5 Tips for Millennials Who Are Looking for Work Or Recently Hired

	Alexandra Levit posted a great list of tips for Gen Y / Millennials at her Water Cooler Wisdom blog, along with a good description of each for those who want more:
Focus on acquiring transferable skills. Use your initiative one small contribution at a time. Take charge of your own career path. Make your boss look good. Look for a mentor with a generosity of spirit who is just a few years ahead of you on the ladder, ideally in another department.

Learning How to Recruit and Retain Millennials

I don’t have a human resources or recruiting degree of any kind yet, as an owner of job board CollegeRecruiter.com, I need to understand the issues facing those who do. I attend a lot of human resource and recruiting conferences and try to take in as many of the sessions as possible and speak with as many practitioners and thought leaders as I can. Today I had the good fortune of listening to two of the foremost experts on the recruitment and retention of Gen Y / Millennial young adults: Terese Corey Blanck and Judy Anderson.

Terese and Judy are the principals behind Emerging Advantage, which helps organizations gain a competitive advantage by providing services which engage and accelerate the development of entry-level employees impacting retention, performance and promotability. In a 2.5 hour presentation to a packed room, Terese and Judy skillfully played off each other and the attendees in first making the case that Gen Y behavior frustrates many employers then proving that it has been misdiagnosed as a generational issue and then laying out specific recommendations for how employers both large and small can recruit and retain those 18-30 year old, emerging adults so they are ready to replace the Boomer Generation as the retirement of those older workers accelerates over the next decade.

The session was sponsored by the Emerging Leaders Association, which also deserves kudos for putting on such an interesting and informative event in an effort to help its members and guests like me guide our future leaders to a state of readiness for the uncertainties and challenges ahead. If your organization is struggling with recruiting and retaining Gen Y candidates, I urge you to contact these two fine organizations to learn more about how they can help.

Good News for the Holidays: 200,000 Hires From Just Four Employers

A flurry of announcements touting significant holiday hiring plans provides some much-needed hope to those seeking temporary, seasonal employment this year. Over the past two weeks, a handful of employers announced seasonal hiring plans that will add a total of 200,000 workers to their collective payrolls, according to Challenger, Gray & Christmas, Inc., the global outplacement firm that tracks job-cut and hiring announcements. The holiday hirers included Toys R Us with 45,000 announced hires, Macy’s with 65,000 new hires, Kohl’s with 40,000 hires, and United Parcel Service with 50,000 hires.

The announcements came at the onset of the 2010 holiday hiring season, which Challenger expects to be better than 2009, though not as strong as the pre-recession year of 2007. Last year, retail payrolls experienced a net gain of 501,400 workers in October, November and December, according to non-seasonally adjusted data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. That was a 54 percent increase from 2008, when holiday hiring fell to a 22-year low of 324,900.

“This year we expect to see further gains in seasonal hiring, but it probably will not achieve the levels we saw in 2006 or 2007 when retailers’ holiday payrolls grew by 746,800 and 720,800, respectively. Consumer spending is still well below pre-recession levels, so retailers and other sectors adding workers will be careful not to over-hire,” said John A. Challenger, chief executive officer of Challenger, Gray & Christmas.
While the holiday hiring outlook focuses on retailers, Challenger is quick to point out that they are not the only employers adding seasonal workers. This is evidenced by the fact that UPS announced plans to hiring 50,000 workers to help meet increased holiday demand.

“Opportunities also exist in areas such as food service, hospitality and leisure. Job seekers also should not limit their searches to the biggest employers. Toys R Us will undoubtedly be swamped with applicants, making it extremely competitive. Meanwhile small, mom-and-pop toy stores may be overlooked,” said Challenger.

HR’s Missing Link

Why Human Capital Supply Chains are critical for post-recession success.

During the recession of 2008/2009, websites like Forbes’ Layoff Tracker displayed a running list of companies that laid off hundreds, thousands and even tens of thousands of workers. Certainly, if CEOs had a more fluid method to relate slowing business performance to a decreased need for human capital in real-time they would have been able to gradually ramp down their staffing levels rather than decrease them so abruptly and publically.

As the economy rebounds, your company will be vying with competitors for the same top talent. Who will win? The company that has been most strategic during the downturn by investing in streamlined processes and best-in-class technologies will be best poised to react quickly and snap up the most qualified talent first. So now’s your chance.

It’s essential that your company calibrate and fine tune your workforce, so you can quickly respond to changing market conditions in small steps rather than in painful mass layoffs or mass rehire campaigns where workforce quality is likely to suffer.

We must all manage our human capital as efficiently and effectively as we manage all of the other parts of our business. It’s time to streamline, optimize and apply integrated technology solutions to human resources. Translating manufacturing and distribution supply chain lessons learned at Toyota, Walmart and Dell to the human capital supply chain is an obvious idea. An obvious idea few are implementing.

Establishing a Human Capital Supply Chain means you link business strategy, business performance, strategic workforce planning, staffing, onboarding and offboarding for improved corporate financial management and greater business success.

Firms that understand their human capital needs on a real-time basis should not be taken by surprise. Rather, they’ll be in tune with market dynamics and able to quickly react with agility, ramping down their workforce less aggressively or fighting back to pick-up core talent without delay.

