HireCentrix - ViewPoint

A Twitter discussion caught my eye earlier; it was about HR not having standards for measurements. HR not having standards is a problem that is truly harmful to the industry at large because of the following reasons:

1. Not having rigorous standards means whatever results and data you get from your internal surveys, performance management, and whatever else you use to “measure” your employees and business are not valid or reliable.

I was in the Dallas-Fort Worth area last week for HRSouthwest and where I presented a session called “this is your brain on diversity.”  This is a session where I take some significant insights from the fields of neuroscience and social psychology and consider what they mean to how we do diversity and inclusion work (and to some extent how we do human resources, leadership & organizational development work as well).

Robert Half  just released the results of its Finance and Accounting Survey in which 36 percent of the CFO's who responded said that the number one reason that new hires don not work out is  poor skills. I would suspect that if you talked to operational executives you would get the same feedback. So, if this country is so great why do we get this type of response to such surveys?

My guess, from multiple observations and sources, is that unethical conduct for business advantage is not only used, but welcomed. The organizations may have massive policies on “ethics” but they are applied primarily to employees doing unethical things for personal gain. If the employee is caught, he/she may be fired.

On September 21, 2011, the Internal Revenue Service (“IRS”) announced its new worker misclassification amnesty program, which is designed to encourage employers that have wrongly classified any of their workers to come forward and correctly classify their workers as employees going forward.  Officially called the Voluntary Classification Settlement Program (VCSP), the program is the IRS’s attempt to “enable many employers to resolve past worker classification issues and achieve certainty under the tax law at a low cost by voluntarily reclassifying their workers”.  

I was talking with a friend of mine the other day about Occupy Wall Street. She said to me “This is what I’ve been waiting for my whole life”. I told her I feel exactly the same way.

The only difference is that she’s in her early twenties, and I’m in my early fifties.