Sexual Harassment and Non-Employees – Employers Beware

Does employers have liability for harassment by non employees in their workplace?  May be if they should have known.

Link to article 

W. Garnett & Associates
Human Capital Management
1-888-884-3910

What You Need to Know About the EEO Department

Employers must be mindful of these statutes, as well as State and International laws, when hiring and firing employees, offering promotions or benefits, and giving or failing to give pay raises.

Link to article

W. Garnett & Associates
Human Capital Management
1-888-884-3910

Punishing Employers: ICE has a Renewed Commitment

The strategy is a 2-pronged approach.  It includes aggressive criminal and civil penalties against employers who knowingly violate immigration laws, and continues to implement programs such as E-Verify (verifies employment eligibility to work in the United States) and IMAGE.

Link to article

W. Garnett & Associates
Human Capital Management
1-888-884-3910

Survival Tips for Employers: Wage and Hour Violations

Employers who want to stay on the right side of the law must re-examine and manage their wage and hour practices. For employers in Maine, the task is especially challenging due to parallel – and sometimes inconsistent – state and federal wage and hour laws.

Link to article

W. Garnett & Associates
Human Capital Management
1-888-884-3910

Uncovering Test Secrets, Part 2

Validation can get squirrelly fast. Without first conducting a legitimate job analysis and choosing a legitimate hiring test, there is no need to go any further. Everything is worthless without the first two steps. Once that is behind you, establish a strong link between a specific test score and on-the-job performance.

Litigation vs. ROI

Litigation threat has down-the-road implications for developing sound hiring and promotion processes. Attorneys seldom work for free, and you do not have to lose in court to lose money.

I have never personally met an attorney who was experienced in job analysis, conducting validation studies, or documenting assessment processes. I’m sure there are a few, but it’s generally not their specialty. Attorneys are trained to know the law and to argue persuasively, not design, develop, and validate selection systems. The corporate attorneys I have worked with fully appreciate the benefit of a well-documented job analysis, validation study, and assessment process. To quote one of them, “I would much rather defend <this process> than the one we use now.”

Remember, in the litigation world, making a persuasive argument is more important than making a good employment decision. However, in the organizational world, if you don’t make a good employment decision, you get to pay twice: once for litigation and forever for low performance.

No Better Than Chance

We said earlier that people tend to think interviews and tests are two different things. Fortunately, for them at least, interviews fly under the validation radar because most folks think of them as conversations. Unfortunately, once an unstructured interview has screened out the blatantly unqualified, it has a long history of chance-level hiring decisions. Think of it this way: after the candidate has passed on unstructured interview, you might just as well ask him or her to pick a marble from a jar filled with 50 red marbles and 50 blue. Blues are high performers. Reds are low. Unstructured interviews are a significant blind-spot. We all know that.

Validation Designs

You don’t need to know the details, but you do need to know there are different kinds of validation. They include predictive designs where everyone takes a test, the scores are ignored, and job performance is later compared with test scores; concurrent designs where job-holder scores are compared with job performance; individual comparisons; group comparisons; group averages and score distributions; measuring job content; evaluating mental constructs; assessing OTJ performance criterion; examining the face of the test; and, so forth.

I prefer predictive designs using OTJ performance, but organizations seldom have the patience to wait; designs using current employees suffer from technical problems (see range, below); and, defining performance is always an issue no matter what design is used.

Just remember that there is no single type of validation. It varies with application; the number of people involved; the potential exposure for litigation; the importance of the job; and, so forth. One last point: Taking a broad-scope generic test, giving it to all job holders, and developing a high-group norm and a low group norm is not validation. Why? Validation requires a causal relationship. Like hemlines and the stock market index, other than moving together, if one does not cause the other, numbers do not make it valid.

Performance Considerations

Next, there is the problem of “what to measure”; that is, the data used to validate, or verify, the test actually works. This includes hard data like turnover, individual production, new account generation, business expansion, call time, customer satisfaction, and so forth. Hard data is always nice to have, but we have to remember it often conflicts, is part subjective, and part objective. Data taken from performance reviews are usually frustrating (i.e., useless). Everyone tends to look the same on paper.

