Great branding is a key element in achieving success in the business world, and this includes the role of the organization plays as Employer.   The Global Human Resources Outsourcing (GHRO) wanted to share an insightful article on the subject.

An “employer brand” denotes an organization’s reputation as an employer – the image of an organization as “a great place to work.”  Employer branding is the process of creating this image.

In an article titled “Mission: Brand Alignment,” HRO Today explores how employer branding aligned with a company’s corporate or product brand can produce great business results.

Linking salient corporate/product brand elements with your employer branding strategy gives an organization the ability to communicate the employer brand to various talent segments – candidate prospects, and current and former employees – across the business.

Many HR groups within organizations are realizing that an effective brand strategy can enhance their talent acquisition efforts.  Signaling your company message on several levels can resonate with job candidates.

Consequently, just as marketing executives leverage a wide variety of tactics and initiatives to drive awareness for product portfolios, many successful HR leaders are taking advantage of various branding elements traditionally found in a marketer’s toolbox.

Where to Start? Compare & Understand

One of the first steps toward aligning your employer brand with your product or corporate brand is to have an open and honest assessment of what your brand really stands for and means. One method that marketers use — in order to achieve a deeper understanding of essence — is to perform a brand alignment analysis.

Source and Attract

As you source and attract candidates in the early stages, one of the goals is to make sure that the different vehicles you utilize, such as job postings, employment advertisements, career portals, recruitment videos, social media, word-of-mouth and other tactics, reinforce your employer brand positioning and messaging.

Employer Branding Alignment Tips

• Collaboration between HR and Marketing is critical.  Learn what aspects of your corporate or product brand will translate well to your employer brand strategy. Many organizations are tasking marketing professionals to head their employer branding efforts and bridge the gap between the two functional areas.
• Focus more on brand engagement over brand communications. This is especially true when designing an employer branding program during your onboarding and employment stages. Think about the influencing and net promoter type brand attributes you can harness from an engaged group of employees. Dialogue and engagement are more powerful and relevant during this stage compared to monologue messaging.
• Assess all candidate touch points. Your employer brand reaches prospective candidates at many intersections. Make sure you’ve identified all of them and that your employer brand messaging is clear and relevant at each juncture.

And a word of caution: don’t assume that just because candidates easily identify with a great product brand that they will assume it’s also a great organization to be employed with.  The burden of proof is on the employer.

The Global Human Resources Outsourcing (GHRO) team knows a bit about women-led businesses, so we thought we’d share some articles on the subject.

“Female leadership systematically underestimated” is from Human Capital Magazine, Australia’s first magazine targeted at senior human resource professionals and top corporate decision-makers.

According to the article, contrary to popular belief and even previous studies, researchers have discovered women may actually outperform in areas traditionally considered to be the domain of men.

The findings were arrived at by Utah-based leadership consultancy firm Zenger Folkman after surveying more than 7,000 business leaders. It was found that across 16 core competencies, the leaders who were consistently found to come out on top were all women. Their skills included:

• Inspirational leadership
• Motivating and developing others
• Building relationships
• Collaboration and teamwork

The researchers found that while stereotypes have assumed that men are stronger in driving for results, championing change, taking initiative, and problem solving, women actually received higher scores on all those points than did their male counterparts.

Women vs. Men

“Study Finds Few Differences Between Men and Women Business Leaders” is from Roxanne Joffe, president of CAP Brand Marketing of Sarasota, Fla.

According to Joffe, despite a long-held myth to the contrary, women business leaders are as successful as men in starting new high tech companies.  Here’s why:

The stereotypical entrepreneur – particularly the Silicon Valley version – is a 20-something, single white male who dropped out of college to work 24/7 and take enormous risks for a shot at becoming the next Mark Zuckerberg.

Women entrepreneurs, on the other hand, are thought to be overrepresented in “lifestyle” industries and more focused on raising families than founding the next Facebook.

A study of more than 600 start-up founders and 500+ fast-growth companies published in TechCrunch deflates these myths. Entrepreneur-turned-academic Vivek Wadhwa and his team studied both men and women business leaders and their companies and found the following:

• Men and women start-up founders are motivated by the same goals – both men and women business leaders are driven by a desire to build wealth, chart their own destinies and capitalize on their business ideas.
• Men and women business leaders largely share life circumstances.  Wadhwa found that most entrepreneurs are closer to 40 than 20 when founding their companies and that most are married with children. Men were slightly more likely than women to be married.

