Here is a cautionary tale on why employers should conduct thorough background checks on employers.
In late 2013, Kristl Thompson, Ashley Raby and Corbie Leslie filed a lawsuit against the Scott Fetzer Co. (doing business as “The Kirby Company”), Crantz Development, and John Fields. The women claimed Fields had sexually assaulted them (including verbal abuse and harassment, inappropriate touching, forced sexual acts, and rape) on numerous occasions between May 2012 and January 2013. A number of these allegations resulted in felony and misdemeanor convictions against Fields.
Fields had worked on and off since the 1970s for Crantz (a factory distributor of Fetzer-manufacured Kirby vacuums) as an independent dealer of Kirby vacuums. Over his decades of work, he had been charged with numerous criminal offenses, including embezzlement, unlawful imprisonment, domestic abuse, and rape.
In their civil lawsuit, the women claimed that Fetzer and Crantz were negligent in hiring Fields and allowing him to go on sales trips with them. The women also asserted claims against Fetzer alone for negligently failing to take appropriate precautions to prevent its independent contractors from hiring employees like Fields, and for negligent supervision of its independent distributor in its hiring practices.
The women alleged that after receiving Fields’s application to become a Distributor Trainee, Kirby conducted a limited background check on Fields, which showed that Fields had lied about his prior criminal record. They further alleged that had Kirby conducted a national search instead of a regional search, it would have discovered his criminal record was much more substantial than he disclosed (including rape). Nevertheless, with knowledge that “Fields had spent almost a year in jail for beating up his wife in 2000, and despite the fact that Kirby knew that Fields lied about his criminal record, Kirby approved Fields to be a Distributor Trainee.”
A year later, Fields applied to become a Factory Distributor. According to the women, Fields “again lied about his criminal record and Kirby again learned of his criminal record.” Despite again learning about Fields’s criminal past, “Kirby approved Fields’ application to become a Factory Distributor.” In the following years, Fields continued to commit crimes, including “forcible rape, first degree domestic violence, unlawful imprisonment, and assault.” While Fields was awaiting trial in the forcible rape case, Kirby learned that he had defrauded elderly customers. That crime appears to have been the tipping point for Kirby, and it terminated his factory distributorship.
Yet, after Fields’ release from prison in February 2012, Kirby rehired him, and he began selling their vacuums again. It was during this period of employment that he sexually assaulted Thompson, Raby, and Leslie.
I hope, however, we can all spot the mistakes made here in screening and hiring Fields.
It’s no longer acceptable to limited criminal background checks on employees locally or regionally. Our society is mobile, and the background checks we are conducting on potential hires should reflect this mobility by being national in scope. Almost all criminal records are available online, and there is really no excuse to do anything other than a national search.
When you discover that an employee has lied about their criminal background, the only resolution is termination. The employment relationship is all about trust, and when that trust is broken the relationship is irreparably damaged.
I’m all for second chances and redemption, but an individual with a history of rape and domestic abuse is un-hireable. Convince me otherwise.
Why rehire someone after they are released from prison for rape, especially with all of this back story? This fact is the most head-scratching of them all.
There was little chance this story was going to have a happy ending. Let’s all learn from it by reviewing our own background screening and hiring processes.
Cynet Systems, an IT and engineering staffing company, had a viral mess on its hands over the weekend after it posted a job that asked for candidates, “Preferably Caucasian.”
Your job listing for a mid-senior level business development position’s top qualification is “Preferably Caucasian”
How could you POSSIBLY think that’s okay?
Uh, hey, it’s very, VERY not OK.
Her tweet, at the time of publication, received 11,249 likes, 6,752 retweets, and 622 comments.
It took Cynet Systems 44 hours(!) to respond, with this tweet:
Cynet apologizes for the anger & frustration caused by the offensive job post. It does not reflect our core values of inclusivity & equality. The individuals involved have been terminated. We will take this as a learning experience & will continue to serve our diverse community.
Its CEO, Nikhil (Nick) Budhiraja, initially tweeted that the job posting was a “terrible mistake,” and that the person responsible had been sent for retraining. Apparently, someone told him that the company needed to take a stronger stand against racism, because that tweet no longer exists, and “sent for retraining” is now “terminated.”
A few thoughts.
First, what the holy hell? Do we not know better in 2019 (not to mention, 2009, or 1999, or 1969 … or, really, ever) that we can’t advertise jobs for “Caucasians”? This is HR 101. There should not be any lesson that needs to be taught here, period.
Second, you can prefer age, sex, religion, or national origin, but only if it’s a bona fide occupational qualification for the position. To qualify as a BFOQ, a job qualification must relate to the essence, or to the central mission, of the employer’s business. A classic example of a BFOQ is safety-based mandatory retirement ages for airline pilots. Race or color, however, can never, ever be a BFOQ.
