So I'm reading Steve Boese's An HR Technology Wish List on this fine Black Friday morn (queue the cool Steely Dan song), nodding after each point including the ones about robots, going mobile and puppies, and I keep coming back to something Shafiq Lokhandwala, CEO of NuView Systems, Inc., said to me in one of my latest HR Market Share podcast interviews (will be live in a couple of weeks).

The right HR technology helps make HR more relevant.

It was something like that. At first I thought, well, there's going to be some grievances filed on that one, but the more I thought about it and its context, the more I agreed.

It's not that HR is no longer relevant - the HR Happy Hour and Fistful of Talent gang and Chief Global Member Engagement Office at SHRM China Gorman all agree this conversation is dead.

It's the fact that many small to mid-size organizations have yet to automate most if any HR processes and systems.

And with the right HR tech comes:

• The ability to more efficiently and effectively track people metrics (recruiting, hiring, onboarding, training, retaining, etc.) and provide sound data on talent strategies and company growth
• The ability to save invaluable time and administrative staffing to focus on talent strategies and company growth
• The ability to integrate with other business units/departments to better share employee information and develop talent that contributes to company growth
• And so much more!

Hence helping make HR more relevant.

Naughty or nice? I'm going with very nice.

Post by Kevin W. Grossman (join me on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn - and now join HRmarketer on Twitter!)

We recently had an exchange with one of our clients that I found interesting and worthy of a blog post.

First, a little background. This client is a young yet well established business, they have very good management and excellent products. Their future is bright. We've been working with them for about a year with very good success. They hired the HRmarketer Services Group to help expand awareness of their brand and generate sales leads. Prior to this they had never really invested in marketing or PR.

The HRmarketer account executive recently reached out to the client (in this case, the CEO) wanting to schedule a particular marketing tactic. It is important to note that for this particular account we are paid a fixed retainer and it is up to the HRmarketer team to determine how the retainer is to be allocated - e.g., what tactics are to be delivered month-to-month. We are ultimately measured on how effective we are in generating sales leads so it is in our best interest to spend the money wisely.

The email reply from the CEO was brief and consisted of two questions:

How is this [insert marketing tactic] going to be used?

How is [insert marketing tactic] going to help generate sales?

My first thought was frustration -- we've been through this many times when proposing new tactics. But as I thought about his reply I quickly respected and understood his response. And I found it very interesting.

We responded outlining all the benefits and we will likely move forward with the tactic. But I continued to ponder the question "How is this proposed tactic going to help generate sales"?

Would this tactic likely have a direct and immediate impact on his company's sales?

No.

But what CEO would find this answer acceptable?

And herein lies the challenge that anyone in marketing and PR is intimately familiar with.

Like many disciplines that involve an element of creativity, marketing is both an art and a science. Good marketer's have a thorough understanding of numbers - from financial statements to campaign metrics - and know how to apply and interpret the information derived from this data. But good marketer's do not let the numbers alone drive decisions. This is the art.

Ever play the game Jenga? What's the value of one block? Not much but take away too many blocks and the structure collapses. Take two football teams with equal talent and a similar playbook and you often see one team that scores a lot of points and one that doesn't. Why? Many times it is because one team makes better use of their plays - their "marketing" mix.

Most HR vendors have access to the same marketing tactics - how they use these tactics is often what separates good marketer's from the pack.

So back to our client's question……

Would this tactic likely have a direct and immediate impact on sales?

Marketing does not work like this - it's more of a cumulative effect. That's why we recommend companies engage in a variety of marketing and PR tactics. This is what best-in-class companies do - from investing in SEO to producing regular "content", direct marketing, advertising, exhibiting, webcasts, media relations and 'social" marketing such as podcasts and blogging (and ideally, Twitter but we'll take it one step at a time).

It works.

It builds the brand, increases a company's visibility, web site traffic and sales leads - assuming they have a quality product and a competent sales organization.

But it takes time and it is not easy.

There are no "get leads quick" schemes that stand the test of time.

You must commit to a disciplined and well diversified "mix" of marketing and PR and be relentless in delivery - yes, even in slow economic times. As Gordon Moore once said, you can't save your way out of a downturn. Or, another favorite of mine: Who has the money to invest in a downturn? Those who invested in the last one.

