Author: Michelle Rafter

It’s the worst of times for some industries—think investment banks, automakers, retailers and newspapers—when not a week goes by without one company or another laying off hundreds or even thousands of employees.

    But bad times for some companies mean good times for others with the financial means to fill vacancies with well-qualified candidates or pick up top talent that may not have been available even a few months ago, according to recruiters, executive headhunters and corporate executives who are experiencing the phenomena firsthand.

    The exodus of high-level professionals, managers and salespeople from industries hard hit by the economic downturn is proving to be a boon for companies in industries or geographic areas that haven’t been affected—at least not at the same level, the industry watchers say.

    Consultant Brad Smart, who helps Fortune 500 executives “topgrade” their workforces through an elaborate screening process to find the best talent, says in the early days of November he was inundated with résumés from people who in September wouldn’t have considered switching jobs. The Wall Street meltdown changed that, says Smart, with Smart & Associates Inc. in Wadsworth, Illinois.

    Not only are there more candidates to choose from, but the larger talent pool also increases the likelihood that companies will find someone with the exact skills and experience level they’re seeking. On top of that, companies won’t have to offer the hefty signing bonuses and other extras they would have needed a year or two ago, Smart says.

    “Base pay will stay the same, but because it’s likely that a bonus in 2008 isn’t going to be nearly what it was in 2007, you’re getting that talent a whole lot cheaper,” he says.

    When the market comes back, so will bonuses, Smart says.

    “So don’t think of it as saving bucks. Think of it as getting better talent,” he says.

    High energy prices during the past year meant oil and gas companies had funds for new projects and were snapping up engineers and project managers to work on them, making it difficult for companies needing the same types of workers to fill their own openings, says Jim Cahill, marketing manager at Emerson Process Management.

    The $4 billion Austin, Texas, industrial automation manufacturer with 37,000 employees found that as energy prices drop, oil and gas companies aren’t hiring as much, so it takes less time to fill open positions, Cahill says. Next year, though, there could be fewer openings, he adds.

    “Like most manufacturers, we see a lot of economic uncertainty in the months ahead, which may have an impact on hiring.”

    Because Emerson makes automated controls for a variety of industries, from energy to pharmaceuticals to biotechnology, the company has ridden out a number of economic slumps over the years, giving it a strong financial track record, including decades of increasing dividends. That’s not lost on job applicants or employees.

    “When times are more uncertain, it becomes a strength,” Cahill says. Employees “may be less inclined to jump to a dot-com or startup.”

    Despite an average overall U.S. unemployment rate of 6.5 percent this fall, demand for well-educated professionals is still high, say Brad Baiocchi, CEO at Global Recruiting Network, a Downers Grove, Illinois, executive placement firm with 180 franchise locations. As of October, the unemployment rate for workers with a college degree or higher was 3 percent, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

    “So 97 percent of people with B.A.’s are employed. That’s a tight marketplace. There’s still demand,” Baiocchi says.

    For industries such as investment banking and real estate, though, 2008 was a “car accident,” a traumatic career displacement event that could change their work life forever, Baiocchi says. The lucky ones—people with the most education and experience—will find similar jobs in a different industry. People without as much experience or a degree are the most likely to have a hard time finding comparable work at comparable pay and may have to settle for less, Baiocchi says.

    However, companies that think they can pick up talent at a discount when times are bad can hurt themselves in the long run, cautions Debbie Zurow, professional services director at Boly Welch Recruiting, a 26-person Portland, Oregon, firm that places executives in accounting, IT, legal and HR positions in some of the biggest companies in the state. When companies hire skilled talent at less than fair-market rates, “They risk low morale and attrition—all much more costly to an organization than the few dollars saved,” Zurow says.

    Ultimately, it’s a corporate culture issue, Zurow says. Companies that would eagerly hire someone for $20,000 under what they’d normally make as a quick fix regardless of the effect on morale or their corporate culture “aren’t typically the ones getting the ethics awards,” she says.

    According to Zurow, demand for professionals in accounting and finance is still strong, especially in the Pacific Northwest. The real benefit of today’s job market isn’t picking up talent on the cheap; it’s being able to shop for the right fit.

    “Employers can make sure [candidates] have the credentials or the Rolodex they can bring into the company. They can take their time to find someone they couldn’t find” before, she says.

    Even if a company isn’t in the best shape financially, it doesn’t make sense to shut down hiring altogether, Smart says.

    “Even if there’s a hiring freeze, if there are key jobs that a company has been unsuccessful getting talent for, they should go ahead” with a search, Smart says. “That’s where the CEO and head of HR come into play—to make those decisions.”