Third, this is not a training problem. If your recruiters do not know that they cannot prefer white candidates, they should not be recruiting for you.
Finally, 44 hours is way too late to respond to a 2019 crisis. When a story goes viral, your company needs to get out in front of it immediately. As bad as this crisis is, Cynet Systems made it that much worse by waiting almost two full days to publish its response. Cynet Systems has now been labeled as a racist company. The offensive job posting certainly created that perception, but its 44-hour delay in responding let the story, and the perception it created, percolate and fester. Every hour you let a viral story go un-responded-to adds time exponentially to undo the harm, if it can ever be truly undone.
So let this be a lesson to you and your business. Know who’s hiring for you, know what they are posting and do not wait to respond to bad press or bad social media.
Facebook and SAP announced integration that will allow SAP SuccessFactors to distribute job postings through the social networking site.
Specifically, users of SuccessFactors Recruiting can choose Jobs on Facebook as a source, then market their openings to Facebook’s community along with any other outlets selected for a particular posting. In addition, the integration provides analytics to measure performance at each step of the recruiting process.
For SuccessFactors, with its 6,700 customers and 100 million users, the partnership is a logical move to expand the reach of its recruiting tools. However, it isn’t clear how well the needs of SAP’s enterprise customers align with Facebook’s largely consumer audience.
Jeff Mills, director of solutions marketing, SuccessFactors.
“The consensus seems to be that Facebook works pretty well for SMBs whose primary web presence is their Facebook company page, and/or companies that are hiring in sectors like hospitality or skilled trades,” said Jeff Dickey-Chasins, principal of JobBoardDoctor LLC, which consults with job board providers on a variety of issues. “LinkedIn definitely has the edge for white-collar workers, and its tools for recruiters are much more robust.”
Jeff Mills, SuccessFactors’ director of solutions marketing, has a different perspective. Many of his customers, including large enterprise organizations, have expressed interest in posting jobs on Facebook. “I do not agree that [Facebook] is best-suited to small, local businesses,” he said. “[Larger companies] are tapping into it more because it is a cost-effective way to reach a local audience.”
To Dickey-Chasins’ point, LinkedIn has an impressive presence in online recruiting. The site reports offering 20 million job postings, and says they result in an average of 4 million hires each year.
While Facebook doesn’t share its number of jobs available, in October 2018 it had filled more than 1 million positions since launching Jobs on Facebook in February 2017.
In any case, integration between HR technology vendors and sites like LinkedIn, Facebook or Indeed are common, Dickey-Chasins said. For one thing, they improve the candidate experience. When a product like SuccessFactors integrates with services that act as job-posting distributors, “that makes things easier for the candidate, which in theory should improve the successful apply rate,” he said.
A Question of Audience
Integrations like this may be more important to SuccessFactors and its competitors than they are to Facebook, observers say. For one thing, “the talent acquisition suite provider is a small fry in comparison to the whole audience that Facebook captures,” said Nikki Edwards, principal research analyst for HR outsourcing at NelsonHall.
Jeff Dickey-Chasins, principal, JobBoardDoctor LLC.
On top of that, Dickey-Chasins suggested these partnerships don’t necessarily work to Facebook’s advantage. “Facebook wants to build an environment where its users never have any reason to leave, so an external integration is, to a certain degree, a negative for them,” he said. “They’d rather control the entire hiring process on their end.”
Facebook doesn’t see it that way. Jackie Chang, head of Business Platform Partnerships at Facebook, said the social network will “continue to identify strategic companies” in order to help businesses hire and people find work. “We’re looking to grow these partnerships,” she said. “We know many businesses are already working with HR solutions providers to manage their hiring needs and we want to make it easier for businesses to tap into the tools they already use, and help more people find jobs.”
In their publicity and marketing, HR solutions providers usually focus on how integrations offer customers a wider range of job-posting options. But just how much value end users realize depends on how sophisticated they are about the integration’s benefits, said Edwards.
“Whether the customers/users really care will depend on how savvy they are about the benefits these integrations can bring, and whether they’re using the [talent acquisition] suite to its full potential,” she explained. “Often, users are not.”
Both recruiters and analysts expect companies like SuccessFactors to continue integrating its services with the Facebooks of the world. Many platforms already have integrations in place, Edwards noted. SuccessFactors, Mills said, has integrations with “most major job boards in major markets.”
While she wouldn’t disclose how many partnerships Facebook has, Chang said the social media giant is working with JazzHR, Talentify, Workable and other vendors in addition to SuccessFactors.
Party City has agreed with the EEOC to pay $155,000 to settle an ADA lawsuit the agency filed on behalf of a rejected job applicant on the autism spectrum and suffering from severe anxiety.
