Month: February 2007

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Background Checks Human Resources Miscellany Online Dating Industry Personal Background Checks Relationships Romance Uncategorized

Harlequin Goes to the Races–Romantic Fiction and Romantic Reality

We saw this interesting article on Online Dating Insider.Gentlemen, Start Your Speed DatesBy David Evans on Feb 19th, 2007

I only caught the highlights of the Daytona 500 over the weekend, talk about exciting! The NY Times (reg req’d) says that Harlequin and Nascar are teaming up on a series of 16 paperback books that feature Nascar prominently. I didn’t know that romance novels account for 55% of all mass-market fiction sold each year.

The first book is called, what else, Speed Dating.

From another book in the series:

It wasn’t gentle, it wasn’t passive, it was a kiss that instantly proved the two of them were like high-octane fuel, their flesh sparking off each other in such a way that Lance felt the purely caveman urge to pick her up and carry her to bed.“

I feel the urge to never read one of these. I’m more of a Formula 1 kind of guy. I’ve always wondered why F1, and other race series, where the cars actually turn in both directions, hasn’t been able to capture the hearts of American motorsports enthusiasts. F1 racing is incredibly popular around the world, but hasn’t caught on in America. It appears the good old boys coming up from dirt track racing are a lot easier to relate to than the teutonic clean-room feel of F1.

Nascar driver Carl Edwards said while promoting the book series, that his own taste in reading ran more to nonfiction, and especially writers like Stephen Ambrose and Robert Wright, and added that first he didn’t entirely recognize this fictional version of himself.

Corra simply loves the idea that Harlequin is going to the stock car races. It is a great idea to partner with NASCAR and develop a wonderful romantic setting for this great American tradition.

But then romantic fiction and romantic reality can be altogether two different animals. In one, despite the travails and disappointments, it almost always turns out for the best. In real life, it can often turn out for the worst.

Most people in and around stock car racing are decent folk with well rooted values and good behavior. But as with most groups, there are the few proverbial bad apples with unseemly pasts and let’s say not the best prognosis for bright and fulfilling futures. Date the good ones and leave the bad ones alone. Corra knows, bad boys are so attractive, until they break your heart, strip your bank account and leave your self-esteem in a thousand tiny pieces.

So check out your potential date mates. Run a criminal check and perhaps a comprehensive background check to review his finances, civil history and property ownership. Corra being Corra gets to hear a lot of very sad stories. So do yourself a favor and check them out before you date them.

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Background Checks Human Resources Miscellany Personal Background Checks Relationships Uncategorized

Companies Rush to Utilize Social Media Means More Job Recruits for Techie and Creative

We found this article on Inc.com

Study: Inc. 500 Companies Fast Adopters of Social Media

Fast-growing private companies use social networking and blogs much more than Fortune 500 companies, according to new research.

From: Inc.com By: Tamara Schweitzer

The nation’s fastest-growing private companies are making use of social media — including blogs, social networking and podcasts — at a rate more than twice that of Fortune 500 companies, according to a new study.The University of Massachusetts-Dartmouth’s Center for Marketing Research surveyed companies from the 2006 Inc. 500 list, to gauge the level of familiarity and usage of six forms of social media — blogging, podcasting, online video, social networking and wikis. Out of 121 respondents, generally managers and other senior-level executives, 42 percent claimed to be “very familiar” with social networking, followed by 38 percent with message boards and 31 percent with blogging.Across the board, respondents were familiar with all types of social media, including 16 percent being very familiar with wikis, which are typically a lesser-known type of social media on average.

Companies were also asked about their actual usage of the various types of social media, and message boards had the highest adoption rate at 33 percent, followed closely by social networking at 27 percent. Blogging had a lower percentage of usage among respondents at 19 percent, and podcasting was the type of social media with the lowest adoption rate at 11 percent.

“These responses are surprising and will likely shock even the most fervent believer in social media,” Nora Ganim Barnes, director of the Center for Marketing Research and a leader of the study, said in a statement. “They indicate that corporate familiarity and usage of social media is racing far ahead of what many have predicted.”