    Continuing to find enough good talent is going to be corporate America’s biggest challenge in the next 20 years, Baiocchi says. Of those firms not constantly interviewing, attracting and retaining the best people—even during a recession—”You’ll always be No. 2,” he says.

When times are good and sales are rolling in, it’s easy to ignore top performers’ spending habits, even when they exceed a company’s travel and expense policies. After all, it takes money to make money, right?

    But when times get tough and sales dry up, companies rein in their rainmakers. During the latest economic downturn, some have beat the higher costs of doing business by asking sales reps set up online meetings instead of flying to see clients in person.

    Other companies are opting to keep their road warriors on the road, but are making them stick to stated travel and entertainment expense policies. More are using Web-based software to make sure they do, says Christa Degnan Manning, an analyst with Boston-based AMR Research, a technology market researcher.

    Besides curbing spending, T&E software lets a company match what’s being spent with what’s coming in, data they can use to determine what’s working and what isn’t.

    “So if you have only so much in a travel budget because of the economy, you can decide where to use it versus using alternatives” like online meetings, Manning says.

    Traditional ERP vendors such as Oracle and SAP offer T&E modules. But more companies are opting to use online, subscription-based software from companies such as Infor, Concur and Workday, Manning says.

    Infor offers T&E modules for pre-trip authorizations, expense reports, payment requests and time sheets. Financial services company Raymond James reduced its reporting and reimbursement cycle by half using Infor’s T&E service, according to an Infor report. At pharmaceutical maker AstraZeneca, another Infor customer, the number of outstanding expense reports more than 45 days old dropped from 7,977 to 1,000 after the company started using Infor’s T&E service.

    The more companies watch their travel expenses, the more Web-based T&E software vendors have profited. Concur, a publicly traded Seattle company, saw revenue in the quarter ended June 30 jump 65 percent, to $54.9 million, on a big bump in T&E software subscriptions, the company reports. In July, American Express paid $251 million for a 13 percent stake in the company. Concur will use the money to expand its current base of 7,000 customers, according to a release issued at the time of the investment.

    The latest version of Workday’s Web-based ERP suite represents a breakthrough of sorts because unlike stand-alone programs, its T&E software is integrated into the rest of its offerings. “There are huge benefits of having all of that with just one user interface and one system,” Manning says.

The public-private partnerships that helped speed up wind energy technician training are being adopted by other Pacific Northwest sustainable energy companies, most notably by solar panel manufacturers moving into the area.

SolarWorld, a leading German manufacturer of solar panels, recently teamed with Portland Community College in Oregon to train technicians who will work at a fabrication plant the company is renovating in the Portland suburb of Hillsboro. SolarWorld expects to have 350 employees working at the plant by the end of 2008, and 2,000 when it’s 100 percent up and running by 2011 or 2012. Of those, 1,600 will be production or maintenance technicians, says Jim Talty, a SolarWorld HR training coordinator.

To make sure SolarWorld gets the technicians it needs, the company is working with Portland Community College’s nearby Rock Creek campus on a two-year solar voltaic manufacturing training program that starts this fall. A third of the 75 spots are already taken, says Dorina Cornea, microelectronics and solar technology department chair at PCC Rock Creek. This summer, the college also started offering an eight-week fast-track certification course that attracted 24 students. Upon finishing the course, these students can expect to start earning $14 to $16 an hour, Cornea says.

SolarWorld doesn’t guarantee jobs for graduates; the chances are good, “but they have to go through the interview process like everyone else,” Talty says.

Although SolarWorld’s new facility is located in the heart of Portland’s Silicon Forest high-tech corridor, home to Intel and other semiconductor manufacturing companies, the company has had little trouble attracting recruits.

Renewable energy is the new kid on the block, and people in the energy-conscious Pacific Northwest are jumping at the chance to work for a green business, Talty says. Add a competitive compensation package that includes up to four weeks of vacation and employee discounts on solar panels, and it’s no wonder SolarWorld has already collected 4,000 résumés. “They’re lined up around the block” for all kinds of positions, Talty says.

The disappearance of jobs because of the poor economy is cutting into some U.S. companies’ recruitment process outsourcing endeavors, but the damage isn’t across the board and plenty of bright spots remain, according to employers and RPO vendors.

    While some companies with existing RPO contracts have trimmed hiring from expected levels for the rest of 2008, those de­fi­cits are being made up for by companies in industries that remain unaffected by hard times.

    The economy has not dampened recruiting efforts at Astra­Zeneca or its contract with RPO vendor the RightThing, which the Wilmington, Delaware, pharmaceutical manufacturer initially used to bump up its sales force by 800 representatives last year.

    Things are going so well that AstraZeneca expanded its initial contract with the RightThing to cover business-as-usual hiring in sales as well as sourcing for non-sales positions at the director level and below, according to Bill Warner, the company’s U.S. sales recruitment manager.