According to the lawsuit, the individual had been receiving services from Easter Seals of New Hampshire to build up her self-confidence, including working and applying for a job. These services included a job coach.
When the Party City interviewer learned that the woman accompanying her to her interview was a job coach, the EEOC alleged that his entire attitude changed.
The hiring manager told the job coach that Party City had hired people with disabilities with job coaches in the past and that it had not gone well, and made disparaging comments about those employees. Although both the applicant and the job coach explained to the hiring manager that the applicant had been successful shadowing others in previous retail jobs, the hiring manager was uninterested in either the applicant’s abilities or in the limited role the job coach would play. … The hiring manager tried to cut the interview short by telling the job coach in a patronizing tone, “Thank you for bringing her here,” while the applicant was still in the room. The hiring manager also stated, in the applicant’s presence, that the Party City employee who had encouraged the applicant to apply would hire anyone, and would “even hire an ant.”
Per EEOC regional attorney Jeffrey Burstein, “Federal law requires employers to consider disabled job applicants based on their abilities, not on demeaning stereotypes.” Adds Kevin Berry, director of the EEOC’s New York District Office, said, “Allowing this applicant to work with a job coach in her early weeks of employment would not have caused an undue burden on Party City. The ADA requires employers to make this type of reasonable accommodation so as to enable qualified people with disabilities to join the workforce, which is a win-win for everyone.”
Four takeaways from this lawsuit and settlement:
An employer’s obligation to consider and offer reasonable accommodations does not just extend to employees, but also to applicants. Employers cannot shirk their ADA responsibilities just because the person needed the accommodation is just an applicant.
Past bad experiences with other employees or applicants are not a valid reason to deny a reasonable to a current employee or applicant. Reasonable accommodations are individualized, and must be considered on an individual-by-individual basis. Telling someone that you can’t offer an accommodation because of past bad experiences with others is a recipe for an expensive (and difficult to defend) lawsuit.
A job coach is potential reasonable accommodation you must consider when presented by a disabled employee or applicant. You have to then engage the individual in the interactive process and determine how to offer that accommodation, if possible.
Party City did the right thing by recognizing that it mishandled this applicant and settling this lawsuit through early mediation. It could have avoided the whole problem, however, by ensuring that those involved in hiring for its stores understand their reasonable accommodation obligations to disabled applicants. Indeed, I’d go so far as to say that no one should be doing any interviewing or hiring without ADA and reasonable accommodation training. This risk is just too great.
It doesn’t matter how talented your new hires are, or what stellar technology training they’ve received.
Chances are within a few years those skills will be obsolete.
Technology evolves so quickly that it is no longer enough to hire for the skills needed today. To stay relevant, companies need to hire people who have the ability to constantly learn new skills that may not yet exist. This focus on reskilling as a talent management strategy is already taking place, said Art Mazor, principal of Deloitte’s human capital management consulting practice, in Atlanta. “Most big companies today are focused on reskilling, and for good reason: The half-life of skills is two to five years,” he said. “That has huge implications for recruiting.”
With demand for talent at an all-time high, companies can’t expect to pluck these skills ready-made from the talent pool. They will have to create them in-house by providing employees with constant access to training, and incentives to continuously reskill.
Research from McKinsey found 82 percent of executives at large organizations believe retraining and reskilling must be at least half of the answer to addressing their skills gap, with 27 percent calling it a top five priority. And 74 percent of global recruiting firms say reskilling workers represents an effective strategy to combat the perennial skills shortage, according to Bullhorn’s 2019 “Staffing and Recruiting Trends” report.
“Reskilling is an important solution to the talent shortage,” said Vinda Souza, vice president of marketing for Bullhorn. She said that as long as there is low unemployment, companies need to consider what training they can provide to new and existing talent to constantly close new skill gaps.
To reskill someone, look for people with “adjacent skills,” said Jesper Bendtsen, head of recruiting for Thomson Reuters in Toronto. “Don’t just look for people who know blockchain or AI,” he said. “Look for people who work with related technologies that will lend themselves to your future needs.”
That talent pool may already be on staff. Bendtsen noted that employees who have been with the company for years may not have the exact skills you are looking for, but they know your culture, your customers and your way of doing business. “Start by looking internally at who might be interested and able to transition to a new role through retraining,” he said. An internal upskilling program can help companies close talent gaps while reinforcing their commitment to the existing workforce.
When recruiting externally, companies need to consider what skills they are looking for and how that impacts the recruiting process. New hires need to be willing and able to learn new skills and to tackle nebulous workplace challenges. Identifying these skills requires more thoughtful assessments of candidates’ soft skills and personality, not just their past history, Mazor said.
Some organizations are adding virtual reality, automated simulations and gaming tools to the recruiting process to observe how candidates handle unknown situations and learn new information to solve problems.
