MTA Job and Career Fair

New York City’s Introductory Number 814-A (814-A) takes effect.

Effective June 11, 2013, the New York City Council has drafted a bill, Introductory Number 814-A (814-A), a provision that makes it illegal for employers to make hiring decisions based on an applicant’s employment status.  Employer violations of 814-A may result in fines of up to $250,000.

The employers must be able to compile substantive job-related reasons for not hiring a particular candidate.  The government also prohibits advertisements from stating current employment as a requirement or that unemployed people need not to apply.  814-A does not make it illegal for employers to inquire about the reasons why a candidate left a prior job and does not prevent employers from examining candidates’ professional qualifications.  This allows an employer to enquire whether an applicant has, for example, an up-to-date license or certification or whether they have undergone the required training or experience. In addition, the law does not outlaw employers from giving preference to existing employees.

 

What are Some of the Inexpensive Steps you Can Take to Improve Engagement and Retention?

Experts in human resources management believe that employees can be more motivated if proper techniques are applied. Employees generally become more engaged when they are awarded appropriately with compensation that meets their needs. These rewards do not necessarily always come in the form of money. Here, I will describe several inexpensive methods that can fit any budget and that does not put large demands on one’s time.

First of all, positive reinforcement is always one of the better strategies for motivating employees. Management should train its employees to identify at least a few positive characteristics in their coworkers and make sincere complimentary comments about those positive traits so that the employee feels respected and appreciated, and thereby more motivated.   Also, offering employees more of the tasks they like to do can potentially help them to become more engaged.  Employees should encourage their employers to make suggestions, and if these suggestions are feasible and make sense, then the employers should take steps to implement these changes.  Doing so can potentially improve the working environment and thereby make employee performance much better.

How to Hire a Great Employee?

 

Hiring the right persons can indeed pose real challenges for an organization. It is very difficult to determine upfront which candidates are the right fit in terms of the candidate’s skill and disposition and the company’s culture and needs.  Developing relationships with potential hires should be an integral part of talent acquisition, even before the positions become available. Thereby, recruiters as well as other types of employees for the organizations should look out for, and keep in the touch with, those candidates who seem to have the right background and characters. Developing a direct relationship with the candidates themselves is not necessarily enough with respect to having a full understanding of their background.  A company needs to have a relationship with people who have experience with the candidate; this should be an important part of the acquisition process.

Recruiters and hiring managers should be clear with what they really want from the open positions. Instead of relying mostly upon standardized job description, the hiring committee should compile lists of requirements that qualified candidate should possess in order to excel in each particular opening. Even within the same job title, the duties and tasks that an individual will perform can vary across industries or cultures. As such, hiring committee should start with a job description for the opening before they even start the recruiting process. In today’s competitive labor market, candidates who possess a more complete set of professional skills are more likely to be easily discovered.  Given this, job advertisements should place requirements on who is eligible to apply for the positions.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Social Media and Talent Managment

HighTech  has come to recognize that the talents of its employees represent the single biggest asset of the firm; indeed, these gifted and intelligent workers have helped to produce one of the world’s most innovative computing companies (Quinton, 2012).  Talented computer scientists and engineers are relatively rare, and as such they have a particularly high value, particularly those capable of creative thinking and who have demonstrated an ability to solve complex problems in elegant and robust ways (Gordon, 2009).  Recognizing this truth, HIGHTECH has developed various computing technologies, including social media, to select, develop, reward, and retain talented high technology workers (Borreman, 2007).

            In order to optimize its talent search vis-à-vis the computing technology profession, HIGHTECH has collaborated with universities in order to provide rigorous training to students interested in social business computer networking (Diana, 2007).  Based on what the students learn from these training programs, they can apply the same principles and problem-solving strategies to develop better networking systems for solving many of the myriad problem that various organizations face.  Training undergraduate and graduate students on how HIGHTECH develops innovative social media as business solutions creates a pipeline of younger computer scientists to replace retired, on-leave, or resigned employees at HIGHTECH (Diana, 2007).

            Because HIGHTECH sees its success as tied closely to building, maintaining and nurturing its highly talented workforce, the organization is receptive to new ideas and it has developed computing systems that can readily allow its employees to exchange ideas to develop more innovative ideas about how best to expand and improve computing services and products (Borremans, 2007; Scott, 2010).  As a matter of fact, HIGHTECH broke new ground in becoming the very first major company to use social media for group communications.  It introduced company-wide conferences through social media technologies in 2001, through which 50,000 of its worldwide employees hyper-connected synchronously to the central conference location, and most of the employees participated at the meeting virtually (Borremans, 2007). 

            Ever since the hyper-connected videoconference took place, a series of other business-related videoconferences have taken place after the very first success.  Employees from hundreds of locations worldwide have worked together on the same computing projects.  For each project, workers have created project accounts on the company-wide internal social media.  On the same networking webpage, participants can communicate digitally in order to report about their work progress or to provide feedback on each other’s work progresses (Borremans, 2007).

            For each project, the members who work on the same project present their work via wiki, video casting, and podcasting on their project’s social media page (Borremans, 2007; Manfield, 2012).  Presenting work progress via these three major forms of social media communications allow people to target individual unique sets of communication styles.  The text of the wiki page and the actions seen in a videocast can elicit interest from visual learners and motivate them to come up with new ideas (Diana, 2007).  Videocasting can help others to learn about the projects kinestically (Gillian, 2011).  Others can repeat what has been done or they can do other things to further improve the projects.  Podcasts target learners who prefer to in learn through the process of hearing; the podcasts broadcast the discussions taking place among the members who work on the same projects. 

