CareerXroads®Update

November 2012

By Gerry Crispin, SPHR and Mark Mehler
mmc@careerxroads.com

Candidate Experience: Insights from This Year's Awards

Reading how others view the work of the non-profit, TalentBoard, which created and administers the Candidate Experience Awards is satisfying. (Full disclosure: we are among the founders.)

This article by Chris Brablc of Smashfly was one of the best and captured our intent to promote a few of the [37] winners by digging into their stories. Chris offered a brief summary for why PepsiCo, Adidas, Deloitte, ADP, CH2MHill, RMS, Case-Mate and Intuit were this year's winners with distinction.

We were delighted that the HRTechnology Conference session where we presented the awards was packed as was the party following. It didn't hurt that we received Wall Street Journal coverage. 2013 will be even more memorable because we've already noted an uptick in interest among companies who say they are now ready to jump in.

Super Storm: Lessons Learned in the Aftermath

Four weeks after Sandy, life is getting back to normal - or is it? Walking the dog around a relatively unscathed block of homes in central NJ (miles from the shore), reminders are everywhere. Tons of debris in front of every home (more than 40 homes); the noise of still more 75-foot oak trees being cut while leaning precariously over homes rends the air; blue tarps draped over roofs (5 homes) that were speared with limbs weighing tons; and a flatbed truck finally easing up behind a flattened neighbor's car (where my 75 foot oak fell). I check to make sure he doesn't accidentally take the new car next to it.

Sandy was a storm that has little comparison even to Katrina although we can take some comfort that lessons learned from that catastrophic event seven years ago were likely responsible for preparations last month that saved lives - response speed and pre-positioning among them.

There are some lessons employers and their HR and Staffing leaders might find challenging in the upcoming weeks and months as the scope and the size of Sandy's full impact unfolds:

  • Your disaster plans should have been in place. Some were. Some weren't. Employers that reached out to check on employees in the affected areas, identify the challenges they were facing either personally or with family and friends and authorized extended personal time, specialized teams, resources, donations, product, etc. etc. will see their employment brand, engagement levels - and retention - rise. After Katrina a SHRM commission on disaster planning led to a number of resource tool kits that employers ought to periodically review.
  • Your employees may need to deal with personal time differently for several months. Loss of cars, access to supplies, friends and family needing relocation (and just moral support), long lines dealing with insurance and government agencies - all will stretch personal time policies. Performance may be temporarily affected. How is your firm responding? Especially if your headquarters is located outside the affected areas?
  • Lots of jobs were lost, mostly small, local and heavily retail (casinos may be the exception) but few people will be leaving the area to seek new work anytime soon. In fact, those that most need to get on with their lives and find new jobs elsewhere are least likely to do so before next spring if past disasters are any guide. Local career coaches, and there are plenty of them, should be offering pro-bono events around career and life issues.
  • Lots of jobs are also created. The economy may even spike upward with the sale of cars and rebuilding - temporarily as people spend money they didn't have.
  • Recruiters will have additional personal they'll need to address when speaking with prospects and candidates willing to leave the area (i.e. needing to return often to handle unresolved family issues, value of real estate), or helping people come into the area (Q: Where can I live where the power is likely to be on? A: Nowhere) and, just getting people's attention to consider a risky move (looking for some stability for the time being). Nothing really new - just more of it, more often.

Recruiting leaders might consider running occasional disaster scenarios. Every disaster is different and there are many small, localized ones between those that impact millions. As a recruiting leader if you have an all hands meeting, think about breaking your folks into small groups and challenging them to solve some outrageous questions like the following:

