There is no shortage of zombies in pop culture today: The Walking Dead, World War Z, Warm Bodies, etc. But think about if an actual zombie apocalypse really came about, and there was just you and your neighborhood to protect yourselves against the “walkers” and…

Michael Sam as a player for the University of Missouri. Credit: Marcus Qwertyus 

There was a lot of news this past weekend about Michael Sam, as he became the first openly gay…

I went to the Tri-State Society for Human Resources Management Conference last week. And the number one topic?

Human resources, as a department, wants a “seat at the table.” In other words, they want the same voice that marketing, finance, operations, etc gets at a company.

So how will they get it? It is all about one thing: revenue. Or, more accurately, tracking and then taking credit for revenue that human…

Take a second and think about recruitment twenty years ago, before the Internet. How did people build their talent pools?

They could put an ad in a newspaper or promote from within or ask people they knew; maybe go to a job fair. Or they could hire a recruitment firm and that firm generally had more connections or would go to…

It all starts with hiring the right people.

This police officer could be described as disengaged. Credit: Wikipedia Commons

One of the biggest problems in the American workforce today is disengagement, which means – as you might surmise – employees do not feel…

There is no more crucial aspect to any organization’s long-term success than hiring. Just one stat: a top-performer at a company, on average, is worth at least 14 times their salary…

Credit: National Cancer Institute

As you know, healthcare costs continue to rise, due mostly to chronic diseases, described by the Center of Disease Control as the most preventable health problems in the United States. So the obvious way to save money for your organization is a…

Imagine 100 stones were dropped on the ground and 40 people were allowed to look through them. Some of the stones were precious gems, others valuable – but not as valuable – quartz and others were worthless fool’s gold; although they all look similar to the untrained eye. In that case, who wins?

It isn’t the person who just grabs a…

Just about every job description lists a series of prerequisites. Three-to-five years’ experience, a certain college degree, etc.

Why?

Look at it from a 10,000-foot perspective. Let’s say you have a lack of customers and you think it is time to hire another marketer for your company.

Does that mean you need five…

Hiring, as we have argued before, should be treated like a zero-tolerance industry. Making strong hiring decisions is crucial to any organization’s success and wrong hires are incredible expensive mistakes that bring down the morale of everybody around them.…

Credit: Wikipedia Commons

So why does a company hire a person?

It isn’t to have more people around. The goal of any company isn’t to rack up its number of employees. In…

Having a great human resources team is crucial to any successful company. The problem is, they aren’t always seen that way to outsiders or even to fellow employees.

Why? Any longtime business owner understands the importance of having a great human resources team and yet it is hard to quantify their value in real dollars. But the truth is, they provide tremendous value, with much of their worth coming from the dollars you don’t have to…

Here’s the question of the day – what if we treated hiring like a zero-tolerance industry?

A zero-tolerance industry is an industry where mistakes are not tolerated. Nuclear engineers work in a zero-tolerance industry. Air traffic controllers work in a zero-tolerance industry. Police officers work in a zero-tolerance industry.

Those jobs are zero-tolerance industries because they are literally matters of life and death. Hiring isn’t.…

Credit: Wikipedia Commons

What does the second law of thermodynamics have to do with hiring?

A lot, really.

For those of you who have not been brushing up on your physics lately, one of the takeaways of the second law of thermodynamics is that no system can be totally efficient. So, for example, all the energy…

A quick story.

I knew a woman who worked at a finance company. While working at the company, she went to school at night and eventually earned her MBA. After she graduated and earned her degree, she walked into her boss’s office and asked for a raise based on her new degree.

Yet the boss instead focused on the money she brought into the company. He pointed out that her output was essentially the same as last year. He declined the…

Let me guess. You already are using social media to screen candidates. And you are not alone. According to a recent survey by Reppler, 91 percent of people involved in hiring decisions at their company said they do too.

The problem is that recent studies have shown that this can be a highly ineffective and, in some cases, illegal way to screen candidates, if done…

Credit: Alan Light

Jerry Bruckheimer, producer extraordinaire and the man behind the original Top Gun, is looking to make a sequel to the 1986 blockbuster. Of course, the movie…

Paying an employee to quit. Does it make any sense at all? Big time, and not just because Amazon says so.

Amazon offers employees at their fulfillment centers after their first year of work $2,000 if they wish to quit. That payoff climbs by $1,000 each year until it caps out at $5,000. Of course, the headline of the money-to-quit contract offered to employees is “Please Don’t Take…

One of the problems facing the long-term unemployed today is that the rest of us – i.e., the people with jobs – think these people are either lazy or have no marketable skills. We beat our chests and proclaim if we lost a job, we’d be out the next day, looking for work until we found a way to make ends meet.…