    Economic woes aren’t affecting pharmaceuticals and other growth industries, or industries such as retail that have high turnover and need to fill jobs no matter what, says Rebecca Callahan, RPO senior vice president at Spherion, an RPO industry leader. “They’ll look at outsourcing because it’s a more cost-effective way to do it,” she says.

    By contrast, RPO contracts in certain fuel-dependent industries, such as the airline business or tourism, have been hit hard, Callahan says. Because rising fuel costs have hurt their business, “Companies that thought they needed to hire 100 people now need zero, but five months from now they may need 500,” Callahan says. Shifting recruiting work to an outside vendor is one way to smooth out those drastic swings, she says.

    At Aon, an HR outsourcer that provides RPO as part of an overall HR outsourcing package, current clients are forecasting decreases in hiring activity, says Pat Tomlinson, the company’s RPO division practice director. But there’s no corresponding decrease in the level of interest that potential clients are showing in RPO, Tomlinson says.

    That’s especially the case for companies looking to fill jobs for IT, engineering and senior-level sales professionals. The U.S. unemployment rate is holding steady at 2 percent to 2.5 percent for such jobs, says Chris Kilpatrick, vice president at CDI Talent Management, a recruiting and RPO specialist and sometime partner of Northgate/ Arinso, a global HR outsourcing specialist. Companies “are looking for an RPO partner who can go out and find those people globally because the demand is so high,” Kilpatrick says.

    Any contraction in the U.S. job market is being countered by growth elsewhere, Kilpatrick adds. “Customers are pointing us internationally to the Asia Pacific region, where their growth is very robust,” he says.

    For every potential customer that’s holding off on possible RPO projects because they’ve stopped hiring, there’s another that’s ready to sign on because they’re restructuring or moving quickly into a new low-cost product area and need to staff up quickly, says Johnny Ramondino, Northgate/Arinso’s senior director of business development. RPO “is starting to prove recession-proof,” Ramondino says.

    For HR departments, RPO is a good way to weather an economic downturn, because instead of making recruiting a fixed cost, employers can pay as they go, says Lisa Rowan, HR and talent management services program director at market researcher IDC. “You have hedged your bets a little,” she says.

Workforce Management, July 14, 2008, p. 44 — Subscribe Now!

Access Development is a prime example of why business coaching is booming.

    Over a recent 18-month period, Access Development’s affinity marketing business grew so quickly that the Salt Lake City company tripled its workforce, to about 150. But many new hires were young, and many of the company’s two dozen managers didn’t have much—if any—experience overseeing other people, according to Access COO Jim Elliott. On top of that, executives were frustrated because managers weren’t putting into action skills they’d been taught in two extensive leadership training courses the company put them through.

    So Elliott and Access’ president and CEO put their heads together and came up with a plan: use a business coach to help train managers be better at their jobs.

    It’s now nine months into Access’ coaching experiment, and so far, so good. “It’s one of the best decisions we’ve ever made as a company,” Elliott says. “I wouldn’t go back.”

    Although Access is relatively small, the company is dealing with the same problems facing companies of all sizes—how to make poor managers better, OK managers good and good ones great.

    Like Access, more companies are turning to business coaches to make that happen.

    That’s just one of the findings in a major study of business coaching published in June by the American Management Association in conjunction with the Institute for Corporate Productivity, an HR industry researcher.

    For the study, the AMA and i4CP surveyed CEOs, HR managers and other corporate executives at 1,030 U.S. and international companies across multiple industries. Approximately 41 percent of the participants had 1,000 or more employees, and about 42 percent reported annual revenue of $500 million or more.

    Among other major findings:

• Business coaching is more popular than ever, boosted by companies struggling to develop a new generation of leaders to replace retiring baby boomers, and due to a proliferation of business coaches and coaching training programs. Of U.S. companies surveyed, 52 percent said they had business coaching programs in place, and another 37 percent said they would be implementing coaching programs in the future.

  
  

• Companies use coaches to work with executives, high-potential employees, problem managers and expatriates headed to overseas assignments.

  
  

• Companies that use formal metrics to measure performance of coaching programs are most likely to report that those endeavors are successful.

  
  

   Once the results were in, the extent to which companies are using business coaches surprised even Ed Reilly, AMA’s president and CEO.

   According to Reilly, AMA’s executive management decided the time was right for a formal survey of coaching after noticing a surge in interest in books and seminar registrations on the subject.

    Reilly says that prior to the survey, he didn’t realize how the coaching field had evolved over the past five to seven years to become an investment in star performers. “When you stop and reflect on it, it makes sense,” he says.

