company is 5 participants. Keep returning to employersgroup.com to check polling results!

Get the training you need at an unbelievably low price. VOTE TODAY. CHECK BACK OFTEN.

Note: Because this is a very low cost offering, Employers Group reserves the right to cancel a session(s) and return any registration fees paid due to lack of registration and/or voting. Registration is on a first-come, first-served basis and members can register after official tally is made public on March 1, 2005. This is a member benefit only and is not available to non-members.

Avoiding the High Cost of Employee Turnover and Performance Issues

While few companies know the actual dollar costs of employee performance problems and turnover, even fewer understand the primary cause: ineffective hiring practices. Here’s some statistics to ponder:

• Estimates of the total cost of losing a single position to turnover range from 30% of the yearly salary of the position for hourly employees (Cornell University) to 150% (Saratoga Institute).
• Losing a single manager can cost a company well over $80,000.
• Total costs run into the hundreds of thousands for small companies and well into the millions for larger companies.

Some of the reasons for these costs are obvious: lost productivity, processing terminations, providing back-up coverage, backfilling positions, new hire training, etc. Yet many of the costs are transparent: executive time on performance and termination proceedings, investment in training, trade secrets, customers and employees recruited away, etc.

Our rebounding economy is on course to compound this problem; according to a survey by SHRM and CareerJournal.com, 83 percent of employees and 56 percent of HR professionals believe it’s likely that voluntary turnover will rise due to the improving economy.

Strategic hiring is key
One of the key contributors to performance issues and turnover is ineffective selection practices. On the front end, very few companies do an effective job of identifying organization and position core competencies, setting themselves up for failure right from the start. Hiring managers and even HR professionals lack in-depth training in selection interviewing and assessment. Inadequate interview formats and rater evaluation errors are rampant.

Screening candidates for organizational fit
The widely used behavioral interviewing model is giving way to context-driven models that base assessments not just on past performance - but also on possibility thinking. However the biggest challenge most employers face is screening for organizational fit. Along with screening for emotional intelligence, proper screening for culture that takes into account the organizing principles of the business (e.g., values, vision, etc.) is one of the newest and most important breakthroughs in talent acquisition effectiveness.

Talent Acquisition support is now available to EG members
The fastest way to create hiring excellence is to ensure that the three distinct elements of talent acquisition - recruitment, selection and retention - are valid and reliable, efficient and cost-effective, and fully integrated from end-to-end.

To help you create the kind of hiring excellence your company merits and save you thousands in employee costs, Employers Group is now offering a full array of talent acquisition products and services to complement the front-end recruitment technology and expert recruiting assistance offered through Decision Tool Box (see feature article). The following products and services are now available through our affiliation with a new recruitment training partner:

• Recruitment 360™ - A quick and easy survey to assess your hiring effectiveness
• Recruitment Mastery© - Strategic recruitment training for HR professionals
• Values-Based Interviewing© - Strategic selection interviewing for organization/culture fit
• Recruitment Partnering Skills for Hiring Managers© – Trains hiring managers to more effectively support the recruiting process
• HR/Recruitment Team Building© - Team building for HR and/or recruiting teams to generate high performance teams
• HR/Recruitment Team Profile™ - A quick and easy survey to assess your team’s effectiveness vis-à-vis high performance HR/recruiting teams

Limited Time Offer
Employers Group is offering a Talent Acquisition Best Practices Consultation at a reduced, introductory price. To get more information or to schedule your consultation, contact Annette Muepo at amuepo@employersgroup.com, or call her at (213) 765-3976.

Keeping Track of Applicants

Are you overwhelmed with trying to keep track of job requisitions, candidates, interview schedules and interviewer comments? What about the EEO reporting on job applicants? When you have a job opening, do you have a way to search through your past applicants to find who might be a good match for the position?

