Author: Heather O'Neill

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Feds Consider Taking Ex-Offenders Out of the Box

When Tirzah Kemp was arrested in 1999, she was afraid of what she could lose. Taken into custody on first-degree assault charges after a domestic dispute with her then-boyfriend, Kemp, whose son was 2 at the time, was afraid she would go to jail and that her child would be taken away from her.

She never dreamed her livelihood might be permanently affected as well.

Kemp, who ultimately pleaded guilty to second-degree assault, is just one of about 65 million U.S. adults with a criminal record. She is also one of possibly millions of people whose record has come back to haunt her in her professional life after her sentence was served.

With nearly 1 in 4 adults in the U.S. having a criminal record, there is a call by civil rights organizations, politicians and some employers to change Equal Employment Opportunity Commission guidelines to “ban the box”—the portion on a job application asking candidates to reveal details of their criminal history during the application process.

The EEOC this past summer held a meeting on whether to ban the use of criminal records for employment screening purposes on a federal level. The commission has yet to release an opinion.

But some states already are independently changing their guidelines. According to the New Haven Prison Reentry Initiative, Connecticut in June 2010 became the fourth state after Minnesota, New Mexico and Hawaii to enact ban-the-box laws for state jobs.

The laws allow employers to ask about criminal history once they’re face to face with applicants and don’t prohibit background checks. However, ban-the-box supporters say eliminating the question on applications gives job candidates an opportunity to get an interview and explain their past.

Boston, Chicago, Philadelphia, San Francisco and Seattle are among the cities that have enacted ordinances prohibiting employers from requiring job applicants to disclose their criminal backgrounds until after the first employment interview. After the initial interview, employers may perform a background check or request the disclosure of an applicant’s criminal history.

Some companies are voluntarily changing their policies as well. The YMCA of Greater Rochester, New York, with 15 locations, has been hiring those with criminal convictions throughout its association since the 1970s, despite the fact that Rochester does not have ban-the-box guidelines.

According to Fernan Cepero, vice president of human resources, while the YMCA has the criminal record question on its application—a requirement to be a licensed child-care provider—checking the box does not preclude past offenders from being considered.

“What we look at is whether the conviction is relevant to the position,” he says. “Ninety-nine-point-nine percent of the time it isn’t.”

While Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibits selection policies or practices that have a disparate impact on protected classes of people, like minorities and the gay and lesbian community, using a person’s criminal record in the recruiting process isn’t, in and of itself, a violation of Title VII, according to Elliott Bronstein, public information officer for the Seattle Office for Civil Rights.

Since a disproportionate number of people of color have criminal records, Bronstein says, the use of these kinds of background checks to screen candidates for employment is at heart a civil rights issue.

“The effect of the use of widespread criminal record checks in employment has the effect of hanging out a sign that says, ‘African-American and Latino candidates need not apply.’ And that is chilling. The consequences are beyond huge,” Bronstein says.

What ban-the-box advocates hope to do is to reduce unfair barriers to employment for people with criminal records in both the public and private sectors.

New Haven, Connecticut—where Kemp lives—adopted the new ban-the-box guidelines in 2010 to reduce discrimination against those with felony and misdemeanor convictions. Before the guidelines were adopted in New Haven, Kemp was searching for work without success.

“I was very immature,” Kemp says of her arrest at age 22. “I was terrified of what was going to happen to me. I had never had a brush with [the law] before, and I was extremely ignorant to the criminal justice system and to the collateral consequences of pleading out. I had no concept of what that would mean for my life.”

In a bad relationship and in fear of losing custody of her young son, Kemp says she decided that accepting the plea agreement, which would keep her out of prison, was the right decision.

“I kept hearing, ‘Jail time, jail time, jail time,’ and the only thing I could think of was that I was going to lose my son. It terrified me. So I took the plea and received three years of probation.”

Following her plea, Kemp’s problems seemed behind her. She went back to work as a medical receptionist, had another baby and believed her legal problems were in the past. When she lost her job several years later, the assault conviction on her record finally caught up with her.

Kemp says that she applied for 20 to 30 jobs in her field and was optimistic. Armed with referrals and good references, she landed interviews and felt that she performed well. Then, one by one, the companies stopped taking her calls. Each time it was the same thing.

“Two or three days later I would get the letter in the mail, either saying that they went with someone more qualified or with a copy of my background check as an explanation of why they didn’t hire me,” she says. “That’s when I started realizing the difficulty with having an assault on my record. I had thought that my character, the way that I spoke, my intelligence and my work ethic would be enough to get me another job. It didn’t dawn on me how much my conviction would make the ultimate decision.”

