Cognet HRO Global Delivery Center

Cognet HRO recently announced the launch of its global delivery center located in Chennai, India reports HRO Manager. Please review this for more information on this Press Release :
Cognet Global Delivery Center

Nelson Hall RPO Forecasts

It’s good news for RPO players. Nelson Hall, a leading independent BPO analyst firm, in its latest research found that RPO is the fastest growing service emerging in support of organizations and talent management requirements. It forecasts the RPO industry to see an annual growth rate of 37% and become a $7 Billion market by 2010. The research also finds the growth to be broad-based, not just restricted to the United States, but emerging markets such as India also to have their piece of the pie.
Key findings revealed in the Nelson Hall report include:
Vendors need to be able to perform an integral role in the development, implementation and execution of their clients, Talent Management and Workforce Planning Strategy.
Standalone RPO represents a much greater share of the market than does RPO provided as part of a multi-process HRO offering – it is also experiencing the highest growth rates.
Clients are increasingly looking for a variable cost structure to pay for services based on usage.
Vendors need to be able to scale their workforce to meet demand for peaks and valleys.
Most current activity is in serving large companies. However, as the market is beginning to mature, increased demand is being send from small and mid-sized companies.
Service providers should provide a service that includes an onsite presence – globally today, only 31% of service providers work onsite but this proportion is expected to increase in conjunction with talent acquisition demand.
Most RPO services are provided from onshore multi-client delivery centers, but offshore delivery is seeing high growth, particularly for non-client facing work.
Service providers are partnering for access to technology and for support services such as assessments and background checks. They are also partnering with other recruiting providers, particularly where they do not have a geographic presence.
Acquisitions are common as service providers look to increase their geographical expansion and to improve recruiting capabilities.
please see this for the complete News Release :
Global Outsourcing Market $7 Billion by 2010

Upcoming HRO Workshop

A workshop on Understanding and Integrating Talent Management Technologies is planned by Human Capital Institute of India in Bangalore. The event is scheduled to take place this year on August 23rd. The workshop is going to be facilitated by Alan Schweyer, President and Executive Director for Human Capital Institute. Alan is best known for his long years of experience in HR and his famous book writings such as Talent Management Systems: Best Practices in Technology Solutions for Recruitment, Retention and Workforce Planning.
For complete details of this event please visit: HR Outsourcing

2007 Health Care Trends

Hewitt Associates recently released the Emerging Health Care Trends for this year’s survey results. The summary is now available in the HRO Manager Research section.

Hiring in India HRO

When I met the Senior VP of Human Resources in one of the top notch MNC a couple of months ago on a promotion drive for HRO Manager, one of his comments took me by surprise. When I told him about how key decision makers on HRO look at informative websites for making their business decisions whether it be for vendor selection or product selection, he stated that he believes many business leaders have neither the time nor the interest to look at website for information that could influence their business decisions.
This may be true to some extent when it comes to taking complex business decisions such as whether or not to outsource their HR and so forth, but how far does this hold true for HR Managers holding key responsibilities who can not allocate time to updating themselves on the latest happing in HR around the world?
When I met another senior HR manager in a call center based in Chennai, India, I asked him if he looks at any HR informative channels such as websites or blogs in specific and his answer was a resounding NO. The reason given was that the bulk of his time is spent hiring talent. This made me think for a while. If this a trend visible in India alone or does is stretch around the world? When I look at my Google Analytics Statistics for HRO Manager, 75% of hits come from the United States, 20% come from Europe and only 5% come from India. This might be a realistic figure given that my site contains more articles pertaining to the United States. However, a mere 5% figure coming from India really concerns me. From my experience and what I have personally observed during my interactions with various senior HR managers in India, it is clear that Indian HR is mostly concerned with hiring and not in a position to go that extra mile in terms of a whole transformation into a strategic HR center competing with global HR standards.
Viewing HR as a strategic business center is still fiction in India and is not currently being viewed as a reality. The everyday job in a typical Indian HR department begins with viewing job requisitions from line managers, job postings, interacting with consultants, conducting entry and exit interviews, documenting for new joiners and exits and so forth. We have yet to see HR leaders playing a vital role in key executive meetings and most of the key HR decisions are still being taken by CEO or COO and the HR heads have simply to implement these decisions. There is a huge cry from among the community to bring a new role to the HR controller or chief Human Resources Officer in Global HR. however; India HR is still far from accepting this. It may be past time for Indian HR to transform into strategic HR centers.

