Author: Sarah Fister Gale

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The ‘Lego-ization’ of Learning

Analytics, machine learning, big data and the consumerization of content have transformed the way learning is delivered — and there is no going back.
 
While the information might be the same, the format it comes in is radically different, said Jennifer Stempel, a director at Deloitte Consulting. Think snackable chunks of learning that can be digested in three to five minutes, and massive content libraries that employees can access at will. “What people need to know hasn’t changed, but how they learn it has,” she said. “It’s about offering new platforms that enable employees to be in control of how they access learning.”
 
The increased focus on the need for training — it’s a top three priority for executives today according to Deloitte — coupled with the flurry of innovative new technologies and platforms to support learning have drawn a lot of attention and investment into the space. The global e-learning market was expected to reach $107 billion by 2015, up from about $32 billion in 2010; and the global market for learning management systems, or LMS, is expected to grow to more than $11 billion by 2020 from just over $4 billion in 2015.

Keep Your Workers Yearning to Continue Learning

By Richard Y. Hu
 
According to Bersin by Deloitte, U.S. corporations increased their spending on employee training by an average of 10 percent in 2014 (the fifth consecutive year of growth) as businesses responded to a growing skills gap in engineering, scientific and technical fields during the economic recovery. The largest portion of that money was spent on leadership development. But are companies doing it right by increasing their learning and development budgets? Here are some issues that human resources professionals should consider.
 
The understated importance of improving competitiveness: According to a 2010 study by the former Bersin & Associates titled “High-Impact Learning Culture: The Best 40 Practices for Creating an Empowered Enterprise,” companies that are better at skills and talent development have a competitive edge: They are 32 percent more likely to be first in a market, have 37 percent greater employee productivity, 34 percent greater response to customer needs, 26 percent greater ability to develop quality products, 58 percent more likely to have the skills necessary to meet future demands, and are 17 percent more likely to be a market share leader.
 
The (mis)perceived importance for retention and attraction of talent: On the other hand, learning and development opportunities can affect a company’s ability to attract and retain talent, though possibly not as much as HR professionals would believe. According to a 2012 survey conducted by Allied Van Lines, on average 23 percent of new employees will leave a company within a year. That survey also found that on a scale of 1 to 5, with 5 being “very likely,” HR professionals believe that 58 percent of employees leave because of a lack of development opportunities.
 
Aligning the program’s goals with the company: Learning and development programs can service an unlimited array of skills and knowledge. As an HR professional, the first thing you should consider is how a training program would be aligned with your company’s overall business strategy and needs. For example, if your company is expanding internationally, how can your learning and development program allow your current workforce to succeed in new business environments abroad? On the other hand, if the company intends to hire new employees in other countries, how will you implement a learning and development program overseas that can help educate them in the culture of the company?
 
Setting metrics for the program: Other considerations include cost and being able to effectively evaluate the company’s return on investment. According to a 2010 McKinsey & Co. quarterly survey, only 8 percent of companies indicated they tracked the program’s returns on investments. However, no single set of metrics apply to every program so it must be tailored.
 
Choosing the right balance of programming: Finally, you should consider the appropriate balance of the types of activities in the program, which may use social and collaborative learning; widespread, but not overly reliant on electronic learning; and action learning); and limited trainer-led instruction.
 
Richard Y. Hu is an associate attorney at Taft, Stettinus & Hollister in Chicago. To comment, email editors@workforce.com.
 
“It’s an exciting market right now, and there is a lot of disruption going on,” said Bill Pelster, a principal at Deloitte Consulting. The big vendors are rolling out a variety of new tools to make training easier to access and consume, and the market is crowded with new startups offering a host of innovative content forms, curation tools and platforms to support knowledge-sharing. “It will be an interesting year for M&A, and new products in this space.”
 
The Micro-learning Trend
 
While learning leaders haven’t given up on the classroom, more learning is done on the fly via computers, tablets and mobile apps. The way employees select and consume content has also changed. Even if the training they need is in a lengthy e-learning course, employees no longer feel obligated to follow it from start to finish, said Sue Rodeman, vice president of product marketing at Skillsoft. “There may be multiple five-minute videos in that 60-minute course, but they will only view the ones that are relevant right now,” she said. 
 
That means learning leaders — and the vendors who support them — are rethinking how to package learning content, how to make it more easily accessible and how to track its use. For years, one of the key performance measures for the training department has been the number of courses taken, but if employees don’t feel the need to complete courses, that metric doesn’t work. “With micro-learning, the completion concept is less important,” Rodeman said. “It’s more about measuring the impact to the business.”
 
The transition from full courses to tiny, training chunks has resulted in a number of new tools and content options from vendors, including short-form video options, access to massive open online courses, or MOOCs, gamification tools to drive engagement, cloud-based content storage to ease access, and social media platforms to foster knowledge-sharing and discussion across the organization. “Vendors are reinventing the platforms their customer use to deliver training,” Stempel said. 
 
 
They are also offering new tools to develop their own content pieces, and access to external content. Many of the bigger LMS companies and content providers are building out libraries of video-based material; the focus is on short stand-alone modules that can be repurposed in multiple courses. Jeff Carpenter, CEO of consultancy Caveo Learning likens these content chunks to Legos, which training departments can reconfigure to build a variety of courses. He notes that larger companies, like his client Dell Inc., have millions of pieces of content, so they have to start thinking about how to “design for reuse” if they want to stay nimble. “Otherwise, managing that volume of content will get unruly fast.”
 
Analytics Made Easy
 
Along with repurposing content, customers are also looking to vendors to help them streamline access to these bits and pieces of learning through better content curation tools. 
 
“There is so much content out there,” Rodeman said. And it’s not just the material in the training library. Employees are accessing external content, social media content, content produced by individual business units and informal bits of information shared between employees. “Companies need tools to better curate all of this information so the right content can get to the right people at the right time,” she said. 
 
“In today’s world, integration and aggregation of content is paramount,” said Nag Chandrashekar, vice president of learning and mobile product strategy at Saba Software Inc. “And it all has to interact seamlessly.”
 
There are a few small tech companies offering content curation tools, and vendors such as Skillsoft are building out their own offerings to make finding and accessing the right bit of content or knowledge easier. At the heart of this trend is analytics tools that enable companies to automate the content selection process for individual users, Rodeman said. Skillsoft is partnering with IBM to develop algorithms to assess learning needs and gaps and to make content recommendations. “We want to automate the process of figuring out what content is right for the learner,” Rodeman said. 
 
Vendors are also employing analytics to help customers predict future learning needs. Predictive analytics for learning has been a goal for training vendors and companies for the past several years, and it appears that these efforts are finally coming to fruition. In the past year, vendors have rolled out new dashboards, analytics tools and machine learning algorithms to predict needs. 
 
Saba for example, now offers TIM the Intelligent Mentor, a set of machine learning algorithms that respond to learner behavior and make recommendations on what content would be useful and help learning leaders track training usage. TIM “helps us see what people are using, and what actions to take,” said Saba customer Chris Salles, who is director of learning for Sally Beauty Holdings Inc. That has been especially valuable, as most of the company’s employees work in retail environments and might not have access to human resources managers to tell them what courses to take and when. 
 
Saba is now taking the analytics technology beyond the individual learner or organization, and incorporating benchmark data to give customers a broader perspective on how their learning efforts and results compare with their peers. For example, the data might show a company that it offers more instructor-led training than average, or its number of hours of training is higher or lower compared with industry standards, said Charles DeNault, senior director of product marketing at Saba. “Benchmarking will allow training managers to step outside their organizations, and help them see whether they are the exception or the rule. The benchmarking technology is still in the development phase, but Saba expects to have a few case studies out early this year.
 