Feeling defeated, Kemp gave up on a job as a medical receptionist and enrolled in a training program in the hopes of reinventing herself.

“I hoped that if they got to know me, perhaps they would refer me to someone else who would take a chance on me,” she says.

It’s a common theme for those with criminal records, according to Roberta Meyers-Peeples, director of the National HIRE Network, a public policy, advocacy and technical assistance project that is part of the Legal Action Center, a New York-based not-for-profit organization. HIRE stands for Helping Individuals with criminal records Re-enter through Employment.

“We were founded in 2001 to respond to the employment barriers faced by people with criminal histories,” Meyers-Peeples says.

In a down economy when hiring managers are getting dozens and sometimes hundreds of applications for a single position, there is a weeding-out process, Meyers-Peeples says. A common first step in that process is to reject applications of candidates who have indicated that they have a criminal history, thereby creating a pool of ex-offenders whose qualifications will never see the light of day.

“Companies are understandably wary of hiring a person with a criminal background because of the possibility of negligent hiring lawsuits being filed that could cost companies a lot of money,” Meyers-Peeples says.

Many negligent hiring lawsuits brought against companies are related to inappropriate background checks, she says.

“We advocate for companies to do thorough checks, just later in the process,” Meyers-Peeples says. “We also advocate candidates to be honest about their history. And if something does come up, we’d like this community to have the opportunity to show the steps they have taken to improve themselves.”

What ban-the-box offers past offenders is a chance to be considered on a level playing field, according to Madeline Neighly, staff attorney for the National Employment Law Project. “It would prevent employers from asking about past criminal convictions until after their qualifications had been reviewed and would only allow those convictions to be considered in the hiring process if they were directly related to the job at hand.”

Neighly says a recent driving under the influence conviction would likely prevent an applicant from being considered for a job as a city bus driver, while a 10-year-old shoplifting conviction would not.

“This allows people to be judged on their merit rather than being excluded summarily for something potentially not job-related,” Neighly says. “By taking off the box that says, ‘Have you been convicted of an offense?’ folks aren’t out of the gate going to be dismissed.”

When criminal history is a deciding factor in an applicant’s employment, it isn’t just the job seeker who loses. By delaying the introduction of an applicant’s record until later in the process, employers have the chance to broaden their pool of qualified employees.

According to Virgil Fisher, senior executive at WeRecycle, an electronics recycling company based in Mount Vernon, New York, ban the box isn’t a bleeding heart-issue but a sound business decision.

“We look at the workforce as a global economy and it is going to take everybody, including those with criminal records, for us to make businesses in this country profitable again,” he says. “I think that cutting a whole group of people, people who could help move the economy forward, makes no sense to me.

“I don’t want folks to look at what we are doing as a human interest story because it is not. This is selfish and about getting the best talent for the job. If you want the best, you can’t afford to overlook anybody.”

Waiting to do a background check may also save companies money. According to Neighly, at the July 26 EEOC hearing on ban the box, Rob Shriver, senior policy counsel at the federal Office of Personnel Management, testified that waiting to do an investigation into an applicant’s background until after a conditional offer has been made would reduce expenses and wasted time for employers.

Kemp, who completed a job training program, began volunteering for and eventually landed a job at the job training facility, but the road to employment was arduous. It wasn’t until ban the box was in place in her community that she was able to land her current position last year as the community grant organizer for the New Haven Prison Reentry Initiative.

Her record never came up during the interview process.

“Without ban the box, I think I would still be held back,” Kemp says. “And I am one of the lucky ones. Many people don’t have the opportunities that I have had to network and meet people and build a supportive following. There are individuals that might be fantastic workers but because of their backgrounds they can’t market themselves.

“When I was arrested, I was in a bad situation. I made a poor choice, and I take full responsibility. I just needed the chance to prove that the arrest does not reflect who I am.”

Heather O’Neill is a freelance writer based in San Francisco. To comment, email editors@workforce.com.

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Building a Sales Team Starts With the First Impression

Being successful in a sales career is about much more than being persuasive. It is about strategy and skill and having a clear vision of the company’s future. But how does a company build a successful sales team?

Experts say look at a candidate’s appearance when hiring and pay attention to your initial reaction. Once they’re on the team, train, train, and train some more.

It is a mistake to rely solely on personality when hiring sales professionals, says Dirk Gorman, a founding partner of consulting group Become Capable Today, which helps organizations build sales cultures. It is about the whole package, beginning with the candidate’s appearance during a face-to-face interview.

