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 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.

Skinner’s recommendations get the “Good Job Hunting Seal of Approval” from the Global Human Resources Outsourcing (GHRO) team.

Organizations seeking to hire top talent now have the responsibility for owning their online career advertising presence through syndication and one-to-one engagement via social media, notably Facebook and LinkedIn. A savvy organization, employing social media intelligently, can quickly get in front of highly targeted passive talent. For instance, setting up an employment page on Facebook means that every time a new opening posts to the page, it will display in all fans’ home feeds.

Old job boards are boring. They’re one-way, mass communication devices largely bereft of personalization and interactivity, attractive only to the most desperate of job seekers.

“Old-think” job boards are on the wrong side of history. But job boards are anything but becoming extinct. “New-think” boards just look a lot different from their predecessors.

Simply Hired and other job boards fall under the category of aggregators. These, along with Monster, are large boards that display job ads pertaining to as many industries as possible. Their scope is national, even international, and they have countless regional counterparts.

Then there are the niche job boards—narrowly focused on single industries, professions, or needs. For example, this category includes FlexJobs, which posts to its board only jobs that are work-from-home friendly—a larger and more dynamic constellation of jobs than conventional wisdom might suggest.

The future of job boards requires that they integrate social media, help hiring companies leverage search engine marketing to optimize postings for a longer shelf life, and build a talent community wherein they help candidates grow and evolve in their jobs.

Managers of the job boards that will flourish must understand that they reside at a confluence of variables, all exerting an influence on the changing nature of the job hunt. These factors include employer brand, job seeker engagement, search engine-driven sourcing and more.

In the end, they’re all seeking the Good Job Hunting Seal of Approval.

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.

According to an article in Federal Computer Week, outside contractors have proved a long-indispensible government resource.  Outsourcing allows the government to perform work beyond its typical staffing, equipment, or monetary resources. It also creates a more efficient government through reduced costs and increased productivity.  In a time of budgetary concerns, outsourcing may be the only way the public sector, and even small private-sector businesses, can maintain necessary service levels.

Cost-savings occurs, in part, because contractors cost less than permanent employees.  Last year, USA Today reported that government employees received roughly $28,000 in annual benefits—over $12,000 more than their private-sector counterparts.  Data has also shown that pay rates in state and local government increase faster than private-sector rates.  Total compensation at all levels of government tends to be higher.

But lower pricing isn’t the only benefit of outsourcing services.  Outsourcing to private companies often results in new, fresh ideas beyond the government status quo.  Outsourcing is a great resource for small, private businesses, too!  It allows businesses to receive services they may not otherwise have been able to maintain or afford.  For instance, outsourcing human resources tasks to GHRO allows businesses to meet their HR needs, from hiring, payroll, employee benefits, to the latest in HR regulations and trends, at a fraction of the cost of maintaining an in-house HR department.  It is low-cost efficiency at its best.

How can HR outsourcing benefit you?  Contact GHRO today for a free quote!

The average worker’s office space has dwindled 15 square feet since 1994, down to a cozy 75 square feet in 2010.  And it’s not just the everyday workers who are feeling the squeeze—senior workers’ office space shrunk 19 feet over the same period.  Everyone but executive management, who enjoyed an increase in office space, has to do more work with less space.

Or are they?

What popularized the cubicle in the 1960s was its functional, modular office space without the construction required to build walled offices.  In the past, cubicle size has had to accommodate the latest office technology, such as bulky telephones, typewriters, and desktop computers.  Today, that technology is slender and sleek, such as flat-screen monitors, laptops, iPads, and Blackberries—and more important, that technology is mobile.

Mobile technology replaces the need for workers to be chained to their desks.  Instead, workers can telecommute or work from different places in the office, as in the open-space seating model found at companies such as Facebook and Intel.  This open-space model is becoming more popular thanks to its team-oriented setup and efficient use of work space.  Due to meetings, travel, shifts, or personal leave, not all work space is required at all times, so it makes sense to have fewer and unassigned work stations.

While some employees appreciate this modern, flexible approach to office space, other employees reject the approach’s irregularity, close quarters, and lack of privacy.  Since employees spend half their days at work, it’s important their office environment works for them to foster comfort and productivity.  But just as office spaces come in all shapes and sizes, so do employees, so not every model will suit every employee’s personality or work style.

Does that mean private offices are on the verge of extinction?  Not if SAS, a North Carolina business intelligence software company, is any indication.  For the last two years, the company was named Fortune magazine’s best place to work.  The kicker?  SAS gives almost all its employees private offices.

The truth is, employment law doesn’t dictate when a business must close for weather—closing a business is solely the employer’s judgment call.  Many businesses may choose to stay open in severe weather, depending on demand for their goods and services.  This is especially true of grocery stores, gas stations, hotels, and public-service industries like police and fire departments, hospitals, and snow plow operations.  It makes business sense to stay operational if there is legitimate work to be done, even in a blizzard.  Plus, businesses in areas that are used to winter snow will be less inclined to close due to weather, thanks to efficient snow removal.

But what happens to employees when businesses make the call to close?  From a human resources standpoint, businesses that close for weather are not required to pay hourly or non-exempt workers.  Like any other workday, these employees must be compensated only for the hours actually worked.  Exempt employees are another matter.  Businesses that close for a few days due to weather must pay their exempt employees who were ready and able to report to work.  On the flip side, businesses do not have to pay exempt employees who were unavailable to report to work, for example, due to the weather, transportation, or child care issues.  An exception occurs when businesses close for an entire payroll week because of weather, flood, or power outage.  Under these circumstances, exempt employees who perform no work for the week—not even checking e-mail from home—are not required to be paid.