We may have to make compromises and adjustments along the way, but, if test scores cannot be compared with performance, there is no way to validate the test. You might as well stop testing, buy a jar of red and blue marbles, and save your money. Your employees will be embarrassingly average, but I’m sure there is a sharp litigator somewhere who might be able to make an effective argument for using marbles.

Range Restrictions

Validation is always confounded by the problem of restricted range. Restricted range means differences between high and low performance among job among job incumbents will always be much less than among job applicants (e.g., think of skill differences between pro golfers and skill differences between people in the gallery). Ideally, we want to compare a broad range of test scores with a broad range of performance ratings.

Restricted range plays havoc with analysis because, instead of having the luxury of big differences between best and worse, the analyst must examine teensy-weensy test score differences and teensy-weensy on-the-job-performance differences.

Group-Size Prerequisites

I won’t go into statistics except to say that trust drops fast if the differences are small and there are insufficient people to evaluate (i.e., I prefer 25 people per factor); if you try to measure too many different things with the same test; if the test domain does not actually lead to or affect performance; if both performance and test scores are not normally distributed; or, if the groups are unequal, then you cannot trust your analysis. For example, comparing scores of five Pandas, 25 Penguins, 12 Puppies, 18 Kittens, and three Bunnies might give you impressive looking numbers, but they will be junk.

Assessment Is not a Four-Letter Word

I listened to an excellent webinar last week. It addressed accurate hiring and placement techniques. The presenters cited substantial payoff in ROI measured by turnover, productivity, training, performance, sales, and so forth. I’m sure many C-level executives would give up their Mercedes for a week in exchange for the financial benefits presented, but there were less than 100 people in attendance! And half those indicated they were already using assessments. What’s up with that?

I think the HR community considers assessments in the same class as toxic waste: dangerous, threatening, difficult to handle, and expensive. Well, let’s put that to rest. Assessment is just another word for “measurement,” and, measurement takes place every time a candidate is screened for a job. Don’t forget an unstructured interview is an assessment (although a rather poor one).

The webinar folks argued the same point I have been trying to make for years: accurate (i.e., validated) tests and assessments lead to better hires, and that leads to reducing expenses and increasing revenue. Is it expensive? Compared to what? How would you feel about an ROI of at least 100% within the first one or two hires? And, non-stop payback after that?

Organizational Handicapping

Here are some of the symptoms of using low-accuracy assessments, failing to validate the assessments you are now using, or selecting employees based on demographics instead of individual skills:

• Not enough people with the right KSAs for promotion (i.e., increasingly complex jobs require increasingly complex KSAs)
• Increased potential for litigation and adverse impact (i.e., decisions are based on personal opinions are less predictive than legally credible validated data)
• Frequent training requests to fix “broken” (i.e., unskilled) employees
• Weak bench strength limits organizational flexibility and reaction time.

The Final Product

I want to leave you with these thoughts. If test or interview questions are not validated, then it is not possible to know whether they work or not. There is no such thing as an EEOC or OFCCP pre-approved test. There is no such thing as a generic test validated for your industry (unless, in the unlikely event, you can show the two jobs require essentially the same KSAs). And, managers’ home-brewed tests are something to avoid like the plague. Finally, investing in validated tests, interviews, and assessments can yield the single best ROI of any organizational dollar you could imagine.

Can you imagine what it would be like if management considered your department a revenue generator instead of expensive overhead?

Uncovering Test Secrets, Part 1

This might seem like a no-brainer, but many tests used for selection/promotion have no validity. In lay terms, the scores predict absolutely nothing! Not only do these tests fail their basic purpose, but they invite legal challenges, favor the inept, and eliminate the qualified. That’s why validation is so important. We all know personal opinions and unstructured interviews are lousy tests. Tests scores (including interviews) are supposed to accurately predict job performance.