Gorman, who also is a founding partner of the Belle Harbor, New York-based medical device distributor Empire Surgical Products, does all of his own hiring, eschewing the use of executive search companies in favor of doing the interviewing internally.

Gorman says he looks for candidates who embody the culture of his company. The candidate must dress professionally, he said, which in his business means wearing a suit.

Looking the part inspires confidence in customers and projects an air of professionalism, he says, but adds that in other industries, different styles of dress would be more appropriate. Apple Inc. is an example of a company whose employees’ attire perfectly projects the company’s culture and the spirit of its products, he says.

“If you look at Apple’s retail stores, the sales team has the look and feel of Apple,” Gorman said. “They are average people who are incredibly excited about the products. They aren’t dressed especially nicely but their uniforms are clean and simple, just like the products.”

Job hopefuls also must be able to make engaging eye contact and tell a captivating story, he said. Gorman believes it is crucial that a candidate be able not just to lay out their past accomplishments but show that they had a rational decision-making process for important moments in their life—for example, why they selected the college they attended or made a job change.

“It is important that you—the hiring manager—enjoy listening to the candidate,” he said.

Woody Staub has 25 years of experience in medical device sales and is now president of his own company, CMJ Medical, which has offices in Pittsburgh, Philadelphia and Washington, D.C. He also is a believer in the power of the first impression.

“My first impression during a job interview is going to be the customer’s first impression,” Staub said. “Candidates need to be someone that you would want to do business with. While we have great products, more and more in this economic environment people do business with people they really trust and like. That is the first hurdle.”

Staub also looks for consistency on a résumé—no large gaps in employment—and for examples of obstacles the candidate had to overcome in the past. Gorman also looks for candidates who have shown resolve in past commitments, considering all notable accomplishments, not just past work experience.

“When I look for experience, I look for experience in achievement and not just in the workplace,” he said. “There is a reason that a lot of salespeople are former athletes, both male and female. They demonstrated that not only could they achieve on a high level athletically, but they could achieve at a high level in the classroom.

“You hit some obstacles that could possibly have derailed you and you obviously figured out how to overcome those.”

Achievement could also come from work with a church or charity, or from leadership shown in clubs and organizations.

“Work experience isn’t the be-all, end-all,” Gorman said. “I do not believe that just because a person has three- to five years’ sales experience that makes them a good salesperson. Being a ‘people person’ is not enough. Sales is a strategy, sales requires an unbelievable amount of determination and preparation.”

For the right candidate, both Gorman and Staub say they are willing to take a chance on hiring a recent graduate with little work experience.

“I will consider someone right out of school. I like training folks from the beginning—my way,” Staub said. “If you find people with the right attitude, the right cognitive ability and a track record of success in high school and college, with the right kind of training you can really do well with some young reps. Put it this way: They don’t have any good habits yet but they don’t have any bad ones either.”

For Carla Anderson, founder of the executive sales search firm C. Anderson Associates based in St. Paul, Minnesota, past work experience is necessary, as are what she calls the “soft skills” of sales, like being assertive, confident and a strong problem-solver.

“At the level we are making placements, experience is crucial,” she said. “I need to know that a candidate has the skills necessary to seek out new business and that they will be able to pull a prospect through the sales process.”

According to research done by the Aberdeen Group, despite the recent economic downturn, sales training has emerged as an imperative expense for companies seeking to be competitive. Since 2009, Aberdeen’s studies have found an increased focus on regular sales training. In a survey of 970 organizations published this year, Aberdeen discovered that 707 utilize sales training. Of those, 91 percent rely on instructor-led training as their primary modality and 85 percent have defined competencies for each sales role.

Gorman agrees that training is a crucial part of building an elite sales team. His company takes it a step further than instructor-led training classes, employing instead a continuous training model. Gorman’s company has developed a smartphone training app called PEPPER, which stands for professional excellence, peak performance, elite results.

The app generates problems or obstacles that might be encountered in the field. Every morning employees receive a new problem and they are required to solve it on the spot. Their responses are shared with the entire company via an internal site, which serves double duty as both a collaborative sales communication tool and a ranking review system. The software, according to Gorman, both allows individuals to improve their sales skills and creates a collaborative environment in which salespeople can learn from one another’s successes and failures.

“We are of the firm belief that practice makes perfect,” Gorman said. “We believe that the deliberate practice of sales—just like in golf or any other skill—is the key to a strong sales team. We treat sales like a serious skill that needs to be honed,” Gorman said. “The biggest mistake I see in sales teams is not training on a regular basis. They are too confident in their ability to communicate and charm and therefore shoot from the hip”

Aberdeen’s research supports this idea. Its recent report shows a clear connection between the use of sales training and a company’s quota attainment, both for sales teams and for individual salespeople. Those companies that incorporate training into their sales strategy consistently outperformed those that didn’t.