“These tools test their predisposition for handling challenges while creating a compelling candidate experience,” Mazor said.
Companies are also integrating hiring managers into this assessment process. At Thomson Reuters, for example, software engineers oversee candidates as they complete coding challenges, while asking questions about their process.
“The goal isn’t to see if they get the right answers, but to see how they tackle problems and use information,” Bendtsen said. “It’s an objective way to assess a candidate’s skills and ability to learn.”
This new approach to recruiting could make it easier for companies to look further afield for candidates who show an aptitude and interest in learning, even if they don’t follow a traditional academic or career path, said Tara Cassady, senior vice president at Cielo, a global recruitment process outsourcing provider in Milwaukee. “You want people who are curious, have an aptitude to troubleshoot, and who use technology to solve problems,” she said. These lifelong learners could just as easily come from tech schools, boot camps and online universities as from traditional college campuses.
Once they do find or retain these candidates, they are also investing more effort into retaining them, she said. From ensuring that interns have a clear path to employment, to making sure newly trained talent are given new assignments and competitive salaries, engagement and retention must be part of the reskilling trend, she said. “If you are going to invest in training talent, you don’t want to lose them to a competing firm.”
Recruiting technology continues to be a hot investment space, with venture capitalists and global enterprise solution providers investing millions in developing and acquiring innovative new point solutions. By the end of the third quarter of 2018, investment volume in HR technology had nearly tripled what was invested in 2017.
“There is a lot of money going into all aspects of recruiting and talent acquisition,” said David Mallon, vice president and chief analyst with Bersin, Deloitte Consulting. “It’s generating a lot of innovation, but also a lot of noise.”
Trends around social recruiting, mobile apps and video interviewing are now the norm, noted Barbara Marder, senior partner and global innovation leader at Mercer. “We are still seeing improvements in these areas but they are now entrenched in the talent acquisition process.”
Newer trends focus on implementing artificial intelligence, machine learning, gamification, and chat bots into the recruiting platforms. “These are all still leading edge and we expect to see a lot more adoption in the coming years.”
Diversity Drives Innovation
How these tools will be applied varies based on the challenges clients face. One area gaining a lot of attention is diversity in recruiting. Diversity ranked as the top hiring priority in LinkedIn’s 2018 “Global Recruiting Trends” report, with 78 percent of companies citing diversity as important to their strategy. However, the majority of these companies also report that finding diverse candidates to interview is their biggest obstacle, said Monica Lewis, product manager for LinkedIn. “They are not getting enough diverse candidates in their funnel, and they are looking for ways to reach a broader audience,” she said.
This challenge has won the interest and innovation of aspiring HR tech start-ups, who have been launching a variety of potential solutions. Vendors like Hired and Gapjumpers offer platforms that hide candidates’ names, universities and other defining features that can lead to bias in hiring. Other vendors forgo résumés all together, forcing companies to choose candidates based on their performance in coding challenges or assessment results rather than college pedigree.
More recently, vendors have begun adding virtual job fairs and analytics tools to help clients expand their talent pool and to be more holistic in honing their short list of top talent. “If companies want more diverse candidates they have to scout in more places,” said Marder. Virtual technologies allow them to canvas on more campuses and to connect with more candidates. “Once they are able to flood the pipeline, they can use machine learning algorithms to screen the data and find the best people.”
These algorithms can track any combination of individual and industry trend data to figure out who will be the best fit for a position, and they get more targeted with every search, she said. “It levels the playing field for diverse talent.” Companies need to be certain their algorithms aren’t also biased. Amazon recently discovered its recruiting algorithm was biased against women, because it was based on the traits of past high performers, who were predominantly male.
Chatbots Add a Human Touch
Vendors are also continuing to develop tools that improve the recruiting experience — for candidates and clients, said Mallon. That includes using chatbots to provide “human” interactions to keep candidates up to date on their applications, or to answer questions about the process. He noted that chatbot technology has gotten a lot more advanced in recent years, making these interactions more engaging than just waiting for an email. “It provides a lot of value while reducing the number of actual humans in the process.”
As these small vendors continue to demonstrate the value of their solutions it will surely lead to another flurry of acquisitions in this space.
“The recruiting industry is currently at ‘peak boutique’ with a lot of little players showing a lot of innovation,” Mallon said. That is often the point where enterprise providers start acquiring all the innovative point solutions to expand their own talent acquisition suite.
For companies wondering whether to implement these new technologies today or wait until they mature, Marder urges them to think about their recruiting pain points, and whether a best-in-class solution is the answer. “If one of these tools solves your recruiting problem and creates daylight between you and your competition — that can give you an edge at least for a while,” she said. That can make the investment in a startup solution worth the risk.
At a time when careers in government are increasingly underscored with public and political pressure, Kirsten Wyatt is sounding the alarm about the public sector workforce.