Tell Me About Yourself

Asking someone to “Tell me about yourself” does not sound like a test question. But, what would you call asking a question, evaluating the answer, and making a decision? It makes no difference if it’s written on paper or verbal. If you make a decision based on a candidate’s answer, it’s a test. Now, how about this kind of test question:

“Give me an example of when you solved a difficult problem. Tell me what the problem was, what you did, and the result.”

Better, yes? But only if the interviewer knows that problem solving is important to the job; the kind of problem solving required; the difference between good and bad problem solving; can pry details from the candidate; and, uses a standardized scoring sheet. Why get all nitpicky? Structure is the best way an interview question can be a good predictor of job performance.

You may think unstructured interviews are the bread-and-butter sandwich of recruiting, but look between the slices: usually you’ll find mold and rancid butter. Interview questions need validation just as much as formal tests.

You cannot trust any selection tool that is not valid! Consider Merriam-Webster’s definition of valid: having authority, relevant and meaningful, appropriate to the objective, supported by truth, basis for flawless reasoning, evidence, justifiable. Now, isn’t that something you want?

False Sense of Security

Once upon a time I worked for a large consulting company. It was filled with administrative assistants who could not spell and used bad grammar. After listening to client complaints, I went to the internal HR department and asked if they gave AA applicants a spelling and grammar test. “Yes,” they answered, “We use one developed by the owner.” A quick examination showed the test looked OK (i.e., was face valid) so I asked if I could see the scores from the last 100 hires. Guess what? Passing rates averaged about 95%!

High AA scores might have given HR a warm and fuzzy feeling, but it was just another case of organizational incontinence. I considered giving them a box of departmental-sized Depends, but I think they would have missed the point. Their test did not test anything! It was not valid. While worker bees labored to present a professional image to big-buck clients, incompetent AAs were misspelling words and using atrocious grammar. I’m sure the president would have responded if he had known, but HR was not going to rock the boat if their life depended on it.

Self-developed tests may seem like a good idea, but they are usually inaccurate, invalid, or poorly maintained. Bogus tests harm the organization because they give a false sense of security, while actually doing nothing to improve quality of hire. This is especially true when managers get frustrated and decide unilaterally to make up their own test. If it’s important enough to test, it is important enough to validate. Otherwise, forget it. Even high-profile assessment organizations make foolish decisions.

From the Frying Pan Into the Fire

Math and reading are becoming problematic. I’ve heard from dozens of organizations about employees who cannot read, calculate, or write. This is an issue when becoming automated, adopting computer-driven equipment, or encountering frequent or steep learning curves. In response, unknowing people think grabbing a test off the shelf will solve their problems. I’ve even seen some who used reading tests developed for placing students in the right English class.

Testing studies show a three-bears effect. That is, human KSAs come in sizes: too little, too much, and just right for the job. For example, we know intelligent people tend to perform better than unintelligent ones; and, intelligent people tend to score higher on abstract verbal and numerical tests. But now life gets challenging …

It’s a fact of life (at the group level) that intelligence test scores cluster into different curves depending on demographics. There are plenty of theories why, but we’ll conveniently ignore them. Let’s just say we have five demographic groups: Pandas, Penguins, Puppies, Kittens, and Bunnies. Pandas score an average of 85, with 2/3 falling between 70 and 100; Penguins average 93 with 2/3 between 77 and 107; Puppies average 100 with 2/3 between 85 to 115; Kittens average 107 with 2/3 between 100 to 122; and Bunnies average 114 with 2/3 between 107 to 129.

Demographics membership does not force someone to be smart or dull. Individual Pandas can still score substantially higher than individual Bunnies and individual Bunnies can score lower than an individual Penguin. There will just not be as many high-scoring Pandas and Penguins at the group level than Kittens and Bunnies. Now this next part is important!

We don’t need to be rocket scientists to know that low scores lead to mistakes, bad products, and safety violations, while high scores usually lead to boredom and turnover. Balancing demographic differences with our need for “just-right” intelligence, how do we establish and defend cutoff scores?

