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Year 1 – Total Recognized Revenue of $2 million
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Year 2 – Total Recognized Revenue of $6 million
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Year 3 – Total Recognized Revenue of $12 million
At BJ’s Wholesale Club, the Definition of Personnel Manager Proves Costly
BJ’s Wholesale Club paid $320,000 in overtime pay to 233 employees as part of a settlement with the U.S. Department of Labor, according to the Boston Globe.
Many of BJ’s 151 stores employ someone called a “club personnel manager.” According to the Labor Department, this person–who answers benefits questions, handles job applications and inputs employee schedules–should not be exempt from federal overtime laws. While BJ’s disagreed with the findings, it said it only settled “to avoid the expense of litigation,” according to the Globe.
BJ’s personnel managers make $14.93 an hour, on average, and work about five overtime hours each week.
New federal overtime rules will go into effect August 23. The U.S. Department of Labor has information online at http://www.dol.gov/esa/regs/compliance/whd/fairpay/main.htm and by telephone at (866) 487-9243.
Job-seekers aren’t Limiting their Searches to Local Companies
Job seekers are relocating more than at any time since 2001, according to John Challenger.
Challenger’s quarterly survey of 3,000 job-hunting managers and execs shows that 25 percent more people relocated for a new job in the second quarter of this year than in the first quarter. Also, 51 percent changed industries to get a new job, 18 percent more than in the first quarter.
Jobless managers and executives still are much more inclined to stay put than they were before the terrorist attacks in the United States. Challenger says that people who aren’t totally frustrated with the bites they’re getting from employers want to stay geographically close to family and friends. “More than at any time in the past,” he says, “job seekers seem determined to find jobs in their own geographic region.”
Dear Workforce How Do I Measure Soft Skills
| To what extent does this employee… Not at all To a great extent | |
| 1. Remain flexible when dealing with coworkers | 1 2 3 4 5 |
| 2. Demonstrate a willingness to listen to others | 1 2 3 4 5 |
iOptimas-i Overview
More Employee E-mail Is Ending Up in Court
One in five U.S. companies has had employee e-mail subpoenaed in the course of a lawsuit or regulatory investigation, according to a survey by the American Management Association and The ePolicy Institute. Last year, 14 percent of companies found their e-mail subpoenaed.
“For financial services firms and others in regulated industries, the failure to properly retain e-mail and instant messages can–and regularly does–lead to six-figure fines, criminal charges, civil lawsuits and damaging publicity,” said Nancy Flynn, executive director of The ePolicy Institute. “Employers simply cannot afford to approach e-mail and IM retention as a hit-or-miss proposition.”
According to the AMA study, only 6 percent of organizations retain and archive instant message records.
A set of sample policies related to managing e-mail can be found online.
Chicago Factories are Booming, but Hiring is Not
Chicago factory owners say that there’s strong demand for their products, but that productivity gains are keeping hiring down.
Prince Industries, for example, “replaced eight temporary employees with a new Swedish laser-cutting machine” that runs constantly, according to Crain’s Chicago Business.
In Buffalo Grove, a Chicago suburb, sales are up 20 percent this year at Schultes Precision Manufacturing. But the company has reduced head count (through attrition, not firings) from 110 employees to 102 employees.
Not far south, in Indianapolis, Navistar International is using improved equipment to build a thousand engines each day using 1,200 workers at its plant–400 fewer than it needed three years ago, according to Crain’s Chicago Business.
Tech Companies Scaled Back on Options
High-tech companies decreased their use of broad-based stock option grants by 15 to 20 percent during the first four months of 2004, according to Mellon Financial Corporation.
Ted Buyniski, a principal at Mellon, says that companies are no longer just focused on the best way to pay employees. They’re basing their stock-option programs on what shareholders will allow.