However, Wadhwa’s team did discover some interesting differences about the business climate in which male and female entrepreneurs operate:

• Women business leaders receive more encouragement from co-founders.  According to the research, women entrepreneurs were significantly more likely than men to report that their co-founders urged them to enter into a partnership to launch a new business.
• Women start-up founders are more likely to cite a role model.  Women entrepreneurs more often reported being inspired by an entrepreneurial friend or family member than their male counterparts.

Let us know what you think by commenting below.

Does the free market’s creative destruction create more than it destroys?  Do oligopoly conditions (a small number of sellers dominating an industry) undermine free market theory?

The Global Human Resources Outsourcing (GHRO) team would like to know the answers to these and related questions, so we’re sharing a discussion of the issue, which is on the agenda at The HRO Today Forum, currently taking place in Washington, D.C. at the Gaylord National.

“A Workforce Congress: Insourcing, Outsourcing, & Job Creation” is the title of a panel headed up by Richard Crespin, Global Executive Director of the HR Outsourcing Association (HROA).

Free markets contrast with controlled markets in which prices, supply or demand is directly controlled.

In a recession, existing businesses shed jobs in an effort to cut costs and hoard cash for the lean months ahead, Crespin argues.  As the economy recovers, they start to add these jobs back.  It’s “economic churn,” not new economic growth.

To move the conversation beyond economic churn, the HROA convened HR Officers from large and small companies to discuss how to can create a more competitive workforce for companies, for America, and for the world.

The HROA also hosted a debate on “Is outsourcing good for America?”  This debate directly takes on the question of whether the free market’s creative destruction creates more than it destroys.

Oligopoly is at the heart of the counter-argument about the free markets concept.  The term “free market” itself reflects an idealized mathematical notion of how people behave, in that the emergent prices are a natural “push and pull” of supply and demand. In economic theory this is called “perfect competition,” because it occurs only when there are a large number of customers and a large number of suppliers in a market for goods which are optional purchases. In a perfectly competitive market, the ideals of a free market essentially exist. This was the economic theory of the 1960s to 1980s.

What’s happening now? The current trend in economics observes that big markets rarely operate in this perfect competition – because human beings are conscious of markets, they seek profits, they shut out competitors, and they corner markets as monopolies and oligopolies.  The result: fewer jobs all around.

Let us know what you think by commenting below.

Jennifer King is an HR Analyst at Software Advice, a company that reviews and compares recruiting and employee performance review software. She reports on trends, best practices and technology in human resources.  The Global Human Resources Outsourcing (GHRO) team enjoys Jennifer’s insights into the recruiting industry, and so today’s post reprises elements of one of her recent blogs: Why Recruiters Use Social Networks to Screen Job Candidates.

In a 2011 Reppler survey about how recruiters use social networks to screen candidates, 91 percent of the respondents claimed they have visited a potential candidate’s profile on a social network as part of the screening process.  But why?  With all the tweets, status updates and comments, it’s unavoidable for any social job seeker not to be searchable in some way.

With social media, it’s possible to learn more about a job seeker than what is on his or her resume, giving recruiters and hiring managers more insight into the behaviors and personal lives of their candidates.
According to Eric Meyer, partner in the labor and employment group at Dilworth Paxson LLP, “Businesses and recruiters want to know as much as they can about a person who they may give a job offer.  But the real purpose behind screening is to make sure the person you’re hiring doesn’t have any red flags that would make them a bad fit or a potential liability for the business.”

When it comes to commenting, posting photos or sharing status updates, we don’t typically update our social media profiles with recruiters in mind.  Instead, we post things that are relevant to our lives, interests and personalities, giving recruiters a clearer picture of the person behind the resume.

Tips for Job Seekers

For recruiters and hiring managers who choose to look up candidates online, it’s likely that what they find will also shape their first impression of that person.

“Perception is reality in the business world,” says Amy Henderson, account executive with Technisource, part of Randstad Technologies. “The way people perceive you online, through social media—that’s what they use to make first impressions.  And those first impressions are lasting impressions.”

And even with privacy restrictions set up on social networking sites like Facebook, it doesn’t mean an employer won’t take extra steps to get a look at what’s behind those privacy restrictions, even if that means bluntly asking a job candidate for his or her login information.

