Career Tools

The available pool of skilled and qualified workers is shrinking and will continue to do so in the years to come. The company that holds on to its best employees will have a decided advantage over its competitors. This book draws on more than 125 innovative and successful strategies being used by businesses across the United States strategies that address the strongest concerns of today's employees.

Are you recruiting for retention or just one year? This is one among many other strategic questions raised by this must-have resource for all association CEOs, staff, and volunteer leaders. It redefines membership as the core business for associations and other nonprofit organizations. It dispels 12 popular myths about retention and reveals key strategies for growth, focusing on how CEOs, staff, and volunteers each have key roles to play in recruiting and keeping members. A 100-question audit provides a quick and effective tool for including keeping members in your association strategic planning.

Retaining valuable employees is one of the most important problems facing today's human resource managers. Suzanne Dibble takes a systematic approach to help you figure out how to understand and respond to the new employment relationship.

During the mid-to-late 1990?s, the recruiting and staffing function moved from the back office to center stage. This paradigm shift was primarily caused by a new reality for corporate America: there were too many jobs for too few qualified people. All of a sudden, sourcing and retaining talent became much more important to an organization?s future and its overall net worth. As a result, companies invested millions of dollars to win this new War for Talent. Many valuable lessons were learned in the process. Then, the recession of the early 2000s hit, and those valuable lessons were forgotten. Many organizations abandoned their newly constructed ?talent acquisition war rooms? in favor of cutting headcount to meet short term budget requirements. Despite those setbacks, however, the staffing department did not return to the back office. On the contrary, it remains in the spotlight and under a microscope. In addition, demographic and other trends indicate that a new phase in the War for Talent is about to emerge. What should recruiters and HR professionals do? You can wait for a surprise attack of new requisitions to hit you from all directions in your company; or you can wage a preemptive strike by immediately adopting the keys to successful recruiting and staffing. If you want to take charge of your future, this book is for you.

The Leadership Pipeline delivers a proven framework for priming future leaders by planning for their development, coaching them, and measuring the results of those efforts. Moreover, the book presents a combination leadership-development/succession-planning program that ensures a steady line-up of leaders for every critical position within the company. It's an approach that bolsters the retention of intellectual capital as it eliminates the need to go outside for expensive "stars," who will probably jump ship before they reach their full potential anyway.

More than 80% of organizations check references?at a cost of $10 to $100 each. Yet employers still can be in legal jeopardy because they hired unqualified or dangerous individuals. The problem? More than two-thirds of the reference checkers can?t obtain sufficient information about their applicants. Wendy Bliss provides practical guidance about the realities, legalities and practicalities of giving and getting references. She discusses setting minimum screening requirements and knowing when to investigate further. She shows how to provide substantive references, while reducing the risk of legal jeopardy. In ?Making the Call? she even walks you through getting information by phone and evaluating it. The book is filled with practical advice and sample forms, policies, and procedures. There are ?tip lists? for giving and getting references; clear, short definitions of legal terms such as "defamation". There is a full chapter on working with and evaluating outside screening firms. A Reference-Checking Program Design Worksheet and sample list of pre-employment screening firms round out this practical guide.

It happens time and time again: the brightest and most talented people leave the company for "better opportunities." Their peers wonder how management could let them go. Their managers feel helpless to make them stay. Bigger salaries, loftier titles, and added perks may work for a while, but what employees really want are meaningful work, opportunities for growth, excellent bosses, and a sense of connectedness to the group. The good news is that, unlike monetary compensation, these benefits are well within the reach of most managers. Beginning with an exit memo written by the composite employee "A.J.," authors Beverly Kaye and Sharon Jordan-Evans explore the truth behind the dissatisfactions of many of today's workers and offer 26 strategies-from A to Z-that managers can use to address their concerns and keep them on the team. These strategies are neither difficult nor costly and, through research, tips, and corporate tales drawn from dozens of organizations, the authors provide examples of how these strategies work in some of the best companies in America. With every employee who walks out the door costing the company up to 200 percent of their annual salary to replace, retention is one of the most important issues facing businesses today. This thoroughly updated and revised edition gives everyone from the CEO to the front-line supervisor solutions for keeping the employees they simply can't afford to lose. This edition features new tips and to-do lists, new stories, and additional research from the media and from the authors' own extensive database. There are also three new appendices: a troubleshooting guide, a guide to saying "thank you" in the workplace, and a reading group guide.

It happens time and time again: the brightest and most talented people leave the company for "better opportunities." Their peers wonder how management could let them go. Their managers feel helpless to make them stay. Bigger salaries, loftier titles, and added perks may work for a while, but what employees really want are meaningful work, opportunities for growth, excellent bosses, and a sense of connectedness to the group. The good news is that, unlike monetary compensation, these benefits are well within the reach of most managers. Beginning with an exit memo written by the composite employee "A.J.," authors Beverly Kaye and Sharon Jordan-Evans explore the truth behind the dissatisfactions of many of today?s workers and offer 26 strategies?from A to Z?that managers can use to address their concerns and keep them on the team. These strategies are neither difficult nor costly and, through research, tips, and corporate tales drawn from dozens of organizations, the authors provide examples of how these strategies work in some of the best companies in America. With every employee who walks out the door costing the company up to 200 percent of their annual salary to replace, retention is one of the most important issues facing businesses today. This book gives everyone from the CEO to the front-line supervisor solutions for keeping the employees they simply can?t afford to lose.

