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You are here: Home / Archives for HR

Getting Employee Relocation Right

March 1, 2016 by recruitdc Leave a Comment

Your company has had an open position for months and you have found the perfect candidate for the role, but they live half way across the country.  Your company has agreed to relocate the new employee and you would like to make sure that it goes well.  How do you proceed with the new hire and make sure that they arrive the first day ready to start the ground running?  Here are several simple tips that you should make sure that your company is taking into consideration when they handle relocation:

  • Stop using Signing Bonuses to pay help pay for Relocation. Many companies that do not have formalized relocation policies use signing bonuses in lieu of a policy.   Bonuses of this nature are taxable income to your new employees.  If you give someone a $10,000 signing bonus then there is an immediate loss of 25-39.5% to taxes right from the start and your employee has not even started to move.  Relocation benefits are not always taxable, it is better to have your corporate funds used for what they were intended for, not extra taxes. 
  • Nothing says welcome to your new job quite as badly as having your new hire pay for their Relocation and wait for reimbursement.  One of the easiest ways to improve your policy without any additional expenditures is to set up a direct bill for household goods, which can be one of the most expensive parts of a Relocation.   For many employees, paying for a household goods move upfront and waiting for reimbursement can place them in an awkward financial situation that they may not want to discuss with a new employer and might discourage them from taking the position.   A Corporate account can provide additional guarantees and service level protection for your team without adding any additional fees. 
  • Relocation benefits come in all shapes and sizes.  Some companies have Relocation Policies based on benefits, some use financial allowances for relocation and many companies do not have any policies in place whatsoever.  When your company is providing a financial allowance for relocation it is frequently referred to as a lump sum policy. Counsel your transferees on how to maximize their relocation benefit under lump sum policies.  When a lump sum allowance is not going to be sufficient to cover all of the relocation costs, have your transferees plan strategically on how to use their funds, so they minimize their tax ramifications.  Discuss the taxable versus non-taxable components of relocation with the transferees.
  • When there is not a formalized Relocation policy in place, we find that monetary caps are being put on the relocation without knowing what relocation would really cost.  The household goods move is not the only cost that needs to be considered.  For non-homeowners, lease breaking and rental deposits can be very costly.  We always suggest talking to a Relocation company to help build a realistic relocation budget prior to presenting the relocation allowance to the new hire.

Need help maximizing the benefits for your employees and minimizing the costs for your company?  Please feel free to reach out to me with any questions.

 

Cathy Ware Partridge is a Client Services Manager with Interstate Relocation Services. You can connect with her at Cathy.Partridge@invan.com or on LinkedIn

Filed Under: Blog Tagged With: Benefits, HR, Relocation

To Find the Right Candidates, Take a Different Approach

June 1, 2015 by recruitdc Leave a Comment

Thomas Handcock, Practice Leader, CEB

Most companies that are hiring for sales or customer service roles tend to do so at large volume, attracting thousands of applicants. Yet, despite the multitude of applicants, CEB data show that 72 percent are of average quality at best.

The reason why? Candidates today are far less picky in the early stages of a job search than they were in the past. A quarter of them apply, often online, to at least 10 companies, even applying for jobs they know they have little chance of getting.

At the same time, recruiters have limited time to reduce a long list of applicants to a select few to interview. So it’s no surprise that one in five new hires are regretted, or that 65 percent of hiring managers aren’t satisfied with the work of their recruiter.

The problem is clear. Despite the volume of applicants and the short deadlines, it’s still critically important that the right person is hired for these types of roles – especially as most of them involve direct contact with customers – and recruiters are struggling to deliver.

What should recruiters do?

75 percent of recruitment and HR teams think promoting their company as a “great place to work” will help solve this problem. However, the approach of mass “branding for appeal” only attracts more mediocre candidates. Those candidates only continue to slow down overworked recruitment teams and force them to dismiss more candidates.

Even more importantly, many candidates, and notably the ones companies really want to attract, don’t pay attention to this type of branding. This is because companies are not applicants’ only source of information when they are looking for jobs. In fact, 80 percent of the information that candidates learn about employers comes from sources outside a recruiting department’s control, for example, sites like Glassdoor. And there’s an easy answer as to why – nearly two-thirds of them say they are skeptical about what employers say about themselves, so they find the information they want to know elsewhere.

To win the war for talent, recruiters need to shift their strategy to help candidates decide whether the organization is the right fit for them and if they have the qualities the company is looking for. Rather than branding for appeal, they need to “brand for influence,” and be a consultative partner to candidates.

This shift to branding for influence yields much better results. In fact, this type of strategy results in a 54 percent increase in quality of applicant pools, five percent more high-performing new hires, and a 23 percent decrease in new hire turnover.

How can my organization brand for influence?

  1. Focus branding on critical talent: Instead of branding across a wide range of talent segments, focus your resources on the talent that you really need now and in the future. Make sure you understand what is important to these people and tailor messages accordingly.