    The impending talent shortage is also driving more companies to use coaches, Reilly says. “For competitive purposes, everybody inside your company needs to be honed and capable,” he says.

    Another factor motivating companies to use business coaches is that it works. According to the AMA survey, companies that use business coaching report performing well on such measures as revenue growth, market share, profitability and customer satisfaction. Individuals who had received coaching were more likely to set work-related goals and to say subordinates trusted their leadership abilities, according to the survey. The study’s findings are echoed by business coaches and executives at businesses with established coaching programs.

    “A lot of my work is on strategy and business challenges and getting companies and executives to the next level” rather than remedial coaching, says Dianne Landau, a former Fortune 500 executive who runs a five-person business coaching business.

    With demand for coaching so high, it’s a good time to be a business coach. More companies are hiring outside coaches and paying top dollar for the expertise. While coaches in business a year or less can expect annual income of around $50,000, coaches with five or more years of experience earn an average of $149,000, according to a 2008 coaching salary survey by Sherpa Coaching, a Cincinnati coaching training company. Other companies choose to train in-house coaches, although according to the AMA survey, they appear not to be as effective as outside coaches.

    Whether a company uses an inside or outside coach, it’s important to vet business coaching candidates thoroughly before engaging one, and have clear goals in mind before pairing coaches with executives, experts say. It’s also important to develop goals or measurements to determine how well coaching works, they say.

Hiring a business coach
    Although “coach” and “consultant” are sometimes used synonymously, there’s a big difference. A consultant is hired to work on a specific project or area where a company might not have expertise, while a coach acts as a trusted advisor to one or more individuals, according to Landau, with Landau & Associates in Malibu, California.

    “The coach becomes a cheerleader, sounding board, someone with whom the manager can brainstorm,” Landau says. “The executive knows what they need to be successful; they just don’t know how to get there.” A coach’s job is to help them get there, she says.

    While different coaches have different techniques, many follow a multi-step plan similar to the one Landau uses. In it, she assesses an individual’s situation or goals, works with them to determine what behaviors are needed to change the situation or reach the goals, charts changes, follows up and provides post-coaching assessments.

    “Sometimes it’s so successful a company wants to do it with a whole team,” she says.

    In other situations, coaches like Landau are called in as part of a larger divisional or corporate strategy initiative, where a coach will provide top-level managers with leadership training to help them reach their stated objectives. “If they want someone to schmooze with, I’m not the right person,” Landau says. “I’m constantly asking, ‘What are you committed to? What are the obstacles? What are the next steps?’ Coaching is about asking important, relevant questions and then guiding them through the process” of answering them.

    At forward-thinking companies, HR executives who are involved in influencing human capital management development are the ones recommending that executives or rising stars work with a business coach, AMA’s Reilly says.

    Companies looking for business coaches are bombarded by choices. In 2007, the International Coach Federation, a coaching industry trade group, estimated the number of U.S. business coaches at 30,000.

    To find a good match, companies should consider a coach’s specialty, background, experience, current client roster and coaching style, coaching industry experts say.

    Certification or accreditation is another consideration. As more coaches pour into the field, many go through years-long accreditation programs through the International Coach Federation or other groups that require several thousand hours of training to earn a coaching accreditation. Other coaches attend shorter workshops focused on a particular aspect of coaching.

    In the long run, though, the most important criterion is a good fit between the coach and the person being coached. Interviewing coaching prospects is the best way to find that out, say Landau and other coaching experts.

    Companies that use business coaches most successfully develop specific performance goals, financial measurements or other tools to determine what they want the end result of their coaching program to be, according to the AMA survey as well as coaching experts.

    For example, Landau is currently working with an engineering company with multiple divisions. The CEO of one division has been promoted to a job where he’ll oversee several divisions and Landau is coaching him and his successor. The company has chosen to gauge the success of the coaching engagement by tracking how much more revenue the CEO can generate from the divisions he’ll be overseeing compared with what’s coming in now, Landau says. To do that, she’ll help spell out where the company is failing to meet goals and objectives “and coach around those priorities,” she says.

    When it comes to measuring how successful coaching is, “there’s no smoking-gun metric,” AMA’s Reilly says. But it is important for companies to develop results-oriented criteria, such as business results or number of promotions, and then stick to them. Plus, “There’s no substitute for asking people who’ve spent time with coaches their opinion” of how it went, Reilly says.

Making coaching an inside job
    While companies that hire outside coaches appear to have the greatest success, according to the AMA survey, some businesses opt to keep their efforts in house.

    Access Development is one of them. It’s the Access way to promote from within, so when executives decided to start a coaching program, it was a given that the company would use an insider. “I needed someone who understood our business and would be here to ensure the follow-through,” says Elliott, the company’s COO.