Performance Management Needs

In order to gather information about performance management practices and outcomes, WorldatWork and Sibson Consulting invited WorldatWork members to participate in a confidential online survey. Results from the 2007 State of Performance Management Study by WorldatWork and Sibson Consulting indicate that improvement in performance management is needed in many organizations and that performance management is stronger in higher performing companies.
Key findings of the study include:
Performance Management techniques for both the effective and less effective organizations are not very different. The greatest difference is the level of active leadership support and championing of the process.
At least half the respondents use information from Performance Management to determine merit increases, promotions and annual incentive distributions.
Only 30 percent of the respondents reported that their employees trust the Performance Management system.
The 2007 WorldatWork and Sibson State of Performance Management Study surveyed more than 550 individuals, primarily senior-level HR professionals. The demographic profile of the respondents is similar to that of the WorldatWork membership. The organizations represented in the study range in size from fewer than 100 employees to more than 100,000 employees. The following industries were represented: Finance and Insurance, Healthcare, Higher Education, Manufacturing, Professional Services, Public Sector and Utilities.
WorldatWork is an international association of Human Resource professionals and business leaders focused on attracting, motivating and retaining employees. WorldatWork supports its 30,000 members and customers in 75 countries with Leadership Education, Publications, Research and Certifications.

RPO Services Contractor

Information Resources, INC., a supplier of enterprise market information solutions and services has selected Aon Consulting to be its RPO service provider. This report comes from Onrec.
According to Nick Peligno, Business Development Manager for Aon Consulting, IRI was using recruitment agencies and traditional media advertising until now, which are basically high-cost routes to its recruitment needs. At the same time, company senior HR managers responsible for hiring decisions were stretched with limited resources. The result of this high cost per hire and time to fill are long. In order to address these challenges, Aon will be providing an onsite tam for IRI and deployed a customized web-based technology system that automates the recruitment process and enables candidates to apply online or to submit detail for future opportunities.

Two Major HRO Players Form Alliance

SuccessFactors, Inc., the leader in on-demand performance and talent management solutions, announced today that TriNet Group, a nationwide provider of human resource (HR) outsourcing services, will offer SuccessFactors performance and talent management solutions to TriNet’s customer base of small and medium-sized businesses, in order to enable them to optimize employee performance and productivity and to achieve overall business goals. For the complete news story please visit: HR Outsourcing.

Aon Consulting Survey Results

Aon Consulting Survey Results
May 14th, 2007
Aon Consulting, the human consulting organization of Aon Corporation, released the results of its Benefits and Talent Survey for 2007. The results of the survey are listed below in brief:
* 4 out of 5 organizations consider recruiting and selecting talent a top or critical issue for 2007
* 63% believe their organizations’ need to recruit and select the best talent will substantially increase in the coming 3 ~ 5 years
* Leadership positions will also be at risk with the impending workers shortage with more than 40% of the companies currently experiencing or will experience a leadership shortage in the next 1 ~ 4 years
* More than 98% of the selected respondents expect that recruiting high-performing employees for most critical jobs will continue to be difficult
* 77% of organizations provide a general overview of benefits with no dollar figure while communicating the total compensation package
* 42% of organizations said that the candidate went elsewhere for compensation that was perceived to be higher

Aon Consulting Benefits Survey

Aon consulting, the Human Resource consulting organization of Aon corporation announced the results of its Benefits and Talent Survey for 2007. The results of the Benefits survey in brief are:
* 3 out of 5 organizations believe that the majority of their employees are not financially prepared to leave the workforce
* 62% of organizations expect that less than 1/2 of their workforce will have enough income to retire between ages of 62 and 65
* 80% of employers offer persionalized online retirement planning tools to educate their employees about retirement needs, however the majority believes that their employees do not fully understand how to invest their defined contribution plan assets
* 98% of employers say it is important for employees to know how much they will need at retirement so they can save accordingly but 34% of organizations expect their employees to find this information on their own
* 26% of employers with 401(k) plans contribute less than 2% of payroll to the defined contributions plan and 82% make contributions to the plan
* More than 40% of organizations that offer a defined contribution plan report that 75 ~ 100 % of their employees contirbute to the defined contribution plans with nearly 30% of organizations reporting 50% or fewer of employees contributing to the plan
* 44% of employers currently offer or plan to offer automatic enrollment in the next 12 months while the remaining 56% have no plans to offer this anytime in the near future

New Convergys Outsourcing Contract

Convergys, a leading HR Outsourcing provider, announced a renewed HRO contract with Fifth Third Bancorp. Under the terms of the contract, Convergys will continue to provide the latter with payroll administration, benefits administration, HR administration, recruiting and resources and employee and manager self-service. The duration of the contract is 5 years.
Per Convergys, although the original contract is not due to come to an end until 2008, Fifth Third Bancorp agreed to renew the contract 2 years early considering the successful execution of the contract by Convergys.
“Convergys has helped us alleviate our back-end administration concerns and enabled us to move our HR focus to more strategic activities, such as talent management, compensation, and benefits,” said Thomas Neltner, vice president, HR Operations, Fifth Third Bank.
“The fact that Fifth Third Bank rewarded us with an early contract renewal demonstrates their confidence in our ability to deliver business impacting services and solutions, based on the results of our HR BPO service delivery model and successful ongoing management of their HR functions,” said Karen Bowman, president, Employee Care, Convergys. “During our discussions, Fifth Third acknowledged its excellent working relationship with Convergys and the benefits it has realized as among the reasons for early renewal.”
The value of the deal has not been revealed.