“While we have seen companies continue to express doubt in the economic recovery, they continue to enhance their spend on sales training regardless of budget cuts or travel restrictions,” Peter Ostrow, research director of sales effectiveness for Aberdeen, writes in his report Sales Training 2011.

A major difference between high-performing companies and other firms has to do with training investments, according to the report. While the “best-in-class” firms employ 25 percent fewer sales reps than other firms, they spend a lot more on sales training: $408,000 per year compared with $302,000 and $294,000, respectively, for “average” and “laggard” companies.

In addition, according to Ostrow’s research, the top performers allocate 38 percent of their entire corporate training budget to the sales team vs. 30 percent at average performers and 22 percent at laggards.

“The ‘Best-in-Class’ learned to put their money where their talent is,” Ostrow wrote, “and are clearly showcasing peak performance results as a reward for their sales training.”

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Video Interviewing Cuts Costs, but Bias Worries Linger

As an executive recruiter for 17 years, Amy Rueda has tried most every form of technology to find the best talent.

Starting in the profession when paper résumés and face-to-face interviews were the norm, Rueda, director of strategic talent management for UCLA Development, adopted videoconferencing when it became popular in the 1990s. She soon discovered that although videoconferencing cut travel expenses and was more convenient, it was pricey since it required specialized equipment and location.

It took her nearly a decade to find the technology that offered the right balance of convenience and cost. After being appointed to her position at UCLA in 2007, Rueda knew she had to implement video interviews as a key part of the university’s recruiting strategy. But finding the right fit took time, as well.

She spent a year researching her options and testing products before finally selecting GreenJobInterview, based in Costa Mesa, California, in 2008. The company’s product promised to be secure, affordable and required no special equipment beyond a webcam, a feature that is built into many new computers. Since incorporating online interviews, Rueda says she has cut spending from about $10,000 per search to roughly $500.

“The technology of interviewing candidates has come a long, long way, and video interviewing is one of the most useful tools recruiters have at their disposal,” Rueda said.

With the economy still struggling and companies having to do more with less money, this type of savings—time, money and resources—is considered substantial. According to a soon-to-be published report by Mollie Lombardi, research director of consulting firm Aberdeen Group, video interviews are gaining popularity.

In a survey of 506 companies, cost was a motivator for companies to adopt the technology, with 67 percent citing the reduction of travel expenses as a draw for them. Forty-seven percent use video interviewing to shorten the time it takes to make a hire, and 22 percent say that they would use video interviewing to help them reach candidates from other geographic regions.

While the technology is cheaper and more efficient, it’s a method that some love and others contend is rife with legal land mines. Video interviewing technology may be useful and financially beneficial, but employment lawyer John Chun with the Summit Law Group in Seattle advises clients to proceed with caution when using it.

“Video résumés are not necessarily riskier than face-to-face interviews, but a talking head on a video does offer more information about a candidate than even a photograph might,” he said. “A video can give the viewer clues to the candidate’s class, race, nationality and can also potentially reveal any disability the candidate might have.”

Chun suggests adopting a screening process that requires the use of a paper or electronic résumé as the first tier of consideration before video is introduced. Whether it is on the beginning or end of the hiring process, he said companies need to create a set of objective qualities, like education, experience, writing samples, references and test results so that if candidates are rejected, there is a reason.

He also recalls a time when attaching photographs to a résumé was discouraged because of the potential for discrimination.

“As people get more comfortable presenting themselves on video, virtual interviews are going to become the norm,” he says. “I don’t think it can be stopped. It matters more now how companies are going to deal with it and what steps they can take to protect themselves.”

While Chun sees the potential for problems, to the best of his knowledge, no lawsuits have been filed that involve discrimination related to video interviewing.

Colleen Aylward, an executive recruiter and creator of the video interviewing tool Interview Studio, was an early adopter of the technology. As founder of the executive recruiting firm Devon James Associates Inc., based in Bellevue, Washington, Aylward felt the pushback, too.

“Hiring managers, like it or not, are human, and people worried that they might make judgment calls on a candidate based on what the person looked like,” she said. “The other side of the argument is that the only reason you bring a candidate in for an interview in the first place is to see how they speak, how they carry themselves and whether they will be a match for your company’s culture. We argue that rather than have a candidate travel for a face-to-face interview, these same observations can be made through a short video clip.”