    The job fell to Travis Isaacson, who had been Access’ partnership marketing director before he was tapped to become its senior director of organizational development, aka head coach.

    As a coach, Isaacson holds individual monthly meetings with all Access Development managers with at least one direct report, or about 25 people. To some managers he teaches people skills. Others need sales training.

    “Most of the time it’s pretty simple coaching stuff,” he says. “For some issues they come back to my office three or four times. Other times it’s a one-off solution.”

    Isaacson is also responsible for helping managers implement what they learned in two leadership training courses: Smart & Associates’ topgrading program for cultivating “A” players, and Stephen Covey’s Four Disciplines of Execution, a technique for setting and meeting business goals.

    Because scorecards and other metrics are built into Covey’s program, it’s easy to measure how well coaching is going, Elliott says.

    One metric they’re shooting for is to reach the 90 percent “A” player level that topgrading founder Brad Smart of Smart & Associates recommends for companies to be successful. “We haven’t gotten there yet,” Elliott says, “but when we started we were 45 percent. Our goal for this year is 75 percent, and right now we’re ahead of that.”

    Elliott wouldn’t say what Access Development’s coaching budget is, except that it covers Isaacson’s salary plus expenses to cover related research, incentives and seminars. “Our expectations are that he’ll pay for himself multiple times over when all is said and done,” Elliott says.

Here’s a list of books on coaching recommended by experienced executive coaches and officials from coach training organizations, including International Coach Federation president Diane Brennan:

    Adaptive Coaching: The Art and Practice of a Client-Centered Approach to Performance Improvement, by Terry R. Bacon and Karen I. Spear, both with Lore Research Institute, a professional development firm (Davies-Black, 2003).

    A Manager’s Guide to Coaching: Simple and Effective Ways to Get the Best From Your Employees, by certified executive coaches Brian Emerson and Anne Loehr and published by the American Management Association’s book division (AMACOM, March 2008).

    Becoming a Resonant Leader: Develop Your Emotional Intelligence, Renew Your Relationships, Sustain Your Effectiveness, by Case Western Reserve organizational behavior professor Richard Boyatzis and Annie McKee, longtime Fortune 500 executive coach and co-founder of the Teleos Leadership Institute (Harvard Business School Press, March 2008).

    Evidence Based Coaching Handbook: Putting Best Practices to Work for Your Clients, a coaching textbook edited by Dianne R. Stober and Anthony M. Grant (Wiley, 2006).

    Executive Coaching with Backbone and Heart: A Systems Approach to Engaging Leaders with Their Challenges, by executive coach and author Mary Beth O’Neill (2nd edition, Jossey-Bass, 2007).

    The Philosophy and Practice of Coaching: Insights and Issues for a New Era, coaching textbook edited by David B. Drake, Diane Brennan and Kim Gørtz (Jossey-Bass, 2008).

    What Got You Here Won’t Get You There: How Successful People Become Even More Successful, by Marshall Goldsmith, longtime executive coach to the corporate elite and Dartmouth MBA school professor. Co-written with Mark Reiter. (Hyperion, 2007).

When Dianne Landau started traveling to Asia for work years ago, her then-employer gave her a valuable gift: sessions with an executive coach to help overcome the obstacles she was bound to face as a high-level manager and woman doing business in that part of the world.

“It was one of the most wonderful growth experiences I ever had,” recalls Landau, who left a 20-year corporate career to become an executive coach in 2002.

Experiences like Landau’s are not unusual. In fact, according to a 2008 coaching survey by the American Management Association and the Institute for Corporate Productivity, companies that provide business or cultural coaching for expatriates report a significant correlation between it and overall business success, as measured by things such as revenue growth and market share.

Even so, the number of companies that offer coaching to expats is surprisingly low: only 7 percent, compared to 60 percent who offer it to high-potential employees, 42 percent to executives and 37 percent to problem employees, according to the AMA survey.

Coaching makes expats more successful in their overseas assignments because it heightens their awareness of cultural differences before they step foot on foreign soil. “They become sensitized to things that they might not otherwise be aware of,” says Ed Reilly, AMA’s president and CEO.

Expat coaching is a wise investment for reasons other than helping executives quickly get their cultural bearings, Reilly says. Corporations have already poured a lot of resources into the caliber of upper-level managers who get sent overseas, and they want those executives to do well—not just personally, but for the company. So it stands to reason that a company would do whatever it took to make sure that happened, including coaching, Reilly says.

“The logic of investing in their performance is cost compelling,” he says.

Landau, who now heads a five-person executive coaching firm in Malibu, California, agrees that the coaching she got before starting to travel to places like Singapore and Hong Kong as a senior executive for Seagram gave her the leap “I had to make to become effective at a high level internationally.”