EquaTerra Pulse Survey Results – Q1

The much anticipated results of EquaTerra BPO service provider’s pulse survey for 1Q2007 and predictions for 2H2007 have finally been released. The survey presents many interesting and valuable insights to the BPO industry players. The survey covered key process areas in outsourcing, call center, F&A, human resources, information technology and procurement. Global players polled in the survey include Accenture, ACS, Ariba, CapGemini, Convergys, Covansys, CSC, ExcellerateHRO, Getronics, Hewitt, HP, IBM, Infosys, mercer, Outsource Partners International, TCS and Unisys. The survey does not capture any quantitative market size information. However, it does capture changes in demand, scope, capacity and related key market indicators. The survey is mainly focused on US and Western Europe. Below are the highlights of the survey pertaining to HRO:
* HRO occupied one of the 3 leading market segments, ITO and FAO being the other two segments.
* Leading HRO processes identified from the survey include payroll, Benefits, HRIT
* Demand continues to grow for HRO despite change in demand growth slipped in 1Q07
* HRO service provider capacity remains tight and deal pursuit selective
* Increased HRO contract complexity is hurting the demand growth and market uptake.
* Demand trend for HRO slipped by 15% to 41% taking the HRO to second place in the overall outsourcing demand.
* HRO functional demand ranking is in line with 4Q06 at 30%
* Demand for recruiting and Talent management has been growing
* Recruitment and Talent management are still more often unbundled from larger HRO deals. Same is the case with Learning and Training services
* Transactional process outsourcing continue to be higher while growth in demand for training and learning in HRO suggest that buyers are continuing to expand outsourcing into more knowledge-centered areas.
* Service provider capacity constraints are impacting the HRO market, for at least the last six quarters, following the rapid growth in 2004-2005.
* Competitive sourcing defined as outsourcing multiple processes within a functional area is becoming more common
* The emergence of Indian service providers is both a driver and manifestation of buyers’ interest in multi provider sourcing
* In HRO areas like RPO, the trend is for buyers to outsource the processes that in the past were typically out of scope to specialist firms while directing more traditional HRO processes to legacy providers
* The HRO market, particularly for large global deals remains challenged
Source: EquaTerra
For more information on EquaTerra’s research efforts, please contact Stan Lepeak @ +1 203 458 0677 ; stan.lepeak @ Equaterra.com

Nelson Hall Research

Nelson Hall, a global BPO analyst firm, announced its latest research titled HR Issues and Initiatives: 2007. In this research, the firm pointed out that HR organizations are turning to be more strategic in nature, shifting their focus from cost-reduction to talent management improvement exercises, reports PRNewswire.
The summary of key HR initiatives for 2007 detailed by the firm in brief:
* Talent management initiatives, including improvements to recruitment processes, changing remuneration schemes to reduce staff turnover, new training initiatives, improved identification of, and reward for, good performance, improvements to absence management procedures, and employee turnover reduction initiatives
* Streamlining HR processes and rebalancing the location of HR service delivery. The latter involves both the development of common processes and the centralization of HR and also increasingly the introduction of local HR staff to assist in removing the barriers between HR and employees
* Cost reduction initiatives including reducing numbers of HR personnel and rationalizing benefits costs
* Sourcing initiatives to rebalance HR services between internal and external service delivery.

Altos Consulting Security Survey

In a survey on the security controls done by Altos Consulting and the National Computing Centre in the UK, the following are the major points of relevance:
* More than 80 percent of businesses found to have their IT security controls across different locations
* Just seven percent of respondents had such measures fully integrated within their business
* More than half of those questioned are not putting any security emphasis on their hiring policies despite staff being widely acknowledged as the major source of such breaches
* HR function within companies should have a more clearly defined role regarding enterprise risk management policy and enforcing employee adherence

New Goals for Convergys HR Head

In a recent interview published in CRMBuyer, Convergys new Vice President of Human Resources, Clark Handy, talks about his challenges as a head of HR for a global HR services company and the opportunities and primary goals before him. During the interview, to answer a question on his initial goals as head of HR at Convergys, Mr. Handy stated “We want to increase the talent management pool and we have a number of initiatives, like the ones I just mentioned, to do that. We want a global company that has managers at all levels prepared to grow through the organization. This means they are prepared to take international assignments and work on cross-country and cross-functional teams. And as we pursue a lot of large global HRO customers, it provides many opportunities globally for these managers”. His goals are just evidence to the fact that Talent Management is a growing concern for HR professionals. Unless effective strategies to address it efficiently and consider it a primary goal of any HR manager in any organization, it is quite difficult to increase the workforce productivity for that organization, considering the factors of high attrition and other global HR concerns.
Mr. Handy also stated on HRO challenges that the faster the transition process of any HRO, the more we can increase employee productivity helping the HRO strategy to be a big success.
Related Posts: Talent Management is a growing concern for HR Profs
Talent Management -Healthcare concerns