  • A disaster in [name a country] has decimated our [name them] products and supply chain. Our business leaders want to move operations to [name a location] for 6-12 months. We need to hire in volume for [x], [y] and [z] jobs immediately. You have 30 minutes to develop a detailed plan. If you have questions, answer them to give you the best chance of success and identify the answers that would sink the initiative.
  • A [deadly contagious] disease has been uncovered in [a neighboring state]. All movement across state lines has ceased. Martial law along the borders has been declared- otherwise business as usual. However 50% of our external hires have final slates with 2 or more out-of-state candidates. Can we fully hire and onboard w/o any problem. How often for example has remote video resulted in an offer rather than screening for finalists? How prepared are we to do all interviews via video, even local ones?
  • The internet is down and will be down for 3 months at a minimum. Our success as a business will be dictated on how well we can adapt versus our competitors. Every function is being challenged to operate w/o the internet or they will be furloughed immediately. List those elements of the recruiting processes, tools and partners that are under water (i.e. our cloud based ATS database of candidates) and how we will work around.

Educating for Privilege: Is Hiring Institutionally Biased at Its Core --- Where We Learn?

The Economist's recent article dissecting China's city-state mentality that blocks poor country cousins from access to quality education offers a cautionary tale much closer to home.

The November 3 article, "Fighting for Privilege", caught our eye as it examined a debate in China that is heating up over a crucial educational reform allowing children from families that migrate from the rural countryside to the city to sit for university entrance exams (gaokao) in the city.

The position of the urban 'citizens' is that these 'migrants' need to go back to where their parents originally hailed from - no matter how long they have been resident, even if they were born in the city. Apparently in China a system of privileges based on registered households (hukou) in each city exists and, of course, the country cousins who have migrated to the city looking for work aren't easily able to obtain household status.

The trickle-down affect is that children in poverty are relegated to seeking admission to lesser schools, have fewer options for advanced education and and must accept the inevitable downward spiral of limited opportunity. Perhaps that is partially why Chinese nationals taking US GMAT exams increased by 45% last year to nearly 60,000 according to this article.

Couldn't happen here? Hmmm list your target MBA schools and preferred colleges by current employee demographics and see if they accept all qualified candidates or just those who are qualified - and very well off.

Zappos: Defining Cutting Edge When It Comes To Transparency

At this year's "TheRecruitingConference" Zappos' staffing leaders treated the audience to a look inside the highly touted firm's recruiting processes. They have 40,000 applicants and get back to every single one in an average of one week. Anyone who asks for feedback, gets it.

There is much more to this story and somebody needs to remind them to apply for the Candidate Experience Awards in 2013. Oh right, we will.

Oniyome Nikki: Diary of a Devil Wife

The Diary of a Devil Wife was a popular TV series in Japan and described in this Bloomberg's BusinessWeek article. The series was actually the story of a woman who chooses to work after having a child. In Japan, women find serious obstacles to returning to work after having a child, ranging from little flexibility in work schedules to fewer daycare options to constant family reminders of the importance of childrearing. So it is almost surprising that 66.5% of Japanese women are working. However, during critical productive years, 70% of Japanese women quit work after having their first child versus 30% in the US.

Japan's female workforce participation rate is second from the bottom among developed countries (Italy is last) and 87th among 144 countries surveyed.To increase productivity, the Japanese prime minister, Yoshihiko Noda, hopes to boost working women ages 25 to 44 to 73 percent by 2020.

Good luck with that. Cultural preferences die hard and we suspect that when recruiters are screening professionals for a final slate women who might be about to have a child are lost proportionately.

In the US that problem is more subtle in that women who choose to take off a few years have fewer options to maintain rapidly changing skills and often opt for or are forced to opt for a total change in career direction when preparing to rejoin the workforce.

Knowing When to Ask

Peter Cappelli, a Wharton professor whose musings we follow assiduously, described an interesting experiment in his latest HRExecutive Magazine column all in an attempt to dig a little more deeply into why there is a gender disparity in income - beyond what is already written.

He first described a field experiment where some academics posted 18 job advertisements across cities in the United States for administrative assistants. They received about 130 applications for each. The researchers then offered more information about the job, including the wage and "for one subgroup, they added that wages were negotiable while for the other group they did not say whether they were."