“The government needs to wake up and realize there’s a talent war,” said Wyatt, executive director of the Oregon-based Engaging Local Government Leaders, a nonprofit promoting diversity, education and networking among local government employees on a national level. “If you’re going to be competing for entry-level or jobs you want to fill with talent you can then nurture, you need to put in more effort.”
Public sector agencies from the massive federal government to tiny rural townships face unique challenges when competing with private businesses for talent. Recruiting and retention is a recurring concern for the skill set often associated with public service employees. And it’s no secret that private sector companies typically offer substantially higher wages and more flexible work schedules. And there are other factors coming into play.
Prime among them is the so-called silver tsunami, a wave of baby boomers exiting the workforce into retirement. Studies show some 10,000 boomers retire every day, leaving a huge gap for public sector employers to fill.
According to the U.S. Office of Personnel Management, the average age of a full-time federal employee is 47.5 years, with 45 percent of the workforce over 50 years old.
The Congressional Research Service indicates 52 percent of public workers are age 45 to 64 compared to 42.4 percent in the private sector.
Federal workers are older than state and local government employees, too, studies show. Of those age 45 to 64, 56.7 percent are federal, 52.1 percent are local, and 49.7 percent are state employees.
In a 2018 survey by the Center for State & Local Government Excellence, public sector HR directors report higher numbers of retirements in 2018 over 2017.
Another challenge: Public agencies depend on tax base or bond-measure revenues to create new jobs and rehire for open positions. Hiring freezes are not uncommon even in flush economic times.
Nannina Angioni
“When taxpayer dollars are on the line, protections and processes come into play that an untrained, private sector employee would not even consider,” said Nannina Angioni, a labor and employment attorney and partner of the Los Angeles-based law firm Kaedian LLP.
Angioni said it can be costly and time consuming to find employees with public sector experience for entry-level positions given the increased ethical considerations, regulatory issues and legal obligations that typically don’t apply to private sector workers.
Still another challenge: enticing people to technology jobs. While millennials exhibit technological advantages being digital natives, it’s also one reason they are scarce in government workplaces with antiquated systems where they can’t sharpen their skills, said Kris Tremaine, a senior vice president focusing on the federal public sector at ICF, a global consulting and technology services company.
Although millennials will comprise 75 percent of the workforce by 2025, they currently make up only 10 percent of the federal sector technology workforce, said Tremaine.
Kris Tremaine
Eighty-two percent of the Center for State & Local Government Excellence’s survey respondents indicated recruitment and retention as a workforce priority. They’re finding it difficult to fill positions in policing, engineering, network administration, emergency dispatch, accounting, skilled trades and information technology.
“When it comes to recruiting talent, you need to go where the talent is,” said ELGL’s Wyatt, adding that while many public sector HR departments continue to advertise jobs in newspapers, potential talent is hanging out on social media.
While Wyatt calls many job ads “boring,” she also notes successful efforts such as one produced by the city of Los Angeles for a graphic designer. The ad appeared as if a child drew it with a crayon. It went viral.
Fort Lauderdale, Florida, human resources professional Jody Blake posts jobs on social media featuring eye-catching images of palm tree-lined beaches or building plans.
To fill vacancies in Fort Lauderdale’s 2,500-member workforce, Blake uses Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, ZipRecruiter and Indeed.
She’s had the most success with LinkedIn, especially for stormwater and wastewater engineers. She posts jobs on engineering group sites at no cost and uses LinkedIn’s Recruiter Lite program to maximize her efforts.
“I believe in getting the word out any way you can,” she said. “Even if people aren’t interested themselves, they may know someone who is.”
The public sector should take a page from the private sector in hiring practices, including internships, career fairs, meet-ups, events, social activities and using more technology, said Tremaine. Blake, meanwhile, also seeks people with a passion to make a difference. Jobs emphasizing social good attract millennials who want to be part of making a difference “such as in helping Americans stop taking opioids or climate change issues,” Tremaine added.
Wyatt said, “You can work in sustainability, be a librarian, police officer or an engineer and all work for a local government with that public service ethos at the core of your job every day.”
Millennials Embrace Collaboration
Human-centered open plan designs supporting teamwork where employees of different skill sets gather is important, said Tremaine.
While millennials skip from job to job often for higher pay, “some want clearer paths to growth and an understanding of where they fit in the organization,” Tremaine said, adding they prefer a coaching-mentor relationship to a boss.
Streamlining onerous paperwork and a protracted timeline involved in public sector employment may attract more employees, Tremaine said.
So too would the ability to leave a job and return “and not lose all of your benefits while drawing private sector best practices into the government,” she added.
Jody Blake
Fort Lauderdale attracts many people looking for a switch after many years working in the private sector. While they made more money in private industry, they seek the security of the public sector, Blake said.
