News broke over the weekend of a fatality at a local manufacturing plant. Undoubtedly, the Occupation Safefty and Health Administration was on the scene to unravel what happened.
Injuries or fatalities aren't the only reasons OSHA might arrive at your door. It might have received a complaint from a current or former employee. It might a random investigation. You might be part of a targeted industry. Or, it could be a follow-up from a prior investigation.
Regardless, when OSHA arrives, whatever the reason, your personnel needs to know that the first call should be to your employment lawyer. Unless the investigator has a search warrant or subpoena, he or she has no right to enter your business, no matter what he or she says to bully through your door.
OSHA is not your friend. It is not there to give you an atta-boy on workplace safety. It is there to find violations and levy fines to make money for OSHA. This is not cynicism; this is fact. And once it is through your door, everything becomes fair game, no matter the reason for the investigation.
OSHA's fines range from a maximum of $7,000 for each serious violation, and a maximum of $70,000 for each willful or repeat violation. Trust me, these numbers add up quickly.
If you are fortunate enough not to have OSHA in your facility, use the time to conduct a top-to-bottom safety audit. Call a workplace safety expert. Call an employment lawyer. Call someone knowledgable in this area to tell you what needs to be fixed before OSHA does it for you. And, if (when?) OSHA shows up at your door, call your employment lawyer to handle the investigation, mitigate the disruption, and, as best as possible, limit damage.
A successful succession strategy should be deeply interconnected with ongoing recruitment practices. Having the right people in place, from the top down, is critical to ensuring a seamless, streamlined transition when necessary. Additionally, from a recruitment perspective, good candidates often look at the job trajectory of the more senior executives. When it’s clear that a company frequently promotes from within, candidates are able to visualize their career growth, an added value tied to the position on the table. It also means that companies are more likely to secure top talent.
Now, let’s dive a bit deeper into the connection between recruitment and succession planning. At its core, succession planning is simply filling a vacant position with the right person. To ease these transitions, companies often look to promote from within — there’s an organizational familiarity, client or workload overlap, etc., which makes a shift less challenging for all involved. As a result, when companies are seeking to fill a position — in fact, any position —they must look ahead, investing in hires that will be able to support the future growth of the organization, even as they mature within the company.
It’s important that companies make this connection between recruitment and succession. When discussing a client’s needs, we always ask if they have established a succession plan. About half the time, companies don’t have a plan in place, nor have they explored developing a formal strategy. Additionally, for those with a succession plan in place, the companies often lack specific benchmarks or goals indicating how employees can progress within the organization. Because most job seekers prioritize career growth, it’s crucial for companies to present a clear and consistent message about where the role will lead in three, five or 10 years down the road. It also ensures a company has a comprehensive succession plan that will help guide the company, securing a sound future.
Being able to visualize that future is equally important to the candidate as it is for the company. Candidates are looking for opportunities at companies that provide a clear path for upward mobility and growth, and it’s a recruiter’s job to ensure the candidate’s goals align with a company’s succession plan. For example, if a company has a number of senior executives who are Boomers, they should expect to fill those positions in the next few years as these executives begin to retire. Therefore, in recruiting for mid-management positions, companies should be looking three to five years down the line, hiring candidates that will be able to step into these more senior roles when the time comes.
Ultimately, succession planning decreases the room for error when selecting a candidate and helps companies and employees both feel more secure in their shared future. How that succession strategy develops, however, varies vastly between organizations — some focus on key positions like the C-suite, while others seek a plan for the entire organization. If you’re an organization that allows employees to move between departments or roles, you’ll need universal succession plan in place. Remember, a succession strategy that aligns with recruitment goals translates into a company and employees that are co-invested in a successful future. In planning your next hire, don’t be afraid to think big and look ahead.
SOURCE: Scott Hopkins, founder, CVPartners, San Francisco, division of Addison Group, Jan. 30, 2015.
I do a lot of speaking. One speech that I’ve been giving over the past couple of years is entitled, “X+Y+Z = A Generational Mess for Your Workplace.” I teach how employers can best manage the diverse needs and abilities of four different generations of employees. I discuss some broad-based generalizations about Traditionalists (age 70+), Baby Boomers (50-69), Gen X (35-49), and Gen Y (under 35). I always finish by discussing the very real risk of age discrimination if you treat these generalizations as gospel, and do not treat each employee, of age any, as an individual, with individual talents and abilities.
Target saw the need to offer the same type of training to its managers, but it left off the part about age discrimination. Gawker (h/t Business Management Daily) published Target’s training materials, entitled, Managing Generational Differences,” which, among other things, describe its oldest workers as “slow to adapt to change,” “rarely question[ing] authority” and see[ing] technology as “complex and challenging.”