On one hand, he says, “Executive levels pay packages are not changing dramatically.” At that level, corporations are replacing options with restricted stock, performance shares or cash. However between pressure from the SEC, from shareholders, and from the FASB, it’s employees further down the corporate hierarchy that are paying the price of options cutbacks. “High-tech pay is starting to look more like general industry,” Buyniski says. “General industry has never given all their employees options. The place where this happened was in technology. By turning options into a scarce resource, the industry that has been the most egalitarian in the use of options has been forced to create multiple classes of citizens,” just as general industry does.
Buyniski says that even though many tech companies are still giving options to new hires, his clients are looking for new ways to recruit and retain top talent in an option-limited environment. Some firms, he says, are looking at giving bigger bonuses; others are giving salary increases; still others are adding to benefits, such as increasing 401(k) matches.
As the Big Three Job Boards Battle It Out, DirectEmployers Quietly Wheels and Deals
As Monster and CareerBuilder battle for the leadership position in online recruiting, a nonprofit association is quietly and slowly influencing everything from what they charge to how coveted customers like Cingular Wireless calculate their recruiting results.
In recent months, DirectEmployers has announced a partnership with Business.com, allied with the networking site LinkedIn, and deepened its relationship with the National Association of Colleges and Employers. Its member companies say it provides an economical way to draw job-seekers to their sites, and that it has devised innovative methods of connecting candidates with businesses, and businesses with each other. But questions remain about how cost-effective DirectEmployers is, especially for smaller companies, and whether it’s more significant for its actual traffic or simply for being an alternative to the policy at Monster.com, HotJobs and CareerBuilder of charging by the listing.
“Social welfare”
Rather than containing listings itself, DirectEmployers.com is designed as a search engine. It currently indexes jobs listed by about 1,400 companies, sending job-seekers directly to the employers’ own Web sites. The site is run by the DirectEmployers Association, a nonprofit consortium of about 170 companies that each pay a flat fee of $12,500 a year. Member companies’ listings appear above others in search results. DirectEmployers will also post them to America’s Job Bank on request. And executive director Bill Warren reports that DirectEmployers is developing plans to make large and small cities’ job postings available.
Warren, the former president of Monster.com, put together the DirectEmployers Association in early 2002. It’s set up as a nonprofit so that its member companies can own and manage it through the nonprofit association, without owning stock. It does, however, pay taxes as a for-profit organization. (According to Warren, it has applied to be a 501(c)(4) “social welfare” organization.)
The association announced a partnership with Business.com at the beginning of June. DirectEmployers also provides job-search functionality for Classmates.com and LinkedIn. Asked about the financial arrangements, Warren says of all three partnerships, “We provide them a service, they provide us with additional traffic, and there’s no money exchanging hands; I can’t go into more detail than that.”
In addition, DirectEmployers and the National Association of Colleges and Employers cosponsor NACElink, a recruiting system that connects employers’ job listings with college career centers’ résumés for students and recent graduates. NACElink now covers almost 350 schools, and plans to expand further. It’s currently beta-testing a campus interview program. But how many job placements has it led to? “The hirings are a tough one to measure,” says NACE’s executive director, Marilyn Mackes. “But when we were at 300 schools, we had more than 100,000 students using the system.”
Steven Rothberg is president and founder of CollegeRecruiter.com. “We don’t feel like [NACElink’s] presence has hurt our business in the slightest, and in fact we think it’s helped our business,” Rothberg says. The DirectEmployers/NACE partnership, he says, has “hurt MonsterTRAK a lot more than they’ve hurt the smaller independent boards–they seem to have broken up what was close to a monopoly.”
Influencing market prices
Other observers note that DirectEmployers itself is significant for challenging the big boards’ position–and providing an alternative to their spiraling fees. “Employers have reason to want a competitive environment,” says Peter Zollman, founding principal of Classified Intelligence. “They want to know that if Monster were to become as arrogant in pricing as newspapers used to be, there would be an online alternative. Now, with the tremendous growth in traffic and postings at CareerBuilder, the landscape has clearly changed since Monster was the overwhelming number one, with competitors barely visible in the distance.” (Asked to comment on DirectEmployers, a Monster representative noted that it has a policy of not commenting on other companies.)