Companies that don’t offer any expat coaching risk “the possibility of some catastrophic mistakes and failures that could affect someone’s career and performance for a long time,” AMA’s Reilly adds.

Innovative expat programs offered by pharmaceutical and other companies include coaching for spouses and kids as well as the employee, according to the 2008 edition of a global relocation trends survey published annually by GMAC Global Relocation Services. It’s in companies’ best interest to include spouses in coaching, as family-related issues are cited as the most common reason expats quit an overseas assignment early, according to the 2008 GMAC report.

Companies that want to start an expat coaching program can check with the International Coach Federation, a coaching trade group, which runs an expatriate coaching special interest group. Relocation service providers are another source of coaching and counseling for expatriates and their families. Worldwide ERC, a trade group, provides a search engine that identifies member organizations that specialize in such coaching and counseling. Other options are a Google search, which will turn up listings for executive coaching firms that offer specific expat programs, and expat coaching blogs.

Sharing a job used to be the fast track to the mommy track.

    In days gone by, the only people interested in splitting a job were female employees who wanted it all, or at least a little of both—a job and time at home.

    The vast majority of employees who share jobs still fit the traditional description, according to HR managers, experts and other sources. But the picture is changing and more companies are discovering that job sharing is an attractive option for hanging on to other valuable employees, whether they’re older workers phasing into retirement, Gen Y employees who don’t want to work so hard, or disabled workers who can’t meet the demands of a full-time position.

    Job sharing is a standard, if small, part of many companies’ flexible-work initiatives. Eighteen percent of 525 U.S. companies surveyed by the Society for Human Resource Management in 2007 had job-sharing programs and another 2 percent expected to add them soon. An even larger percentage of companies recognized as good places to work offer job sharing. The Great Place to Work Institute found that 63 of 100 on the 2008 list of the “Best Companies to Work For,” which it produces with Fortune, offered job sharing, according to Amy Lyman, corporate research director at the San Francisco nonprofit management consulting and research firm.

    Those organizations don’t distinguish between traditional and nontraditional job sharing. But it only takes a little digging to uncover some examples of the new wave:

• Timberland, the Stratham, New Hampshire, maker of outdoor footwear and apparel, has two 30-something male attorneys sharing one legal department job.
• AstraZeneca U.S., the Wilmington, Delaware, pharmaceutical manufacturer, has a 60-year-old male employee sharing an HR department job as a way of phasing out of full-time employment before he retires.
• A California executive recruiter filled a CFO position at a manufacturing company in 2007 by splitting the job between two women with complementary skills: an experienced CPA and a younger MBA with merger and acquisition experience.

    Such nontraditional job shares are still rare, however.

   The HR department employee at AstraZeneca, for example, is one of 200 employees in 100 current job shares at the global pharmaceutical company’s $13.35 billion U.S. subsidiary, which has 12,200 employees. The rest are women field sales reps or pharmaceutical sales specialists who want only part-time work because they’ve got young kids at home, says Andrea Moselle, senior manager of AstraZeneca’s work/life program.

    AstraZeneca began promoting job sharing as part of a comprehensive flexible work program in 2000. Since then, Moselle says she has seen a smattering of nontraditional job shares. A few male employees have shared a job as a way of taking an extended paternity leave. Other employees have requested job shares at the end of their careers or because they needed part-time hours to take care of elderly family members, Moselle says.

    Some field sales reps have shared a job for five or six years. But generally speaking, a job shares don’t last for a long period of time, Moselle says. It can be tricky for two people to cover meetings, interact with supervisors and juggle the other aspects of job sharing indefinitely. “People do them for a period in their lives and move on,” she says.

    That’s what happened when Kelly Watson, an executive recruiter and owner of Career Partners in El Segundo, California, filled the manufacturing company CFO slot in fall 2007 with a pair of finance executives with complementary job skills. “The CPA was older,” Watson says. “Her kids were in college and she brought a lot of maturity and perspective to the team. The MBA had two small children and was fresh and energized, just unwilling to work 80 hours a week anymore.”

    But the company they went to work for was in financial distress, so the team only worked together for a few months, Watson says. “They were pretty excited about how it was going at the time.”

Job-share hall of famers
    If there were a job-sharing hall of fame, Rebecca Hinkle and Karen Boda would be in it. For 14½ years, Hinkle and Boda shared a series of customer-service management jobs at Hewlett-Packard before leaving the technology giant in 2006.

    Over the years, they shared jobs through multiple promotions, bosses, corporate mergers and the birth of five children—three for Boda, two for Hinkle. For a majority of the time they worked in different states. In their last position, they managed an HP business customer support organization of several hundred employees in 24 countries.