These concepts can be difficult to accept for companies that do not have a "marketing" culture. It's outside their comfort level and they fall into a trap of questioning and trying to measure and assign an ROI to each individual tactic and cutting or not doing those tactics that don't have an immediate and/or easily recognizable benefit.

That is what a client told me years ago. He is a very bright CEO from a highly successful HR benefits firm. Prior to founding his HR business, he was a highly respected psychologist in Manhattan and admittedly did not know (or appreciate) marketing from Adam but was getting his lunch handed to him by a competitor who did. He changed his ways and his business flourishes today. Not a single decision is made without involvement of marketing - from operations to product development. And they are relentless in their marketing. He told me we helped bring a "marketing culture" to his business.

But after several decades in marketing and having worked with some of the best minds in marketing I still have difficulty responding to a CEO's question "will this tactic have a direct and immediate impact on sales"?

After all, I am a marketer, not a sales person :-)


Related blog post: Get a little messy AND measure stuff. Contradictions are the new marketing chic.

An HR blogger said something interesting in a recent job boards-are-dying type post: "We will be job board free in 2 years." In a follow-up post to explain how this would occur, this anonymous blogger says (problem areas in red):

"When you need something, you go to Google, so why not use it to find a job?  Simply enter your criteria, say sales jobs Chicago, and what you’ll get is a myriad of jobs.  Some will be on the boards (they pay an inordinate amount of dough to get their results listed high on Google), some will be on aggregators, some will be on free sites, and some will be from company sites. The point is, they are all in one place!  No longer do you have to search Monster, and then Hotjobs, and then craigslist.  They are all indexed in one convenient place, your Google search results.

The huge shift that is occurring now is that companies are optimizing their own job boards so that their results will show ahead of the job boards on search.  This means unless there is a huge, fundamental shift on how they do business, the job boards will continue to bleed revenues on job postings."

Now I just can't resist pointing out the flaws here, one at a time:

"We will be job board free in 2 years."

First, if your company is not jobboard-free today in the middle of the deepest recession in memory, chances are you're going to be relying on them more heavily two years from now. It's hard to remember what recruiting was like three years ago when everyone with a pulse had a job. This same lack of imagination is why sellers pay to stage expensive homes for sale, filling them with furniture, hanging paintings etc. It's hard to imagine what it would be like to live in a home, when you're standing in an empty house. It's even harder to imagine employers falling all over themselves to hire back the talent they just fired... but it's coming.

I will go out on a limb and say many companies should not even want to be jobboard-free.  Let's say for example that your corporate core competencies are in structural engineering and your company specializes in road construction projects. When business is booming, will it make economic sense for you to prioritize achieving freedom from the evil job boards? Or should you be focused on sales and operational excellence? Would it make sense for Honda to prioritize going television-ad or magazine-ad free?

"what you’ll get is a myriad of jobs" and "and some will be from company sites"

When I searched Google for 'sales jobs Chicago', there were no job postings in the first page of results. There were no company sites either.

"companies are optimizing their own job boards so that their results will show ahead of the job boards on search."

Easier said than done. If you are CNN.com, no sweat. But for the average company, this is a pipe dream. There are 10 search results on the first page - because of rapid click through drop-off, the first five really matter. The lions share of traffic goes to the first result, a lot less goes to the second result and so on. If you're not on the first page, you might as well not exist. The truth is, CNN could get a top ranking for 'sales jobs Chicago' but doesn't need one.  And that's how this works - if you don't need the ranking, you can get it. If you do need it, it's beyond your reach. Reminds me of the saying "If you have to ask the price, you can't afford it".

Let's go one step further and pretend that I'm flat out wrong about this. Let's imagine that average companies could get top Google rankings. Now pretend that 10 companies have beat the job boards out of all the first page rankings on Google. That means just five companies have traffic flow with which they can do some real recruiting. How many companies in the Chicago area hire sales reps? More than five?

For all these reasons the "job-board free in two years" movement is deeply flawed. For all these reasons employers would do well to treat job boards as partners and valued vendors. In my early years running a job board, I would despair at being treated impersonally as any other business by employers. I wanted to be perceived as a marketing extension for employers and a partner for spreading the costs across many companies. I wanted employers to recognize that I was a passionate and intense entrepreneur dedicated to their service - worthy of a certain amount of loyalty.  Job boards are more efficient than newspapers and more efficient than what employers can do themselves. Job boards merit special status. But I was naïve.