Video interviewing vendors began popping up in the mid-2000s in response to the cost of videoconferencing and the headache of travel. Before the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, recruiters would normally fly into a city and interview local candidates in airport lounges. That became impossible when airport security laws stopped allowing nonticketed parties past security.

Greg Rokos, who co-founded GreenJobInterview in 2007, was among those who saw the post-Sept. 11 recruiting issues as a business opportunity. An executive recruiter for 20 years, Rokos—like Rueda—had experienced the inefficiencies of job interviews.

“In my practice, I was amazed by the waste surrounding first-round interviews,” he said.

In addition to the cost of flights, hotels and meals for candidates who often were not a good fit for the company, Rokos was bothered by the environmental impact of the practice. Videoconferencing, he said, was problematic for different reasons.

“While it was more convenient than flying, there were drawbacks—namely that the candidate had to travel to a videoconferencing center, which sometimes took hours depending on where they lived,” Rokos said.

In addition to the expense—up to $500 an hour—the technology didn’t allow for multiple connection points, so executives from various branches couldn’t sit in on a single interview. And, since most videoconferencing centers were merely hosting the interview and were not the actual provider of the video transmission, technical support was lacking.

“I saw a dramatic need for improvement in video technology specific to job interviews,” Rokos said.

While GreenJobInterview provides real-time virtual interviews, companies like Active Interview, based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, allow organizations to utilize video interviewing in other ways. Asynchronous interviews—interviews that are recorded by the candidate, then viewed later by the recruiter or HR representative—allow companies to sidestep the problem of scheduling multiple preliminary interviews by allowing the candidate to record their responses to a series of preset questions.

Companies can create custom questionnaires, and those questions are presented to the candidate on their computer screen. The candidate then presses the record button to tape a response.

Sandeep Ghael, co-founder of Active Interview, says there are benefits to using this tool in the recruiting process.

“The candidate can do the video at their leisure, and the company can view their responses when it is convenient,” he said. “It makes the process more collaborative because an entire team can view the same video and score them, rate them and share them with each other.”

While some contend that video interviewing could open the door to a lawsuit, UCLA’s Rueda says it’s an unnecessary worry.

“I think people who argue that this tool can be used to discriminate are the biggest hypocrites to walk the earth. It is an argument that doesn’t hold water,” Rueda says. “If you are an organization that is inclined to discriminate, you are going to do it whether it is in a video interview or in person. If you are not an organization that is inclined to discriminate, you are going to be looking for attributes that are key to the placement.

“We are in a time where we all have to strive to be our best while being very careful with our resources and how we use them. Video interviewing is an amazing money-saving and time-saving tool.”

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Corporate America Embracing Their Version of the Peace Corps

When Ronda Grosse submitted her application to be a part of a team of Dow Corning Corp. volunteers in Bangalore, India, she expected it to be a new experience. What she couldn’t predict was that just getting to work would be an adventure in itself.


Each morning during her 10-minute walk as a member of Dow Corning’s Citizen Service Corps, Grosse found herself dodging cars and buses and weaving through a sea of people, cows and goats, navigating what she called “an interestingly chaotic” commute before she reached her destination.


Grosse, science and technology group manager for Midland, Michigan-based silicon products maker Dow Corning, is among a growing number of corporate employees who are discovering that a stint overseas can be an enriching personal experience for many reasons. Not only do they come to appreciate the creature comforts of home, but also the trip helps them become a better leader with a deeper understanding of the business and the knowledge to manage a more diverse, global workforce.


The overseas corporate volunteer projects are proving to benefit both the employer and employee. Acting as a sort of corporate Peace Corps, volunteers aid nongovernmental organizations with complex projects, while their companies simultaneously gain insights into emerging markets and the employees build leadership skills that might otherwise take years to develop.


With the help of CDC Development Solutions, companies are sending groups of highly skilled employees overseas on a variety of volunteer projects. In the two decades since its founding, CDC Development Solutions, which originally was known as Citizens Democracy Corps and then Citizens Development Corps, has morphed into an economic development organization using corporate volunteers and focusing on emerging markets, says director of business development Kate Ahern.


Interest in overseas corporate volunteerism is growing, says spokeswoman Katie Levey. Last month, the Washington, D.C.-based not-for-profit organization released a survey of 20 companies—a combination of CDC Development Solutions clients and other companies known for their work in the area of corporate volunteerism. This year, companies plan to send nearly 2,000 employees into 58 countries, a big jump since 2006, when 280 employees traveled to four countries.


