Author: Paul Temple

Life gets distilled to its essence every day for human resource practitioners, and it can be a pressurized mix of the best and worst in people bottled up with an ill-fitting cork.

At least that’s what our Day in the Life of HR survey suggests. On the pages that follow you’ll find much of the human drama played out in all its anguish, nobility, stupidity, and intelligence. The statistical results indicate a profession on the bubble: a tight labor market has pushed recruitment and retention to the top of most corporate agendas, and HR is expected to deliver answers while tending to the nagging chores that must be managed with fewer resources.

The best HR will deliver on these challenges and help shape corporate culture so employees want to stay and recruits line up at the door. But there are plenty of ladders to climb from the engine room to the bridge of the corporate juggernaut our numbers show, and judging by anecdotal testimony, there are plenty of skippers whose eyes aren’t always focused on the horizon. You’ll also get a real-world glimpse of the daily lives of five HR executives in settings that range from the Colorado penal system to Harvard University, Eastman Kodak, the city of Vancouver, British Columbia, and television broadcaster CBS.

Woven throughout this special section are the transcripts of your collective visit to the HR confessional. Here you gave voice to those tales from the trenches that defy metrics or reason. It’s just another day at the office.

Few HR professionals have ever had the need to fiddle with HTML coding for a Web site, so it’s unlikely that they will need to know any more about XML than what itmeans and why it will soon be making their lives easier.

XML is theacronyn for eXtensible Markup Language. A markup language like HTML defines thelook and feel of a document in a reader or browser. XML is a method for puttingstructured data in a text file. Structured data includes such things asspreadsheets, address books, technical drawings, or of more interest to HRusers, résumés. One of XML’s main reasons for being is to allow the exchange ofinformation between different, and potentially incompatible, systems connectedto the Internet. Documents coded with XML will be much easier to transmit andsort than HTML or text files.

The payoff forHR will be significant. Resumes will be much easier to collect and sort in XML,and financial data will be easier to transmit and analyze. Expect to see a moveto XML within the next six months to one year.

About a NewGroup: The HR-XML Consoutium.

The consortium(www.hr-xml.org) is open to all interested parties, but membership is targetedto:
Software Vendors. For example, vendors providing HRIS, staffing andrecruiting, or workforce planning software solutions.
Employers. Particularly large, multinational employers seeking torationalize workforce management processes.
HR Service Suppliers. For example, providers of recruiting, payroll,benefits consulting, and temporary staffing services.
XML Tool Vendors/Technology Companies. Vendors of XML editors, servers,and data management tools Non-Profit HR-Related Associations. SHRM, IHRIM, EMA,and other HR-industry groups.
Human resource professionals. Human resources and recruiting andstaffing professionals, compensation and benefits administrators, and HRISadministrators.

The HR-XMLConsortium has developed three provisional schemas. The schemas are verypreliminary and are intended to generate discussion. They do not represent a consensusamong Consortium members.
A distribution file for each schema is available for download. The distributionfiles contain Document Type Definitions (DTDs) as well as MicrosoftBizTalk-compatible schemas. Following are the schema:
JobPosting. The JobPosting schema is intended for use in structuringexchanges of information about job openings. Documents conforming to JobPostingcan be more freely and more predictably exchanged among and between employers,recruiters, career web sites, and workforce staffing solution providers than ifproprietary protocols were used. A JobPosting document contains contactinformation for the hiring organization and information about the job opening,including a job title, a job description, and information on how to apply.
CandidateProfile. CandidateProfile is intended for use in structuringexchanges of information about job candidates. Because documents conforming toCandidateProfile explicitly identify job candidates’ personal data, employers,recruiters, and job sites would be able to apply standardized measures tosecure the privacy of job candidates. While similar to resumes,CandidateProfile documents are more concise and are structured moreconsistently.
Resume. The Resume schema provides a way for job candidates to addvaluable metadata to their online résumés. The richly descriptive taggingavailable in the Résumé schema will enable the creation of resume databanksthat are easier to index and search. In addition, XML-enabled resume databankswill be better able to secure job candidates’ personal data at the elementlevel. Encryption and filtering techniques also will enable the creation of“try-before-you-buy” databanks that recruiters can search and evaluate fortheir suitability before having to commit to purchasing resume or job candidatedata.

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We are conducting a series of online surveys, and preliminary results from the first one, focused on HR’s implementation of technology, may interest you. Results todate show that HR departments are lagging behind the rest of their companieswhen in technology implementation, with 61 percent rating the HR side asmarginal but functional and another 11 percent characterizing their technologyas obsolete or ancient.

Only 26 percentwere so bold as to claim that HR’s technology was ahead of the curve, and abarely perceptible one percent said they were at the leading edge. Bycomparison, 54 percent gave their companies an overall ahead-of-the curverating, and another 11 percent ranked their companies as leading edge.

Many of you are using HR-related software in one form or another. Here’s the breakout: HRIS, 40 percent; payroll, 42 percent; applicant/résumé tracking, 12 percent; Benefits enrollment/administration, 20 percent; testing and assessment, 6 percent; Web-based training, 7 percent; training administration, 8 percent; and ESS/IVR, 4 percent.

Of particularinterest was the fact that 40 percent of you are working with HRIS software,correlating roughly to the 43 percent of respondents whose companies have morethan 1,000 employees. Most of your software resides on your company’s server,although 17 percent of you weren’t exactly sure. You are recruiting moreaggressively on the Internet, the survey tells us. For job postings, 46 percentused recruiting sites, 41 percent posted on company sites, and 22 percentposted on multiple sites. An additional 28 percent advertised job openings onother Web sites, and 19 percent hired candidates through recruiting site leads.Half of you said you sometimes search online job boards some of the time, 40percent not at all, and 10 percent use them mostly.

More than 99percent of respondents had a computer at their desks and an equal number had anInternet connection. Most were high- speed connections, but 13 percent dialedup, and the one respondent who had no Internet access must have borrowedsomeone’s computer.

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