Welcome to the June 27, 2007 issue of The Total View

Published by Success Performance Solutions, Written by Ira S. Wolfe

Visit our Human Resources Blog and Perfect Labor Storm Blog where we can post daily (and more often) human resource updates, news, and Perfect Labor Storm facts. 

What's Inside:

1. Solving the "Resu-mess" Backlog

For individuals in search of a new job or career, it is as easy as Copy, Paste, and Submit. Job opportunities abound for skilled workers.   Internet recruiting has progressed from simply e-mailing a resume to candidates submitting video resumes and podcasts. But as with many technologies, convenience often drags complexity along with it.

Just like the neighbor attending an open house just to get a peek at how the people on the other side of the street live, an increasing number of job candidates are just "shopping". Add those to the serious
candidates looking for better opportunities and hiring managers are receiving a massive influx of resumes - an HR administrative nightmare I call the "resu-mess".

No longer do managers receive a dozen or so of resumes mailed or faxed from a single ad in the Sunday classifieds. They are greeted daily with hundreds of emails clogging inboxes from Internet job postings. After years of cutting back on the size of human resource departments or just adding more and more responsibilities on the shoulders of the HR generalists and recruiters, it is fair to say that reviewing and processing these resumes is like having eight lanes of traffic exiting onto a two-lane side-street. This translates into a bottleneck at the hiring tollgate.

The bottleneck leads to two devastating business mistakes – the urge to cut back on advertising in order to avoid getting too many resumes and not responding promptly to candidates.

In order to manage the resu-mess, successful recruitment marketing strategies are being derailed by the voluminous response of applicants. Managers reduce the number of job boards and other media
outlets on which they advertise to better manage the number of applications. This strategy is tantamount to HR suicide. Considering today's challenge of finding the right candidate in a shrinking talent pool, throwing out the widest net possible, not cutting back, is in the best interest of employers.

But more resumes aren’t necessarily better without automating the process. Few managers, human resource professionals and assistants have the time to screen the applications, call the candidates, do the voice mail dance, complete phone interviews, schedule face-to-face interviews, check references, complete background checks and so on.

This leads to the second mistake. While managers and HR staff are attempting to weed out the unqualified or disinterested applicants, high-demand qualified candidates are being overlooked and turned off by slow response times, cumbersome hiring hurdles, and inexperienced interviewers.

If first impressions skew a top candidate's opinion of your company, then the reputation of many organizations is abysmal. Administrative overload is creating backlogs and feeding the chief complaint of job seekers - poor communication and follow-up. Based on the 2007 Staffing.org survey of nearly 500,000 job seekers, ratings for communication and follow-up after applying for a job was a pitiful "1"
(poor) out of a 5-point scale.

Managers are at a crossroads. Business didn’t used to be as complex as it is today. But many organizations still insist on using the techniques of yester-year to solve today's problems. Candidates hire professional resume writers. They search the Internet for information about your company. They download dozens and dozens of answers to the most common interview questions. Yet managers are still doing interviews on the fly, relying on gut instinct and an exaggerated resume to make the final hiring decisions. What can an organization do to attract more candidates and simplify the complex process of recruiting and hiring?

Simplify the application process.

Streamlining recruitment, hiring quickly, and selecting the right people are no longer options but key growth strategies.

An effective applicant solution has many pieces, including applicant tracking, screening, testing, interviewing, and background checks. All of these components must mesh with business processes and create an end-to-end solution.

To first attract and then actually hire the best talent, making the entire application process as convenient as possible is critical. Prospective employees should be able to fill out an application at a
Web site, and any tests or profiling tools should be available through the Web or by phone.

Clients of Success Performance Solutions have been using Total-APS, an online applicant processing system, comparable to those used by the Fortune 1000s but now affordable and easy-to-use for even the small business owner.

Total APS allows managers to create job specific filter questions (such as "Are you available to work weekends including Saturdays and Sundays?” or, “Have you completed a two-year or four year degree?”) as well as behavioral and competency based questions, allowing candidates
to self-qualify or disqualify themselves, and avoiding many needless phone calls to unqualified, unmotivated and uninterested candidates.

Total APS also automates follow-up responses to candidates who are disqualified and reminders to qualified candidates who need to complete personality assessments or provide additional information.

A case in point: A client, a small real estate broker, recently received 131 applicants to her job ad. Of those 131, only 23 were qualified based on her customized criteria. Had she not utilized the
Total APS she would have had to sift through 131 resumes – and she still wouldn’t have known which of her candidates met her basic criteria. The ease in which she was able to identify the best
candidates prompted her to e-mail us and say, “I love you guys! You are so worth your money!”