But by requiring login credentials for candidates’ social media profiles, employers run the risk of losing top talent due to a perceived lack of trust.

Connect with Jennifer on LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/jenniferking1. And check out her post on Employee Performance Evaluation Software.

pres·en·tee·ism – n. the practice of coming to work despite illness, injury, anxiety, etc., often resulting in reduced productivity.

Presenteeism only promises to continue as a major workplace problem in 2012, so the Global Human Resources Outsourcing (GHRO) thought we’d share some insights into the issue.

Speechly Bircham’s Employment group is a UK-based employment law practice.  In their in-depth 2012 survey of HR directors and senior HR professionals across the UK, they determined that working hour increases are linked with higher stress and staff turnover, while longer work hours and presenteeism are set for big increases in 2012.

A review of the survey can be read at The State of Human Resources blog.  Conclusions include:

• Greater business uncertainty is linked with higher stress, absence, presenteeism and workforce discontent.
• Talent shortages for 40 percent of organizations exist and are linked with longer working hours, stress and presenteeism.
• Presenteeism is now a major workforce issue, linked with more grievances.

Today’s workplace has changed from two or even one decade ago. Some of these changes have contributed to the growing incidence of presenteeism.

Causes of presenteeism

• Increase in dual-earner and “sandwich generation” households.
• Fear of note meeting Employer expectations.
• Little or no paid sick days available or accrued.

Employer Solutions

• Recognize the problem.
• Rethink the use of disciplinary action to control absenteeism.
• Develop a workplace policy on presenteeism and inform and educate employees.
• Provide Paid Sick Leave and/or Paid Time Off (PTO) to Workers.
• Make an Effort to Boost Employee Morale.
• Offer a flu vaccination program.

The image of a sick-as-a-dog employee who comes to work as being a dedicated and valued worker is no longer fitting. Presenteeism costs are a real and potentially significant drain on a company’s financial well-being. Employers need to make a concerted effort to develop a workplace with healthy and highly functioning workers. This will go a long way toward meeting goals for company productivity and profits, and fostering a healthy work culture and environment for employees.

According to a recent survey by the Profit Sharing/401k Council of America, 401(k) plans will remain a top priority in 2011 as many companies plan to restore contributions that were reduced or suspended due to economic troubles.

Of the 14.8 percent of companies forced to shelve matching contributions during 2008–2010, over a third have already restored contributions, with an additional third planning to restore contributions by mid-2011.  During that same two-year period, over 70 percent of companies’ matching contributions remained unchanged, while 10 percent actually increased.

The survey also found employee participation in 401(k) plans rests largely on matching funds. Of companies with suspended matches, 78.1 percent reported a decrease in employee participation.  Of companies with non-suspended 401(k) matches, nearly a third reported an increase in employees contributing to the plans.

Additionally, the survey showed that companies are more actively involved in managing their 401(k) plans and disseminating information to their employees.  Companies also focused on employee education, investment advice, and monitoring their plans for optimal returns.  In 2010, the vast majority of 401(k) plans changed their investment lineups to replace underperforming funds.  Plan fees have also come under greater scrutiny.  This increased attention to plan management may be a result of companies appointing committees to review fund performance—94 percent of surveyed companies used such a committee.

Brandon Carl, our Business Development Manager, chatting about Human Resources outsourcing and GHRO with Ciaran Foley on LookSee.TV!

2010-08-10 Brandon Carl and GHRO Discuss Outsourced HR from Ciaran Foley on Vimeo.

The fact that businesses are choosing to outsource for female employees is not surprising. The latest workforce trends are progressively positive for women. Currently over 46% of the labor force is made up of women and they hold slightly under 50% of the mid-level management positions.

This rise in the numbers of women in the workplace has also had a positive impact for business. Research collected in 2007 has indicated that women are very successful in leadership roles and management positions and produce higher returns than men do. This not only increases women’s value in the job market, but also the value of the companies they work for.

In an effort to recruit more women companies are utilizing human resource outsourcing to attract, advance and retain this talented and hard working segment of the population.

By enlisting the help of Professional Employment Organization (PEO) women are able to take advantage of the recruitment services of a team of experts whose sole focus is to place and manage qualified employees.

HR outsourcing provides many new opportunities for women and allows companies access to employees with the skills and performance record that is vital to developing and expanding their business.