Offshore Outsourcing Wage Cost Advantage

The wage cost advantage of offshore locations for office services is set to last for another 20 years, says the latest annual survey by global management consulting firm A.T. Kearney. Even though wages in offshore locations for services, such as IT, business processes and call centers, have started to rise, they will remain cheaper for the foreseeable future under the most aggressive projections of wage inflation and currency appreciation in developing countries.
India and China continue to lead the pack of preferred offshore destinations by a wide margin, with
declines in cost advantages offset by further improvements in talent supply and business environment.

HR Business Excellence Award

During the London Chamber of Commerce 24th Annual Business Achievement awards, Ernst & Young was awarded with Business excellence in HR. The award is given considering the consulting firm’s progressive hiring, retaining and recognition practices in Canada. The awards will be finalized based on recruiting, recognition and retention practices at companies facing talent shortages in London, Ontario.

MetLife Survey

MetLife recently conducted a survey on US employers and employees for its Study of Employees Benefits Trends. This year’s findings make a compelling case that benefits strategy holds the key to one of many employers’ most pressing challenges – the need to recruit and retain the best talent in an increasingly competitive labor market.
Highlights of the Survey are listed below:
* 1,514 benefits decision-makers from organizations with a minimum of 2 employees were interviewed for the survey
* 61 percent of employers surveyed had fewer than 500 employees
* 20 percent employers had 5,000 or more employees
* More than 55 percent of the benefits decision-makers agreed that retaining employees is the main goal in creating a benefits plan
* Controlling costs is secondary
* Among employees who considered themselves “highly satisfied” with their job, 80 percent reported being “highly satisfied” with their benefits
* Seventy-two percent of the 1,202 workers cited workplace benefits as the reason they joined their current employer, and 83 percent cited it as one of the reasons they remain.

HR Metrics Series I: Employee Engagement

Employment Engagement is an important concept in HR Management. Engaged employees are more productive, more profitable, more customer focused, safer and much less likely to leave their employer. The reason why it is considered important is that it can be linked inversely proportional to Employee Attrition, which is an irk to almost every HR organization. In what way does Employee engagement correlate to Employee Attrition? This just may be one question that emanates in the minds of many.
The more Employee Engagement is seen, the less Attrition is seen, and it goes both ways. This is what our research tells us. The more an organization works towards its employees’ engagement, the less attrition we see and hence employee engagement exercise is one way to cure the attrition irk.
Employee Engagement is defined as a positive attitude or thinking exhibited by the employee towards the organization and its core, as well as business, values. It is the responsibility of the organization, especially HR, to develop healthy and matured engagement thinking in the minds of their employees. Why is it the responsibility of HR specifically? The concept is a two-way relationship. The more the employer works with the employees to develop an emotional bonding towards the organization through every possible means, the more the employee engagement percentage will be. Many surveys done on this concept have revealed that many organizations continue to have a lesser percentage of engaged employees versus a higher non-engaged employee percentage. A lesser engagement will always prove to be a danger to the organization where it leads to a higher attrition.
Employee Engagement Drivers are divided into two categories.
1. Intrinsic Variables
2. Extrinsic Variables.
Among these two drivers, Intrinsic Variables are considered to be the key drivers. Examples of Intrinsic Variables are working through a common purpose, personal growth, etc.
Extrinsic Variables are things such as pay, rewards and so on.
The entire process of creating awareness to the concept as well as maintaining a stable engagement in employees and efforts to continuously drive engagement to further high levels are the primary responsibilities of HR. Failure to accord an important role to this particular concept will lead to higher attrition for employers.
How could we take this engagement as metric? Does it qualify to be an HR metric? Yes, absolutely! From our viewpoint, Disengagement will lead to increased attrition, productivity losses, lesser ROI and so on. Focused on developing a better understanding of how variables such as quality of work relationships and values of the organization interact and their link to important work outcomes are HR’s responsibilities to address.
As far as Measurement of this metric is concerned, there is no specific set of formulas to arrive at the engagement score. The engagement score can be determined or measured through various surveys in their respective organizations which are followed u with actionable items. These surveys could include 10 questions or 100 questions. What is more important is the relevance of the questions to the engagement. The best way to gauge HR performance as far as Employee Engagement is concerned is to compare the engagement score with the earlier scores, as well as benchmarking the engagement score. It is simply the duty of HR to make their employees clearly understand the overall business goals and objectives. The same surveys can be used to measure the engagement score as well as arrive at the performance levels of HR in conductive and facilitating a productive work environment. Any increase in Engagement scores of overall employee size or scores arrived at through conducting surveys on engagement should be attributed to the HR performance.
Our earlier publications on HR Metrics:
1. Employee Attrition
2. Time to Fill
3. Cost Per hire
4. Quality of New hire
5. ROI for HR function
[Read more]