The city of Weston, Florida, took a different approach 21 years ago by outsourcing most positions per its charter.
“Probably 70 percent or more of a government budget is the cost is to pay employees,” said City Manager John Flint.
Only 10 positions for the city of Weston are in-house: six department directors, a city manager, two assistants and a clerk. An assistant city manager handles necessary HR functions such as insurance and payroll contributions.
Law enforcement is provided through the Broward County Sheriff’s Department. Other city jobs are filled by government outsourcing services such as C.A.P. Government, Calvin, Giordano & Associates, Municipal Technologies, and Weiss, Serota, Helfman, Cole & Bierman.
“All of the people here are by invitation and not by right. If the people assigned to us don’t meet our expectations, it is easier for us to replace them. I don’t have to spend my time managing people. I can manage the city and spend more time with our elected officials and residents,” said Flint, adding Weston’s approach offers greater flexibility and efficiency.
Some outsourced employees have been with the city before its incorporation in 1996 when it was a community development district, said Flint. When the city changes service providers (which hasn’t happened in a decade), Flint ensures the incoming provider retains the current employees and keeps their salaries and benefits at least equal to the previous provider.
Kaedian LLP’s Angioni said that once they are hired, many public sector employees stay in their job for decades for the perks of consistent work hours, minimal demands outside of their set schedules, union benefits, rights to reinstatement, pensions and appeal rights to disciplinary actions.
Career Moves
The public sector also offers the ability to try different careers while retaining benefits in one organization.
An agency might consider moving someone who’s been an analyst in community development for a few years into public utilities for another few years to increase their knowledge base and broaden their skills.
Such moves keep employees “engaged, excited and continually learning” while also giving departments “a fresh set of eyes,” Wyatt said. That’s important to retention, given the hundreds of thousands of dollars spent on employee wages, benefits, training and development over a five-year span, she added.
John Flint
To retain employees in one of the most difficult public sector jobs — solid waste collection — Greenville, South Carolina, Solid Waste and Recycling Manager Mildred Lee treats a crew to lunch monthly to show her appreciation and elicit their input.
She’s retained employees by leading an effort to convert solid waste collection from five to four days. A supervisory mentoring program for all frontline solid waste employees has transitioned two into management.
A 2018 survey by the Center for State & Local Government Excellence noted that more than 45 percent of the respondents offer flexible scheduling, 65 percent support employee development and training reimbursement, 37 percent host wellness programs or on-site fitness facilities, and 34 percent provide some form of paid family leave.
Wyatt said she receives increasing feedback about the value the midprofessional generation places on paid family leave.
Kansas City, Missouri, recently finished a one-year paid family leave pilot program. It was utilized primarily by male police officers. It’s the hardest job for which to recruit and is typically dominated by young men, said Wyatt.
“You look at the long-term impact that has on employee morale and loyalty and who you choose to work for with everything else being equal,” she added.
As the public sector starts to see the dismantling of retiree benefits, one useful tool may be adopting the Individual Medicare Marketplace for retiree health care programs, “a model generally far more affordable for retirees while offering cost savings for employers,” says Marianne Steger, director of public sector strategy at Willis Towers Watson and former health care director for the Ohio Public Employees Retirement System.
Retaining employees has meant offering low-priced health insurance, a generous retirement plan, educational incentives, annual reviews typically with pay increases and the ability to start off at a good rate of vacation time accrual, said Fort Lauderdale’s Blake.
Blake offers advice to new hires on how to improve their profile to increase their promotion chances. Employees are surveyed on the work culture. Employees are called community builders while residents are called neighbors.
Wyatt and her husband Kent — both former public sector employees — founded ELGL after noticing local government education, training and networking was siloed based on job title. Its 4,000 members nationwide represent a cross-section of entry-level employees to mayors and city managers.
“It helps when librarians can learn from planners and cops can learn from finance directors,” said Wyatt.
Their organization provides collaboration and cross-departmental training through a technology network connecting public sector employees in one part of the country to others elsewhere to help deal with problems for which others have found solutions.
It also provides online content, monthly webinars, regional pop-up conferences and a national conference. Informal meet-ups are held on college campuses to introduce local government careers to college students.
Further, it focuses on increasing the number of women and people of color into local government leadership to reflect U.S. community demographics.
While there is much focus on age demographics in public service, Wyatt said what most people in a public service career want is no different than anyone else: “feeling recognized for a job well done, independence and learning something that takes them to the next step in their career.”
Wyatt has seen some members go through a career crisis as they contemplate a move to the private sector for more pay and better fringe benefits.
“They choose to stick with government,” she said. “They built a network that supports them and reminds them it’s work worth doing and that’s powerful.”
The unemployment rate may be at a record low, but there are still vast pockets of workers in the United States struggling to find jobs.