  • When wages were said to be negotiable, not that many people actually tried to negotiate: less than one in four. Actually our opinion is that 25% asking at the 'get go' to negotiate salary for such a low level exempt (yes it was an exempt) position was an amazing number since this was only the first stage. It's pretty obvious that any candidate who asked was doing so at their own risk. Anyone with good career coaching would realize that timing is critical to be challenging the wage.
  • Where wages were identified as negotiable, women were slightly more likely to ask.
  • Where wages were not identified as negotiable, men were much more likely to ask.

Ok, the flaw as we see it is the choice of job, Admin Assistant, but hey these are academics after all. Maybe we should try to replicate this with a marketing manager or HR manager or maybe even a recruiter position.

Peter concluded that "Women are less likely to negotiate when it is not clear that negotiations are appropriate but they are more likely to do so when it is expected."

So are we saying here that the more inappropriate you are the more likely you'll end up either not getting the lower paying jobs and therefore have to be paid more - or be paid nothing which isn't part of the average? Gotta love it. Perhaps.

Peter might also look for more obvious gender disparity challenges like this next item.

Gender Bias in Hiring: Still a Problem

Apparently our University colleagues (who should know better) have been outed by one of their own. We're really surprised this hasn't gotten more press, but we sure enjoy the pure irony of PhDs being studied by PhDs. The study entitled Science faculty's subtle gender biases favor male students isn't so subtle at all and was published this summer by the National Academy of Sciences.

The investigators (who included two men among the five conducting the study) convinced science faculty from research-intensive universities to rate the applications of a student - who was randomly assigned either a male or female name. The position was for a laboratory manager.

The participants, all faculty involved in hiring at their respective institutions, rated the male applicant as "significantly more competent and hire-able" than the (identical) female applicant. The experimental 'Hiring Managers' also offered a higher starting salary and more career mentoring to the male applicant. It didn't matter by the way if the faculty were male or female. They were equally likely to exhibit bias against the female student.

We think somebody ought to be saying a bit more about this.

Bad Math Predicting Admissions

MIT miscalculated the number of students they would admit to Sloan School this year - by a lot according to this Wall Street Journal Article. Apparently they ended up offering as much as 20k in deferred scholarships to get volunteers to shift their start date to next year.

We know the deferral has been used when companies make a mistake but why not offer deferrals upfront as a means to getting high quality in-demand students you want but don't have room for? Let them plan a year off after college or join the Peace Corps. #Good-for-the-employment-brand.

Post-Graduate Competition: US versus the World

There is a poster in a dorm room in Peking that says, "If you work hard enough you can grind an iron bar into a needle." I doubt we would find a similar poster as easily on a US campus.

India and China are upping the ante and investing significantly in quality education. This Wall Street Journal article, Can U.S. Universities Stay on Top?, focusing on investment in higher education outside the US should be a wakeup call but, if nothing else, it is one of the factors employers will use in evaluating and developing a better long-term workforce plan.

Do You Know If Your Employee is an Online Celebrity?

Meet your newest management headache: the co-branded employee.

Do your employees' actions on social media clash or complement your Employer Brand? Does their 'handle' include your firm's name? Are they leveraging your company brand to establish their next gig? Are they developing relationships with a customer base that may become prospects if your employee were to be hired by a competitor?

Do you want this headache? If you see the value and the advantages as described in this article (and even if you don't) you may want to do an audit of your current employee population and consider how you would add this factor into vetting candidates. Maybe how much you would weigh a finalist's Klout score versus other finalists?

Good Grief! Charlie Brown applied to EVERY firm on the Fortune 100 Best Company List

This article by Teresa Lindeman at the Pittsburgh Post about our annual mystery shopping initiative offers some of the most interesting blockhead moments Charlie encountered.

What wasn't mentioned was our effort to have staffing leaders help us out this year by volunteering to apply as Charlie. Most of them quit in frustration after one or two applications. Check out the whitepaper we wrote detailing Charlie's experience.