Today, I understand that every company is more or less on its own in a recession. All bets are off until the good times roll again. My message to employers -- when you need us in a couple years, we will answer your call. We will be there for you because SEO is not just another IT project and job boards will survive!

After announcing it would open up its platform ages ago - LinkedIn finally lets outside developers have access. All the pro's and con's are detailed here - including the t & c's that they are imposing which may be a bit stifling and limiting. But nonetheless- really interesting development for our clients. Watch this space.

I got really excited last week when one of our marketing/PR services team members (Adriana Saldaña) forwarded me the executive summary for the new Bersin & Associates talent acquisition study titled Talent Acquisition Systems 2010: Facts, Practical Analysis, Trends, and Provider Profiles.

I highly recommend you check it out just like I highly recommend you check out the HR tech reports from the human capital analysts at Gartner, IDC, Forrester, Bersin & Associates and Aberdeen.

When you can afford it, that is, other than being a paying member of the analyst firm.

The Bersin TA report is $995 for non-members. Not a shocker and pretty much in line with most analysts charge for their industry reports.

But I'm not buying it. Granted we're not an analyst firm by the traditional definition, although we've got a pretty good finger on the HR marketplace pulse and our marketing/PR services team has done a great job in analyst relations this past year on behalf of our HR supplier clients, we also do our own supplier/buyer research every year that's pretty solid.

So we've got that covered. Would I like to read the human capital analyst reports? Absolutely.

I'm sure the HR decision makers and influencers out there would like to as well, but most never do. Bill Kutik confirmed that earlier this year (and I agreed with everything he said in the article).

Smaller to mid-size firms don't have IT directors or CIO's (chief information officers) who historically have been the folks to buy these reports or be members of these analyst firms and get the reports as part of their service.

Member costs are huge annually depending on the level of service - $20K, $30K, $50K, etc. Keep in mind that I'm not saying the value of analyst membership isn't worth it for buying firms or the suppliers themselves. It's just a lot of frickin' money in an already flattening world of accessible information online.

The reports themselves can be invaluable to large organizations shopping for talent management, performance management or learning management software systems.

But why not expand on the Aberdeen model and allow supplier sponsors to subsidize the cost of the report and give it away to their prospects?

Really, why not? I don't have any stats on what kind of revenue these reports generate, but based on what I do know, membership is where the bank is. As it should be. There are a lot of very smart people who work for the analyst firms, especially the analysts, and their services have been invaluable for many enterprise-level customers in the HR marketplace.

That's why so many investment-funded HR software suppliers clamor to get in the reports and/or buy services from analysts.

We already get there's some conflict of interest in analyst firms when it comes to reviewing who the paying suppliers are and who the paying buyer firms are. It's inherent in the model. As Bill Kutik wrote in his analyst article, "I feel comfortable about their objectivity, and you should, too."

I do, because they're really smart people who know HR tech and software systems, but the value of the reports could reach so many more buyers and influencers in the HR marketplace if the reports were used in content marketing to generate publicity, traffic and leads:

• And either subsidized by sponsoring suppliers and given away - for an indefinite amount of time or until the next report.
• Or just given away by the analysts to reach a broader HR buying/influencing audience.

Wouldn't that in turn increase their annual services revenue and market share on both sides of the buyer and supplier food chain?

Nearly 6 million companies say so.

Post by Kevin W. Grossman (join me on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn - and now join HRmarketer on Twitter!)

In Part 1 of this series, I explored and challenged the practice of traditional candidate pipelining.

Some people may have interpreted my last post on the subject to mean that I don’t believe in any form of proactively building candidate pipelines. That would be incorrect. Anyone that really knows me knows that I am not a black/white, either/or kind of guy.

What I am is the kind of guy that will tell you that anyone who says there is only 1 way to do something is ALWAYS wrong, because there is always more than 1 way to do anything. I’m also the kind of person who wants to find the BEST way of doing a thing – I am not satisfied to do things “the way they’ve always been done,” nor will I blindly accept what other experts tout as best practices.