These results contrast with previous research that found only 8 percent of Fortune 500 companies have a public blog. The purpose of the study, which was not conducted at the request or on behalf of Inc. magazine or Inc.com, was to see if there was a difference in the knowledge and usage of social media in companies selected by growth rather than revenue. The respondents represented a wide range of the Inc. 500 and were diverse in terms of industry, size, and location. Four respondents were in the top 10 of the list, seven were in the top 25 and 22 held one of the top 100 spots.

Additionally, a majority of the Inc. 500 companies acknowledged the critical role that social media plays for their future success, with two out of three respondents indicating that it is “very important” or “somewhat important” to their business and marketing strategies. A breakdown of the results shows that 26 percent deemed it “very important” while 40 percent thought it was “somewhat important.”

“For those of us who have been following fast-growth companies for years, it’s no surprise that they would be at the forefront of using innovative technologies to enhance their visibility, marketing, and interaction with other companies,” said Edward Sussman, senior vice president of Mansueto Ventures, the publisher of Inc. and Inc.com.

Inc. will expand the list 10-fold this year, to become the first-ever Inc. 5,000, ranking the nation’s 5,000 fastest-growing private companies.

Corra knows that social media is the word of the day, even the month and year. With everything from Fortune 500 to smaller companies working the social media route in search of leads, customers and advocates, these companies will be increasingly searching for new talent to run and maintain these pages. Companies will be looking for everything from the creative to the techies.

Naturally, in that world some of your potential job candidates tend to “embellish” both their education and past experience. And then there are the few who learned their craft as hackers and breakers as well as graffiti artists and street artists. Everyone has to learn it somewhere, Corra supposes.

But to make sure you don’t put the wrong soul into your work place, run pre-employments screenings. By nature, creatives and techies can be a bit eccentric, but then you don’t want them getting high in the bathroom or using your server to store pirated programs.

Run a criminal check, but also conduct education and employment verification. In this case you might forget the credit report. It may be too gruesome for words. But as Corra says, check them out before you hire.

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Background Checks Human Resources Miscellany Personal Background Checks Uncategorized

Age Discrimination Can Mean For YOur Business A Better Talent Pool

We found this article on Inc.com
Age Discrimination Gets Younger

As the economy changes and the Baby Boomer generation ages, age discrimination is affecting more workers who are nowhere near the end of their careers.

From: Monster.com
By: Vince Winkel

Not long ago, age discrimination was mostly associated with those getting close to retirement. But as the economy changes and the Baby Boomer generation ages — the youngest Boomers turned 40 in 2004 — age discrimination is affecting more workers who are nowhere near the end of their careers.

In fact, many managers in their 40s may feel like they’re just hitting their stride in terms of professional accomplishment.

“Age bias seems to almost be acceptable, and that’s a real problem,” says Dan Kohrman, senior attorney for AARP and an expert on age discrimination. “In some cases, employees are being let go, and they don’t realize what was done to them — that they were discriminated against because of their age.”

The Age Discrimination in Employment Act of 1967 is designed to protect those age 40 and older. According to the US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), age discrimination complaints have been increasing steadily since 1999, especially among those between the ages of 40 and 50. And a survey conducted by ExecuNet in February 2005 revealed that 89 percent of those polled, who represented a cross-section of white-collar workers aged 30 to 60, were concerned that they may soon be discriminated against for age-related reasons.

Educate Yourself

So what can you do if you feel you’re a victim of age discrimination? If you have recently been fired or laid off, talk to others who were recently let go and look for possible patterns. What sort of anecdotal evidence can you dig up? Does the company have a history of discrimination, not just by age, but also by race, gender or other factors? Also, contact an employment lawyer or the EEOC, which has a section of its Web site on age discrimination.

It’s a trickier situation if you are employed but concerned about age discrimination in your workplace. In this case, you should educate yourself on all the different shapes age discrimination can take, advises Kohrman. Have you seen colleagues get passed over for promotions and raises because of their age? Has the company recently begun using evaluations such as “forced rankings”? Age discrimination experts say this rating system, which can be used to assign poor performance ratings to previously high-performing employees, is one tactic used to create a paper trail that can protect a company from a potential age discrimination lawsuit.

But thinking you’re a victim of age discrimination is one thing; pursuing legal action is another.