“I see the big commercial boards becoming something like the Wall Street Journal is now in terms of recruitment advertising, where people only go to them for hard-to-fill jobs,” Warren says. “Charging $300 to $400 per ad–that’s going to be tough in the future.”
Paul White, director of staffing at Cingular Wireless (who is also on DirectEmployers’ board of directors), agrees that the presence of DirectEmployers has softened up the big boards’ costs to companies: “The major job boards are much more willing to negotiate pricing now, and we’re not seeing increases year after year.”
Ray Schreyer, manager of Internet recruiting at DirectEmployers member IBM, says he remembers “when job boards cost $3,000 to $4,000 a year. But within a few years, we saw the cost for large companies rise to millions of dollars. DirectEmployers gives us hope for a level playing field.”
Competing on cost per candidate
The question is, though, how many candidates–and of what quality–does DirectEmployers.com drive to its members’ listings? It’s hard to say. As of June 21, Alexa.com’s numerical rankings of Internet traffic listed Monster.com at 152, CareerBuilder at 316, HotJobs at 494 and DirectEmployers.com at 23,808. Then again, Warren says, “Alexa rankings do not apply in any way to us. A job-seeker will come to our site and stay there an average of about 22 seconds, and then they’re off to a corporate Web site. Our measurements are how many people are hired, and how effective it is for recruiters.”
Still, there are no audited figures for the measurements Warren suggests. And workforce-management professionals, especially at smaller companies, want numbers that are comparably cost-effective to those of the big boards. “When I look at advertising media,” says Chuck Matthews, director of human resources with G&T Conveyor Co., “I’m very interested in knowing what the subscriber base is, how many Web site hits they get, how many unique visitors–it’s like a newspaper ad. DirectEmployers has solid companies, but I’ve never really found out how many hits they get. And they’re cost-prohibitive; for $12,500, I can do a lot more with other endeavors.”
For larger companies with more positions available, though, the flat rate may represent less of their overall recruitment advertising costs. Cingular’s White says that, this year, DirectEmployers has driven about 23,000 candidates to Cingular’s listings–about 2,500 in all. “The major boards are driving more traffic,” he says, “but when you look at cost per candidate, it balances out to be roughly even.”
Even so, because of DirectEmployers’ low-key approach, it’s still not well known among job-seekers. David Tanguay, CEO of recruitment-monitoring company Wanted Technologies, calls DirectEmployers “one of the best-kept secrets of job banks out there.”
Randy Mehl, managing director at Robert W. Baird and one of the analysts who covers Monster.com, agrees that the word hasn’t gotten out: “DirectEmployers hasn’t had a noticeable influence yet.” The consortium’s members, Mehl says, are “companies that would probably pay a million dollars a year for online recruitment advertising–so about 1 percent of their budget goes to DirectEmployers…. Companies are paying for where you’re actually going to get candidate flow. I think the online recruitment segment can support growth, but it’s going to be challenging to make progress beyond the big three and the established niche job boards.”
Quality of Hire How Companies Are Crunching the Numbers
One of the few things that recruiters and hiring managers can agree on is that “quality of hire” is an essential recruiting metric. When asked what it means, however, many companies are stumped.
Kevin Wheeler, president of Global Learning Resources, a Fremont, California, consulting firm, offers the following ways to measure whether an employee is a success.
Goal Completion. Too often, employers don’t establish specific metrics for measuring an employee’s success on the job–particularly for white-collar workers during the first 30 to 90 days. It helps to have a mutually-agreed-upon goal. The goal can involve measures of quantity, quality or a combination of the two. For example, a technical writer might produce three manuals per month; a software programmer might produce a certain number of lines of code with an error rate below 1 percent. “More objective standards lead to fewer disagreements and arguments,” Wheeler says.