A well-designed applicant processing system is like the EZ-Pass of human resources. It can help organizations filter and process résumés quickly and provide a central repository for potential candidates. When the system aligns with business processes, it's possible to identify talent more quickly and reduce hiring time. The net result is that you can snatch talented individuals before your competitors do.

For more information about streamlining your recruiting and hiring process including the Total APS, please visit our online demo or contact us at 800-803-4303.

2. Perfect Labor Storm Workforce Statistics and Trends

Annual voluntary turnover rates in the U.S.:

2002         2003         2004           2005        2006

20.9%      20.29%     20.20%      22.7%      23.4%

Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics, Office of Occupational Statistics and Employment Projections

Perfect Labor Storm 2.0 is now available. The year 2007 will see an increase in skilled worker shortages and more competition. The result will be higher salaries, more training and career advancement opportunities, and more flexible work cultures. How prepared is your company to find skilled and dependable workers?

Perfect Labor Storm 2.0 is the newly updated and revised 2007 edition of best-selling book first published in 2005. You can now download an advance copy of PLS 2.0. a $10 value with every purchase of the original Perfect Labor Storm, still a great value at $9.95. Order your copy today!

3. The World's Whiniest Workers

According to a study by FDS International, a company in the United Kingdom that conducts market research, the 11 countries with the most demanding--or whiniest--workers are:

1. France
2. United Kingdom (tie)
2. Sweden (tie)
4. United States
5. Australia (tie)
5. Portugal (tie)
7. Canada(tie)
7. Greece(tie)
9. Poland
10. Germany (tie)
10. Spain (tie)

FDS published the results of its study of work attitudes after surveying nearly 14,000 employees in 23 countries.

4. Motivating Hispanic Employees
A Practical Guide to Understanding and Managing Hispanic Employees

Hispanics make up a huge percentage of the workforce in the hotel, food, manufacturing, service and many other industries. As a manager or co-worker do you understand the motives and needs behind the behaviors? Do you want to learn how to create a more inclusive environment, and how to increase your effectiveness with cross-cultural communication to get results?

Learn more about Motivating Hispanic Employees.

5. ASSESS Leadership Series Makes A Difference

The focus in The ASSESS Leadership Difference series is on people leadership and how that impacts how effective you are in your organization. Great leaders are capable of creating synergy among
their team and motivating them to achieve great results.

In our Leading Leaders and Leading Others Seminar we take a strategic approach to people management. We will work from the top-down, beginning with business strategy, to create an alignment between the people and the organization's needs.

In each workshop we provide assessment feedback based on management and leadership competencies and guidance in the context of developing leadership skills, moving from managing others to managing managers. Participants in the workshops will learn critical people management
skills. Each participant will leave the workshop with a personal development plan and/or a plan for developing their management team.

Read more about ASSESS Leadership Workshops

6. Industrial and Adminstrative Skills Testing

SkillClues evaluates technical and/or administrative skill proficiency levels - from industrial to healthcare to basic and advanced computer skills, including MS Office, Accounting, Design/Graphics and more. Reports contain both graphical and verbal interpretation of the applicant’s results, including overall and specific question scoring.

Learn more about Clues for Skills.

7. Wolfe to keynote PA Chamber Skilled Worker Shortage Crisis roundtable

The Pennsylvania Chamber Foundation invites you to a free public service roundtable "Help Wanted: The Skilled Worker And Business Leader Shortage Crisis", from 8 a.m. to noon Tuesday, July 31, 2007 at the Holiday Inn Harrisburg-Hershey, Grantville, PA. Ira S Wolfe will open the event with an update on The Perfect Labor Storm.

Designed for presidents, business owners, HR professionals, supervisors, department heads and other business executives who hire in Pennsylvania, in addition to local chamber executives and state
association executives, this event will provide practical, concrete advice on how the business community can cope with the current and anticipated shortage of qualified, skilled employees and business leaders.

Read more about The Skilled Worker and Business Leader Shortage Crisis

8. Quotes from Hire Authorities

"There is one key to profitablity and stability during either a boom or a bust economy: employee morale."
Herb Kelleher, founder of Southwest Airlines

Permission is granted to consultants, managers, business owners and HR professionals to reproduce content from this newsletter for your internal publications, or to distribute copies to your workforce, on the condition that you reproduce the credits and contact information as follows: "Reprinted with permission from Ira S Wolfe and Success Performance Solutions. Copyright 2007 Ira S Wolfe." We also hope you will forward the newsletter in its entirety and recommend to others that they subscribe.

Ira S. Wolfe Copyright 2007 - All Rights Reserved. Reprints and other distribution by permission