For companies that want to grow in a post-recession economy, it’s time to refocus and apply the lessons learned from optimizing your product lines to optimizing your workforce. Here’s how you can start:

1. Understand your company’s total spend on human capital. This is a key input to the business ROI and the first step of any Human Capital Supply Chain management program. This requires you and your CFO to get your arms around both your internal (wages, benefits and taxes) and external (accounts payable) human capital spending.
2. Break down barriers between HR, procurement and senior leadership. Establishing a Human Capital Supply Chain management program requires a major change management effort for all stakeholders. You’ll need to speak a shared language, utilize each other’s strengths and unify your human capital goals.
3. Build on existing (even somewhat disjointed) business functions. To employ an end-to-end Human Capital Supply Chain management business process, you’ll want to start with <<this example Ch 6>> and tailor it to your own organization.
4. Automate. Automate. Automate. The use of technology in automating the end-to-end business process is a common way to reduce costs and speed turnaround time. It’s also vital for real-time measurement and management of human capital.
5. Embrace the value in staffing suppliers. The bias toward permanent staff needs to change in order to be more nimble in today’s marketplace. Transform your relationships with staffing firms into strategic partnerships in order to best enable Human Capital Supply Chain goals.

The recession we’re pulling out of could be the turning point for the global industry and our HR executives. The call to streamline. The catalyst for innovation. The moment that will change our industries forever.

It is vital that all of us – CEOs, HR executives, procurement and staffing industry executives – answer this call to action. It will ensure that we’re ready for the post-recession ramp-up in hiring and the skill shortages that will return as the Baby Boomer generation actually begins to retire.

There is no doubt that if you want your company to lead in the post-recession talent grab, you must start building your Human Capital Supply Chain now. It’s your decision. Are you ready to get going or are you going to wait to be overtaken by competitors that act first?

By Tim Giehll

Tim Giehll is co-author of Human Capital Supply Chains: Just in Time Talent to Boost Profits. With over 30 years of technology, staffing and manufacturing expertise, Giehll serves as CEO of Bond Talent US and Bond eEmpACT.

It’s Officially an Old Wive’s Tale: Fantasy Football is Not Hurting the Economy

With three weeks of the NFL season in the books, the big question is whether fantasy football leagues are sapping the nation’s workplace productivity. According to human resource professionals from around the country, the answer is a resounding NO.

In a survey by global outplacement consultancy Challenger, Gray & Christmas, Inc., the majority of respondents said fantasy football had little to no impact on productivity. Ranking the level of distraction on a scale of 1 to 10, with 1 being no noticeable impact, nearly 70 percent said four or lower. Less than eight percent of respondents said the level of distraction rated a 7 or 8 and none of the respondents felt the phenomenon deserved a 9 or 10.

“Other surveys show that people are indeed managing their fantasy teams from work. However, what we are hearing from the human resources community is that this is not at all affecting the level of output workers are expected to deliver,” said John A. Challenger, chief executive officer of Challenger, Gray & Christmas.

The Challenger survey found that about one in five employers block access to sports and fantasy football websites. However, many simply look the other way with nearly half (46.2 percent) saying they do not care if employees spend part of their workday on fantasy football, as long as the quality and quantity of output does not decline. About 22 percent said they merely ask workers to limit fantasy football and other personal activities to lunch and other break times.

“It is difficult for companies to take a hard-line stance against fantasy football. The internet technology that helped fuel the rapid growth of fantasy football participation and makes it possible to manage teams from one’s desk also makes it possible for employees to attend to work duties during their personal time,” said Challenger.

Fantasy football is becoming so popular it may be difficult for employers to stop it, even if they wanted to. A 2008 study by the Fantasy Sports Trade Association estimated that 27.1 million Americans participate in fantasy sports, with 75 percent of those or roughly 20.3 million playing fantasy football. That was up from 17 million fantasy sports participants and 13.6 million fantasy football players estimated by the Association just a couple of years prior.

Meanwhile, other studies from the Fantasy Sports Trade Association indicate that fantasy sports participants spend about three to four hours on the Internet per week, with nearly 1.2 hours of that time at the office. “Managers should only crack down on those whose work is clearly suffering from the added distraction. An across-the-board ban on all fantasy football or sports websites could backfire in the form of reduced morale and loyalty. The result could be far worse than the loss of productivity caused by 10 to 20 minutes of team management each day,” said Challenger. “Companies that not only allow workers to indulge in fantasy football, but actually encourage it by organizing a company leagues are likely to see significant benefits in morale as well as productivity,” Challenger said. “In the long run, this may lead to increased employee retention.”

A 2006 Ipsos Survey, 40 percent of respondents said fantasy sports participation was a positive influence in the workplace. Another 40 percent said it increases camaraderie among employees. One in five said their involvement in fantasy sports enabled them to make a valuable business contact.

Despite these impressive figures, less than eight percent of the Challenger survey participants said their companies “embrace” fantasy football participation as a morale-boosting activity and none of the employers represented officially organized leagues.

The Challenger survey was conducted online among approximately 100 respondents from the end of August through late-September. Interestingly, about 65 percent of those polled said they participate in fantasy football leagues, either with co-workers, friends outside of work or both.