For four weeks, Grosse worked with nongovernmental organization Ashoka, which is focused on an initiative in India called Housing for All. Ashoka’s objective is to provide housing for families with insufficient income, many of whom live in slum areas, as well as to encourage the government to create sustainable and affordable homes on a large scale.


The Dow Corning team’s goal was to write a standard to help local officials define affordable housing, specify limits on the size and type of dwelling that can be built, and regulate all the players involved in its construction.


Grosse says the experience was helpful to her work at Dow Corning, where she develops new and affordable products and technologies.


“This service project gave me ample insight into that part of my job,” she says. Personally, she adds, it changed the way she sees the world.


Grosse blogged during her time as a corporate volunteer in India. Here is the link.


Typically, multinational corporations have offered overseas volunteer assignments to only a small number of executives. In 2007, IBM Corp. set out to offer a similar opportunity to a larger pool of its high-performing employees.


IBM was the first corporation to retain CDC Development Solutions to create an international volunteer program. Since then, other companies, including Dow Corning, Deloitte, FedEx Corp., Novartis and Pfizer Inc. have established programs with the help of CDC Development Solutions, branding the program as their own. IBM has named its program Corporate Service Corps; Dow Corning, Citizen Service Corps; and Pfizer, the Global Health Teams.


Launched in 2008, IBM’s Corporate Service Corps program assigns high-performing employees to community service assignments around the world. Each year, hundreds of employees apply to work for IBM’s partners—often nongovernmental organizations—in countries such as Egypt, Ghana, Romania, Tanzania and Vietnam.


“The value of the work of participating employees is estimated at $25 million” since the program’s inception three years ago, says Michael Bazigos, a strategy and change executive for IBM. “Teams consist of employees from over 50 different countries who have specific technical and consulting expertise. They take on issues that include local economic development, entrepreneurship, transportation, education, government services, health care and disaster recovery.”


To date, 1,000 IBM employees have participated in 100 projects in nearly 20 countries, Bazigos says.


There are three primary goals of IBM’s program, he says. First, help address economic and civic challenges in places that would benefit most from IBM’s expertise; second, help employees feel more fulfilled within the company; and third, help employees—and thus the company—gain insights into growth markets they might not otherwise understand.


With IBM’s program as its model, Pfizer began working with CDC Development Solutions last year to create its Global Health Teams, an expansion of a longer-term volunteer program already in place. The Global Health Teams last year sent 12 employees throughout Latin America to work in teams in Peru for two weeks. This year Pfizer is expanding the program, adding additional teams and locations.


Competition to secure a spot on the teams is fierce, according to Caroline Roan, who oversees worldwide corporate responsibility at Pfizer. The pharmaceuticals company has one of the more exhaustive application processes: interested employees must write essays, provide references and submit their résumés. Their qualifications are reviewed internally and by the nongovernmental organizations Pfizer works with.


Because time is limited—most projects run between two and six weeks—it is imperative that employees with the right skill sets be chosen. The process, Roan says, is similar to applying for a job.


Once employees are chosen, the training is rigorous. Most companies spend about eight weeks preparing them, and train them on everything from the history of the country they will be serving to lessons in corporate responsibility.


In addition to training at their home offices, Pfizer participants attend a weeklong orientation at the company’s New York headquarters. That orientation includes direct training with the nongovernmental organizations, distribution of materials and equipment and the opportunity to meet with alumni of the program.


The intensive training is in preparation for an intense work experience. Ten- and 12-hour days are common. The work can be exhausting, especially when coupled with the challenges of living in a less-developed country.


“We were in Bangalore staying in a guest house, which was similar to a youth hostel,” Grosse says. “It was an immersion program, so we got used to some of the same constraints that people who live in Bangalore are used to, like having no hot water or water pressure at times or periods where the electricity wasn’t working.”


According to Edward Colbert, director of talent management at Dow Corning, Grosse is not alone in saying that she returned from her trip a changed person. The program, he says, is the company’s most effective leadership classroom.


“These employees return as different people, deeper thinking people, people that have stretched their brains and hearts, opened their eyes and figured out solutions to problems that they likely had never thought of before,” Colbert says. A “boss can’t easily provide like opportunities at the corporate headquarters.”


Workforce Management Online, May 2011 — Register Now!

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Focusing on the Core

New players are shaking things up in the human resources management software world by challenging traditional “core HR” powerhouses with systems that some say add functionality and, in many cases, cost less.


The new technologies and an ever-widening selection of vendor offerings are providing more and more choices—and more confusion about what to choose. What should a company look for in a core HR system, the software that holds basic but important employee data?