Survey from Salary.com

Survey from Salary.com
March 19th, 2007
Employees prefer to work for a small or medium company for various reasons outlined below:
* Small companies are less regimented than the large ones
* Small companies impose fewer policies that govern employee conduct
* Small companies can be located much closer to residential areas rather than companies
* Employees of small companies experience high levels of accountability and a noticeable impact on business results
* Small employees provide employees with more responsibility and power to execute
* Small companies offer opportunity for meaningful relationships with co-workers and customers
Employees prefer working for a large company only for the reason that they may provide the employees with high fringe benefits and there is a scope for advancement within the organization.
The above are revealed in salary.com’s 2006 survey on Working for a small or medium size business. For a complete survey report, please visit salary.com

Female Boss Survey

A survey conducted in January 2007 by MSNBC.com and Elle Magazine shows that the negative perceptions of Female Bosses is slowly dying, reports SHRM.
The survey was restricted primarily to MSNBC.com readers mostly around the age of 42. Among them, 94% are full-time employees while 44% supervise other workers.
The results of the survey are reproduced below:
* More than 1/2 of the 60,000 people surveyed said it doesn’t make any difference whether their boss is a male or female
* 1/3 (30% men and 37% women) said they prefer working for a male boss
* 15% of female bosses and 7% of male bosses were seen having a family/work conflict
* 71% of all women surveyed revealed that female bosses think they have to work harder to earn the same respect for men while 64% of men disagreed with that sentiment