Training When You Need It
 
With all of these technological advances, companies still need vendors to make these tools easy-to-use and accessible. Jesse Hartigan, national training manager for Dyson, the global vacuum cleaner company, said he initially chose Mindflash Technologies Inc. for his company’s LMS because “they had a free demo, and I was signed up and using it in 20 minutes.” He stayed with the provider because it continued to improve its offering adding tools that Dyson needed. The most important: a mobile app to support training in the field, which is vital for Dyson’s widely dispersed sales team. “Mobile is really important to us because one-third of our team is on the road all of the time.” He especially liked that employees could access things like PDFs and learning summaries on their mobile devices, which they can access right before a presentation or sales meeting. “It helps us reinforce consistency in our messaging,” he said.  
 
Source: Deloitte University Press "Global Human Capital Trends 2015"
 
Dyson isn’t alone. Mobile learning has been a popular trend in training for several years, and vendors have been steadily rolling out apps that enable trainees to access content anywhere and at anytime. LMS vendors, including Mindflash, Saba and Skillsoft all offer mobile for learning and learning management, and their customers are eager to adopt these features. Recent data from nonprofit benchmarking organization APQC show that half of all organizations expect to offer training via mobile devices by 2020. 
 
As companies adopt these technologies, also expect vendors to prove the value of their content and platforms to maintain their business. For Dyson, that’s all about “stickiness.” “If we are paying for content, it needs to add value,” Hartigan said. His team measures stickiness based on sales performance and watching trainees on the job. “That’s how we vet our training partners,” he said.
 
How to Choose
 
With all of these new technologies, it can be difficult for companies to know where to invest their training dollars. Sally Beauty’s Salles encourages companies to look for vendors that make the effort to understand the organization’s learning needs before they give a sales pitch. “It’s a relationship-based business,” he said. “Vendors should focus on your problems and how the product can solve them.”
 
Companies should also consider testing new technology with a few small pilot projects to see if it’s worth a broader investment, Deloitte’s Stempel added. “It’s a great way to test new technology, and to sell the concept internally to stakeholders if it works.”
 
And finally, don’t get so enamored with the technology and lose sight of what content the learner needs, said Elissa Tucker, research program manager at APQC. She notes that soft skills training and leadership development are the key challenges companies will face in the next five years, so they need to think about how the best training paradigms to help them close these gaps. “If you foster an environment of continuous learning where employees have tools to guide their own learning and development, you can begin to close these gaps.” 
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Workers Can’t Stand Choosing Benefits, and Spanish Speakers Can’t Understand Them, Too

Remember how complicated it was to understand your health care benefits when you got your first real job? Now imagine trying to figure it out if all the information was in another language. That is exactly what happens to millions of Spanish-speaking workers and their families in the United States, and it’s costing them — and their employers — a lot of money.

In 2013, 21 percent of U.S. households (about 62 million people) reported speaking a language other than English at home, and Spanish was by far the most common at 62 percent. That same year, there were roughly 11 million Latino immigrants working in the United States.

“As our workforce in this country becomes more diverse, it’s just good practice to think about what form information should come in for it to be most effective,” said Irfan Hasan, senior program officer of health and people with special needs at the New York Community Trust, which supports an array of nonprofits in the city. That means giving workers the information they need in a language — and platform — that is most easily accessible, he said.

While companies may factor these language barriers into things like workplace training and on-the-job coaching, it often doesn’t extend to other areas of human resources materials, which can cause employees and the business to suffer, said Robin Gelburd president of New York-based Fair Health Inc., a national nonprofit dedicated to bringing transparency to health care costs. “If employees don’t understand how to cost-effectively access care, they often choose the most timely and expensive options,” she said. She noted that 30 percent of Latinos still view the emergency room as the first point of care.

“That creates long delays that leads to missed work and lost productivity, and it’s not affordable,” she said.

To help companies better meet the health care needs of their Spanish-speaking employees, Fair Health recently launched a Spanish-language health care cost transparency mobile app, called FH CCSalud (the English language version is FH Cost Lookup), which can be downloaded free from iTunes and Google Play. The app, which the organization created with a grant from the New York Community Trust, was designed to make health care information more accessible to the Latino population. “Having good information is the first step of making sense of complex health care information,” Hasan said. “The New York Community Trust sees this app as a way to reach an underserved population with that information and education in a format they are most likely to use: mobile apps.”

Several recent surveys show that Latinos are more likely to access the Internet through their phone rather than a computer, including a 2014 Experian report that shows 45 percent of Latino smartphone owners are mobile-dominant when it comes to going online.

The free app enables insured Spanish-speaking consumers to estimate their out-of-pocket costs and insurance reimbursement for medical and dental services received in- and out-of-network; while uninsured consumers can obtain an estimate of the full cost of procedures in their geographic area. Users also have access to educational guides, glossaries and resources to help them make more informed choices when selecting plans and managing health care expenses. The cost information provided in the app is supported by Fair Health's database of more than 18 billion claims made for privately billed medical and dental procedures dating back to 2002. 

 “HR people need to think about how they can engage their Hispanic employees to create a new generation of engaged consumers,” Gelburd said. “If you arm your employees with the right information, they can take hold of their health care so that they can find less costly, more proactive ways to manage their health.”

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The Green Screen

When it comes to background screening, employers today face dueling challenges: They want to add speed and efficiency to this often cumbersome process but are worried about their ability to adhere to compliance rules, especially when hiring in multiple states or countries.
 
 
 
 
 
In response, leading background-screening providers in this $2 billion-a-year industry are automating their processes and streamlining information-gathering steps while making sure their in-house experts stay abreast of changes in national and global regulations.
 
Compliance continues to be top-of-mind for employers, said Nick Fishman, executive vice president and chief marketing officer for EmployeeScreenIQ, a background-screening vendor based in Cleveland. In its annual survey, more than half (51 percent) reported that compliance was their biggest challenge. “It surpassed every other response by a wide margin,” he said, noting the next biggest concern — using the most comprehensive criminal record search — was only cited by 14 percent of respondents.
 

Background Check Blunders 

Nothing is more American than the ideal that hard work will get you a house, car and comfortable life for your spouse and 2.5 children. But for a third of all Americans, hard work is only half the battle.
 
The FBI reports there are approximately 80 million individuals in its master criminal database. What’s more, nearly half of African-American men have been arrested by the age of 23. 
 
Employment law is beginning to catch up with the criminalization of America in order to address hiring practices that exclude applicants and employees with criminal background blemishes. When navigating the tempestuous waters of criminal background checks, employers should be aware of these background check blunders. 
 
Many employers desirous of conducting criminal background checks hire third parties to perform this task. Unfortunately, employers must beware of the Fair Credit Reporting Act, or FCRA, a federal statute requiring that employers provide specific types of notice before and after using a third party to conduct a criminal or credit background check. 
 
Specifically, under the FCRA, employers must: notify applicants before even starting the background check that a third party will be evaluating their background histories; provide applicants a copy of the background check report and an opportunity to challenge its findings after the background check is complete, but before an employment decision is made; and give applicants or employees notice of the final decision and the basis of that decision. The FCRA should be consulted for the specific wording required for each type of notice and additional requirements. 
 
Also keep in mind that there is a current wave of ban-the-box laws being enacted in states and municipalities across the country. Ban-the-box laws forbid employers from asking about criminal information prior to giving applicants a “conditional” offer of employment. The laws are intended to end the once common practice of automatically rejecting qualified candidates with criminal histories without providing an opportunity to explain the circumstances of the incident. 
 
Initially, ban-the-box laws applied only to public employers. But there are now an increasing number of jurisdictions applying ban-the-box laws to private employers, including Baltimore, Chicago, New York, San Francisco, Seattle and Washington, D.C., as well as several states. Companies doing business across several cities or states should be especially careful, as their practice might invoke several of these laws. Best practices dictate that employers comply with the ban-the-box framework as if there is a valid law in their respective locale.  
 