As for the head cold, a recent CareerBuilder survey found 72 percent of workers report for work when they’re legitimately sick.  Most respondents (55 percent) do this because they feel guilty about missing work.  While this seemingly demonstrates amazing loyalty, how loyal is it to show up to spread germs to healthy coworkers?  Furthermore, does an office full of runny-nosed people slumped at their desks promote productivity?

And then there’s that Caribbean vacation.  A Right Management poll found 46 percent of workers didn’t use all their vacation time in 2010.  Workers either couldn’t get away from their desks or felt like they couldn’t get away to enjoy their annual vacations.

Whatever the case, employees are spending more days at their desks.  With so many businesses short staffed, with more duties falling to fewer employees, taking personal time is a legitimate concern for many workers.  Employees also worry that if they miss work, even for a day or two, their employers will realize either the worker or the position isn’t vital.  Employees are afraid to step away because their jobs may not be there when they come back.

If your employees aren’t taking the personal time they need, they’re at risk for employee burnout.  Workers who don’t feel like they can get a break from work, either to get healthy or to have fun, are more likely to suffer persistently high stress levels.  In turn, high stress levels can lead to employee turnover, which can quickly have your business flipping through job applications.  So what to do with employees who won’t unlock that desk chain?

Hand them the keys.  Now, more than ever, it’s important to tell employees it’s OK to miss work—and it needs to genuinely be OK.  Remind employees that their jobs will be waiting when they come back, and then train coworkers to fill in for sick or vacationing employees.  At the end of the day, employees able to take time off work will be healthier and happier, and will respond with increased loyalty and productivity.

1. Unpaid or Incorrect Overtime Pay

According to the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA), all work over the employee’s regular 40-hour workweek must be paid at time and a half. Note, California’s overtime laws are based not only on a 40-hour workweek, but also an 8-hour workday (except for certain employees on a modified work schedule, such as a 4/10). Any work performed in excess of eight hours in one workday is considered overtime, paid at time and a half, as well as the first eight hours worked on the seventh day of work in any one workweek. Similarly, work performed in excess of 12 hours in one workday shall be paid at double-time, as well as any work performed beyond eight hours on the seventh day of work in any one workweek.

Compensatory time may be granted instead of overtime wages, but it must be paid at the same rate: 150 percent.

Pitfall: If your business requires overtime to be preapproved, even if a non-exempt employee works “unauthorized” overtime, it must still be reported.

2. Minimum Wage Violations

As of July 24, 2009, federal minimum wage is $7.25 per hour. Many states have their own minimum wage laws; current minimum wage in California is $8 an hour. If a discrepancy exists between federal and state rates, the higher rate prevails. Under certain circumstances, minimum wage exceptions apply to special job groups, including tipped employees, full-time students, and disabled workers.

3. Unpaid Vacation Time

Employers are not legally required to pay employees for vacation time; however, if employers choose to provide paid vacation time, any accrued vacation time becomes part of an employee’s compensation package. That means accrued time must be paid out when an employee separates from the employer, whether through resignation or termination.

4. “Use It or Lose It” Vacation Time Policies

Some employers have adopted a “use it or lose it” vacation time policy, where if employees don’t use all of their accrued vacation during the calendar year, they will lose that time once the new year starts. In some states, “use it or lose it” vacation policies are unlawful.

5. Unpaid Compensable Time

Paid work time extends to more than just an employee’s job duties. If an employee spends time changing into a uniform, performing stock inventories, or setting up and cleaning a work area, that time is compensable. An employee is also entitled to wages for extra hours worked, such as working through lunch break, even if the employer didn’t require it.

Employment law has so many fine details, it’s tough to remember them all and implement them just right. One mistake can mean disaster! If employment law is getting you down, the Human Resources specialists at GHRO can help. Our professional staff stays on top of federal, state, and local employment regulations so you don’t have to! We’ll teach you the best way to adapt employment regulations to your business goals. Visit our website today to see how GHRO’s services can work with your business.

Personality profiling is designed to spot and prevent personality conflicts before they happen.  If significant differences emerge between an employee’s and a manager’s personality profile, a personality conflict will likely occur that may cause stress in the workplace.  An aggressive manager could see a more passive employee as working too slowly and lacking motivation, whereas a passive employee could see a more aggressive manager as controlling and micromanaging.  Such an environment can have negative effects on employee retention, as the new hire is more likely to resign—and quickly—when such a distinct conflict exists.

Comparing personality profiles can deter personality conflicts from being introduced to the workplace.  But what if a personality conflict already exists?  First, try assigning the new employee to a more compatible manager.  Higher compatibility rates yield faster-learning, more productive employees.  If that isn’t a viable solution, arrange a meeting with the manager and the new employee.  Sometimes, verbalizing how the two are alike and how their differences can complement each other is enough to get them working as a team.  Addressing differences in a positive manner puts an optimistic spin on a stressful situation and can help promote harmony.

As part of its turnover reduction strategies, GHRO offers employee selection services including personality profiling, employment testing, drug screening, and background checks.  These services are only a small part of what GHRO has to offer as your business’ Human Resources PEO.  Through GHRO’s services, you’ll receive the expertise of a professional HR team at the fraction of the cost of hiring an internal Human Resources Department.  Contact GHRO today to see how your business can benefit from outsourcing its Human Resources needs!