Exclusive Interview With John Nail

He knows how to optimize technology to derive desired HR solutions. However, he is not a technology guy. He founded Employease, a company that was highly regarded as the first Software-as-a-service (SaaS) vendor and that was subsequently acquired by ADP. He founded DigitalBenefits, an information management company intended to serve employee benefits and HR for mid-market insurance brokers and their customers and innovated the company;s flagship product BenefitsATM, which was acquired by Authoria. He is now the Principal of the Industry Radar, the much-talked RSS driven HR portal serving more than 100,000 HR professionals across the globe. He is John J. Nail, A 54 Year old HR innovator, a serial Entrepreneur, a HR TECH man. HRO MANAGER is proud to present to its readers, an exclusive interview with Mr. John J. Nail. We spoke to him at length about his initial head-start in the HR industry up to his current ventures and future plans.
Q. What stimulated you to choose HR industry as your growth path?
The first 17 years of my career I spent working for what is today The Unum Group, the world’s largest disability insurer in sales and management. I like to say that I spent half my career with a carrier torturing people with paperwork and the second half trying to automate it. I got interested from a management perspective originally in business process improvement essentially selfishly to meet our needs on the carrier side and in our office. The more I looked at the problems we had in getting clean data on employees to do our job the more I realized that employers did not have the tools to do things like benefits enrollment etc. better. The original idea for what became Employease I proposed in 1990 at UNUM and was actually was for a “disk” based tool – a sort of mini spreadsheet – for employers to provide us with their employee census and enrollment information. That core data about an employee – name, address, job title, dependent info etc is the raw material at the core of the entire HR industry and was not being managed electronically but on paper and then poorly so. That would allow us to upload data rather than hand type it, eliminate errors, speed up our work and better service our customers. You have to remember that PC’s were still just getting started then in business and the idea went nowhere at the company but stayed in the back of mind.
Q. You are best known as a “Serial Entrepreneur” in the HR industry. Could you explain on spell of your years long Journey in HR as an entrepreneur?
I’ve always been a “gadget guy” I got it from my Dad who worked for the old Zenith Radio Corp . The quality goes in before the name goes on. Having been playing w/ PC’s since 1984 I had been using Prodigy and AOL and even paying bills online long before the Internet exploded on the scene in 1995.I had been playing w/ the net for 18 months or so trying to understand its real power and potential as it was clear to me that the idea of “all connected to all” to paraphrase Nicholas Negroponte from “Being Digital” was going to change the way we all operated, I just had not figure out how yet. One day a friend called me asked me if I was using the web and I said yes and simply asked me the idea from 5 years before could actually be done over the web. A light bulb went off in my head; the web would be able to connect people to data not just web pages. I literally sat down for 13 hours non-stop and wrote the first business plan for Employease ” initially labeled, Census, Inc. I was 42 years old and as I floated the idea with friends in the industry and got positive response to it I got that passion that I “had to” pursue this idea. So literally I jumped into the “entrepreneurial abyss” as I have heard it called, with a passion for an idea that had been in my mind for a while. Once my mind started down that creative path that has been my passion, to really synthesize ideas and technology into solutions.
Q. You founded DigitalBenefits which was acquired by Authoria. Same was the case where you found Employease which was again acquired by ADP. These two acquisitions show how your products are well taken into HR world, either it be the SaaS model or an Extranet for Benefits. However, as a Seller, What is your preposition behind your strategy? Identify a business problem, find a solution, develop the solution, sell the solution?.
I have never thought of an exit strategy when I started any business. I always approach the problem with a solution and expect to make it successful. When I sold DigitalBenefits it was when the web bubble burst and venture capital dried up. We never really had a chance to take it to the level we wanted to. I guess my basic supposition in all my ideas is looking at an infrastructure problem to solve and going from there. Many people create solutions to symptoms; I always try to solve root problems as the real long term value comes from that. That is why Employease was successful in its own right and why ADP bought the company.
Q. Way back in 1998, Red Herring described you as a “Tech geek trapped in a middle-aged Insurance guy’s body”. Do you agree?
You know, this is a great line and one I use for laughs when I do speeches. It is partially true. As I said before I am a gadget guy and love to try new things. I am curious by nature I guess. I can’t program in the traditional “geek” sense but I do understand how things work well enough to be able to put ideas together with solutions. I do have friends though who would say this is a truer statement than I might like to admit.
Q.Coming back to your current successful and growing venture, The Industry Radar, Could You explain the thought process that went into setting it up?
Very simply I was finding it hard to stay on top of what was going on in an industry that is converging with HR, payroll, benefits, healthcare, talent mgmt, HRO, recruiting and technology all coming together. Existing industry publications still look at the space as silos even though customers do not and cannot and I found them lacking in timeliness of information or unfocused in what they deliver to their audience much of the time with their online “news”. Print publishing in all areas is behind and meets a smaller and smaller fraction of people’s needs in a world where even a few minutes of attention a day is highly fought over w/ all the options we have. We live in a real time world and we needed a real time solution and my mind told me that RSS could allow us to create a tool to bring together disparate sources of information, news and content into a cohesive real time solution that meets our industry’s needs. My biggest surprise frankly, and the lesson I have learned this past year is that the issues that we grapple with here in the US around people and work are universal and the international following we have developed with readers in over 50 countries this year is surprising and gratifying and fun to see.
Q. What is the current estimated traffic to Industry Radar and at what rate are you expecting this to grow in coming years?
We reach north of 100,000 industry professionals daily growing about 7% a week there. We just cracked a million article views for a week for the first time last week. Our plans are to double our subscriber base and do close to 100 million article views for the year.
Q. What is your future growth strategies lined up for Industry Radar?
We will be expanding in 5 key ways. As you know we added US Regional and state feeds on 2/1/2007. On 4/1 we will be adding four Retirement Radars and 4 Property & Casualty Insurance Radars. In 2 Q we will be adding International HR feeds for 8 regions around the world. The area I am most excited about is The Industry Radar calendar which is nearly ready for launch. Our mission is to be the only place and HR, benefits, healthcare or insurance professional needs to go to be fully informed. We are creating a central calendar for this group that has unlimited sub calendars so that in one place vendors can post conference, web cast info etc and users can access it in any subset- topical, geographic, job level etc. that they want. Nothing like this exists today and opens up new revenue areas for us in advertising, listings etc. Cross promotion of events in our newsletter and on our website as well as users subscribing to their own specific event RSS feeds will be very popular.
Q. Are you planning to expand the number of Radars available on Industry Radar? In other words, are you looking forward to add any sub groups to the existing radars?
Our fifth area of growth will be in creating deeper channels in our Radars. For example three that are ready to go today are focused on US insurance brokers and their acquisitions and US healthcare payers and providers and the disputes going on between them. There are nearly limitless opportunities to connect our river of news and content to specific channels each one bringing revenue possibilities
Q. You continue to be a veteran in Human Resources Industry. What are your thoughts on the outsourcing trends in HR?
Outsourcing is the key to long term success provided that the right technology tools are employed by your partners and that the customer understands that they must manage these processes going forward, measure them and continually improve service delivery while driving costs down. This management role is one I think companies often overlook when outsourcing just assuming that the vendor is now responsible. The biggest mistake I see companies make is trying to simply unload old, outmoded paper processes on an outsourcer to provide at a lower cost. If that is all you are trying to do you will fail. At its core the real value of outsourcing is applying scale and expertise and proven best of breed processes against an existing customer. That change from status quo to best of breed will involve pain but bring value in quality of service and bottom line contributions from HR, a new concept for most.
Q. Would you think Technology additions alone can bring productivity to HR, if not, what are the other factors?
Getting organized is the single biggest thing any size employer needs to do and most are not or are not as well organized as they should be. If an employer has one single database with all the relevant data for an employee around their job, HR, benefits, payroll etc and connects the output from this to their payroll, healthcare, benefits and retirement vendors they go a long way to solving theory traditional problems and save a lot of money on mistakes and rework. Couple this with a truly integrated employee portal that combines information, connectivity to partners and self service transactions and a culture to support it and a company of a 100 or 100,000 will be successful in this area.
Q. You have pioneered in providing optimized benefits administration solutions through your earlier ventures. Our research tells us many PEOs and HROs, administering benefits plans for their clients loose several $ due to reconciliation differences and lack of a proper administration map. What is your advice to them in terms of streamlining their benefits programs to minimize their risks and standardize?
You are right and this goes back to my earlier point on how I’ve tried to create solutions. The reason we were successful at employEase was we focused on the infrastructure problem that all the needs of a company for HR and benefits emanated from one single, integrated employee record for HR, payroll and benefits and built our solutions on top of that. If your systems are not fully integrated, and designed by industry experts, not simply techies, like this, then you will always be throwing band aids (i.e. people) at problem and not able to get the scale to make money. Things that can be automated must be off a common set of data and connected on the backend directly to carriers etc. The straight thru supply chain concept has to be applied to make money on this space and most importantly improve service quality to employees around billing, eligibility and services.
Q.You have interests in sports too to our belief. You are a founder member of Secession Golf Club in SC. How passionate you are towards Golf as a sport?
I truly love the game and its traditions but the last few years I have played very little which I hope to remedy this year. My 7 year old loves to hit golf balls so I plan to really get him into the sport this year.
Q. Any other John Nail trademark HR ventures in pipeline to be set up under the Radar Group?
You never know. My mind never stops working on ways to improve communication and connectivity between the players in what I call the “HR supply chain”.