Even after carefully navigating the procedural pitfalls, employers must continue to be vigilant when making adverse employment decisions based on criminal history. Many states and local governments have laws prohibiting employers from using the fact of an arrest alone as a basis for not hiring or firing someone.
 
Rachel L. Schaller and Daniel R. Saeedi are lawyers in the Chicago office of Taft, Stettinius and Hollister. To comment email editors@workforce.com. 

 
 
Employers screen candidates to avoid bringing liars, cheaters and felons into the organization, but if they don’t adhere to stringent — and often shifting — compliance laws, they can open themselves up to additional legal woes. “Compliance can be very confusing for employers,” said Christine Cunneen, CEO of Hire Image, a national background-screening firm based in Johnston, Rhode Island, and a member of the board of directors for the National Association of Professional Background Screeners. “We are definitely seeing more legal restrictions around what information employers are allowed to have access to and when,” she said.
 
The most notable restriction stems from the ban-the-box movement, which requires employers in a growing number of states and municipalities to delay criminal background checks until after a job offer has been made. Because there is no federal law governing this process, employers and screeners need to track current laws where they operate.
 
They also need to understand the parameters of these laws, Fishman said. If a potential employer finds a discrepancy that would prevent employment, the law requires them to send two letters: one letting the candidate know what they found so they have a chance to dispute it and a second confirming that the finding will prevent them from being hired. Yet in a recent survey conducted by EmployeeScreenIQ, only 42 percent of companies said they send both letters, and 35 percent don’t send any. 
 
“These employers aren’t going out of their way to violate the law,” Fishman said. “Rather, it’s a lack of education about what’s required and why.”
Regardless of their reasons, when companies don’t comply with this rule, they are violating a basic principle of the Fair Credit Reporting Act, or FCRA, which puts them at risk for class-action lawsuits, which aren’t cheap. The average lawsuit during the past 12 months cost employers $3.1 million.
 
And these lawsuits are likely to increase in size and scope, Cunneen said. “With no monetary cap on settlements, we expect the number of claims and lawsuits to grow as plaintiffs’ attorneys see an opportunity to score large payouts.”
 
Ban the box isn’t the only compliance issue affecting the screening industry. Cunneen also expects rules around using social media in the screening process to continue to evolve as more companies use social media in the hiring process. “There are discrimination, consent, privacy, legal and sometimes moral issues that can arise from using social media to screen applicants,” she said. 
 
As employers expand their hiring network to include international contractors and employees, compliance only gets more complicated. Every country has a different set of rules about screening and a different process for finding that information, said Matthew Glasner, managing director of the South Asia Pacific office of First Advantage, a global background screening provider. In Singapore, for example, you are not allowed to run a criminal background check. In Thailand, criminal checks can be run through the courts or the police. “The courts are quicker, but they only provide about 60 percent coverage,” he said. 
 
Ultimately, the best defense is making sure you work with a provider that understands the intricacies of the markets being targeted. Most employers rely on screeners to filter out any information that could potentially break U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission rules, which means they have to be confident their screeners have the best processes in place. Having a reliable screener is vital, because if rules are broken, the vendor isn’t going to be held accountable, Cunneen said. 
 
“The employer is responsible for following the law, so it behooves them to do their due diligence,” she said.
Background checking companies also report seeing growing revenue streams from companies in the peer-to-peer, or so-called sharing economy, where individuals provide rides, labor or home rentals. “These exchanges are all based on trust,” said Dave Dickerson, CEO of Accurate Background. “If you are getting into someone’s car, you want to be sure that person has been through a background check.”
 
Even though these work relationships are more nebulous than a traditional full-time employee or even a contractor, the Federal Trade Commission has suggested that under the FCRA, an employment relationship could be defined broadly enough to include sharing economy jobs as contractor services, Cunneen said. This suggests that it is within the legal rights of sharing-economy companies, like Airbnb Inc., Task Rabbit Inc. and Uber Technologies Inc., to perform screenings as part of their contractor relationships. 
 
While this may add time and cost to their contractor onboarding process, it may also be good for business. According to a 2015 consumer survey from market research firm from First Advantage on the sharing economy, 86 percent of consumers said they were more likely to use a business if the people involved passed a background check.

Faster and Friendlier

From a recruiting process standpoint, employers are pushing vendors to make the screening process faster, easier and less painful for recruits. “Even though 90 percent of candidates don’t have an issue, this is still a stressful process, especially if they don’t hear anything right away,” Dickerson said.

 
It’s also frustrating for the employer, especially when they are hiring people nationally, said Craig Kwasniewski, human resources director at Strang Corp., a food service and hospitality company based in Cleveland. He said that some states, such as Michigan and Pennsylvania, require multiple waivers and extra steps to complete criminal background checks, which can add days to the recruiting process and increase the risk that the company might lose a good candidate to another company. “It means I have to go back to the boss and explain why it’s worth the extra time to complete the check,” he said.
 
The rising competition for top talent will only increase these pressures. According to HireRight Inc.’s “2015 Employee Screening Benchmark Report,” the biggest screening challenge for respondents (40 percent) is reducing time to hire, followed closely by improving overall screening efficiency (32 percent).
 
To ease these stresses, vendors are implementing a variety of technologies and processes to add efficiency without compromising integrity. 
 
Companies like Accurate Background Inc. have begun working directly with recruits to gather information pertinent to the screen rather than requiring the information be funneled through the employer. “It ensures the candidate knows where they are in the process and speeds up information-gathering,” Dickerson said. It also takes the onus off the employer to capture and transmit the information back and forth.
 
Vendors are also digitizing their front-end data-gathering with apps to automate information uploading and virtual signatures to eliminate paper. And on the back end, they are building interfaces with courthouse databases to speed access to information, and integrating their technology with applicant tracking systems to make the screening information easier for clients to integrate into their recruiting process. “It’s about making the whole process faster and simpler to manage,” Glasner said.
 
It’s why the industry has been slow to take advantage of historical screening data to create benchmark reports and analytics tools to predict which candidate profiles are more likely to have red flags. “Our obligation with each check is that the information lives and dies with that individual request,” EmployeeScreenIQ’s Fishman said. “We wouldn’t want to aggregate that data for other purposes.”
 
However, Glasner imagines such trend data and analytics could be a possibility in the future. “It’s not something we are doing, but it is something clients are asking for,” he said. “They want greater insight, and I think there is a lot we could do to add value without leveraging personal data.”
 
While employers want a faster, more efficient process, they are cognizant of the balance between speed and diligence. To cut time and costs, some vendors rely on databases for all of their screenings, which is definitely quicker, but may not be as thorough as a visit to the local courthouse. “Even if you use databases for initial screening, you still have to vet the information if you want to be certain it is accurate,” Dickerson said. 
 
Live verifications is a key criteria for many HR leaders choosing background check vendors, including Strang’s Kwasniewski. “Companies that just use databases make me nervous, because I don’t know how often they are updating them,” he said. “I’d rather wait 48 hours to get the most accurate report.”
 
And he’ll never abandon the screening process to speed hiring, though he was tempted once. In his previous job at a news media company, one of his biggest advertisers asked if the company would hire his nephew for an entry-level job as a personal favor. “If we had gone on his recommendation, we would have hired him,” Kwasniewski said. But the company had a background check process, he added, so it ran the nephew through the system — and found that he had an outstanding warrant for rape. “We didn’t hire him,” he said, noting the client never mentioned it again.
 
Kwasniewski went on to teach a course on HR ethics, where he often tells that story. “It’s a great lesson on why it’s so important to be consistent in your background checks,” he said. “At the end of the day, we stuck to our process, and I’m very glad we did.”
 