No organization I know is forced to hire unqualified people. But, the EEOC and OFCCP expect you to show there is a business need and job requirement. Oh yes, and it is incumbent on employers to give new employees “reasonable” time to learn the necessary skills. If you eliminate new employees based on something they could learn in a reasonable time, you better be able to explain why.

A well-done validation study keeps the input funnel filled; employs only fully qualified employees; keeps training times reasonable; minimizes adverse impact at the group level; and maintains both business necessity and job requirements.

In the next part, I’ll discuss a few differences between validation and litigation.

Glassdoor Selling Employer Pages

Glassdoor, thus far known as a place for job-seekers to see what salaries people are earning and to read reviews of employers, is launching a service for employers.

The profiles start at around $495 for companies with 5,000 employees or less, with discounts for companies that commit to 12 months. Bigger companies usually pay $795/month, but a few with super high traffic will pay more. Fourteen companies, including the Cleveland Clinic, Orbitz, Microsoft, AT&T, Geico, Adobe, and Ernst & Young, are signed on, at a discount to start. They’ll have pages on Glassdoor with a “why-work-for-us” section, a listing of best-places-to-work awards, a feed of open jobs, and a feed of the company’s Facebook and Twitter updates.

Also, companies that pay get an analytics page showing such things as what other companies the candidates who visited their page also visited, as well as what cities they’re located in. So Adobe’s analytics page hypothetically might show that its applicants are also visiting Microsoft, Cisco, and Intel’s pages, and that they’re most often located in San Francisco, San Jose, and Austin.

Glassdoor says it has two to three million visitors per month, and is growing 15-20% monthly. Half the users have zero to five years’ experience.

Recruiters, You Could be Killing Your Employer Brand

A close friend of mine landed the job of her dreams last week. Competition was fierce, the testing process was exacting, and the interviewing process connected her with very impressive representatives of the firm.

Yet when the offer package came, there was a significant typo, which could have translated into several thousand dollars of unintentional income to my friend.

Of course my friend pointed out the error, and new docs were drawn up, but something sad happened in the interim.

A bit of tarnish on the brass ring.

(What do you do when the cover letter has a typo? Recruiters are always looking for reasons to dump resumes in the garbage, and when candidates send cover letters with typos, they throw them out — no matter how good the credentials might be.)

There are many phases in the recruiting process, including:

• Advertising
• Sourcing
• Pre-screening
• Interviewing
• Preparing for the new hire
• Offers and regrets

How your recruiters (internal or external) handle each part shapes impressions, positive or negative, of your brand.

If your brand is about Delivering the Wow (Zappos), then I want to be just as wowed with the recruiting process as I am when my shoes arrive (I am.)

Your brand beats through everyone.

Monster Offers Broader Features for Its Career Ad Network

Tens of millions of searches are conducted on the job boards every month. These are the active job seekers, drawn to one or another or, as is usually the case, more than one job board because, as Willie Sutton never said, that’s where the jobs are.

But for every active seeker, there are many more who, if they learned of the right opportunity, might just be convinced to kick the tires. Reaching those millions of others in order to find just that one, perfect candidate, is a recruiting goal best described as a quest.

For years, now, the job boards have been in hot pursuit. They’ve partnered with newspapers — CareerBuilder is mostly owned by newspaper publishers and Yahoo’s network is hundreds of newspapers deep — they power niche sites, buy keywords on search engines and traffic from social media, and have built networks of hundreds, even thousands of blogs, content providers, hobby sites, professional associations, and others.

In most cases, the networks and traffic deals simply broaden the distribution of job postings. Some, like the programs run by SimplyHired and Indeed, offer publishers the ability to choose what types of job ads to display. It’s a rudimentary type of targeting based on the content and nature of the site.

Monster’s Career Advertising Network is more sophisticated in that it targets ads to the user based on their browsing and job search behavior. Come across an ad that catches your attention and you click into the posting on Monster.com.