    After they left HP, the women started Twinstar Consulting in Atlanta to help companies set up virtual teams and other flexible work programs in order to do a better job hanging on to valued employees.

    In their current position, Hinkle and Boda say they’re seeing more companies offering nontraditional job shares, including jobs shared by Gen Y-age employees who refuse to put in the 70-hour workweeks their baby-boomer parents did. “It’s still rare,” Boda concedes. “You might see this more in lucrative fields like accounting, law and management consulting where you can make plenty of money working just 30 or 35 hours a week.”

    That looks to be the case at Timberland, where two male attorneys in their 30s were interested in sharing a single job for work/life balance, says Cara Vanderbeck, a spokeswoman for the $1.4 billion company. This particular job share calls for both attorneys to work three days a week with one overlapping day “so the position is seamless,” Vanderbeck says.

    From a purely legal point of view, job sharing gives employers an avenue for complying with the Americans With Disabilities Act and similar state laws protecting the rights of disabled workers, according to Helene Wasserman, a partner with Ford & Harrison in Los Angeles who advises corporations on employment issues. Companies could comply with the laws by offering job sharing to workers who incur a disability while they’re employed, or to job candidate whose disabilities would prevent them from working full time.

    Job sharing is also a way to accommodate an employee who wants to take time off under the Family and Medical Leave Act, Wasserman says.

    Plus, considering the dramatically low unemployment rates in some highly sought after professions, job sharing is a way for companies to creatively fill vacancies, she says. (View a video podcast hosted by Wasserman on next-generation job sharing.)

Job-share basics
    Regardless of the employees involved, most companies with job-sharing programs have a standard application process, says Lyman, with the Great Place to Work Institute. Generally, that process boils down to a written proposal spelling out conditions, such as overlap time. Proposals also address what changes—if any—a shared position will bring to the participants’ benefits and career development, Lyman says.

Some companies have adopted the job-sharing mentality without taking the next step of setting up true job shares. The Aerospace Corp., a government-funded space agency in El Segundo, has a long-standing practice of pairing entry-level employees fresh out of college with older employees who can share their collected knowledge.

At a company where half the employees are over 50, it’s important to mentor new workers, says David Jonta, an Aerospace Corp. spokesman. “This company represents the institutional memory of the military space program,” Jonta says. “Knowing what has gone before, that has a lot to do with what the future’s going to look like.”

If companies aren’t thinking about job sharing as an option for older workers, they should know that their employees are. And some are hiring consultants to map out strategies for using job sharing to phase into retirement.

    One such consultant is Pat Katepoo, who runs Kaneohe, Hawaii-based WorkOptions.com. Katepoo works with individuals, many of them baby boomers, who want advice on how to negotiate flexible work arrangements. Katepoo sells a flexible-work request template that she encourages people to tailor to their own situations and use to pitch job sharing to their management or HR department.

    In January, Katepoo started a Web site for baby boomers called Time Off Tactics that includes, among other things, suggestions for starting a job share with a younger worker as a way to get more free time.

Rebecca Hinkle and Karen Boda shared a job at Hewlett-Packard for more than 14 years, through multiple responsibilities, managers, promotions and physical locations, as well as five pregnancies and maternity leaves.

Over time they learned a lot about what makes job sharing successful, information they now use to teach Fortune 500 clients of Twinstar, the Atlanta consulting firm they started after leaving HP two years ago. The partners counsel companies to consider the following when deciding whether two employees would be a good job-sharing match:

Communication skills: Employees’ written and verbal communication skills need to be excellent “to keep the job share invisible to the outside world,” Boda says, but also so one person can update the other about what happened while they were off.

Organization: Being organized and planning ahead are critical when you’re splitting duties. The same goes for flexibility, Boda says. Partners have to accept that the other person may have a different way of doing something, and buy into the notion that because of it, the whole can be more than the sum of its parts, she says.

Work ethic: Job-sharing partners need a similar sense of commitment to the job. Are they both willing to take calls on days when they’re technically “off”? Would they both put in extra work? “You do have to match people who have the same styles. That’s as important as the actual qualifications,” Hinkle says.

Trust: Partners have to believe that the other person can do the job as well as they can, so much so that they’re willing to let their career depend on it, Boda says. If the partner on duty makes a mistake, they have to agree never to discuss it with anyone else until they have a chance to talk it over “behind closed doors,” Hinkle says.

Compatibility: Hinkle and Boda lasted in their shared job as long as they did because they had common career goals: to continue advancing but only work part time, and to take jobs that interested both of them. Sometimes managers suggested a promotion and sometimes they sought one out. Whenever anything came up, “We spent a good deal of time talking about it,” Boda says. “We weren’t so like-minded that the job was obvious. It was … a lot of negotiation.” In fact, it took two years of negotiating between themselves before they decided to quit and start their consulting firm.