“What has been traditionally known as ‘core HR’ is evolving quickly,” says Doug Dennerline, president of San Mateo, California-based SuccessFactors Inc., one of the talent management software vendors disrupting the market.


Core HR systems, sometimes called human resources management systems or human resources information systems, track fundamental worker information such as name, location, job title and supervisor.


For much of the past decade, core HR products have represented a large but relatively sleepy corner of the HR applications market. Over the past few years, though, the core HR market has heated up. For one thing, firms have sought a stable “system of record” that can help them comply with rules such as training requirements and nondiscrimination laws. In addition, companies have put more attention on their human resources management systems as they seek to analyze their workforce data more rigorously for business insights.


One key distinction in the increasingly crowded market is how core HR tools are delivered. On the one hand, there are the traditional “on-premise” systems sold by vendors including software giants Oracle and SAP. With on-premise software, companies typically buy a permanent license to the product, install it on their own computers and pay an annual “maintenance” fee to vendors for software upgrades and patches to fix “bugs.”


Then there are newer core HR applications delivered as a service over the Internet by vendors including Lawson Software, SilkRoad Technology Inc., SuccessFactors Inc., Ultimate Software and Workday Inc. Under the software-as-a-service model—sometimes called the “on-demand” approach—organizations usually sign a contract to access the applications for a set amount of time, such as three years.


Some vendors straddle the fence. Oracle, for example, designed its new Fusion applications to be delivered both through the on-premise method and as a service over the Web. Lawson also will deliver core HR software either way.


Paul Hamerman, vice president of enterprise applications at Forrester Research, says the software-as-a-service approach promises fewer technology hassles because vendors manage upgrades and patches.


“The SaaS model that Workday and Ultimate have is attractive because it really takes the upgrading and the patching out of play, and it makes the cost of ownership very simple and transparent,” he says.


A study by research firm Aberdeen Group last year found that companies were split on whether to purchase an on-premise system or an on-demand product and overwhelmingly chose whichever system would be most cost-effective. “It came down to cost,” said Aberdeen analyst Jayson Saba. “If it is too expensive for a company to replace its on-premise SAP, they aren’t going to dump it for an on-demand Ultimate Software system.”


Another 2010 Aberdeen study of more than 300 organizations found that, in the face of the economic downturn, companies were investing in core HR systems that help manage costs, ensure compliance and allow HR personnel to be more strategic. The companies surveyed believed that integrating human resources management systems with payroll and other applications had benefits including a lower cost of administering HR functions.


That finding plays to the strengths of the traditional big guns of core HR systems, Oracle and SAP. Both vendors have payroll systems. And they portray their core HR products as crucial hubs to a wide range of related HR software and other business management tools.


“Our customers tend to review Oracle’s products and say, ‘This is our system of record and not just for our HR processes,’ ” says Gretchen Alarcon, vice president of human capital management strategy at Oracle. “They are using that one system as a core centerpiece that everything else integrates with.”


Although software as a service has grown in popularity in recent years, it raises questions about long-term costs. SaaS providers defend the approach—which is sometimes referred to as “cloud” computing.


“Independent sources like McKinsey have confirmed that the pure cloud model gives customers the best value not only in terms of total cost of ownership over time, but also in terms of immediate value from a superfast implementation, no worries about infrastructure and maintenance, and continual product innovation,” says Tom Fisher, chief information officer of SuccessFactors.


For small to midsize companies, Hamerman agrees: “The long-term costs of ownership tend to favor SaaS, except where very large enterprises can achieve significant economies of scale via licensed, on-premise ownership for transactional HR and payroll processes.”


Vendors with newer products also claim they are bringing new capabilities to the table. Workday, for example, says its core HR system has been built from the ground up to be able to adapt to frequently changing corporate structures and newer management models, such as “matrixes” where employees report to multiple managers. The software also can run on the latest devices used by today’s employees, such as iPads.


“We had the opportunity to start from scratch,” says Leighanne Levensaler, Workday’s vice president of human capital management product strategy. “That gave Workday the chance to build a modern system that really meets the needs of today’s business climate.”


In addition, Workday has a payroll product that can be paired with its core HR application. Ultimate and Lawson also have payroll applications.


That’s not the case at SuccessFactors or SilkRoad, which started out as talent management software vendors. But these firms say their core HR products can tie up with other payroll applications or services. And they tout additional functionality, such as social networking tools that foster collaboration.


SuccessFactors, for example, says that its product allows users to easily update their own employee profiles with such information as their skills and experience, as well as tap the system to find and collaborate with colleagues across the organization.


SilkRoad’s software also allows for individual employees to enter their own information, reducing the need for the type of back-end work that is required by other systems, says company co-founder and chief operating officer Brian Platz.