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Special Report: The New Recruits in E-Recruiting

Companies may have big plans to grow their workforce this year, but there is an ongoing war for top talent, and companies need better tools and strategies to secure the best recruits — especially younger candidates with high expectations for the recruiting experience.

According to CareerBuilder, one-third of employers have plans to add full-time staff this year, which is a 50 percent increase over 2014; and Glassdoor Inc.’s 2015 Recruiting Outlook Survey shows talent shortage is the No. 1 hiring challenge today.

“Recruiting as a business strategy is going to get relevant much quicker than people expect,” said Holger Mueller, principal analyst and vice president at Constellation Research Inc. If companies don’t adapt their recruiting process, they aren’t going to be able to fill these roles, especially as seasoned baby boomers head toward retirement. “If you can’t find the right people, you can’t grow your business,” he said.

Fortunately, recruiting technology vendors are here to help. This segment of the human resources tech sector is full of innovative young companies eager to help customers add speed and efficiency to every aspect of the recruiting process, from marketing jobs via social media and building talent communities to simplifying and streamlining the application, interviewing and onboarding processes.

 

 

Hot List
Source: Companies

 

 

“All of the HR tech trends around big data, mobile, social and cloud, started with recruiting,” said Derek Beebe, director of HR technology for HR consultancy Towers Watson & Co.

And the biggest innovations are coming from the smallest vendors. “The pace of change in this sector is outpacing the big providers’ ability to keep up,” Beebe said. “The smaller, nimble organizations are the ones on the leading edge.”

Join the Community

One of the most popular areas for innovation in this space is around social media. Beebe points to tools like iCIMS Inc.’s Social Distribution, which helps companies leverage social media sites through employee referral networks and automated job publishing. “ICIMS has nailed the social component of recruiting,” he said.

It appears that iCIMS isn’t alone. Bullhorn Inc., Jobvite Inc. and Newton Software Inc., and other applicant tracking systems vendors are fleshing out their own social media engagement tools to provide customers with more holistic ways to connect with passive candidates online.

They are also beginning to build features that allow customers to create “talent communities,” where recruiters can track and stay engaged with candidates who might one day be a good fit for the company, even if they aren’t looking today. This is part of the larger trend of companies curating their own social networks of candidates, said Ivan Casanova, senior vice president of marketing for Jibe, a cloud-based recruiting software company. “Talent networks will differentiate how well organizations market themselves and build their brand within the talent pool.”

It may also give them a new way to entice passive candidates, who appear to be growing weary of cold calls from recruiters and networking sites — Glassdoor’s survey shows more than half of hiring decision-makers say their passive recruiting efforts have grown less effective in attracting highly qualified candidates, and nearly half say that candidates respond to emails and phone calls at a much lower rate than they did in the past. “The old methods of recruitment and job search just aren’t working well enough,” said Steve Roop, general manager of Glassdoor for Employers, in a news release. “Potential candidates are researching opportunities through new, interactive channels, and hiring decision-makers are planning to invest more in these channels to attract more qualified candidates.”

Going Mobile (But Not There Yet)

This shift in how companies use technology to connect with candidates reflects a broader effort to make the application experience less frustrating, said Kathy Kalstrup, an executive vice president at Aon Hewitt.

For years vendors have focused on how they can make the recruiter’s job easier and more efficient. But as the demand for talent quickly outweighs supply for many critical roles, vendors have shifted their thinking, Kalstrup said. “Today it is all about making the candidate experience as easy and seamless as possible.”

A big part of this transition is occurring through the adoption of mobile recruiting apps and mobile-optimized career pages. The bigger HR tech players, including SuccessFactors, Taleo Corp. and Workday Inc. all offer mobile tools to support recruiters on the go, and Workday even took a “mobile first” approach to building its recruiting software.

 

 

 

Data Bank
Source: Indeed

 

 

Smaller vendors are equally mobile-focused as they strive both to meet the needs of recruiters and to accommodate candidates where they spend most of their time. According to LinkedIn Corp.’s Global Recruiting Trends survey, 28 percent of companies report that candidates applied for positions using mobile devices in 2014 (up from 16 percent in 2013); and 34 percent say their career site was mobile-optimized in 2014. This is also up from just 20 percent the previous year, but still suggests that a large majority of companies are still struggling to adapt to the mobile trend. These companies are looking to industry vendors to help them close this gap.

For example, Sonoco Products Co., the global product packaging company headquartered in Hartsville, South Carolina, is working with a handful of independent recruiting tech vendors to address shortcomings in its recruiting technology. The company, which has 22,000 employees worldwide, relies on Tweetmyjobs to generate traffic and market new opportunities via social media; iMomentous to build out its mobile job application process and to collect data on its talent pipeline; and Async Interview to conduct video interviews of candidates as a way to streamline its screening process. “It’s a piecemeal approach, but we’ve seen solid results,” said Keesha Moore, Sonoco’s talent acquisition specialist. The tools are helping her reach a broader candidate pool and shorten the hiring process, and it gives her a chance to test new recruiting technologies for a relatively low investment.

“Our next step is to find a vendor who can help us with predictive analytics for workforce planning,” she said.

Recruiting Analytics: Just Getting Started

She’s not alone. Workforce analytics continues to be the holy grail for companies that are trying to figure out where the best candidates come from, how much time and money it takes to find them, and how successful their recruiting processes have been. “Companies aren’t just interested in how many people they hire; they want to understand the quality of their hires,” said Amy Wilson, vice president of human capital management product strategy at Workday.

Smarter Recruiting, Smarter Technology

Software that monitors and audits equal employment opportunity and affirmative action data is a must.

In today’s day and age, technology has become part and parcel of the workplace, and what better use of technology than to let it help you manage your workforce and recruit the best talent available in the marketplace. Recruiting software automates the sourcing and hiring process through a stand-alone program that can be incorporated into the company’s pre-existing human resources management software, integrating payroll, talent management and compensation management. Here’s a look at how recruiting software can help you as well as the potential legal pitfalls you should consider.

A More Efficient Hiring Process

The primary function of recruiting software is to provide a searchable database whereby you can track all of the applicants for your company, allowing you to easily identify where an applicant is in the hiring process, manage correspondence with the applicant, update an applicant’s information and status, schedule interviews, process background checks and manage the transition from applicant to employee once hired. Some software may also allow you to create automated procedures for screening out unqualified applicants, route qualified applications to the appropriate recruiter or hiring manager, manage the requisition and acquisition of applicants, generate reports, and track the sources of your best hires.

Legal Considerations of Recruiting Software

As part of equal employment opportunity, or EEO, regulations, a company must follow certain guidelines for collecting, storing and reporting information that is gathered from job applicants. In order to be compliant with EEO laws, you should make sure the recruiting software program that you use requests voluntary EEO information from each applicant, automatically records the reason for rejecting every applicant, automatically records the minimum qualifications for each available job, creates logs of the hiring process for each job and applicant in case of an audit (e.g., data received, name, position, job group, race and sex, veterans status, reason for rejection and date of hire) and can generate reports that show the company captured the vital information for each applicant. (Note that you cannot force an applicant to provide EEO information, and this information must be kept confidential and not be made available to a hiring manager).

Finally, you’ll also want to monitor and regularly audit your EEO and affirmative action data, so make sure to use software that allows you to view this information online and generate custom reports.

—Richard Y. Hu

Fully 64 percent of global talent leaders say they are not doing a great job tracking return on investment on sources of hire, according to LinkedIn’s global recruiting survey. Though again, the vendors are doing everything they can to make that happen.

All of the recruiting technology firms, from the startups to the enterprise giants, are trying to build better, easier and more robust analytics tools to help customers improve and measure their recruiting efforts. But it is still a work in progress, said Jibe’s Casanova. “Using analytics to enable data-driven recruiting is a big trend, but we are only at the very beginning.”

