Increasing Benefits Costs to At-Risk Employees

March 14, 2007 · Filed Under For the love of HR · 9 Comments 

A recent trend in benefits is to pass some of the increasing costs of medical insurance to at risk employees. One of the easiest assailed groups are smokers. Not only are they easily identified but they are not faultless in their affliction (like some cases of obesity or cancer with genetic predispositions). The second reason is that smoking is verifiably expensive. A recent study cited the figure of 6-8% of total medical costs in the US is attributable to smoking and nearly one in five deaths can also be traced back to that cause. While 6-8% may sound like chump change, health care costs in the US comprise of 16% of our GDP. Or nearly two trillion dollars.

While workplace bans on smoking while at work isn’t uncommon in the new century, stricter methods have been put into place. In 2005, there was a well publicized case about an employer banning smoking outright as a condition of employment. And it is becoming more of a common practice to charge smokers more for health care coverage than their non-smoking colleagues.

This trend has outraged some rights groups while gaining applause from health groups and insurance companies. On one side, it is unfair to dictate what your employees do outside of work. Not only that, but there are greater risk factors where employers will not penalize an employee. For example, alcoholism may go untreated for years and may do damage far beyond that of moderate to light cigarette usage. On the other hand, employers want to find ways to decrease costs and maintain profitability. Discrimination on the basis of smoking is not against the law so employers are free to do as they please in this arena. And this sort of discrimination isn’t uncommon anymore. As an example, companies routinely give health care discounts to employees who participate in their wellness programs and discriminate against those who don’t participate.

Where do you come down on the issue? There are obviously very polar positions on the issue but there is definitely some middle ground. I’d like to hear your take on it before I post my next post in which I will go into my views in great detail.


The keys to your job search are at JobCentral.

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Book Review: Office Superman

March 11, 2007 · Filed Under For the love of HR · Comment 

076241971701_aa240_sclzzzzzzz_.jpgYou’ll have to bear with me here for a few weeks. Not only is college basketball in full swing but I have been going through each of the eight books I have on my bedside as partially read and finally finishing them. Some of them are not related to business but I will try to write reviews for each one that makes sense for this blog.

So this book I read recently is called Office Superman: Make Yourself Indispensable in the Workplace.

So this book definitely has some good points to it. In fact, all of the points he makes throughout are really good in and of themselves. Especially for all of those people who are looking at moving up or being superstars in their industry.

The only problem is that this book is so full of Superman analogies, it drove me insane. Maybe if I were more into comic books, I would be a little more entertained by the whole premise of comparing Superman to being a great worker over and over again. I think this book goes overboard on the whole thing to the point of distraction.

Which I think is unfortunate since, as I said, it has a lot of great points buried beneath Superman analogies.


Recruiting is marketing. Try jobcasting.

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How to Break into the HR field?

March 4, 2007 · Filed Under Finding Your Job, For the love of HR · 3 Comments 

Many people who read this blog show an interest into breaking into the HR field. While I may question their sanity for this, I only know this is a popular topic because I get e-mails about it all of the time from all types of people. I realize that I keep repeating myself over and over again.  So now I am going to put this out as kind of a catch all for those questions so this may be edited from its original version.

First of all, it is not very difficult to break into the HR field. I did it, and I don’t think I am that smart. That being said, it can appear to be very difficult to break into it from the outside because it is very difficult to do it from the outside. Most people want experience if they are hiring from the outside and don’t want a fresh face from college to get them into legal trouble because they mess up application. So here are the ways to get in with no experience:

  1. Work from the inside. College education: not required, additional educated needed though. Depending on your company’s size and culture, you may be able to break into HR from the inside. Good companies love internal HR hires because they understand the culture already. You will probably be required to get an HR certificate (PHR is a nice one that is recognized pretty well). Again, depending on your company, you might get this paid for (at least partially). The bad? Not a sure thing and totally cultural dependent. May mean you get crappy pay for a while.
  2. Start as a recruiter. College education: likely to be required. At many large companies, the easiest way to break into the HR department is through the internal recruiting team. Recruiting is relatively easy to understand and companies seem to be comfortable hiring directly for these positions plus they typically pay really well. The bad? Likely long hours, traveling, tons of time on the phone and … well, some of the stuff I complain about recruiting in this blog. Of course, I don’t think that stuff is that bad so.
  3. Start at an outsourcing firm. College education: likely to be required. HR outsourcing is big business these days and as such, outsourcers may be more willing to train entry level people because of increased demand and repetitiveness of tasks. Everything from payroll processing, to third-party recruiting, to full on HR department outsourcing is covered here. The bad? Third-party recruiting can be good money if you have the skills but almost everything else is going to pay you…well, entry level wages.
  4. Start at a smaller business. College education: probably. With the economy still doing relatively well, starting at a smaller business can be a good start to getting in with experience at other firms. Smaller businesses usually go after people with strong entrepreneurial drive who are willing to learn quickly and do a lot of other things inside the business. Targeting businesses between 25-50 employees (depending on industry) can be key to this.  The bad? You might get pushed into doing payroll or other things at a smaller business and you may not be able to have an appropriate mentor like you would at a larger company.