Once the investment bankers and lawyers have closed their briefcases and gone home, the real work of combining the operations and employees of two independent organizations has just begun. The challenge is to ensure that the valuation and synergies hypothesized prior to the closing of the deal are realized. <M&A Integration walks you through every step of this often-overlooked but all too important part of the M&A process. This hands-on, technique-filled book provides strategies, frameworks, guidelines, and real-world examples for managing a successful integration.

"Please, not another t-shirt!" is the common cry among employees. Make Their Day! shows what employers and employees each expect from recognition and why most efforts miss their mark. Author and management consultant Cindy Ventrice demonstrates that to be effective, recognition must be built directly into the work and workplace, directed at specifics, and tied to performance. Written from the employees' viewpoint, this book explains why good working relationships form the core of effective workplace recognition. The author then offers specific, low-cost recognition programs that have been effective in improving morale and productivity at leading companies like FedEx Freight, Cisco Systems, and Wells Fargo Bank.

This unique resource gives managers and executives instant access to 751 tough, effective questions that help weed out the winners from the losers, from team players to risk takers. These powerful, hard-hitting interview questions cover a full spectrum of topics. Pressure questions, ice-breakers, exploratory questions, and much more arm interviews with powerful tools that help anyone who hires, find and keep top-notch talent. The questions cover the complete range of jobs, from entry level to senior management.

If you find yourself asking questions like these, you can't afford not to have The Manager's Pocket Guide to Generation X! This concise, hands-on guide will enable managers to recruit, train, motivate, and retain young employees. It explains in simple terms what makes Generation X employees different, and outlines how you can put their unique skills and characteristics to work on behalf of your organization.

Today's tight labor market is forcing organizations to maximize the time they spend attracting and keeping top performers. Organizations that can attract, inspire, and retain top performers are in the position to beat out their competition. This is true both in market share and being able to draw outstanding employees. This book is for individuals with training responsibilities who are looking for tools to help their managers, supervisors, and/or team leaders interview, hire, and retain top performers. If you or someone in your hiring system has limited experience in interviewing and hiring, this book will help you and your organization to be more proficient in hiring practices. Includes over a dozen job aid templates for recruiting, hiring, and retaining top performers.

Today's business climate calls for flexible, technoliterate workers who think like entrepreneurs, take charge of their own careers, and quickly adapt to ever changing responsibilities. Ironically, the workers who best fit this profile are the very same Generation Xers whom business leaders have decried as disloyal "slackers" with short attention spans who don't want to be told what to do. As it turns out, the slacker stereotype and the "worker of the future" profile are like mirror images of one another, and companies in every industry are now scrambling to recruit the best young talent.

During the past decade, employee turnover has become a very serious problem for organizations. Managing retention and keeping the turnover rate below target and industry norms is one of the most challenging issues facing business. All indications point toward the issue compounding in the future and, even as economic times change, turnover will continue to be an important issue for most job groups. Yet despite these facts employee turnover continues to be the most unappreciated and undervalued issue facing business leaders. There are a variety of reasons for this, for example, the true cost of employee turnover is often underestimated. The causes of turnover are not adequately identified, and solutions are often not matched with the causes, so they fail. Preventive measures are either not in place or do not target the issues properly, and therefore have little or no effect, and a method for measuring progress and identifying a monetary value (ROI) on retention does not exist in most organizations. Managing Employee Retention is a practical guide for managers to retain their talented employees. It shows how to manage and monitor turnover and how to develop the ROI of keeping your talent using innovative retention programs. The book presents a logical process of managing retention, from identifying turnover costs and causes, designing solutions that match the causes of turnover, developing tools for tracking turnover and placing alerts when action is needed, and measuring the ROI of retention programs.

The California-specific guide and forms CD includes everything that is new for 2004, such as new and modified forms and new legal information.

Managing Generation Y is for organizations that want to become the employer of choice for the next cohort of young adults (those born between 1978 and 1984) who will impact the workforce during the next five to seven years. Discover the Gen Y traits that pose the greatest challenges to managers as well as the best practices you can implement immediately to keep these upbeat, techno-savvy worker focused and motivated.

This booklet describes 13 steps for designing and conducting a successful compensation survey.

More Than a Gut Feeling III teaches you to select the most qualified job candidate by applying the ever-popular behavioral approach? to interviewing. This method, developed by industrial psychologist Dr. Paul Green, directs you to probe the job applicant for specific examples of their past. The reason is simple: The best predictor of a job applicant's future work behavior is their past work behavior. Viewers of More Than a Gut Feeling III will learn helpful job-related interviewing techniques practiced by so many hiring staffs all over the world. You can refrain from judging an applicant on gut feeling by: asking rapport-building questions; discussing the job; taking notes and explaining why; asking specific, open-ended questions to get specific answers; allowing for silence if necessary; maintaining control; getting contrary evidence and evaluating. This video applies these techniques to the most common interviewing situations and helps you to refrain from judging the candidate on intuition.

More Than a Gut Feeling III teaches you to select the most qualified job candidate by applying the ever-popular behavioral approach? to interviewing. This method, developed by industrial psychologist Dr. Paul Green, directs you to probe the job applicant for specific examples of their past. The reason is simple: The best predictor of a job applicant's future work behavior is their past work behavior. Viewers of More Than a Gut Feeling III will learn helpful job-related interviewing techniques practiced by so many hiring staffs all over the world. You can refrain from judging an applicant on gut feeling by: asking rapport-building questions; discussing the job; taking notes and explaining why; asking specific, open-ended questions to get specific answers; allowing for silence if necessary; maintaining control; getting contrary evidence and evaluating. This video applies these techniques to the most common interviewing situations and helps you to refrain from judging the candidate on intuition.