When you are sued for discrimination, your training materials are fair game in litigation. While you write them to aid your employees, you must do so with (at least) one eye on the jury that will read them during trial. You do not want to have your manager explain to a jury, in an age discrimination case, if he thought the plaintiff was “slow to adapt to change” when he made the termination decision.
I spent yesterday working from home, as Cleveland got socked with nearly a foot of snow and my kids had the day off from school.
While working from home, I came across an article from Crain’s New York Business, entitled, Porn and the snowbound workforce. The article argued that winter storms lead to increased software security violations, including those on company-owned computers that employees are using to work from home, including a spike in malware infections.
[I]ncreased levels of malware infections go almost hand-in-hand with increased traffic to porn sites. Adult-content platform Pornhub reported a 21 percent increase in traffic from New York City-based users during this week’s storm…. For randier New Yorkers who might have been home with work-provided laptops, the blizzard malware infections could cause more than just an uncomfortable chat with human resources.
Companies should want employees to have the flexibility to work from home during inclement weather. It’s certainly safer than having them traverse icy or snow-covered roads. Moreover, it enables you to capture some of the productivity you would otherwise lose from childrens’ snow days and other weather-related days off. Companies must, however, make it clear to employees that work computers are for work, and not for play, even if the employee is using the computer at home.
The user’s local IT unit must provide, maintain, and support a computer with an approved Emory configuration defined by the Local IT unit. The configuration must address the Information Security Requirements for Telecommuting Arrangements which includes items such as current security updates and anti-virus capability, removal of administrative rights, proper firewall configuration, and security incident reporting requirements.
Telecommuters must use only the Emory provided computer for telecommuting.
Telecommuters must protect the computer issued to them and any sensitive data that it might contain.
Telecommuters may not store sensitive information on the computer unless authorized to do so, and even then, telecommuters must only store the absolute minimum required.
Telecommuters must encrypt or password protect documents that contain sensitive information when possible, and upgrade to Full Disk Encryption when an enterprise solution becomes available.
Telecommuters may not transfer sensitive data to non-Emory owned systems or removable media, and they may not allow unauthorized users to use the computer issued for telecommuting.
Users must immediately notify their manager and local IT support if a system used to telecommute is lost or stolen or if the system is compromised or suspected of being compromised by a computer virus or hacker.
These types of policies cannot guarantee a malware-free IT infrastructure. They will, however, provide you some sense of security in knowing that your employees are aware of the issue, while at the same time providing you the ammunition you need to support action against a employee who misuses your computers.
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.
There exists an inherent tension between open-door and other self-reporting policies and the Equal Employment Opportunity laws.
Consider, for example, a recent more than $100,000 jury verdict against a trucking company for disability discrimination. The company maintained a written “Open Door” policy, and an unwritten policy that prohibited any driver who self-reported alcohol abuse from ever returning to driving. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission sued after an employee who availed himself of the Open Door policy to self-report an alcohol addiction was banned from any future driving for the company.
Even though the company offered the driver a part-time dock position as an accommodation, the EEOC successfully argued that the employer failed to “make an individualized determination as to whether the driver could return to driving and provide a reasonable accommodation of leave to its drivers for them to obtain treatment,” and that “to maintain a blanket policy that any driver who self-reports alcohol abuse could never return to driving — with no individualized assessment to determine if the driver could safely be returned to driving — violates the [Americans with Disabilities Act].”
Employees need to be able to engage in protected activity without any retribution or other negative consequences. In this case, the employer learned of a disability and failed to engage in the interactive process for a reasonable accommodation. In others, employers might retaliate against an employee who uses an open-door policy to complaint about discrimination or harassment.
Open-door policies are laudable. They foster the communication that is necessary between employees and management necessary for a healthy (and hopefully union free) work environment. With that openness, however, comes responsibility — the responsibility to learn information without retaliating. Employers need to train management so that they know what to do with protected information once they learn it, and how to act without violating any of our EEO laws. Without this training, employers are setting up their open-door policies and programs for a litigation fail.
I don’t believe there is one single answer to your current recruiting challenges, but I applaud you for examining your methods to ensure you’re not missing any opportunities. As you examine your current recruiting strategies, it’s important to recognize how the job market is improving for most qualified job seekers. There are far more “passive” than “active” job seekers in today’s market. As a result, we as recruiters have to be more resourceful and make our opportunities stand out from the crowd. Here are two suggestions on how to do that:
Make sure you are investing in social media recruitment. Today’s job seekers aren’t necessarily hanging out around job boards, but statistics show they are very regularly participating in social media sites. You need to have a strong presence on at least LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter and Google+. Get your brand out there and provide them with good content that isn’t just about “hot jobs.” Industry information, original content or fun things about your company will engage them and help to raise your visibility with the audience. It’s not just “about you.” It’s “about them.”