These are the four places I would start if I had to do it again. Me personally? I did a combination of 2 & 4.

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Your HR Guy is MIA but He Makes Up For it

February 13, 2007 · Filed Under For the love of HR · 1 Comment 

Even your HR guy gets a little pressure put to him at work that he needs to take care of quickly. That has been the past two weeks in a nutshell. So while I am trying to catch up on blogging and blogs and all those things, I just had to share this amazing site.

I don’t know about anyone else but I am a big fan of The Office (both the British and American versions). If you have ever watched it, it is noteworthy for its cringe factor among HR professionals. Besides the obvious reason why, this blog goes episode by episode estimating the potential litigation costs for the employer.

Fascinating for numerous reasons but definitely something I’ll make part of my regular routine on Friday.

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Put the damn salary range down!

December 20, 2006 · Filed Under For the love of HR · 5 Comments 

Whenever I see other people advertising on job boards and the like, one thing that bugs me is when people don’t put down the pay range and benefits.  Note that my annoyance level goes up with the maturity and specificity of the position.

For instance, one employer put down that they wanted a person with 15 years of Human Resources experience, a SPHR, a Bachelors (but preferably an MBA) and seven years of management experience.  What did they put for the salary range?  Depends on experience. Uh, dudes, you know what their experience is going to be.

Pay is such a taboo topic and I like confronting it head-on. You’ve got to though and that’s why I think job seekers should also be very honest about salary if the prospective employer is being honest. I know what I want to make and what I am unwilling to work for so I would say “optimally I would like to make this much per year but I will absolutely not take any offer below this much.”

The poor argument I always hear is that we don’t want to disqualify candidates who might overlook the position based on salary range. I say that if the perfect person walked in today and you aren’t going to pay him or her more than 60k plus 10k in bonuses, we might as well advertise that as our upper limit. Because if someone comes in with a minimum of 80k and 20k of bonus, it is just going to be a big waste of time trying to reconcile those two numbers.

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Google indexing fun…

December 11, 2006 · Filed Under For the love of HR · 2 Comments 

No, really.

So I was talking to Joel Cheesman a month or two ago about the fact that Google hadn’t indexed my website. Since it had been six months since I started this thing, I thought it was a bit weird.  So did he and we pretty much left the conversation baffled. MSN and Yahoo already had me on their radar. I don’t really care all that much about Google juice but I was just annoyed at that prospect.

The Cheez did give me a piece of advice though: “try to run some AdWords on Google.”  I didn’t feel like doing it out of principle.  Google should be giving me props anyway.  Why should I give them any money?

Last Sunday (the 3rd), I finally relented. I looked to see if my site was indexed and it still wasn’t.  I opened up an AdWords account and put in some keywords that made some sense. I directed all of the ads to this page.

Well, here comes Tuesday the 5th and I check it and guess what: I am indexed.

Coincidence? I think not.  I submitted my site to Google in May and September. There is no logical explanation for this except that Google figured out I was a legitimate site only after I ran an ad with them.

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Workers Compensation is Crap

November 29, 2006 · Filed Under For the love of HR, Stupid Employee Tricks · 3 Comments 

As a side story, I was playing a video game version of Jeopardy and a question (answer?) came up where the correct answer (question?) was “Workers Compensation.” The only problem is, this game was created in 1987 and the correct answer of course was “Workman’s Compensation.” This was 1987 after all! When men worked (or at least got compensated for it) while the women folk stayed home and fed the kids.  Oh my, how times have changed.  Now 20 years later, I am playing an old gaming system (that has been obsolete for 16 of those years) and blogging about it on something called the internet.

So here I am, 20 years later, hating the words “Workers Compensation.” If you have ever had to experience a case, you understand.  The cold sweat.  The shaky hands.  The paranoia.  The paranoia is what kills you.  Or it kills me at least.

Every time someone around your work says “Ow” or “Ouch,” you over-react like a first time parent. Saying things like “maybe we need to call a doctor” with a minor cut or asking questions like “When was the last time you had you tetanus shot?” You start putting cushions on every single remotely sharp object. No wonder people think we are insane paranoids.

But hear me now and believe me later, it isn’t our fault!

No, it is the system of guilty until proven innocent if you’re an employer.  It is the system of ridiculous OSHA requirements.  People ask me why I flip out whenever work at home is suggested. Work at home? You mean getting injured at home.  I can control the environment to a certain extent here at work but when OSHA is rewarding money based on the fact that somebody got hurt in their home office (often due to their own ridiculous negligence), yeah I am going to freak out.