HireRight to Provide Employment Screenings

ExcellerateHRO, a global HRO provider announced its partnership with HireRight, an on-demand screening leader for employment screening.
“Today’s HR outsourcing customers are looking for a full-service provider with market-leading solutions, global reach and HR industry expertise”, said Iris Goldfein, vice president, global offerings for ExcellerateHRO.
“HireRight is pleased to be ExcellerateHRO’s employment screening partner”, said Eric Boden, president and chief executive officer, HireRight, Inc.
This partnership is in line with our research article published before in earlier post (HR Outsourcing Providers on an acquisition spree: Consolidation) that HRO providers are consolidating to offer multi processes and become an end-to-end outsourcing partner for their clients.

Manpower Survey

Almost all shares of major staffing companies inched lower on NYSE in today’s morning trades after a seasonally adjusted survey showed that employers are likely to maintain or trim staff levels in the second quarter. The survey was done by Milwaukee-based global staffing company, Manpower Inc.
The results of the survey are given below:
1. According to this survey, excluding seasonal factors and the number of companies that expect to cut jobs, the results mark the third straight quarter in which the predicted rate of hiring has declined.
2. In the U.S., the number of companies expected to raise hiring during the second quarter declined to 18 percent from 19 percent in the 2007 first quarter and from 21 percent in the 2006 second quarter
“Overall, labor market data has been somewhat inconsistent, and the sustainability of the pace of hiring remains uncertain in Europe and the U.S.,” Morgan Stanley Analyst Gutek wrote in a client note. He further says “We expect employers to report a more cautious hiring outlook in coming quarters.”
Manpower shares declined 27 cents to $73.59, and Labor Ready Inc. lost 17 cents to $18.35. Robert Half International Inc. shed 54 cents to $36.95, while Adecco SA gave up 19 cents to $15.91. All stocks trade on the New York Stock Exchange.
Monster Worldwide Inc. lost 16 cents to $49.06, and On Assignment Inc. fell 20 cents to $12.59, both on the Nasdaq Stock Market.

Talent Management Concerns

The one common concern experienced by many HR professionals is Talent Management. Given the ever rising demand curve of quality human resources, HR professionals are fighting hard to combat the issue of talent retention and management. In countries like India this issue is often ignored. When a quality hire leaves the company, it involves monetary loss as well as to create several operations issues like productivity loss etc. The probabilities of losses will increase the responsibility and pressure of talent retention on a HR professional. They often have to look for ways and means of containing the attrition rates as well as increasing the retention rates. HR professionals try to retain the talent through common methods like counseling exercises with the employee willing to leave the organization, take their feedback, offer to address their issues, offer them benefits for sticking with the company etc. However, these procedures are not getting implemented properly and processes like Exit interviews are just getting more routine than getting much better. “In countries like India where the demand for quality hires is rising day after day, it is a tough call for a HR professional to adopt balanced strategies of Talent Management. However, it is requisite to overall success of a HR department and hence can’t be ignored as well. This is where companies like Cognet HRO comes to play helping corporate HR unburden their responsibilities like Talent management tasks. We work with HR of our clients in designing strategies of an effective Talent Management. We don’t simply work as a recruiter for our clients who seek recruitment services alone and we always go beyond a recruiter” says Mr. Ram, Founder and CEO of Cognet HRO. He thinks HR professionals should adopt a pro-active strategy as far as Talent management is concerned say for example, HR should identify the potential employees who might be a possible candidates for exiting the company and should devise strategies on working out for their retention.