They say change breeds opportunity. For a good example, consider the opportunities brought on by a change in the federal government form that companies must fill out when they hire a new employee.

    As of December 2007, all U.S. companies have to use an updated version of the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services Employment Eligibility Verification Form I-9 to prove a new employee is in the country legally and eligible to work.

    Along with other changes, the revised form can now be completed and stored electronically—and that’s where the opportunity kicks in.

    Since the beginning of 2008, at least eight vendors have begun selling Web-based paperless I-9 compliance services, which they maintain can help companies fill out and store the forms more accurately, efficiently and safely than they could by themselves.

    In addition to helping with I-9 forms, some of the vendors can also submit information to the government on behalf of customers participating in E-Verify, a separate voluntary federal program that allows companies to instantly match new employees’ documentation against databases at the Social Security Administration and Department of Homeland Security to confirm they’re cleared to work. Some states, notably Arizona, also have made the use of E-Verify mandatory for some employers.

    In the short time Web-based I-9 compliance services have been out, vendors claim to have signed up companies of all sizes in all types of industries. An estimated 56,000 U.S. companies have signed up for E-Verify. Another 1,000 are joining each week, according to Citizenship and Immigration Services, which is part of the Department of Homeland Security,

    Vendors that are marketing I-9 compliance software include established background checking and hiring management firms such as Kroll, Acxiom Information Security Services, Accurate Background and First Advantage. They also include a smattering of startups, including Form I-9 Compliance, I9Advantage, Verified Person and Verify I-9.

    There’s so much competition that vendors are reluctant to share details about customers they’ve signed or what they charge. However, industry sources say standard rates run $5 to $10 a form, though volume discounts are common.

    Most I-9 compliance software is sold as a Web-based application, so a company doesn’t install anything on its own computer servers, but just logs on to a Web site to fill out forms and access stored information. Vendors keep records on servers at their own data centers, using multiple layers of encryption and security technology so clients’ data isn’t hacked into or stolen.

    Getting paperwork finished quickly and accurately and storing it safely are important because Citizenship and Immigration Services gives companies three days from an employee’s hire date to complete an I-9 form and requires them to store records for three years after someone is hired or a year after they leave, whichever is longer.

    Fines for companies that fail government employment eligibility audits are steep—up to $1,000 per form.

    That’s the main reason a company should use an outside party: If an issue comes up, someone else handles it, says Dave Dickerson, president of Accurate Background in Lake Forest, California. “In an extreme case, there could be 57 steps involved,” including checking documents with the multiple federal agencies, Dickerson says. “The employer doesn’t want to become an I-9 specialist. It’s easier to outsource it.”

    Another selling point: Some software can be integrated into a company’s HR software. To differentiate themselves from competitors, some vendors paired up with partner companies that Citizenship and Immigration Services has approved as E-Verify designated agents.

    Kroll does both. The background check company’s I-9 service can be integrated into a client’s applicant tracking or HR IT systems. Kroll also partnered with Form I-9 Compliance, a Newport Beach, California-based startup and E-Verify designated agent, to offer E-Verify services. Barry Nadell, a senior vice president with Kroll’s background screening division, won’t disclose how many clients the company has signed, though they range in size from very small to several hundred thousand employees, he says.

    More often than not, Kroll’s contact is a client’s HR manager, though at larger companies the general counsel’s office gets involved too, Nadell says.

    The service can help large companies that previously had to depend on branch office employees to get I-9 forms filled out for new hires, says Chas Patterson, a Form I-9 Compliance vice president. “You have people at a store whose job is retail, not HR,” Patterson says. “This application makes it so you don’t have to be an expert. It removes the worry.”

    Sales pitches aside, it is possible for even large companies to handle I-9 forms on their own, says Grace Hoppin, an immigration attorney with Jackson-Hertogs in San Francisco. In early April, Hoppin helped with an I-9 compliance training workshop at a client with more than 5,000 employees, “and they still do paper copies,” she says.

    Also, it might not make sense to invest in I-9 software if the federal government changes employment verification requirements again, a distinct possibility in light of pending immigration reform bills, Hoppin says.

    Some of those bills call for electronic verification of all employees, not just new hires, and different forms of electronic verification have been proposed, Hoppin says.

    In the end, a company’s main concern should be doing everything possible to check out potential employees, especially if companies are in food service, construction, manufacturing or other industries that have had chronic issues with unauthorized workers, Hoppin says.

    In those cases, companies need to have rigorous processes to show they’re complying with the law. If that means using an outside service, “that could be a really convenient tool to show they’re doing everything they can, that they’re checking people out,” she says.