I think it has to be better in some states but I am sure it isn’t rainbows and ice cream.

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I don’t know what I was thinking…

November 28, 2006 · Filed Under For the love of HR · Comment 

I tried out GeekLog and it…

well…

I’m back to WordPress.

After spending several hours tonight cleaning up spam (this after I had instituted three plugins to deal with spam), it was time to switch back. Which is all well and good I suppose.

I might change the theme a bit but that’s it.

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How do you keep to your guiding principles?

November 20, 2006 · Filed Under For the love of HR · Comment 

I don’t know about some of you but whenever I started getting into HR, I did so with a lot of lofty goals and guiding principles in mind.  Making genuine contacts, helping people get into the right career (whether it was with me or someone else) and continually educating and improving myself.  I think we all do this, regardless of the career we choose.  Then…

Well, then life happens.  Not only do you have expectations, goals, deadlines, reports and all these work hassles (I say that with kindness of course), you have REAL life as well.  Some of us do at least.  The ones that get out from behind the computer once in a while.

You lose sight of those guiding principles, the ones that actually mean something.  The ones that give fullness to your career.

Last week, I had the pleasure of making real contact with a colleague.  And while I do value making contact through the internet with people, nothing quite connects like a jabber box (a.k.a. the telephone).  I spoke with Ami from Recruitomatic a bit about offshoring and a bit more about my blog and HR on the front lines.  It was a ten minute conversation but it was more than what we could have done over several hours of emailing.  That’s what I like about the telephone.

Which brings me to the point that the conversation reminded me to post about.  My blog is about keeping connected with my guiding principles. It isn’t a substitute for it but it is part of it.  It serves as an outlet and it serves as a reminder.  Whenever I called Ami, it reminded me that I wanted to make contact with several other people just to see how they were doing. Old job seekers that I had helped in the past that I couldn’t place with us but who otherwise were great people. One had found a job and one hadn’t and it reminded me that someone I knew was looking for somebody with this person’s qualifications.  They have an interview this week together and I was pleased at that result (especially when, at this time of year, it is obnoxiously difficult to talk to people about switching careers. 

The point of this isn’t to pat myself on the back, it is to demonstrate the way I remind myself to stay committed to those principles.  How do you keep yourself focused on the overall goal of your career (possibly your life)? How do you not keep from being bogged down by work and start getting excited about fufilling a purpose you have laid out for yourself? 

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Balance between HR and Recruiting

November 14, 2006 · Filed Under For the love of HR, Recruiting in the 21st Century · Comment 

There is a fine line to be drawn between HR and recruiting and quite a bit has been discussed regarding these two. Some have said they should be separated and I think I can understand that. Recruiting can often be part of the brand experience of a company, it can be marketing and it can be sales all in one. Those three things are usually not associated with traditional HR departments. How strange could it be to try to shove recruiting into HR then? HR, the red-headed stepchild of either the Finance or Legal departments in an organization does not fit in with recruiting, the sexy, meaningful realization of marketing and brand awareness at the local level(s). After all, it is one thing to sell a product to a customer, it is quite another to sell a lifestyle, a work environment and a position to a potential employee.

So why do I think HR and recruiting are not only connected at the hip but have an incredibly close relationship in a “global economy”?

Simply stated, it is all part of the employee lifecycle. And managing that throughout with reasonable offers and expectations set in front, training and employee development, and exit planning so that recruiters can be prepared for the next batch of hiring.

When unplanned turnover happens, it is often (but not always) avoidable. And when turnover happens, it is a burden on a recruiter (who may already be sitting on several recs). Wouldn’t you rather have your recruiter working on new and high worth positions rather than scrambling to replace a guy that you could have retained? Whenever someone is recruited that ends up having avoidable job fit issues, wouldn’t you rather that the recruiter be closely aware of the issues and to work with traditional HR to either solve the issue or to move forward with someone else?

The biggest reason is that separating HR and recruiting will lead to mistakes in most organizations. Mistakes that are both burdening on the employee as well as on the company. Not only lost revenue but lost opportunity. And with the success of both HR and recruiting depending so much upon each other, there has to be a strong, departmental team.

The reason I post this now is because it is a conflict I see daily in my current position. And I know that as we get bigger, the problem and balancing only becomes more stated and more complex. And while it will always be a balance, it shouldn’t ever be a conflict. Because what is best for recruiting is best for HR and whatever is best for HR is best for recruiting.

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    Your HR Guy is a Human Resources Generalist practicing in the field. But don't let that fool you, this isn't a boring blog. I seek relevance and humor in a place we will spend much of our lives. Everything from workplace issues, job seeking and terrible bosses. Read more...

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