HRO Manager’s Choice For HR Resources

We advocate Industry Radar as the best RSS resource for HR professionals across the World. RSS syndication and aggregation is the new trend in E-media as more and more readers are opting out to get e-mail updates by subscribing to the feeds or reading directly from the feeds. Not many RSS aggregators exist in Human Resources feeds which could match to the quality of content published in Industry Radar as per the results of our survey. When we checked up with Laurus HR India Operating Head, Mr. Saleem Yusuff on what feed aggregator he prefers to read everyday besides HRO MANAGER, he gave not a second thought before he admitted that Industry Radar was the best resource . Mr.Yusuff says, “We should appreciate the work and technology of Industry Radar. Bringing updates on Human Resources Industry from every corner of the world as such is not a simple exercise. Industry Radar is able to accomplish this complex exercise through the means of RSS feed aggregator, Thanks to its best technology“. Industry Radar collects HR feeds from over 10,000 sources everyday. The man behind Industry Radar is John Nail, who founded Employease which was acquired by ADP in 2006.

Humetrics Survey On US Minimum Wage Hike

In a recent survey conducted by Humetrics Inc., a research division of Deploy Solutions, 47% of 1000 HR professionals responded against the minimum wage hike to $7.25/hour.
Questions in the survey covered participants’ current starting pay for hourly employees, what influences current wages, and how they would respond to a federally mandated increase. According to the survey results, when asked if they were for or against raising the hourly wage:
* 47 percent said they were against it
* 31 percent approved
* 16 percent said that the minimum wage in their state was already higher than the proposed rate
When they were asked how they would absorb the rate hike:
* Over 62 percent said they would raise prices
* 42 percent stated they would reduce labor hours
* Only 27 percent resolved that they would take the hit on their bottom line
* 18 percent said they would change their mix of part-time and full-time employees to compensate for the increased costs

Deloitte Survey On Healthcare Costs

Deloitte Survey On Healthcare Costs
March 6th, 2007
Respondents to Deloitte Consulting’s 2007 Top Five Total Rewards Priorities Survey indicated that talent issues are beginning to trump concerns about healthcare costs among survey respondents. Healthcare costs are still a pressing priority, but talent shortages represent a greater challenge, according to the survey conducted in collaboration with the International Society of Certified Employee Benefit Specialists (ISCEBS). The Top Five Total Rewards Priorities Survey has been conducted annually since 1994, sponsored jointly by Deloitte Consulting LLP (Deloitte Consulting) and the ISCEBS, reports CCH
Survey results in brief:
* Survey respondents identified controlling the cost of healthcare benefits as their number one Total Rewards priority
* Companies with revenues of more than $1 billion see attraction and retention of a high-quality workforce as their number one priority for 2007
* 80 percent of respondents identified controlling healthcare costs as one of their Top Five priorities with 36 percent naming it their number one priority
* Concerns about healthcare costs are down significantly from the 2006 results: 91 percent and 55 percent, respectively
* Concern about the ability of companies to attract, motivate, and retain talent continues to rise steadily with 75 percent of respondents listed this priority in their Top Five

Achievant Human Capital Management Services

A new company based in Indianapolis, Achievant, has been established to help banks and credit unions maximize the performance of their people. The company is focused on improving the financial institutions’ ability to recruit, assimilate, compensate and manage the performance of employees while insuring the actions of employees align with organizational goals. This report comes from Business Wire.
Achievant’s initial human capital management services and technology platform supports recruitment, the processes necessary to bring a new hire into the organization and get them productive as quickly as possible, referred to as employee onboarding, compensation and performance management processes.

Salary.com Survey On Employee Satisfaction

Salary.com, a leading on-demand compensation management solutions provider, released its results for the 2006/2007 employee satisfaction and retention survey. Nearly 12,000 employees and 311 HR Professionals participated in the survey. The results of the survey revealed employers often underestimate both volume and seriousness of employee job searches despite HR profs identifying retention as their top business challenge.
Results of the survey in brief:
1. Over 60% of employees surveyed said they plan to look for new job. This is double the 36% expected job searches by employees that employers perceive
2. Nearly 50% of employees feel they are underpaid and over-titled.
3. Nearly 66% of tenured employees plan for another job in next 3 months
4. Employers are linking the job dissatisfaction to underpay alone
5. Lower-paid employees are most likely to search for a new job (46% of respondents who are earning less than $40,000 said they are planning to leave
6. 70% of hourly, non-union employees are likely to look for a new job.
7. 73% of employees says they have updated their resumes (in contrast to the 32% estimated by HR Profs)
8. Nearly 80% of employees have surfed online job postings
9. The majority of employees feel that a 10-15% hike in pay could keep them happy

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