Create robust, engaging job descriptions. One of the common mistakes that staffing firms make is that they will spend money on job boards, websites and other online resources, but they don’t pay attention to the critical piece of content that drives it all — the creation of a robust job description. If you’re asking someone to consider making an important career decision, you can’t expect them to get excited and apply to one of your jobs if the information is poorly represented. Recruiters need to take the time to get detailed information from the client on the opportunity they’re recruiting for and present it in a compelling manner. Is it a great company to work for? Is it in an exciting location? Is there room for career growth? If so, then tell them! How can a candidate get excited enough to apply for a job if your staff isn’t excited enough to take just a few minutes to properly and professionally present it?
I hope these two suggestions help to freshen up your recruitment strategy so you can start attracting the candidates you’re seeking.
SOURCE: Deborah Millhouse, president, CEO Inc., Charlotte, North Carolina, April 21, 2014.
In early 2009, Aker Plant Services terminated the employment of Tommy Sharp as part of a workforce reduction. When Sharp asked his supervisor why the company chose him, as opposed to his less experienced, less senior co-workers, the supervisor replied that the company decided to keep younger employees who could stay with the company longer. Sharp then sued, and ultimately won, for age discrimination.
While Sharp’s age discrimination lawsuit was pending, a staffing agency attempted to place him for a temporary position at Aker. The company, however, immediately rejected Sharp’s candidacy, notifying the staffing agency, via email, as follows:
Yes, we do know Tom. He does acceptable work as a designer, but he violated a DuPont mandate on the use of electronic recording devices on company property when last employed here. There are combustible materials in the plant that can potentially be ignited by the use of cell phones, recorders, cameras, etc… [sic] DuPont maintains a zero-tolerance approach to safety violations on its property so, unfortunately, we will not be able to consider Mr. Sharp for this role.
Sharp then brought a second suit, this time for retaliation. The district court dismissed the retaliation claim, concluding that the 15-month gap between Sharp’s initial notification of an intent to sue for age discrimination and the email to the staffing agency severed any potential causal connection between the two events.
Considering the evidence in the light most favorable to Sharp, one could reasonably infer that Aker declined to rehire Sharp in retaliation for his then-pending discrimination action. Yes, it was fifteen months later…. Aker terminated Sharp before he filed his age-discrimination lawsuit, and therefore could not retaliate against him in any manner until he returned seeking temporary employment a year and a half later. Evidence showing that an employer had no opportunity to retaliate sooner supports a finding of temporal proximity.
Retaliation are the most dangerous claims that employers face. This employer likely felt safe refusing Aker’s placement because of the 15-month gap. That time gap, however, was tempered by the fact that the company no longer employed Aker, and its next interaction with him was the claimed act of retaliation. When an employee engages in protected activity, you must treat that employee with added care, as any act that could dissuade an employee from engaging in protected activity could give rise to a retaliation claim.
Yesterday, I wrote about the need for employers to be more accommodating for their employees’ protected needs. Today, I bring you two real-world illustrations.
In both instances, the EEOC made the same point — the Americans with Disabilities Act imposes on employers an absolute duty to determine whether or not they can accommodate an employee’s disability. Absent that consideration, the law has been violated. Moreover, after engaging in that interactive process, the employer can only deny the request: 1) if it poses an undue hardship, or 2) if the employee cannot perform the essential functions of the job with or without the accommodation. Otherwise, you may find yourself on the receiving end of an EEOC press release, which is not the position you want to be in.
If you are a federal contractor of subcontractor, in four months you will have new affirmative action obligations relating to sexual orientation and gender identity.
According to a Final Rule issued last week by the Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs, beginning April 5, 2015, federal contractors and subcontractors must include sexual orientation and gender identity in their affirmative action plans.
According to the Rule, which implements Executive Order 13762, federal contractors and subcontractors must:
Take affirmative action to ensure that applicants are employed, and employees are treated, without regard to their sexual orientation and gender identity.
Include sexual orientation and gender identity as prohibited bases of discrimination in the Equal Opportunity Clause in all federal contracts, subcontracts, and purchase orders.
Update all solicitations or advertisements for employment to state that the contractor considers all applicants for employment without regard to any of the protected bases, which now must include sexual orientation and gender identity.
Post updated notices in the workplace for applicants and employees, which state that sexual orientation and gender identity are protected traits in employment.
Notably, and different than affirmative action for other protected traits, the Rule does not require contractors to set placement goals on the bases of sexual orientation or gender identity, nor does it require contractors to collect and analyze any data on these bases (although the OFCCP will consider statistical and non-statistical data in determining whether contractors have met their nondiscrimination obligations).