But recruiters are looking for more; instead of simply collecting apps, recruiters, influenced by social media, want to build relationships with candidates and bring them to the corporate career site.

Now Monster is leveraging its ad network to drive candidates to where recruiters want them and to deliver an advanced set of analytical tools to  help them more accurately tally up the results of a CAN ad.

I got an overview of the changes Monster has tested with some of its bigger customers. The change in the business model will undoubtedly appeal to recruiters and employers who might have balked at the old program’s double-dipping. Previously, you bought a job posting on Monster, then bought a CAN ad that linked to that job posting.

However, Monster is clearly putting the emphasis on building traffic to corporate career sites. Customers want to go from their ATS to the ad network and drive traffic back to the corporate career site via the ATS, Monster’s PR chief Matt Henson said, explaining the rationale behind the first of the enhancements to CAN.

Previously, employers who bought into CAN converted a job posting to a text ad (with logo) to get broader exposure: active job seekers via the Monster posting, and passive seekers (or at least less active seekers) via the CAN ad. CAN, being a period buy, meaning the ad would be served up over 14 or 30 days, didn’t guarantee a certain number of impressions, but company officials said an ad would typically get at least 40,000 and as many as 200,000.

Now, employers who have a Monster account can skip the job board posting and go right to CAN, bringing potential candidates directly to the corporate career site where the company can tell its story and begin a relationship.

The second development that Monster introduced is every bit as valuable and, if you are data-driven (as Dr. John Sullivan has been evangelizing for years), it may even be more useful. This is a set of enhanced analytics that can tell you where a candidate saw your CAN ad, how they came to your career site, and what they did when they got there.

So even if a candidate came across the ad last week, didn’t click on it, but today remembered it and Googled the company to find the job, the new analytics will tell you that. Did the candidate check out the job, leave, and then come back a few days later to apply? The metrics will tell you that.

“It let’s us go beyond the click,” says Chris Snow, analytics product manager at Monster. His comment that these analytics are “a powerful tool for recruiters” is understatement. Besides offering insight to the targeting and effectiveness of a specific ad, the data can help assess the ad’s branding value.

The first release of the analytics are already in place. They provide data on landing page visits (for the ads), candidate source information, application starts and completes, and basic ad click and impression information. More data points are coming in the future.

The analytics use a cookie with a 14-day duration, so anyone refusing cookies or who cleans them out at the end of a browsing session or acts after two weeks doesn’t get counted. That’s an issue everyone faces with cookies.

Still, that’s likely only a small number of job seekers. For everyone else, recruiters can get a much clearer picture of candidate interest and ad yield.

It’s also a plus for Monster, since source of hire statistics have always been problematic. Most sourcing data is gathered by candidate self-reporting or automatic capture by the ATS. So that candidate who Googled the company in the example above would be counted as coming from a search engine, when, in reality, they were acting on an ad.

Making all this work requires a tight integration with a corporate ATS, which means the CAN ad tracking isn’t going to work for every employer. You need to  have a way to create and submit a requisition through Monster’s Business Gateway.

Monster says there’s also a certain amount of customization a vendor is going to need to do for the system to work. It’s working with a few of the major ATS vendors now, though the customers will be driving the integration.

Employee Referral Programs Using More Social Media

Employee referrals and social recruiting, which already began melding through Jobvite, Cachinko, and other tools, are growing even closer as new vendors enter the field and corporations test how well their jobs spread on Facebook and other sites. Jobster has tried this all before, as did H3. But their mixed success did not mark the end of an era, but rather a foreshadowing of what was to come.

A New York startup called Referrio is quietly entering this niche. On that site, Cisco, for example, lists 11 jobs and is offering about $2,500 per job for people who fill the openings by spreading the word through social media sites or email.

Meanwhile, Virginia Mason Medical Center has set up a “grab this widget” tool for employees to share the organization’s jobs. The Seattle-area nonprofit needs to fill a director of nursing informatics job, IT jobs for people with Cerner experience, and more.