If these are some of the issues you face in the competitive world of recruiting, there is a better way. A way to keep you organized and on-top of the whole recruiting process through maximizing your ability to control the entire recruiting process from your desktop. Here are just a few of the ways an integrated HRMS (Human Resource Management System) can help you with recruiting:

• The ability to create a job requisition on-line.
• Track candidates through the interviewing process.
• Keep pertinent information on each candidate, including: demographics, skills, education, work history.
• Search your database of past candidates to match against new requisitions.
• Hire a candidate from your applicant database, directly into your employee database, keeping all of their data.
• Provide EEO analysis reporting.

Employers Group has two different HRMS solutions we offer our members. Whether you are looking for a web-based, outsourced solution like eeAccess, powered by UltiPro, or an in-house solution like Abra, we can help you.

For further information, contact Joyce Weldon, HRMS Product Manager, at Employers Group, at 1-213-765-3999 or jweldon@employersgroup.com.

Reveal the Person Behind the Resume
“96 Great Interview Questions to Ask Before you Hire”

Every busy interviewer knows the danger of throwing out vague questions to a potential employee. You get canned answers in response and the result can be a disastrous hiring decision. You can’t afford not to carefully question each potential but, with today’s harried work pace who has the time to formulate probing questions and expected answers?

Now there’s a quick way to find out what really makes a candidate tick. “96 Great Interview Questions to Ask Before you Hire” written by Paul Falcone, literally offers 96 probing interview questions, plus helpful tips on interpreting the responses.

In this book Falcone offers invaluable advice on how to identify high performance candidates, probe beyond superficial answers and spot 'red flags' which indicate evasions or untruths. In addition, he details how to get references which provide truly reliable information about candidates and how to negotiate job offers which attract winners. Between the pages of this must-have reference you will also find:

• How to elicit spontaneous, truthful responses.
• How to watch out for red flags that predict sub-par performance.
• How to solicit meaningful information from reference checking.
• How to hire people that best fit the organization’s needs.

With questions covering seventeen topics and all types of job openings, this book serves as both a ready reference for managers and a refresher course for seasoned human resources personnel. It’s like being able to read the other team's playbook before the championship game! As the most senior HR executives can tell you, your goal in any interview is to ultimately reveal the person behind the resume. These questions are above and beyond the normal tested legal guidelines, they ask whether a person can do the job as described.

Paul Falcone, M.A., who is a nationally recognized speaker in the field of Human Resources, provides insight into the standard set of HR questions that all interviewers should to know. "What are your strengths"... "What are your weaknesses"...? Why ask these questions unless you know what you are looking for? This book provides an in depth discussion of these and other questions with sample answers, what you should look for in an answer and possible follow up questions.

This book and many others are available through the EG Store at a discounted member rate. For more information you can visit out web site at http://www.employersgroup.com/Product/EGStore/Default.asp or you can call our Member Services Center at 800-748-8484 to speak to a representative.

360° Feedback can Help Improve Performance

In today’s changing and often volatile economy, organizations are continually looking for ways to improve performance to secure continued growth and customer satisfaction. Achieving this does not necessarily remain static considering the often unforeseen changes to the culture of an organization.

360° feedback is playing a growing role in enhancing the culture of organizations, and is considered by many firms to be a top method for assisting managers in recognizing areas of improvement within their department, production line and/or overall organization.

This feedback data provides structured and in-depth information about current performance as well as what will be required of an individual in the future. Many organizations are implementing this program as a yearly needed assessment for internal growth and a form of security for continued success.

360° feedback, also known as multi-level, multi-source feedback, is a very powerful and sensitive process. It can increase the individual’s awareness of how their performance is viewed by their colleagues and indeed how it compares with their own view of their performance while serving as a strong impetus for development and behavior/culture change.

360° feedback can be paper or email deployed as well as customized for individual departments or firms.

For information about implementing the 360° process at your company, contact Juan Garcia, Employers Group’s Director of Research Services at jgarcia@employersgroup.com or (213) 765-3969