There is always a better way.

The comments I received from Part 1 in the series were fantastic! They gave me significant insight into what many of the industry heavyweights think – and it’s obvious that traditional candidate pipelining is alive, highly valued, and practiced often.  

At the end of Part 1, I mentioned that the ugly truth is that proactively pipelining candidates ahead of need has many intrinsic limitations and hidden costs that no one seems to want to think or talk about.

So let’s talk about them.

The Hidden Costs of Pipelining Candidates

No one seems to attach a value to all of the time and effort it takes to develop and maintain Work-in-process (WIP) candidate inventory – a pipeline of candidates that have been sourced, screened, evaluated, and “kept warm” through ongoing relationship management.

But don’t kid yourselves – there is a heavy cost associated with all of this work!

Building and maintaining a traditional pipeline of candidates requires quite a bit of time and effort. First you have to source well qualified candidates who closely match the forecasted/projected requirements – this often means a mix of phone sourcing, internet sourcing, social recruiting, and network/referral recruiting.

Then you need to screen and evaluate the potential candidates to verify that they are in fact good at what they do. After that, you’ll have to stay in regular contact with them to maintain a relationship and stay abreast of any changes in their situation and motivators.

Multiply this effort X 20, 50, 100+ candidates and simply the relationship management aspect of recruiting becomes the single largest time consuming aspect of pipelining candidates.

There must be some value being provided by all of this work being performed to proactively find, screen, and build and manage relationships with candidates for whom you don’t currently have a need, right?

From the comments I received on Part 1 in this series, I can tell many seasoned recruiting veterans certainly know the value that candidate pipelines generate for them.

However, the real question is what value is a recruiter providing to their customers – both candidate and client (hiring manager) – by all of this pipelining activity?

That question is trickier to answer than most people think. It’s actually a pretty deep question, and it can’t be answered by you. Value can only be determined by your customers – both candidates and clients. I’ll be dedicating a whole post to this concept in the near future.

Waste

I think that a large percentage of the time and effort associated with proactively building WIP candidate pipelines (candidates that have been found, screened/evaluated, and kept “warm”) is pure muda.

Muda is a Japanese term for an activity that is wasteful and doesn’t add value or is unproductive. One of the key steps in Lean production and the Toyota Production System is the “identification of which steps in a process add value and which do not. By classifying all the process activities into these two categories it is then possible to start actions for improving the former and eliminating the latter.”

It’s been a LONG time since I’ve written about my theories of Lean Recruiting – I honestly worry that it’s not a topic most people are interested in reading about because it is definitely “outside of the box” of traditional recruiting. However, I feel that Lean production concepts (including JIT sourcing/recruiting) will be a big part of the future of recruiting and staffing.

“Lean production is a practice that considers the expenditure of resources for any goal other than the creation of value for the end customer to be wasteful, and thus a target for elimination. Basically, lean is centered around creating more value with less work.” Now can you see why I’m such a Lean nut?

And remember – we’re not talking about the value to YOU, we’re talking about the value to your customers – candidates and clients.

The 5 Deadly Wastes of Candidate Pipelines

The activities associated with proactively building and maintaining work-in-process candidate pipelines involve 5 of the 7 wastes identified by Lean/TPS: overproduction, inventory, defects, over-processing, and waiting.

Overproduction

This happens each time you engage more candidates than needed to deliver to your customer. Proactively pipelining candidates ahead of need almost always leads to overproduction. Chances are you’ve never looked at it this way.

Inventory

A proactively built pipeline of WIP candidates is inventory and requires time and effort to maintain. Sitting in the “relationship maintenance” phase does not provide  a real value for the candidates or clients, and what happens when the positions you pipelined candidates for never get approved or never become available?

Defects

According to Lean, a “defect” is something that does not conform to specifications or expectations.
I’m not suggesting that the people themselves are defects. However, candidates that are proactively sourced, contacted, screened, and with whom a relationship is maintained that do not ultimately match the actual hiring need are defects of the pipelining process. Defects arise whenever job specifications/requirements change from forecast, rendering pipelined candidates no longer qualified, or when candidates are no longer interested, available, or when their motivators change change away from your opportunity.