Most vendors offer some version of an analytics dashboard and/or metrics to track where candidates come from and basic measures around quantity of candidates and time to hire, though they are far from delivering on the promise of predictive analytics. Casanova predicts that the real benefit won’t be seen until these tools become a seamless part of the recruiting workflow — like the dashboard in a car. “Until the technology is integrated into the recruiter’s life, there won’t be mass adoption,” he said.

While that vision may be years away, there are some interesting innovations already in the market. Mueller points to Work4 Labs, a social media recruiting vendor that uses analytics to post job openings to social media sites where the most attractive candidates for the job spend most of their time. “It’s a more intelligent way to search,” he said.

Similarly, HireVue Inc.’s new Insights tool provides companies with analytics to analyze their internal hiring processes, including how good interviewers are at making the best hiring decisions. “This is something no one else is doing,” Beebe said.

Forget the Résumé

Vendors are also coming up with more innovative ways for recruiters to assess a candidate’s fit, for both the position and the culture, said Forrester Research analyst Claire Schooley. “We are moving beyond the résumé,” she said.

For example, video interviewing tools from vendors like Async and HireVue allow managers to see applicants in action before scheduling face-to-face meetings; HackerRank lets companies assess the skills of tech professionals by giving them programming challenges to solve; and vendors like BrandAmper and Match-Click help companies market themselves and their corporate environment to candidates who are looking for a place where they will find a good culture fit. “It’s an interesting time in the recruiting space,” Schooley said. “Everyone is focused on building relationships and making sure a candidate is a good fit for the company.”

Prepare for Another M&A Frenzy

Despite all the exciting innovations that are coming from small stand-alone vendors, the big HRMS players still have a powerful value proposition to offer because their recruiting tools tie into the broader talent management systems. Workday’s Wilson noted that one of the biggest things its client advisory board is interested in is the ability to recruit internally. “Recruiters want access to both internal and external candidates, and they want to be able to compare them side by side,” she said. That’s more likely to be accomplished if you are using a single HR management system because it holds the end-to-end data necessary to provide that level of candidate transparency.

And it is likely that most of these stand-alone vendors won’t be independent for long. Analysts across the industry predict that the big firms are going to begin another buying spree as they eye the accomplishments of these independent recruiting tech firms. “Over the next 12 months we will see another wave of acquisitions where the upstart recruiting providers will get swallowed up,” Beebe said.

It isn’t something customers need to worry about, but they should keep it in mind. “You want to choose tools that will solve your problems today, while keeping an eye on the future,” he said. “There is a great wave of innovation going on — but you don’t want to sign any five-year contracts.”

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Recruitment Process Outsourcing: Find on the Mind

For years, recruitment process outsourcing was viewed as an efficiency play with big companies tapping outside vendors to hire a lot of low-level people as quickly and cheaply as possible. But times, they are a-changin’. Today’s RPOs are being brought in specifically to unearth the hard-to-find talent that companies need to fill highly specialized and critically important roles.

 

‘Companies today don’t want to work with a different RPO in every country. They want vendors who can offer a common global process and governance structure.’

—Stacey Cadigan, principal consultant, Information Services Group

“RPOs used to be all about the time and cost of filling positions, but they are moving up the value chain,” said Stacey Cadigan, principal consultant for Information Services Group, a market intelligence firm based in Stamford, Connecticut. “Now it is all about how to attract the right candidates to the organization.”

“Efficiency will always be important,” added Greg Karr, executive vice president of Seven Step RPO in Boston. “But companies today care more about the quality gains they can achieve from a business perspective.”

Recruiting’s Catch-22

This shift is coming mostly as the result of internal business pressures. On the heels of the economic crisis, global hiring is rebounding and shortages of key talent are forcing companies to seek help filling strategic roles as they ramp up for a new growth phase. According to the “Global Trends in RPO & Talent Recruitment 2014” report from KellyOCG, nearly 3 out of 4 companies — 73 percent — plan to increase full-time hires this year, but 61 percent say they face difficulties recruiting staff. Ironically, one of the positions they struggle most to fill is recruiter. Shortages of skilled recruiting staff was cited as the top impediment to hiring in the report.

 

 

At the same time many industries, including oil and gas extraction and construction, are bracing for the mass exodus of aging baby boomers. Those workers will inevitably need to leave the highly technical senior-level positions they may have held for decades, which will create a substantial talent gap.

 

 

This is driving large and midmarket companies to use RPOs more strategically — streamlining their own recruiting process while reducing the burden on HR — and to use vendors’ expertise to build their social media brand and presence to connect with a broader candidate pool.

AGCO’s New Crop of Talent

That’s one of the reasons Eric Haggard, director of human resources and talent management for AGCO Corp., started working with Seven Step RPO in 2013. “There was a lot of profit to be had in our industry at the time, and we needed to get people on board quickly to take advantage of it,” he said.

AGCO is an international global agricultural equipment manufacturer that does 20 percent of its business in the United States. But the company was having trouble recruiting against better-known U.S. brands, like John Deere, for a small pool of highly skilled engineers and other experts. They also found it difficult to persuade those candidates to relocate to the company’s often remote rural offices.

When Haggard joined AGCO in 2012, the company already had an RPO provider, but the vendor wasn’t meeting goals, and there was a growing backlog of positions tofill.

“They didn’t have a big enough, dedicated team to meet our needs,” he said. He later learned that the vendor had pushed for a larger team, but the AGCO manager who hired them pushed back to lower costs, and they relented. It was their downfall. “They shouldn’t have agreed to it,” Haggard said.

Haggard’s experience should be a lesson about the importance of collaboration and partnership. “Your RPO has to be willing to be honest and transparent with you, even if you may not like what they are telling you,” he said. “Sometimes it’s necessary for them to save you from yourself.”

AGCO now works with Seven Step, which is helping the company make better use of its applicant tracking system, rewrite job descriptions to appeal to a broader candidate pool and hone their offering and sales pitches to make relocation more attractive.

One of the biggest advantages Haggard gained is his ability to be flexible around talent acquisition. AGCO’s business is seasonal, and based on crop prices, the company often has to ramp up hiring for a while, and then tamp it back down. “Outsourcing recruiting has given us the best of both worlds,” he said. “I can broaden my capacity to recruit without having to build that expertise in-house.”

RPOs Go Global

The growing demand for hard-to-find skill sets, coupled with the looming talent crisis, has been a boon for RPO industry leaders who were able to transition themselves from being transactional, low-cost providers to strategic HR partners — though it left other RPO providers in the dust. The shift in what customers want from their RPO providers has caused a dramatic change in the industry makeup over the past five years, with former leaders like Adecco and Aon RPO dropping off industry top 10 lists, while new players like Seven Step RPO and Cielo (formerly Pinstripe & Ochre House) have risen to the top.

There have also been several mergers and acquisitions in the past few years, many of which include international pairing in an effort for RPOs to create an instant global footprint. U.S. firm Pinstripe Inc., for example, merged with British company Ochre House in July 2013 to form Cielo, and the U.S.-based Wilson Human Capital Group’s merged with CPH in the U.K. to expand internationally.

Going global is a major trend in the industry as vendors try to align their service offering with customers’ expansion goals. “Companies today don’t want to work with a different RPO in every country,” Information Services Group’s Cadigan said. “They want vendors who can offer a common global process and governance structure.”

Many of the top RPO providers — such as Alexander Mann Solutions, Cielo and Randstad Sourceright — now have a presence or partnerships in regions around the world, giving clients the option to use one vendor for all of their recruiting needs; others are partnering with key clients to open offices in support of their specific expansion goals.