Global hotel chain Hyatt Corp. is tapping into one of these talent pools with RiseHY, its new community-hiring program, which uses virtual reality and gaming to introduce young people looking for career opportunities to the hospitality industry.
As part of the initiative, Hyatt hotels around the world have committed to hiring 10,000 “opportunity youth” — people ages 18 to 24 who are neither in school nor working — by 2025. According to data from Brookings Institute, 4.7 million young people fall into this category.
“This program is a labor of love,” says Jessica Schultz, Hyatt’s senior manager of community engagement. Part philanthropy and part talent development, RiseHY was designed to support the community while helping Hyatt fill its talent pipeline. “This is a pool of untapped talent who have skills and ambition,” said Audrey Williams-Lee, vice president of corporate HR and philosophy. “They could be a great fit for our organization.”
Immersive Hotel Tours
However, RiseHY is more than just a targeted recruiting effort.
Audrey Williams-Lee
Opportunity youth often come from disadvantaged neighborhoods and have limited work experience and education. “Hospitality jobs aren’t even on their radar,” Schultz said. When Schultz and Williams-Lee began designing the project, they knew they would need to close that gap and find a way to help young people imagine building a career in hospitality.
To give them a sense of what life would be like working in a hotel, they worked with a vendor to build a virtual reality app, called YouVisit, where candidates can take a virtual guided tour of a hotel, see what workers do and learn what’s required of different roles including room attendants, hostesses, wait staff and concierge. “The virtual reality lets them see what their career path could be, and to think about whether this is a good fit for them,” Williams-Lee said.
Gaming the System
Priyanka Jain
Interested candidates are also invited to complete an online assessment, built by Pymetrics, that uses artificial intelligence to assess a candidate’s skills and attitudes through a series of games and reasoning exercises. The games use neuroscience and reviews of past assessments to measure things like how well candidates multi-task, whether they can filter distractions, and their willingness to take risks, explained Priyanka Jain, head of growth and lead product manager for Pymetrics.
The system then determines where a candidate would be a good fit. “There are no good or bad responses,” Jain said. Rather, it helps the candidates and Hyatt understand where candidates are likely to thrive in the absence of a resume or past job experience.
Jessica Schultz
The virtual reality app and game-based assessments are meant to ease these young people through the early recruiting process, but it is also expected to help increase retention and job satisfaction by ensuring the right people are put into the right roles, said Schultz. “It will create a better flow for our talent funnel.”
Once candidates are selected, they are either hired directly and given a mentor to support them as they ease into the role, or they are placed in a three- to six-month training program developed in partnership with community groups to give them the skills they will need on the job.
Once the training is complete, they may be hired by Hyatt or referred to other hospitality employers. “We aren’t just doing this for Hyatt,” Schultz said. “It’s about helping these kids find careers in hospitality.”
Expanding the program ensures every interested youth has an opportunity to find a job and that Hyatt doesn’t have to slow the program down during low hiring seasons, she added. “We expect to hire at least 10,000 youth, but this program will impact so many more.”
Nearly half of U.S. veterans leave their first post-military job within a year.
Most employees want a meaningful job, but for returning military veterans finding private-sector work that offers a sense of purpose can be a big challenge, and that can lead to job dissatisfaction and high turnover for employers.
“In service you wake up every morning and the mission is defined and clear,” said former Marine Corps intelligence officer Elliot Parks, a cybersecurity consultant at PwC based in Philadelphia. “You have a clarity of purpose, but in the private sector it’s not always clear.”
While more companies are hiring veterans — 40 percent planned to recruit them in 2018, up from 37 percent the previous year, according to a 2017 survey by CareerBuilder — nearly half of U.S. veterans leave their first post-military job within a year. Many large employers have turned to veterans groups such as Hiring Our Heroes and Veterans Employment Initiative for help, resulting in a marked decrease in the unemployment rate for post-9/11 veterans from 12.1 percent in 2011 to 3.8 percent as of August 2018, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Yet, turnover remains high.
To help turn this trend around, PwC, Google, Citigroup, T-Mobile and other large employers are partnering with FourBlock, a nonprofit that provides professional development and networking opportunities to veterans who joined the military after 9/11. The New York-based organization, which was founded in 2012, offers a semester-long, university-accredited program that features classes taught by top corporate executives. Veterans learn how to translate their military skills and experiences into career opportunities, creating a pipeline to leading companies through its Career Readiness Program, a semester-long course developed with Columbia University.
Self-promotion is difficult for military veterans, especially when civilians don’t understand the nuances of military life.
“I was in the military with seven years active duty and promoted twice and not once did I have to sell myself or rely on personal branding,” said Chris Crace, veterans advocacy leader at PwC. “Your body of work speaks for itself. We come out and it’s a brand new industry where everything is foreign and we’re just not comfortable selling ourselves. It’s always about the team, the ‘we,’ not the ‘me.’ That’s a big challenge.”