Forecasts are never perfect – they can’t be.  Positions and requirements change, and people don’t stay interested or available forever.

Over-processing

Over-processing occurs any time more work is done than what is required by the customer. Screening and building and maintaining relationships with candidates that will never be submitted to a client/manager can be seen as performing more work than necessary. Are your customers (candidates and clients) requiring you to maintain relationships with a large number of people who will likely no longer be available or interested or even qualified when you actually have a need? 

Waiting

Whenever candidates are not being advanced through the recruiting and hiring process, they are waiting. In most traditional recruiting processes, a large part of a candidate’s life is spent waiting to be moved forward in the process. Maintaining relationships with candidates is not moving forward – it’s a holding pattern, which for many candidates, is permanent.

This is What I’ve Got vs. This is the Best Candidate

One of the biggest issues with building candidate pipelines/work-in-process candidate inventory is quite insidious.

What does a recruiter do when they’ve built a deep candidate pipeline and a specific hiring need finally becomes available? They will go to their candidate pipeline of course. 

At first glance, this seems like the logical thing to do – they’ve spent all of this time and effort building their work-in-process candidate pipeline – so why wouldn’t they start there? However, when recruiters do this, what they’re essentially doing is going through their inventory – what they happen to have on hand – which they produced not in response to this specific and “real” need, but a more general forecasted need.

Does this sound like a process designed to produce the best candidate at the right time?

I’ve watched many recruiters push their inventory. In many cases, after sorting through their candidate pipeline and determining who is still available, interested, and who actually fits the opening(s) – they may have had some candidates to submit to a client/hiring manager. However, the probability that the “best” candidates in their pipelines were still available and interested was low.

The issue here is pushing candidates just because you have them, without asking the critical question of whether or not they are actually the best candidates you can find.

Opportunity Cost

One of the opportunity costs of developing traditional candidate pipelines comes in the form of spending time and effort following up with candidates and checking to see if they are still available, interested and qualified rather than simply going out and finding the best candidates available.

When that position finally opens up for which you’ve been pipelining for – your first order of business is to make contact with everyone in your pipeline to see who is still available, who’s still interested, and who actually fits the job specifications. This can take a lot of time and effort – time and effort that could arguably be better spent simply going out and finding the best candidates you can, rather than checking your inventory.

And what happens when none of the best candidates in your pipeline are available, interested, or even fit your current hiring need?

Perhaps the reason why many recruiters seem to have too little time to find more and better candidates is because they’re spending so much time maintaining relationships with their candidate pipelines rather than trying to find the right people.

The Alternative to Work-In-Process Inventory

Now that we’ve taken a critical look at traditional pipelining – proactively building work-in-process (WIP) candidate inventory – let’s take a look at another way of viewing candidate inventory.

If you recall, work-in-process inventory is comprised of candidates that a recruiter stays in routine contact with, without a specific and current need. This is what many refer to as the relationship maintenance phase. It’s called “work-in-process” because they’ve been “processed” (sourced, contacted, and screened to some extent) and they also remain “in-process” as long as the recruiter maintains routine contact with them.

So could there be a form of candidate inventory that is not “in-process?”

Yes – I’m glad you asked!

Raw Material Inventory

I believe that resumes and/or candidate profiles (ATS, social networking sites, etc.) that sourcers and recruiters have access to and have the ability to retrieve on-demand are essentially candidates in their “raw material” form.

A raw material is something that is acted upon or used by human labor to create some product. To paraphrase Merriam Webster’s definition, raw material is material that can be converted by processing into a new and useful product: broadly – something with a potential for improvement or development.

“Raw material” candidate inventories consist of readily accessible resumes and/or relatively detailed candidate data (ATS solutions, resume databases, LinkedIn, etc.). These are people who have been identified as potential matches for current and/or future hiring needs based on their candidate data, but no time or energy is spent in an effort to build and maintain a relationship with these potential candidates prior to actual need.

Now, before you go thinking that I am commoditizing people – I’m not.

Remember, the resumes/candidate/social media profiles are the raw material – NOT the people they represent.

So What’s the Alternative to Traditional Candidate Pipelining?

I know it’s not easy getting people to question “the way it’s always been done.” That’s why I’ve spent so much time thoroughly exposing some of the intrinsic issues associated with traditional candidate pipelining.