Bernard Hodes helped it develop the widget, which recruiters and some Virginia Mason employees are putting on their Facebook pages and elsewhere. But a big push to get employees to add it to their sites is yet to come. First, the center needs to set up a social media policy. ”We’re a little bit new to all of this,” says strategic recruitment specialist Carol Altschul. “I think it’s kind of happening a little backwards. The social media (widget) set up, then the policy created. Right now it’s just kind of growing organically. We’re getting our feet wet.”

At Enterprise Rent-A-Car, employees are adding widgets about company jobs to their personal Facebook pages, and getting paid if the widgets result in a hire, which, I hear, a couple have. Hyatt is testing a widget developed by NAS; Hyatt employees will be listing Hyatt jobs on their Facebook pages and sending them out to friends via Facebook.

At Banner Health, the Phoenix and Western U.S. nonprofit, experienced nurses and occupational/speech/physical therapists are among the highest in demand. Michael Seaver, sourcing program manager, said there was “unreal” interest when the 36,000-employee organization moved to an electronic employee referral system two months ago. About 1,500 people referred candidates in about a month. This was not a social media campaign per se, but that’s likely coming soon. Banner, with help from CKR Interactive, is working on how it’ll incorporate its 16 Facebook pages, 16 Twitter accounts, and YouTube account into employee referrals. Banner was until recently in a transition phase, acquiring other organizations. Now, it is “focusing on the people we have,” says Seaver, and will make it easier for those people to refer others.

One sign of the employee-referral times is that SelectMinds, a company mainly known for its work on alumni networks for corporations, is moving deeper into the referral world.

Michael Mallin, the SelectMinds VP of product management, believes that “innovation stalled” a bit during the recession, which “created an opportunity to do something quickly.” That something is a tool that melds employee referrals with social media. Jobster, Mallin believes, had the right idea, but was simply ahead of its time, just before the real explosion in social media. He says that Jobvite (whose success with TiVo I wrote about in the Journal of Corporate Recruiting Leadership) has a good handle on small and mid-size companies, particularly those that want to use Jobvite as their talent acquisition system, but that SelectMinds’ relationship with large firms, like the biggest accounting companies, will help its referral program succeed.

SelectMinds is planning on having a couple of its clients do a free beta of the referral product for two or three months, starting probably in July. For companies that pay, Mallin says it’ll cost about $2,500 per month for companies with up to a few thousand employees, and higher for the largest firms. Pricing varies based on the number of people you make “referrers.”

What happens with SelectMinds is that an automated (or manual, if a recruiter wishes to select some employees to send it to) email goes out to people who might be able to help fill a job. Let’s say hypothetically we’re talking about a software job at Nationwide, and that the job is in Dayton, Ohio. An automated email about the job opening might go out to 1) Nationwide employees in any region who are in IT jobs, and 2) all Nationwide employees in Dayton. The SelectMinds email allows employees to either email selected contacts on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter to tell them about the job, or update their LinkedIn and Facebook statuses (and soon Twitter, just not on the demo I saw) with info on the job. The chain of link-forwarding gets tracked as it moves around online, and the employee either gets the whole referral kitty, or can share part of it with a second person, depending on how the company sets it all up.

The employee who’s doing the referring can tell their company, via a short form, how well they know their friend, and what they think of them. The referring employee also gets emails notifying them if their contact has expressed interest in the job.

Meanwhile, recruiters view a dashboard listing how many times a job was referred, and how many applications came in for it. A recruiter can drill down and see who’s referring who.

Mallin hopes the future versions — and he says SelectMinds hopes to release new ones monthly — are “more intelligent.” For example of what he means, let’s take that software job in Dayton. Mallin hopes that a later version will notice that a Nationwide employee may not be in the software field now, and may not even be in Dayton now, but the system knows through combing that employee’s LinkedIn profile (if privacy rules allow it) that she used to work in the software field. Because she may have friends who still work in the field, she’d get the automated job notice asking for referrals. This smart marriage of referrals and social sites is where we’re headed.

Next Page »