HR outsourcing enables women to more actively pursue senior management positions by giving them the leverage they need to apply for work in the more specialized areas that are being outsourced. They can actively seek a position geared towards their individual qualifications through PEO’s recruitment services and a team of experts working to connect them to the right employer.

Women are a critical force in the workplace. They offer their employees a track record of performance and professional achievement that translates into a higher return on their investment.

Businesses are finding that by using HR outsourcing they are finding superior recruitment serves and are attracting, advancing an retaining a more skilled group of women applicants who provide them with the talent they need to improve their bottom line.

Global Human Resources Outsourcing knows that women are a dynamic force in the workplace and provide effective and reliable recruitment services that cater to both professional women and the businesses that need them.

The human element is surprisingly not the first priority for businesses to take into consideration when they decide to outsource. It is the element, however, that is critical to create relationships and interpersonal communications to facilitate the productive capabilities of a workforce that has specific needs.

It is not commonly recognized that employees who feel they are well qualified to perform the tasks or duties they were hired for are more content with their jobs and as a consequence consistently provide increased productivity.

Employees who were expertly placed in the positions they were hired for are more likely to feel happier with their work and will strive to help make their company money.

Surveys indicate that an employee’s attitude impacts a business’s bottom line and the workers who feel empowered and competent stay more motivated and committed to their job.

Adequately placing and developing solid relationships with employees takes skilled recruitment services. An HR outsourcing management team that is highly organized and experienced ensures not only company’s growth but also raises employee satisfaction and productivity.

Businesses not only need to cultivate the relationships with the employees they have in- house, but also must have the capacity to attract and keep the qualified talent they outsource.

Global Human Resources Outsourcing can help companies with their administrative services organization by expertly recruiting and placing talent while guaranteeing a more personalized process that will meet its business objectives and the needs of its employees.

GHRO’s professional employment organization has a Talent Acquisition Team with over 50 years of combined HR outsourcing experience and hires over 400 employees a year.

GHRO will work with your company to provide:
•    Benefits Outsourcing
•    Employee benefits
•    Employee/Labor Relations
•    Employee Leasing
•    Government Compliance
•    HR Audits
•    HR Consulting
•    HR Management
•    Payroll Services
•    Recruitment Services
•    Safety and Worker’s Compensation

The human element is always important to take into consideration. When deciding on HR outsourcing it is always wise for companies to use an organization that will expertly take care of the employees who are vital to their productivity and profit.

Making the decision to use human resource outsourcing can be a difficult one for any business to make. However, there are a few guidelines that can help any company to better understand the benefits of outsourcing to make an informed decision.

Lowered Costs: Outsourcing results in lowered operating costs when comparing them to the costs of hiring full time employees and providing them with long term benefits packages. Benefits outsourcing can save a company substantial amounts of money in both the paid hours it takes to process all of the administrative functions to hire and maintain a full time employee as well as the capital that can be reallocated to other interests.

Raised Productivity: The strategic advantage of HR outsourcing allows businesses to meet their growth demands with the skilled employees who can significantly improve a company’s output. It makes sense that relying on employees who are experienced and well-managed will produce larger quantities of  work at a higher quality.

Simplified Operation: Not enough can be said about reducing the burden of navigating the paperwork and logistical details it requires to sustain a full time employee. Small businesses in particular will be able to rely on an administrative services organization that will bring the experience and reliability to make running their business operations more efficient on a day to day basis.

Employee Satisfaction: When people are managed properly they not only feel that their needs are being met and but are more productive when their efforts are being adequately rewarded. This results in employees who are not only more satisfied with their jobs but will also increase their value to a company because their time and energy is focused on input rather than on employee/labor relations.

Expanded Selection of Qualified Talent: Outsourcing can provide the perfect solution for finding talent and qualified employees with the ability to meet the demands of an increasingly sophisticated marketplace.

Allows Focus Application of In-House Resources: Most employers spend time on personnel issues that could be better utilized with their core business pursuits. HR outsourcing simply allows businesses to focus on increasing output.

Reduced Risk: There are many assumed risks companies would benefit by turning over to a Professional Employer Organization (PEO). These include government compliance, safety and worker’s compensation and employee/labor relations.

Global Human Resources Outsourcing will provide viable business solutions that will lower your operating costs, protect your assets and reduce your risks. Whether you have a small, mid-size or large business HR outsourcing will meet your human resourcing needs and allow your company to stay competitive in the marketplace.