Now that I’ve shown you a different way to look at candidate inventory (WIP vs. raw material), in my next post I will explain Just-in-Time sourcing and recruiting, under what conditions it can be achieved, and why it’s superior to traditional candidate pipelining.

I’ll also reveal what I believe is the ideal method of pipelining candidates.

Yes, I know that it might come as a bit of a shock to hear that I do believe in building candidate pipelines, especially after the thrashing I’ve given to proactively pipelining candidates ahead of need. However, the method of pipelining I’ve used to be highly productive and to provide maximum value to both candidates and clients isn’t traditional pipelining.

Speaking of value – In my next post I’m thinking of exploring what the true value is that recruiters provide candidates. Here’s a hint - it’s not pipelining. Because when you really get down to it, pipelining primarily helps YOU, not the candidate.

But more on that next week.

Click here to read Part 3

There really weren't any resources for my mother in 1972. She volunteered and then worked as a secretary for the local school district where I grew up, and every time my birth father beat her, there was full clothing to cover the bruises, avoiding others stares and conversation, absenteeism when it was really bad, and more.

There were no domestic violence or workplace violence programs, no employee assistance programs offering counseling or shelter referrals, no assessment and action plans from human resources.

Don't ask, don't tell. The fear and shame that comes with abuse and intimate partner violence is overwhelming enough (intimate partner violence another name for domestic violence) - you don't want your employer to know for fear of losing your job. Employers don't want to know for fear of potential violence in the workplace.

For my mother and countless others it was faith and prayer and finally the personal strength to get out of the violence.

It still is, although today there are thankfully so many more resources available and more and more companies have workplace violence and/or intimate partner violence programs and/or EAPs.

HR can and should take the lead in providing these programs.

But consider these:

• A recent survey of CEOs found that most believe domestic violence to be a serious issue, yet 71% did not believe it is a problem in their company. (The reality is that approximately 21% of fulltime working adults report being a victim of domestic violence.)
• Over 70% of United States workplaces have no formal program or policy that addresses workplace violence.
• Of the approximately 30% that have formal workplace violence policies in place (usually binders on shelves gathering dust), only 13% have domestic violence in the workplace policies and only 4% provide training on domestic violence in the workplace (Bureau of Labor Statistics from 2006).

Only 4%. Seems like one helluva short trip from 1972.

And consider these EAP obstacles:

• The most common reason women didn't contact their EAP for intimate partner violence is that they didn't think about it or didn't think appropriate.
• Employee utilization of intimate partner violence EAP services is very low.
• The number one concern of battered women before contacting an EAP is confidentiality -- they’re afraid employee will find out.
• Most EAPs don't have standardized evaluations or codes for intimate partner violence.

But even considering there's much work to be done, human resources, security professionals, EAPs and workplace violence non-profits have all made huge strides in working together to address intimate partner violence and workplace violence.

One organization in particular - the Corporate Alliance to End Partner Violence - is the only national organization of its kind founded by business leaders and focused on the workplace. Check out some the companies that are members. I came in contact with this organization earlier this year and was fortunate enough to participate in a few of their S2 - Safer, Smarter Workplace webinars. I was also fortunate enough to interview its Executive Director, Kim Wells (that'll be the next HR Market Share podcast after Thanksgiving).

Amazing employer resources come from the CAEPV. Download Six Steps to Creating a Successful Workplace Program here. Also, great list of dos and don'ts here.

EAPs play a critical role as well. One of our clients - Corporate Counseling Associates - recently released a white paper titled Healthy Organizations Mitigate the Risk of Violence that includes several ways to reduce the threat of violence in the workplace:

• Communicate a zero tolerance policy & develop ongoing employee communications to reinforce the message.
• Set up company procedures for reporting incidents of violence.
• Create a Threat of Violence (TOV) Team, involving members of the following departments: Health Services, Human Resources, Security, EAP, Legal, Facilities Management, Corporate Affairs, and Public Relations.
• Establish organizational mechanisms to prevent violence.
• Constantly monitor and identify “weak spots” in management practices and/or development programs.
• Educate senior management on the warning signs and symptoms of violence-prone individuals, and the environmental pressures that can trigger incidents.
• Train the TOV team to ensure a disciplined execution of strategy.
• Learn how to de-escalate aggression and improve conflict management skills. Run crisis scenario simulations.