Analytics, the Next Big Thing

 

 

Analytics offerings are also tying into RPOs’ desire to position themselves as strategic partners. Like many HR industry segments, they are trying to rapidly ramp up their analytics capabilities to provide customers with demonstrable proof of the value of their service, and to help them perform more strategic workforce planning for the future. “Analytics is an incredible opportunity to change the landscape of what RPO companies are doing today,” Seven Steps’ Karr said.

 

 

It is enabling some vendors to tie their recruiting efforts to things like time to productivity, improved retention and the effect on sales, all of which have business implications. “We are definitely starting to see organizations interested in tying talent acquisition to these kinds of measures,” Cadigan said. But as with most analytics trends, it’s still early days. She estimates that only about a third of RPO vendors today have advanced analytic measures tied to business results. The middle third are trying to implement these tools, but they don’t have the capabilities to use them effectively, she said, and the lowest third haven’t yet begun.

Cadigan predicts the vendors that master analytics capabilities early on will have a competitive advantage going forward. “It proves they are willing to be creative and to take a bigger stake in the outcomes of their performance.”

Contingent Labor Is the Future

The one trend that RPO providers have been slow to embrace is the rising tide of contingent labor. Ardent Partners’ 2014 “State of Contingent Workforce Management” report shows that, by 2017, 45 percent of the total workforce will be made up of contingent or contract workers, which is about 13 percentage points higher than today.

This trend presents a clear opportunity for RPOs to expand their service offering, said Chris Dwyer, vice president of operations for Ardent Partners, who is the author of the report. He noted that 80 percent of companies surveyed said that their top talent management priority is optimizing workforce management. A big part of that involves integrating contingent labor data with traditional human capital data to gain a concise view of workforce trends, he said. “If half of all talent is temporary, HR professionals need to figure out how to bridge the gaps between traditional and nontraditional data.”

Today, less than 30 percent of companies link these disparate workforce data sets, but an additional 45 percent of enterprises expect to link this data within the next two years, Dwyer said. While few RPOs offer contingent labor recruiting services today, he anticipates that more will move into the space as companies attempt to gain greater clarity around all of their workforce recruiting and management efforts. “If an RPO has the capacity to integrate a vendor management system with the talent management system, it could give them a real competitive advantage,” he said.

Cadigan also sees contingent labor as a future area for growth, but companies shouldn’t expect their RPO providers to have solutions today. “There are only a few competitors with capabilities on both sides that have taken steps to integrate these systems,” she said. “But the interest is there.” As companies look for ways to manage talent holistically, leading RPOs should be looking for ways to deliver a more comprehensive approach, she added.

Sarah Fister Gale is a writer based in the Chicago area. Comment below or email editors@workforce.com. Follow Workforce on Twitter at @workforcenews.

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Collaboration Realization

Presenteeism

Shared workspaces, daily stand-ups, virtual meetings.

These serve as some fundamental elements of the modern workplace, where collaboration is seen as the holy grail of innovation, employee engagement and, ultimately, a higher level of business success.

Virtually every workplace blogger and author touts the value collaborative workers bring to the table while castigating the opposite end of the workplace spectrum: the siloed employee — the prototypical loner in a high-walled cubicle, nose perpetually inches from a computer monitor who seldom communicates with anyone about a current or future project.

While collaboration may indeed spark innovation, some contend that it can go too far. Back-to-back-to-back meetings, overly chatty colleagues, never-ending conference calls and endless streams of emails and instant messages can cause some workers to pine for the solitude provided by a siloed work environment.

Problems are compounded when companies mistake inclusiveness for collaboration, said Bhushan Sethi, PricewaterhouseCoopers’ principal of the advisory practice in New York. When teams feel obligated to build consensus around every idea and generate buy-in before they make a decision, it becomes burdensome to the team and hurts morale. “You want people to break down silos and to be collaborative across departments, but you can’t let it get in the way of the work.”

The trick is finding the balance between a friendly, cooperative environment and giving people the space they need to get their jobs done, said Sean Vogt, director of operations for Greenview Data, an anti-spam software company in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Vogt’s company has 28 employees and collaboration is an important part of the culture.

The office has an open floor plan where people can easily engage in brainstorming sessions, and each employee is hired because they bring a unique skill to the team. But Vogt makes sure his people understand that collaboration is only a small part of the process. “Two people can’t program the same thing at the same time,” he said, “and only rarely does a support call require more than one person.”

To ensure people have the time to get work done, his team eschews daily stand-up meetings unless they actually have something important to discuss, and employees are empowered and encouraged to be self-directed. “It’s all about having the right team of people who can work just as easily together or alone,” he said.

What Is Collaboration Anyway?

Part of the problem is a lack of understanding about how to collaborate, or when it is most appropriate in the workplace, said Theresa Welbourne, director of the Center for Entrepreneurship at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and CEO of eePulse Inc., a technology and human capital consulting firm. Even when managers think they have a clear understanding of what it means to collaborate effectively, they rarely take the time to define it for their team, she said. “Without that guidance, the demand to collaborate can start to feel like micromanagement, which is annoying and ineffective.” 

‘People start to feel like the team is unproductive, and that becomes a self-fulfilling prophesy.’

—Shane McWilliams, director of client services, CSID

 

Companies often fall into this pattern when managers are encouraged to create collaborative teams but are not told how to do it, Sethi said. “Leaders need training on how to set goals for collaboration, how to embed appropriate time for collaboration into the workflow, and how to use collaboration tools to enhance rather than diminish productivity.”

This is especially important as companies grow, and managers take on added responsibility for bigger teams and more projects, Welbourne said. “When you are small and nimble, you don’t worry about how the work will get done; you just do it.” But as companies grow they start adding processes and rules. “That’s when mandatory meetings and consensus-building requirements start to erode the quality of collaboration.”

Protect Team Privacy

Too much collaboration not only wastes time, it undermines the team’s confidence in themselves and each other, said Shane McWilliams, director of client services at CSID, an identity-theft protection company in Austin, Texas. If you have to gather everyone in a room to vet every idea or jointly make a decision, it suggests a lack of leadership, he said. “People start to feel like the team is unproductive, and that becomes a self-fulfilling prophesy.”

McWilliams understands the challenge of finding the right balance because as an IT professional, he has worked for many companies where teams often felt overburdened by the obsessively collaborative culture.

“When you get stuck in so many meetings that you have to put in extra hours just to get your own work done, it’s a problem,” he said. After a while, that starts to destroy morale, which can drive good employees out. “In an exit meeting, they won’t say they are leaving because of too many meetings, but that’s what they will be thinking.”

Since joining CSID two years ago, McWilliams has made a conscious effort to protect his team from too much togetherness. The key, he said, is to build a culture where people’s time is valued and employees are encouraged to speak up if that time is being compromised.

At CSID, managers make sure every meeting has predefined goals, which provides direction, and gives people a reason to speak up if the conversation goes off-track. They also take steps to reduce the number of people who need to attend meetings, in part by communicating meeting details to the broader team.

This allows those people who only need a few pieces of information from a 90 minute meeting to skip it, McWilliams said.

Though for this model to be effective, people have to trust that the information will be shared even if they don’t attend, he said. “Strong communication channels have to be in place for people to feel confident about not attending those meetings.”

McWilliams further protects his team’s productivity by making sure subject-matter expertise is spread across the group so that no single person is the go-to for every technical issue. CSID employees are also are encouraged to find answers on their own before going to one of their peers with questions. “This is an unspoken rule in our culture that puts a filter on those drive-by requests,” he said. “You know that if someone comes to you with a question, it is because they need to leverage your expertise; not because they were just too lazy to look it up themselves.”

And when all else fails, everyone on the team has the freedom to work from home if they need a little extra isolation to get a project done. “It is all about leadership and creating an environment where people can be productive,” he said. “If you empower people to say no to meetings, and you show them that you value their time, the culture change will follow.”