  2. Challenge and tell, don’t sell: Think of yourself as a consultant to applicants. Challenge their ideas about your organization and the kind of role they think you offer. Offer realistic previews of the role and the firm’s culture to help them truly understand the culture and what it’s like to work for your organization.

  3. Build a network of brand influencers: Focus on improving the way you manage relationships with the people that influence candidates. These “brand ambassadors,” whether they’re from inside or outside of the company, can have a significant impact on the quality of the applicant pool.

When done properly, a branding for influence approach means better people are hired at lower cost. But not only that, the higher quality of hire that can be realized by this type of approach yields new hires that are higher performers and turn over at a lower rate. And these results don’t come at a high price tag – just about a three percent increase in employment branding costs. Even if your organization doesn’t have the funding to devote additional spend to branding for influence, adopting the strategies suggested above can still go a long way toward improving the quality of the applicant pool and, ultimately, the quality of hire – even in high-volume service roles.

Thomas Handcock is a Practice Leader in CEB’s HR practice. You can connect with him by visiting his LinkedIn profile

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: CEB, employment branding, HR, recruiting

Five Questions You Aren't Asking About Your People Data

September 4, 2014 by recruitdc Leave a Comment

By Susan LaMotte

Quick quiz–how many presentations have you given with percentages or pie charts? Business has always been a numbers game. Every proposal, every case, every request for funding–data drives decisions and we know it. And now we’ve gone big. Big data. 

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: analytics, data, HR, recruiting, Susan LaMotte

How To Think Like A Marketer

May 1, 2014 by recruitdc Leave a Comment

By Lexi Gordon

It all comes down to marketing. When a political candidate is lobbying for votes, he’s campaigning. I would argue he’s marketing. When a lawyer makes it to partner, she’s no longer practicing law, she’s marketing the firm’s services to bring in new business. When a recruiter is seeking out candidates, he’s recruiting. I call that marketing. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: employment branding, exaqueo, HR, Lexi Gordon, marketing, Recruiters, recruiting

Guest Post: The Future of HR Tech

October 23, 2013 by recruitdc Leave a Comment

Ed. Note: This was republished with consent from HR Examiner. To see the original post, please click here

By John Sumser

Our current definitions of what is and isn’t HRTech are astonishingly narrow. Generally speaking, the world of HR Technology is limited to the varieties of software and service that execute the administrative end of Human Resources. Talent Management, HRIS, Recruiting, Sourcing, Payroll, Learning and Learning Management, Benefits Management and some elements of Health record-keeping are the general limits of the known universe.

Each year, someone wedges new data into our crowded closet. HR manages gift card programs, real time performance feedback, assessments, competency and more. It’s a great big pile of administrivia that is all about maintaining the records to keep the organization running and the regulators at bay.

And still, the definitions are too narrow.

Right around the corner, about to be embedded in our phones and tablets, are a universe of sensors that will blow the lid off of HR as we know it. Huge flows of data from health and fitness simulations, which allow employees to take charge of their own health and employers to optimize performance, are coming to a cloud computing installation near you

Take a look at A Doctor in Your Pocket from the Wall Street Journal.The article details the rapid rate at which we are moving to be able to really control our own health at microscopic levels. The article envisions a very near future of micro sensors and personal simulation that enable us to optimize human health and performance.

These are not the ramblings of a science fiction crazed futurist hopped up on dreams of the singularity.

It has to start with data collection. In 2004, Dell launched a company program called Well at Dell to encourage healthy lifestyles. Employees receive alerts and information customized to their health issues, incorporating their latest test results and treatments and allowing them to make more informed decisions. A newly diagnosed diabetic, for example, might get information about how to monitor blood sugar and watch out for the circulatory problems that often accompany the disease.

Not surprisingly, these corporate health-management tools have come under fire, with most critics worrying about privacy.

But we can’t expect the health-care industry to continue to innovate and grow if we continue to hoard health information. The federal agency that administers Medicare pays over half of the medical bills in the U.S., but it doesn’t retrieve, organize or mine that data. Imagine how much better the Medicare system could be if all this data were analyzed to improve public health. Or imagine databases from many different sources, private and public, coming together in a centralized network that would look for patterns and try to translate them into new ideas for anticipating and preventing health problems.

Who’s going to win the recruiting contest? The company that helps you live longer or the company that squirrels around with primitive offerings?

Who’s going to have the competitive edge? You guessed it.

Whether it takes the form described in the WSJ or adopts some other approach. the flows of data from personalized sensors and simulations will break the databases and structures we have in place.

John Sumser is the CEO of HRExaminer and the Principal Analyst at HRxAnalysts, as well as a former Keynote Speaker at recruitDC. Follow him @johnsumser Email him john@johnsumser.com

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: HR, HRTech, John Sumser, Tech, tools

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