Capacity. A retailer might expect an experienced call-center rep to handle an average of 100 calls per hour while maintaining a customer rating of “satisfactory” or above. The organization should understand what a typical person can handle during the first month or 90 days and communicate the requirements to new hires.
Motivation. Is the person interested in his work? Does she come to work on time and appear motivated and energetic? “It’s pretty much a subjective measure based on the assessment made by their supervisor or manager,” Wheeler explains. However, he adds, it is possible to provide managers with a framework for measuring motivation by creating a list of specific criteria that describe such abstract words as motivation. If an employee, for example, asks to take on more responsibility, or wants to know more about a subject or about the company, that might indicate a high level of motivation.
Knowledge and Skills. It sounds simple enough: does the person have the requisite skills to perform the job at a high level? Wheeler says that it’s rare for a company to hire someone and then fire the same person because of a lack of skills. However, “we see a lot of people who claim to be an expert programmer but are really more of an intermediate programmer.” It’s smart to use objective measures such as a skills test both pre-hire and post-hire. The one drawback? “Many people resent having to take these tests, especially after they have already been hired.”
General Performance. It’s particularly important to know whether a new hire is performing on a par with others in the department or functional area. Although it’s next to impossible to eliminate subjectivity, Wheeler says that a stronger emphasis on metrics and measurement standards translates into greater success. Peer review and 360-degree performance reviews can help an organization achieve more objectivity. “You might ask all 10 people in the department to rate the new hire after 30 or 60 days and look at the resulting profile,” he says. “You eliminate the bias that a single person might have.”
Problem-Solving Skills. Almost every job requires some ability to analyze and solve problems. “A trademark of a good employee is the ability to solve problems without a lot of input from their manager or supervisor,” Wheeler explains. If an employee is continually asking basic questions, then he or she may lack the required problem-solving skills.
Experiential Contributions. The ability to bring knowledge to the job based on learning from past jobs is another key factor in measuring a new employee’s value. Again, there’s a certain amount of subjectivity involved in such assessments, though it’s possible to rate workers on the basis of key criteria or through a peer-review process. Some people come into a new job and are unable to apply what they’ve done at previous jobs to their current position.
Customer Compatibility. In some sectors, such as retail or sales, it’s essential to track the number of complaints from customers about a new employee and the seriousness of the complaints. Wheeler says that a simple customer survey can go a long way toward understanding performance issues. If serious problems arise, a follow-up call to the customer can provide useful information.
Work-Group Compatibility. In recent years, the ability of employees to function effectively within a work group has become a key factor in achieving success. Getting along with others, handling an appropriate workload and meshing with the group’s culture is critical. “If a person doesn’t fit the work team, huge problems can ensue,” Wheeler explains. “In some cases, a person might be an excellent employee and a valuable asset, but not fit a particular work group. It’s important to match the person to the right group.” He says that good employees sometimes wind up getting fired because the organization assigns them to the wrong work group and isn’t willing to make the necessary adjustments.
Organizational Compatibility. The most important compatibility issue is centered on the individual’s fit with the corporate culture. “It’s conceivable that a person doesn’t get along with the people on his team but can be transferred to another team,” Wheeler says. However, if an individual doesn’t fit into the organization’s overall culture, it might not be the right match. He believes that attitudinal surveys administered during the hiring process can reduce friction down the line. “When there’s a cultural fit, the odds of an employee succeeding are much greater,” he says.
Change/Learning Attitude. Today’s fast-paced business world demands constant change. Employees who can adapt–and make a concerted effort to constantly learn new skills and upgrade their knowledge–are more valuable and more likely to succeed. Companies can determine such qualities by conducting an attitudinal survey after the employee’s first 30 to 90 days. The capacity for change, Wheeler says, isn’t so easy to instill in employees, so HP, Southwest Airlines and other companies try to measure this during the interview process, rather than hope that an employee will suddenly become flexible a month into a new job.