Nowhere to Hide

One of the biggest features of the collaboration trend is an office’s open floor plan. Companies are spending millions of dollars to tear down their silos and replace them with shared workspaces and meeting areas with comfy couches and coffee bars where collaboration will naturally happen.

And it works, said Beth Moore, director of workplace strategy for CBRE Inc., a global commercial real estate services firm headquartered in Los Angeles. “When people come together outside the confines of the traditional office or conference room, there is a more natural open dialog.”

These casual collisions may spur innovative exchanges, but when the collaboration time ends, those same people need quiet places to work on the big ideas they just generated. That’s when the open floor plan can become a problem.

CBRE has spent the past three years rebuilding its global office spaces with vast, sunny shared spaces that are arranged by “neighborhoods” designed to bring departments together. And while employee surveys show people are happier with the new arrangement, there are challenges to the shared-space model. 

Moore points to a team of real estate brokers who moved into one of the neighborhoods. “They needed to interact, but they also deal with confidential client information that others on the team can’t see,” she said. That means they needed time and space when they could be absolutely focused on their work, which can be hard to find in an open-floor-plan office space.

CBRE recognized this need in the planning stage and accommodated it by creating one-person daily rooms in each neighborhood, which are enclosed offices anyone can reserve for the day. “Because the brokers are often off-site, there are always enough rooms to accommodate the need for privacy,” she said.

In other cases, employees have found simpler ways to create privacy in an open-plan environment: wearing ear buds. CBRE recently conducted a focus group with millennials on how they prefer to work. Every one of them reported that they wear ear buds while they work, and half said they often aren’t even listening to music. “In an environment where you can be interrupted at any time, ear buds are a physical sign that you don’t want to be disrupted,” Moore said.

But if employees are forced to wear headphones to maintain some level of privacy, too much collaboration can be a problem.

You Are Doing It Wrong

To find out if your collaboration culture isn’t working, start by asking employees what they think, Welbourne said. “You’ll learn quickly if too many meetings are affecting their productivity.”

If you find that employees are frustrated by too much togetherness, take action. Cut unnecessary meetings from the schedule — especially the standing meetings that occur every week whether you need them or not.

And set goals for the remaining meetings so they are a productive use of everyone’s time, said Michael Moon, director of research for the HCM practice at Aberdeen Group in Boston. “Have a purpose and set ground rules so people feel like their time and ideas are being respected.”

When rethinking the approach to collaboration, be sure to include virtual meetings in the downsizing process. In a culture where every task has a sense of urgency and email and instant messaging create a constant visual clamor, it can be especially difficult for employees to break away from their online peers, Moon said. Just as some meetings are viewed as an enormous waste of time, mass emails, endless chats and a constant demand for online updates will whittle away at productivity and morale.

And don’t assume that shiny new piece of collaboration software is the answer. “The biggest mistake organizations make is assuming that a social collaboration platform will solve all of their collaboration troubles,” she said. As with all technology, collaboration software is not a solution — it is an enabler. “It doesn’t change behavior, and if it’s not used properly, it can easily become a distraction.”

Quality collaboration, in which people have the chance to generate new ideas and work with integrated teams, are a vital part of being innovative, but when the demand to collaborate isn’t backed up by quality goals, people’s time is being wasted. To find the right balance, make sure leaders are trained in what it means to collaborate, empower employees to speak up when meetings are unproductive, and treat people’s independent work time as a valuable asset that should not be compromised.

Sarah Fister Gale is a writer based in the Chicago area. Comment below or email editors@workforce.com. Follow Workforce on Twitter at @workforcenews.

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Analytics for Dummies

Workforce analytics may dangle the promise of finally letting companies use data to make better talent management decisions. But there is one big problem: no-one really knows how to do it.

The current generation of workforce analytics tools is still relatively complicated, according to Ron Hascombe, research director at Gartner, an information technology research and advisory company. “Most technologies run ahead of what all but a few HR people are able to utilize,” he said.

Fortunately, that is slowly changing. HR technology vendors recognize that customers want faster, easier, more robust analytics tools, and they are racing to develop or acquire software specifically designed to make it easy for non-analysts to do workforce analytics.

“It is critical that we continue to simplify how customers turn the vast amount of people data… into insights,” said Leighanne Levensaler, vice president of human capital management products at Workday, a Pleasanton, California-based software producer. “There is a lot of hype and hyperbole when it comes to big data and workforce analytics, yet there is still a dearth of people with advanced analytics skills in the industry.”

Doers and Dreamers

Most companies fall into one of two categories when it comes to workforce analytics. There are companies that want to collect and interpret basic internal metrics – but don’t really know where to start. Then there are the advanced organizations that are already doing some analysis of internal and external data, and are ready to move into more predictive reporting. These companies are usually larger, and have some level of analytics expertise on the HR team.

For the time being, most companies fall into the first category, said Hascombe. Gartner research predicts that by 2017, only 15 percent of organizations with more than 5000 employees will be doing predictive analytics using internal and external data.

Fortunately, most vendors in the human capital management industry are focusing on the needs of the many by creating ever-more sophisticated analytics tools that use visualization strategies, preset queries, and simple report generators that allow managers to choose a combination of metrics and rely on the technology to do the rest.

“The vendors will continue to invest in this subset of tools for the next three years,” Hascombe said.

The most recent upgrades suggest that vendors are focused on making analytics less technical and more user-friendly.

For example, SuccessFactors, an HCM software producer, recently launched ‘Workforce Analytics: Headlines,’ an automated tool that reviews employee data, interprets and prioritizes findings, then sends relevant information to managers in the form of news stories.

“It strips away the obscure analytical terms and just tells managers what’s happening with their teams,” said Mick Collins, principal consultant of workforce analytics and planning for San Francisco-based SuccessFactors. “It supports a more self-serve model for workforce analytics.”

And last fall, Workday rolled out a new tool designed to help customers combine various sizes, sources, and structures of internal and external workforce data to give them greater flexibility in the kinds of information they explore. Customers can answer business questions by building unique scenarios merging data from multiple sources, or they can leverage pre-built analytic templates to tackle common scenarios such as market compensation comparison or retention risk and impact analysis, Levensaler said. “It is about providing people with easier access to insight.”

There are also stand-alone vendors, like Visier, which focus entirely on workforce analytics and helping clients transition from interpreting past data to predicting future trends. Visier’s cloud-based platform unifies customers’ workforce data from multiple sources and allows users to get answers to hundreds of workforce-related questions.

Visier, which is based in both Vancouver and San Jose, rolls out new updates every quarter, and is focused currently on building more robust visualization tools, said Dave Weisbeck, chief strategy officer for Visier. “Employee data has a lot of complexity that simple charts can’t capture, which is why visualization is so important.”

For the more advanced clients, both tech vendors and human resource consulting firms, like Mercer, PWC and Gartner, offer ‘analytics as a service’ models, through which consultants set up custom models to analyze masses of workforce data and provide analytics support.

Hascombe points to IBM’s launch of IBM Workforce Analytics, which provides a mix of applications to help companies do predictive workforce analytics.

Good Data Is Good Enough

Many vendors are striving to help clients achieve the ultimate goal of predictive analytics, but there are still many obstacles to overcome – both in what the technology can deliver, and how HR thinks about data.

Most of the current workforce analytics tools available are still limited, preventing companies from mixing and matching complex metrics or customizing their reports. “In most cases, to get predictive analytics still requires consulting support,” Hascombe said.

HR leaders also need to get more comfortable diving into the analytics world – even if they have limited analytics skills and imperfect data sets, Weisbeck said. “The biggest obstacle for us is the fear HR departments have about their data not being good enough to do analytics.”