Crace, a former Marine captain, works with recruiters and hiring managers at PwC to educate them on the skills and talents that veterans bring and oversees the firm’s recruiting efforts.
“At a minimum, the hiring manager needs to know the different branches of military and the pay scales,” he said. “They need to also be prepared for the fact that résumés won’t jump off the page as meeting job requirements. They need to be open to having conversations with vets about what they do.”
At PwC, newly hired veterans go through an onboarding program that pairs them with a mentor who is also a veteran and can join an affinity group that supports veterans and their families.
“It’s important to identify mentors with military experience,” said Parks. “Having somebody who can speak both languages is really helpful. And having a forum or advocacy network where we can connect with each other is also important.”
So far, FourBlock has served more than 1,700 veterans with 70 percent staying with their first employer for at least one year, according to Eric Ahn, the organization’s director of marketing. Ahn experienced the program in 2014 after retiring from the military due to an injury.
“I joined the Marines in 2004 and spent 10 years in infantry,” he said. “I was in Iraq and Afghanistan and bases in Greece and Germany. I had combat experience but also worked with coalition forces and that gave me a broad sense of what people in other countries experience. But I think people looked at my résumé and said he did XYZ in the military so he can do XYZ job. People only saw my infantry code and saw me as a law-enforcement candidate or a security company candidate, which was fine but I was injured and needed to find something more suited to my injury and my education. FourBlock helped me connect the dots.”
The Recruiting award recognizes organizations that developed and implemented an innovative and effective recruitment initiative that helped the organization source, attract and recruit job candidates. Here are the winners for 2018:
Gold: SSM Health
Amid a health care worker shortage, SSM Health needed to improve its recruiting practices. The St. Louis-based Catholic, not-for-profit health care system includes 24 hospitals, more than 300 physician offices and many other services that require an influx of nurses. Despite great need to hire quality graduate nurses, SSM struggled to do so, sparking its graduate nurse recruitment program.
“It’s a scarce talent market, and the needs of our communities need to be met and filled,” said Tom Ahr, vice president of talent at SSM Health. “We have to continue to get better every day to attract the best talent for us.”
To do so, Ahr’s team interacted with schools and identified goals and metrics to plan ahead of hiring needs and move candidates through the hiring process efficiently. A team of educators, operations leaders and new graduate nurses met in spring 2016 to review programs to best explore the needs of an improved recruitment plan.
By June 2018, SSM implemented a variety of solutions, particularly around the candidate experience. To make the process efficient, the team enhanced communications, using texting, email and phone while also pre-screening via video interview to best fit the busy schedules of nursing students. These and other efforts helped SSM to share the job decision within two business days, as well as share detailed feedback with the candidate.
In addition to the recruiting process improvements, SSM revamped its residency program to better retain talent.
Results include identifying internal demands earlier, thus going to market with the positions more than 30 days sooner than last year. SSM then filled all open nursing positions in June 2018; in June 2017, 33 positions went unfilled. In the same time frame, operation costs were reduced to save $90,000.
“Any time that our business can tell us what they need and we’re able to deliver and do it in a really timely way and in a way that is really efficient with our resources, then we consider that a successful initiative,” Ahr said.
For the organization’s efforts to improve graduate nurse recruitment, SSM Health is the 2018 Optimas Award Gold winner for Recruiting.
Silver: Choptank Transport Inc.
Choptank Transport Inc. needed to grow its hiring strategy in conjunction with its increasing headcount.
To meet aggressive hiring goals for 2018, the third-party logistics company created #ChooseChoptank, a hiring and recruiting initiative that focuses on employer branding, candidate experience, employee referrals and digital optimization.
Branding efforts include pushing a fresh brand logo in all photos and videos to “ensure a consistent, well-branded presence that candidates will see and remember,” according to its award application. To get more eyes on job postings, the company added digital advertising for jobs and increased the referral program’s payouts. Through advanced training for new employees and outlining potential career paths, retention efforts also improved.
Results include a 16 percent increase in employee referrals and 70 percent increase in candidates who reach the first in-person interview.
For its creation and use of #ChooseChoptank, Choptank Transport Inc. is the 2018 Optimas Award Silver winner for Recruiting.
Bronze: ReedTMS Logistics
For ReedTMS Logistics’ creation and implementation of its 212 initiative, the third-party logistics provider is the 2018 Optimas Award Bronze winner for Recruiting.
“At a minimum, the hiring manager needs to know the different branches of military and the pay scales,” he said. “They need to also be prepared for the fact that résumés won’t jump off the page as meeting job requirements. They need to be open to having conversations with vets about what they do.”
Bronze: ReedTMS Logistics