           The employees can post to these sites information about their progress, the details of the stage they are working on, how they have overcome certain challenges, how their managers’ comments on their work, and other project-related information, thus allowing for the creation of a robust online documentation process (Borremans, 2007).  Digital recording documenting allows for the existence of a body of information and experience to serve as guides, thus meaning that new projects will begin with greater clarity and a laid-out and test structure and pathway for success.  In the future, workers can look at what others have been done, after which they can carry out similar protocols and incorporate features of the previous projects into their newer project without having to reinvest resources into developing newer projects.  These ways of organizing and storing information and processing project development have saved the firm both in terms of labor costs and time   (Manfield, 2012).  Newer projects do not necessarily always have the same components as older projects; the information regarding developing and processing the older project have been used as the foundation for developing more innovative projects (Manfield, 2012).

            Using social media for communication has become quite natural to HIGHTECH employees, particularly with respect to business networking (Hosford, 2009).  Online communication allows for greater flexibility and fluidity in terms of assigning individuals to work on company projects (Quinton, 2012).  Workers from different locations in the company can collaborate on the same projects.  The reason why the company assigns individuals located in different nations to collaborate is due to the fact that doing so allows the company to take advantage of talented people irrespective of their location (Clegg, 2012). Marsh says. "If everyone comes from exactly the same niche, it doesn't stimulate as much creativity as when there is a wide diversity of thought. (Clegg, 2012, p. 45)" Indeed, it is often the case that various nations have differing concentrations of competencies and expertise.  These technological tools allow members with unique sets of talents and skills to fill different job functions for the same assignments (Clegg, 2012).

            HIGHTECH has collaborated with various social media giants, such as YouTube and LinkedIn, to help their business partners to attract more viewers and to accommodate diverse viewer needs and interests (Diana, 2012; Hosford, 2009; Q&A: HIGHTECH’s VP, 2011).  These collaborative efforts have offered numerous learning opportunities for HIGHTECH employees to come up with best possible technological solutions to the challenges that these social media giants have faced.  By learning from working on their clients’ myriad and complex technological problems, HIGHTECH employees has been very successfully in marketing the company’s own products and services through social media marketing campaigns (Gillian, 2011; Hosford, 2009;Maddox, 2009; Quinton, 2012).

            In order to get the most from the talented employees that they locate, hire and nurture, HIGHTECH also has used social media to retain its talents.  On the HIGHTECH Employee Benefits and Saving Social Media page, the HR department at HIGHTECH matches its employees with a wide array of diverse benefits and savings (Bailey, 2011).

            The company has offered employees retail discount offers, exclusively for its own employees and their family members, which can accommodate HIGHTECH’s diverse employee population (Bailey, 2011).  HIGHTECH Reward’s Twitter updates its employees with offers for saving on purchasing merchandises.   The employees have found the benefits and rewards offered on the social media to be very useful; they have described positive testimonies in forms of videos or writings on the HIGHTECH Benefit Blog, which further elicit other employees to use the offers on the HIGHTECH Reward Twitter (Bailey, 2011).

        HIGHTECH has no formal policies regulating how its employees use social media for business purposes (Cunningham, 2010; Davis, 2010; Scott, 2010).  So long as the contents neither contain inappropriate materials nor breach confidential confidentiality information, HIGHTECH’s managements is accepting of the posting and exchange of information.  Indeed, HIGHTECH encourages a culture of openness and receptivity to ideas anytime and from anyone.  This open door policy regarding social media usage facilitated the creation of the HIGHTECH Center for Social Business, a facility that comprises a computing research facility that facilitates an extensive global collaboration with business partners and academic partners working together to develop better computing and technology solutions to organizational problems (Lynch,2008).

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Lynch. C.G. (2008). Center to Connect on Social Software, CIO,  22 ( 3),16-16.

 

 

 

 

Maddox, K. (2009).  Some question payoff of social media efforts. B to B, 94(4), 1-28.

 

 

 

 

Manfield, L. (2012). Is your business actually social?. Backbone, 11-14.

 

 

 

 

Q&A: HIGHTECH's VP of predictive analytics talks social media. (2011). CIO, p. 1.

 

 

 

 

Quinton, B. (2012). HIGHTECH’s Social Selling. Chief Marketer, 3(7), 11-15.

 

 

 

 

Scott, D. M. (2010). Let Them Communicate. EContent, 33(3), 40.

Managing Three Types of Change Resistance

Due to the difficulties that organizations face in adapting to dynamic environments, businesses have become more interested in helping their employees to adapt to changes by creating a more open-minded atmosphere that fosters creative and accepting attitudes.  Within such a paradigm, it is important that employees take seriously their obligation to coach each other by developing an array of communication skills that are able to persuade each other to respond positively to changes, including adversity.

The table below outlines strategies that can aid employees in helping each other cope with change. Complacency, resignation, cynicism are some of the major reasons that cause people not to take steps to respond constructively to changes.  Employees should help each other see situations from unique angles so that they can all see these changes as opportunities for further growth and development. Looking at these angles also will allow employees to understand that refusing to change is a very risky proposition within a broader dynamic world. By not making behavioral changes in response to changes in the environment, people might miss opportunities for moving their organization in the right direction.   

Nekoranec, W; Fourrier, D. Coaching Managers Through Change. 67(6),  26-29