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Corra Group Client Selected for Red Herring 100 North America

Corra Group is pleased to announce that one of our clients, BlueNog, has been selected by Red Herring for its list of 100 North American Finalists.   We have been conducting background checks for BlueNog for sometime and know them as a consummate website management service.

To be picked for the Red Herring 100 is no small feat.  Thousand of companies apply and only a scant hundred are selected every year.  To be eligible for the Red Herring list, a company must be privately held, headquartered in North America, and not listed on any exchanges in the world.

BlueNog claims its name comes from favorite color, blue, and Nog, a wooden peg that hold infrastructure together.  What Co-Founder and Director, Scott Barnett does not know is the company first caught my eye because “Nog,” is also the title of one of my favorite early reading and cult status novels, by Rudolph Wurlitzer.

In any event we want to congratulate Scott and the Team at BlueNog for winning this coveted award.  This is the second major achievement award for BlueNog this year.   They were also picked for the Information Startup 50.

Way to go.

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Background Checks Business Research Economy Human Resources Miscellany preemployment screening Staffing Uncategorized

When You Pay Employees Not To Work Their Jobs

We all used to hear the stories about the mob run unions where underworld assets were paid union salaries for jobs they didn’t work.   Be it the longshoreman, construction, or waste removal it seemed there was always someone getting paid for not showing up.     This is all pretty outrageous and part of our lore, but it is organized crime, after all.   We may not like this, but we can at least expect this kind of behavior from organized crime figures.

On the other hand, when according to an article in the Los Angeles Times, school teachers for the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) are getting paid not to teach, it becomes a whole other matter.   Apparently, teachers under review are getting paid their full salaries not to show up for work.   This is costing the school board around $10 million a year.   Ten million a year is a lot of money in a good economy.   In this economy where the State of California and the City of Los Angeles are in debt up to their proverbial eyeballs this is costly.   It is one more addition, it would seem to the ongoing cluster mess known as municipal hiring practices.

Some months back it was reported, also by the Los Angeles Times that new hires for the County Sheriff’s Department and hospital and healthcare workers were either not undergoing background checks or that the background searches were taking so long to return, by the time they did so they were often ignored.  Serious crimes were overlooked.   Which is not a great idea for law enforcement and healthcare.   The reasons for that should be pretty obvious.

But to be fair to Los Angeles, certain other cities encounter the same difficulties when their teachers are under review.  Under review, means that the teachers in question are being investigated for possible disciplinary actions.   In New York, teachers are assigned to what is called in the article “rubber rooms.”  They just sit there untilt he day is done.  In San Francisco, however, tachers are consigned to working int he warehouse or some other place where they are at least somewhat productive.  In Chicago the move faster on the dismissal process,lightening the burden ont he school budget.

So the issue really is that if your company has such archaic policies, then I would reduce expectations about seizing your part of the market share.  Like anything else, if there is dysfunction in one area then for sure there is dysfuntion in others as well.   In the case of public schools the level of dysfunction has reached legendary proportions.   With businesses in the private sector, often we fail discover the deleterious effects of such practices until way too late.

So perhaps in this economic downturn, time is put to good use by going over policies and practices.   Streamline what you can, get rid of the nosnense and get down into the fighting shape that will make you comeptitive in an increasingly challenging market.   As for the school boards and their teachers, they still have a lot to learn.

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Background Checks Business Research Economy Human Resources Miscellany preemployment screening Staffing Uncategorized

Don’t Let Your Marketing Team Take You Out of the Game

It is no secret that when the economy is as bad as it is bucks for marketing and promotion are hard to come by.   Even when the economy is upbeat  it can be difficult  to increase the marketing and advertising budgets.    But when sales are off and because of a recession there are no projections that things will change in the near future, companies are looking to cut marketing and advertising costs, not increase them.   What relatively few bucks you do have, you better use wisely.

Unfortunately, this is not the case with the recent debacle at KFC.   For whatever reason, the marketing team decided to launch a grilled chicken campaign.  Grilled chicken in a  friend chicken joint, right there you have dilemma.   Especially when your initial branding is based on Kentucky Fried Chicken and a long deceased special recipe for just that and not any bird that meets the grill.   But so it goes.   This would not be the first group to dilute the brand.