Aberdeen’s Saba says the core HR field isn’t done changing. “There is a lot of activity on the provider side,” he says. “The market is moving and it is going to continue” to do so.


Workforce Management Online, April 2011 — Register Now!

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U.S. Automakers Comb Colleges to Engineer Industry’s Future

Two of Detroit’s Big 3 automakers have embarked on a hiring binge in recent months, and they’re not just seeking blue-collar assembly-line workers to re-staff recently reopened facilities.

Late last year, General Motors Corp. announced the addition of 1,000 engineers during the next two years to focus on its next generation of electric vehicles, while Chrysler Corp. committed to hiring 1,000 researchers and engineers by the end of the first quarter of 2011 to help with global growth and the expansion of its small and midsize vehicle lineup.

Yet recruiters face challenges in wooing candidates to an industry and a region beset by years of financial hardship, plant closures and massive layoffs. Though American auto buyers seem to be warming again to the Detroit 3’s products, skepticism remains in and around the Motor City about its ultimate recovery—particularly among residents of Michigan who suffered through the industry’s decline that culminated in bankruptcy for GM and Chrysler.

Kristin Dziczek, director of the Program for Automotive Labor and Education and a director of the labor and industry group at the Center for Automotive Research, says despite a sluggish recovery, auto companies can’t skimp if they want to entice top talent.

“For automotive engineering and technical jobs, it is quickly becoming a candidates’ market—especially for those with advanced powertrain, electrification or embedded software skills,” Dziczek said. “Any company looking to acquire talent in this market will need to have attractive economic packages as well as other job qualities that are attractive to these people.”

Dziczek said automakers must commit to hiring full-time employees rather than temporary or temp to permanent workers. The brightest talent, she said, will only be attracted by full-time work with a salary and benefits.

Potential employees also will be looking for incentives like assurances of advancement on a technical path and not just a promotion into management, as well as company support for additional training and education to develop their skills.

Dziczek added that the automakers must give their employees the freedom to innovate if they want to attract the most gifted and creative engineers.

According to Chrsysler spokesman Michael Palese, the automaker’s recruiting efforts are under way and on track to have completed hiring 1,000 new employees by the end of 2011’s first quarter. Many of the new hires are coming straight from the classroom.

“We are very aggressively recruiting at colleges and universities and are currently on approximately 35 college campuses where we have teams of employees who are working with those colleges and universities to develop different recruitment programs,” Palese said. “We are certainly working with associations like the Society of Automotive Engineers and within organizations that we have close associations with such as National Black MBA Association and Black Engineer of the Year and others to attract talented people and a diverse workforce.”

Palese says employees who were laid off from Chrysler are “welcome to apply” for the current job openings, as are other applicants. The company, he said, seeks and selects, “a diverse array of candidates who can contribute to the success of our business.”

The booming overseas auto industries aren’t a target for Chrysler, Palese said.

“There are so many people here who are looking for work, and we are working with them,” he said.

The aggressive on-campus recruiting effort received a push from newly elected Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder’s Reinvent Michigan initiative. The newly elected governor has pledged to keep more of the state’s brightest students in the Michigan workforce after graduation.

The amount of students leaving the state in recent years was startling; in 2008, 53 percent of Michigan-native grads of the University of Michigan fled the state, according to the university.

According to Garth Motschenbacher, academic specialist for electric and computer engineering at Michigan State University, automakers have made their presence known on college campuses.

“Engineers are very hands-on and they like technology,” Motschenbacher said. “Ford had a night in November where they brought some of their new, slick automobiles on campus, including the new cruisers they are putting out to the police departments across the nation. That got a lot of attention.”

GM held an event last summer where students, faculty and staff could test-drive new vehicles, Motschenbacher said. The automaker plans to hold a similar event in the fall.

Motschenbacher said face-to-face encounters with students are as important to the recruiting process as compensation and benefits packages. While he encourages all companies he works with to meet job candidates, he believes it is especially important for automakers, whose reputations have been tarnished in recent years. Convincing students that the American auto industry is regaining its health will be the first step in the hiring process.

These students, particularly those from Michigan, “have seen the free-fall and near demise of the domestic car companies up close and personal,” Motschenbacher said. “Although students these days can be quickly engaged, they are also a brand-loyal group who has seen loyalty in the auto industry personally affect the lives of family and friends.

“If you are going to come recruit them and advertise a job, you first have to convince them that what they grew up knowing and learned is not what the future holds for them.”

Workforce Management Online, March 2011 — Register Now!