Sydney siege and thoughts for HR teams

...more importantly, where does the moral compass of your management team and company lay in making exceptions?  (We heard just this week about the new employee at a household brand employer who was sent overseas for a work trip,  He suffered a horrific car accident, and wasn't eligible for financial or medical support beyond the first couple of months of his hospital stay because he didn't qualify under the company's policies for employees still in probation)

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Enjoy the Christmas party however...

Certainly the party cannot get out of control.  Like the Christmas event when Sam took full advantage of the free booze to the extent she was carted off in an ambulance after just 2 hours to get her stomach pumped.  Or when police had to break up the fight that ensued between 20 colleagues – for a whole year their management teams had been vying them against each other in “healthy” competition and slanging matches (so it was just a matter of time till that much warring testosterone resulted in fisticuffs)

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Recruitment agency fees

 I'm an advocate for cost containment when you do need to utilise the experience/support/expertise of a 3rd party recruitment service.  I'm also aware that there are still some recruitment providers who haven't changed their fee ratios or champagne and long lunch lifestyles since the nineties, and I know that that exorbitant fees do not guarantee the best service and results from any agency.  

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Quit with class from your HR job

There may be short term satisfaction in telling your bosses or colleagues what you really think about them, and emphasising this with some colourful insults, but there is nothing to gain in the mid to long term.   This is also a good reason to avoid last day drinks – in the emotions that practically everyone feels on their last day, it’s too easy to say the wrong thing with a little artificial courage…

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Supply and demand

He went so far as to suggest that we'd made up the role,  that we didn't know what we were doing, and that the employer would be furious at us for not having effected the introduction.  He demanded to know who the other candidates were, and who the employer was so he could check into the validity of a/ the job existing and b/introduce himself to the company directly since we didn't know what we were doing.

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Competency Based Interviews

Competency based interviews (CBI) are a trend that is not slowing down. Many of our HR community will be familiar with the CBI approach and may well have used this format to conduct interviews in the past. However the experience of being on the “other side” of a CBI process is likely to be quite different, and to help your interviewing success, it is useful to understand the reasoning behind use of CBI as a screening and selection tool.

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Tip for homeworkers

What do you do when the IT help desk isn’t picking up your call?  When the explanation over the phone from the support team just isn’t making sense?  When you are struggling to translate the description of a thingy-me-jig to someone on the phone, who only talks tech?  When you cannot continue effectively with your work until the tech issue is fixed?

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