Perhaps in borrowing a page from the recently successful Denny’s campaign where the restaurant chain gave away a free Grand Slam Breakfast, the KFC marketing and promotion group thought they would offer free grilled chicken.  They even tied in with Oprah Winfrey to further promote the offer.  Two free pieces of grilled chicken when you redeem the coupon.   The marketing group back up this play by spending millions of dollars on a television ad campaign.

As noted in the article in Advertising Age, every KFC restaurant was soon overwhelmed by hungry victims of our recession, looking to redeem their coupons for two free pieces of chicken.   Some even printed the original coupon and gave it to their friends.   Reportedly, there were riots as chicken lovers were denied and the order window.   In all, it was a mess.   KFC had to rescind the offer, telling customers that if they had the fortitude to bring in their old coupon and sign up for a new coupon, sometime in the future KFC would honor the chicken offering.

As the erstwhile chicken deal lighted on the shack of catastrophe, the Public Relations team was accused of being asleep at the wheel.   Consumers were upset.  The media who sponsored the commercials were upset.   The chain owners who were forced to pick up the free chicken tab were very upset.   In all, KFC ended up angering more people than, arguably, any other campaign in history.   Not quite the results it was looking for.

If this campaign is to gain historical prominence it will be taught in marketing departments at universities as what not to do.   It will be remember with dismay on many levels, as those who remember the Edsel.  If the initial grilled chicken product launch and promotion cost mega-millions, the clean up, regaining consumer trust, all that sort of stuff, will probably cost three times as much.

So when you hire a marketing team, whether it in-house or an outsourced agency, check out the employees very careful.  If it is in-house, as part of your preemployment screening program, conduct professional reference checks.  While most job candidates will provide you with references they believe will give them favorable reviews, you can still find out valuable information.  You can ask about skill sets and inquire as to which campaigns they worked on.    What was their role in those campaigns?   From there you can research the campaigns themselves and ascertain your employment candidate’s relative success or failure in the services he provided.   After conducting the professional reference checks, review his work samples with the knowledge provided by that reference review.

For outsourcing marketing companies, you should also ask for references.   You should conduct careful business research to see if this agency is the right fit for you.   You may not be able to drill down as deeply as if it was an in-house job hire, but you can still gather useful information.  Avail yourself of it.

Marketing money is tight enough.  Business is down due to this recession.   In this economic climate, especially, you can’t afford to make mistakes.

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Background Checks Business Research Economy Human Resources Miscellany preemployment screening Staffing Uncategorized

Which Employers are Laying Off Because of the Economy, and Which Are Just Cleaning House?

Not every employer is laying off its workers.  In fact, some are hiring new employers.   Despite the economy, according to the New York Times, while 4.8 million people were laid off from their jobs, there were 4.3 million applicants who were hired in the same period.   I realize this leaves the employment shortfall at close to half-million jobs  lost that month, but then one has it wonder is all of it due to the economy.

It is no secret that every employer has dead wood in its work force.   There are people whose skills sets are outdated and have neither the initiative or desire to retrain.   There are the employees whose performance levels are sub-par.   There are the workers who spend too much time surfing the Internet or engaging other employees and wasting their time.   Then there is the office theft issue.   On the still expensive but more negligible levels, this could mean the employee who steals office supplies.   At the more extreme level, it is the employee who steals valuable databases and proprietary information.   This is what they try to sell to your competitors, either to resolve a perceived slight or just to make some money.   Either way, in any form, none of it is any good for the working environment.

It should be no secret that employers use economic downturns to rid themselves of the dead wood.  It is the perfect excuses.   The economy is terrible, times are tight, we have to thin out the staff.   Those who are obsolete, overlapping, under-performing, or thieves, can be discharged with minimum of repercussions.   They are merely part of a mass layoff policy.   The thing is, these are not the people who will be hired back.   Other, more valued workers will return to their jobs, or ones like it, when the economy turns around.   But the underperformers and underskilled, they are the canon fodder in a recession.

Surely, they will try to find jobs elsewhere.   Which is all the more reason the conduct background checks.  While a preemployment screening program cannot vet very negative aspect of a job candidate, it can go a long way in weeding out the underqualified.   Besides the usual background searches, an intensive interview process and even aptitude and psychological testing may better enable the employer to dodge the deadwood that will most certainly still be floating around once the economy has rebounded.

As with many things in life, there are few bargains out there.   So check them out before you hire.