In fact, the latest S2 webinar was all about Addressing Domestic Violence in the Workplace: An EAP/Employer Partnership. (CCA wasn't a part of this webinar, however.)

We have come a long way from 1972. With all the organizations like CAEPV, CCA and many other EAPs, HR weaves the safety net for victims of intimate partner violence in the workplace.

More on this to come. We're organizing a roundtable virtual discussion on workplace violence for early in the new year.

Post by Kevin W. Grossman (join me on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn - and now joinHRmarketer on Twitter!)

We are in the process of identifying and selecting some training programs for various departments at HRmarketer.com.

Research over several decades indicates that only between 10 to 20 percent of employees apply what they learn in training programs to achieve business results.

Ouch.

So when I saw this recent e-book announcement from HRmarketer.com member RealTime Performance on “Getting More From Your Investment in Training: The 5A’s Framework” I was interested.

I downloaded the first two chapters (this was their content offer - very nice).

The e-book, authored by Dr. Stephen J. Gill and RealTime Performance CEO Sean P. Murray, addresses the internal organizational roadblocks to effective learning and guides managers through a framework to help them get more business impact from their every dollar invested in training.

The "framework" outlined in the book, called the 5A's Framework, offers a description of the factors that lead to a learning culture and outlines steps to ensure that training investments will produce desired business results. The areas (5 "A"'s) include alignment, anticipation, application, alliance and accountability.

It's a pretty good read. Check it out.

HRmarketer has launched a new blog called HR Vendor News. This replaces an older - and award winning - blog titled Breaking HR News.

The quick facts..........

Blog Name: HR Vendor News
Blog URL: www.HRvendorNews.com
Feed: http://www.hrvendornews.com/?feed=rss2
Description: Selected press releases from human resource vendors - updated daily.

Some other "news" sites, content sites and blogs from HRmarketer that HR vendors may be interested in include (all are free):

• HR Industry News: This weekly newsletter includes about 30-40 news stories relating mostly to HR vendor news. A great way to keep up with what is going on in the space. View archives here or subscribe to the newsletter here.
  

• News for HR: This newsletter gets distributed to over 80,000 opt-in HR decision makers. To submit your content for consideration please send to newsforhr [at] hrmarketer.com. Advertising is also available. The archives are online here.

• HR Buyers Guide: Our HR Buyers Guide, located in our HR Directory, includes detailed profiles for over 700 human resource vendors - and growing daily. If you do not have your profile, create one (its free). We'll be adding some very cool features to this buyers guide soon including the ability for HR decision makers to initiate RFPs and communicate with vendors online. Thousands of human resource professionals visit our Directory each month giving your company increased exposure to this important audience.

• White Papers +: Also located in our HR Directory is our White Papers + database where over 3,000 HR white papers, articles, case studies, podcasts, research, webcasts and more can be found. Once you have a Profile in our Buyers Guide, you can add content to your "Content Syndication" section on your profile so your company will be listed more often in our White Papers + database. You don't need to upload the content, just the URL of where it is on your web site which will improve your SEO. An example of how this can be used can be found at the Profiles for Buck Consultants and Accurate Background.

• HR Marketing and PR Downloads: As many of you know, HRmarketer produces lots of great white papers, articles, podcasts and other resources to help educate HR vendors on best practices in marketing to HR. All are free and all are located here.

Enjoy.

Yet another post about the impact of the ‘Downturn’ on Incentive Compensation, but this one is special. Check out my quote in the Workforce Magazine if you haven’t seen it already.

The gist of the article is that when external forces such as the economy are having some fun, companies must react and adapt… And in the world if incentive compensation, especially for the large enterprise, this does not only mean strategy changes but also software changes.

Many executives don’t think that such IT changes can be difficult… And often it’s true. But sometimes changes can be easy, but time consuming. Other times changes should be easy, but can’t be done because incentive calculations are done on a 40 year old mainframe system using COBOL and Focus databases and no one remembers exactly which digit in the 2000 character string called SFSHJHE represents the rate. This is just another reminder of the importance of having a ‘flexible’ compensation system.