Weisbeck encounters many companies that are so focused on perfecting their data and rooting out all errors and anomalies that they never actually get to the analytics process. According to Weisbeck, those companies are missing opportunities.  “You can get amazing insights from imperfect data if it is analyzed properly.”

Workforce analytics will continue to be an important part of the talent management process, and the sooner companies embrace these processes the sooner they will be able to use employee data to make meaningful decisions, Hascombe added. “In the meantime, clean up your data, invest in governance and work with your organization to determine the critical metrics that you will want to track.”

Sarah Fister Gale is a writer based in the Chicago area. Comment below or email editors@workforce.com. Follow Workforce on Twitter at @workforcenews.

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The Untapped Talent Pool of People With Disabilities

Recently, Dana Marlowe’s technology consultancy was managing a software project at a Fortune 500 company, when the client told her he was so impressed with her project manager that he wanted to hire him on the spot. That’s not surprising in a world where great tech talent is hard to come by, but it may be surprising to hear that this particular project manager is both deaf and legally blind.

“He’s a brilliant guy, and why wouldn’t they want to hire someone who is brilliant?” said Marlowe, who is principal partner of Accessibility Partners, a Washington, D.C.-based firm that helps organizations ensure their information technology products and services are accessible for people with disabilities. She prioritizes hiring workers with disabilities with the goal that at least 75 percent of the workforce has a disability.

Having workers with disabilities on her team is about more than doing the right thing, she said. “Employing people with disabilities just makes good business sense.”

The unemployment rate among disabled workers is double the average population, according to the U.S. Labor Department’s Office of Disability Employment Policy, or ODEP. Yet many of these workers are highly educated, deeply talented, and very loyal, Marlowe said. “People who overcome challenges on a daily basis can handle whatever workplace issues you throw at them.”

In an economy where companies are facing serious talent shortages, workers with disabilities offer a great value proposition. They not only bring expertise and experience to the table, they help organizations create a more inclusive workplace culture, said Kathy Martinez, head of the ODEP. “Diversification breeds innovation,” she added.

That’s important today as older workers are opting to stay in the workforce longer and could develop a disability while employed. “If you train a person for 30 years and they lose their vision due to diabetes, you would make accommodations so they can keep working,” she said.

Yet a lot of companies shy away from hiring candidates with disabilities in part because they aren’t sure what “accommodations” those employees will need to do the job. Employers imagine they will have to buy expensive equipment or adapt their office space, but the reality is quite different, Martinez said. According to an ongoing study by the Job Accommodation Network, 58 percent of accommodations don’t cost the company any money, while the rest typically cost about $500.

“Accommodations are really just productivity tools,” she said. Many solutions are as simple as lowering a desk or buying an extra piece of software like a screen reader for the blind, or an amplified phone receiver for someone hard of hearing. “It’s not going to be as expensive as you think.”

The other obstacle that hiring managers face is the discomfort that comes with not knowing how to discuss the disability, or what questions they are allowed to ask. But most of the concerns are answered in the Americans with Disabilities Act. For example, according to the ADA, an employer cannot make any pre-employment inquiry about a disability or the nature or severity of a disability. An employer may, however, ask questions about a candidate’s ability to perform specific job functions and may, with certain limitations, ask an individual with a disability to describe or demonstrate how that person would perform these functions.

“People with disabilities usually know what they need to do the job, so just ask them,” Martinez said.

Even if hiring someone with a disability requires a little discomfort or a small investment in new technology, it’s worth it for the value they bring to the organization, Marlowe said. “This is a huge, untapped talent pool, and companies would be foolish to ignore them.”

Sarah Fister Gale is a writer based in the Chicago area. Comment below or email editors@workforce.com. Follow Workforce on Twitter at @workforcenews.

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Don’t Ignore Low-Performers

What about the lowest of the low performers in an organization — the bottom 10 percent?

Initially, these employees may be the result of bad hires. But after those people quit or are let go, talent leaders still may be left with some lower performers who do just enough to get the job done, but should be doing better.

While companies don’t want to reward low performers by giving them similar compensation and recognition as mid- or high-performing workers, ignoring them isn’t a good idea, either, according to Stacia Sherman Garr, vice president of talent management research for Bersin by Deloitte.

“After two or three years, your bottom people aren’t necessarily bad,” she said. “They may just be mismatched with their manager or their skills don’t fit their role.”
They may also be going through a personal crisis that is temporarily affecting their performance — like a divorce, a new child or sick parent.

So how should talent managers deal with these low performers?

To start with, find out why they may be struggling in the job and what they think would help them improve, said Jay Conger, senior research scientist for the Center for Effective Organizations and professor of leadership at Claremont McKenna College.

If they are normally strong employees whose performance has dipped due to a personal issue, ease their stress by simply acknowledging their situation and letting them know that once they get back to where they need to be, they won’t be penalized, Conger said.

If they are struggling for other reasons, such as the lack of a specific skills or experience, managers should address that through training, mentoring or more consistent feedback on their performance.

Talent managers may also find that such low performance is not attributable to anything they’ve done, but rather it’s the result of the way they are managed.

“You may have a visionary working under a manager who is very detail-focused, or vice versa,” Conger said. “Under a different boss, that same person could flourish.”

Sometimes poor performance is the result of a low-performing manager.

“If a specific manager has a lot of turnover, consistently low performance ratings or low engagement ratings, that should be a red flag,” Conger said.
In these cases, rather than penalizing the employees, hold managers accountable.

This story originally appeared in Workforce's sister publication, Talent Management.

Sarah Fister Gale is a writer based in the Chicago area. Comment below or email editors@workforce.com. Follow Workforce on Twitter at @workforcenews.

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Moving on From HR: Finding Your Next Job

In the past it was common for human resources professionals to stick with one industry for an entire career. But times have changed, and today such longevity can be seen as detrimental.

“More companies today want HR leaders with diverse experiences that will help them make decisions in ambiguous situations,” said Diane Youden, a partner in professional services firm PricewaterhouseCoopers’ HR transformation group. “It shows that they can apply their knowledge in creative ways.”

Youden and other HR professionals offer this advice on how to land a job in a new industry.?Make moves early. When younger and in the early stages of an HR career, it’s easier to take risks. It’s also easier for companies to take a risk on you, said Jim Flanagan, chief human resources officer at auto parts store chain Pep Boys.

“If a job comes along that looks interesting, take it,” he said. “And if it doesn’t work, use it as a springboard to something else.”

Choose organizations that value HR. Especially early in a career, aspiring HR leaders want to work for a company where they can develop skills and be tested, said Tony Fogel, chief human resources officer for IT consulting firm Ciber Inc.

“To be employable, you have to continuously grow your skills, abilities and experiences,” he said.

Look for complementary industries. When trying to move across industries, consider the talent management issues of the current role and identify other industries that face similar challenges, Youden said. Common themes that span industries include regulatory compliance, labor unions, recruiting for service-driven industries and global growth.

Know the business and industry. It’s not enough to be great at HR in general. Aspiring talent leaders also need to understand the unique talent management challenges facing a potential employer and be able to speak about those issues in business terms.

Help recruiters see the connections. Unless being recruited, talent leaders will likely have to demonstrate how their experience can apply in a new field to land a job in a different industry, said Kim Shanahan, managing director of the HR practice for Korn Ferry.

Share examples of specific programs or tasks performed. Also, discuss how those experiences are relevant to the new company.

Be thoughtful about each position your take. When aspiring to be a CHRO, plan a career path that provides a diverse experience — both in industries and roles. In considering a new position, think about how it will help develop new skills. Will it provide new experiences or opportunities to take on leadership roles?

This story originally appeared in Workforce's sister publication, Talent Management.

Sarah Fister Gale is a writer based in the Chicago area. Comment below or email editors@workforce.com. Follow Workforce on Twitter at @workforcenews.