Gather Evidence

Kohrman and other attorneys point out that employment law is tough on plaintiffs.

“Smoking guns needed to prove deliberate age discrimination are hard to find,” says Michael Harper, a Boston University Law School professor. You won’t find corporate memos mandating that 40-somethings be eliminated, he adds, so cases will always involve statistics and anecdotal evidence.

That means a lot of research, according to Kohrman. But workers have one advantage today that didn’t exist 20 years ago to help them prepare for an age discrimination battle: The Internet.

“Someone who feels they have been wronged can do a lot of preliminary research on their own,” says San Francisco attorney Adam Levy. “It’s incredible what you may learn about a company or a supervisor or a CEO just using Google or Yahoo.”

Corra believes that with time the Boomer and “older” generation and its vast pool of talent and experience will be working well past retirement. It is a generation that is often much too restless to stop work and one that the younger generations will need at least in support capacities as the labor pool thins out.

Just the same, be sure your HR Department runs background checks on every job candidate, regardless of experience or time of employment. Like Corra’s grandmother used to say…”you never know.” We suggest you run a criminal check on every candidate and a Social Security Trace. You may also wish to run credit checks as well as education and employment verification.

Like any other group, the Boomers have good ones and bad ones. So check them out before you hire.

Categories
Background Checks Human Resources Miscellany Personal Background Checks Uncategorized

What’s It Cost You When Your Employers Stay Home From Work?

We found this article on workforce.com
Most Firms Don’t Track Cost of Days Off
Corporations’ fervent cost-cutting efforts in recent years apparently stopped short of examining the issue of employees’ days off, according to a recent survey.

January 30, 2007
Most Firms Don’t Track Cost of Days Off

Corporations’ fervent cost-cutting efforts in recent years apparently stopped short of examining the issue of employees’ days off.A recent survey by Hewitt Associates, a human resources consulting company based in Lincolnshire, Illinois, found that many companies can’t put a price tag on what it costs them when employees don’t show up for work, whether they’re out sick or taking a vacation day. In fact, three-quarters of the 421 companies surveyed could not even estimate how much sick pay cost them as a percentage of their overall payroll.“The survey demonstrates that there are a good number of employers that don’t have a good appreciation of what the costs of absence are,” says Kim Stattner, a principal in Hewitt’s health management consulting practice. “If they don’t understand what the costs are, they equally don’t have a good understanding of what the productivity impacts are on their business.”The 25 percent of companies surveyed that came up with the cost of sick days put it at 1 percent to 3 percent of payroll. Extrapolating from that, Hewitt concluded that total paid time off, including vacation days, sick days and disability, could cost companies as much as 9 percent of payroll.

Stattner said data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics show that the cost of paid time off is equal to the cost of medical benefits. For each $1 a company spends on benefits—a category that includes paid time off, medical benefits, retirement plans, and Social Security and Medicare contributions—25 cents goes to time off and another 25 cents goes to medical benefits.

“We all know that companies spend a lot of time managing their health care, but employers haven’t historically spent as much time managing their time-off programs,” she says.

The complexity of time-off programs makes it hard for companies to keep track of employees’ absences, she added. Many companies dole out sick days, vacation days, holidays and personal days separately, and according to the survey, just 11 percent of companies provide the same time-off program for all their employees.

Stattner suggested that paid-time-off banks, which are programs that encompass sick days and personal days as well as vacation time, can give companies a better handle on employees’ time off and the expense involved.

In fact, according to the survey, paid-time-off banks are growing in popularity: 32 percent of companies say they used a paid-time-off bank for at least some portion of their workforce, up from 18 percent in 2000.

Corra well understands that good help is often hard to find, and your business doesn’t run well when absenteeism is running high. For any business it is important to assure your workforce is punctual and consistently in attendance. Employees that don’t show up from work not only don’t produce, but they they tend to bring down the morale in your other employees.

Background Checks will help determine what kind of job candidate you have. Besides the criminal check, Corra suggests you run employment verification and education checks. Make sure they aren’t lying about their education, and, in general, employees with longer track records with other companies tend to make for more consistent workers.

So, heed Corra’s advice and check them out before you hire.