Closer Watch on Human Resources

C-suite executives are being forced to look at their human resource functions. You may be asking why this is true. Michael Gregorie is the CEO of a large corporation known as Taleo. Taleo is a large company that deals with human resources technology. A lot of people seem to be focusing on contractors rather than employees.

“You hear Steve Ballmer at Microsoft saying they have to be more cool, like Facebook. Well, something like that is pretty hard to [bring about] when half of your people are paid in a different way than the other half.” stated Michael. It’s a lot of pressure to sit back and try to hold full time employees with the economy in such shambles.

Setting up shop in different countries is also a major employment problem. The bottom line is that most of these companies can get cheaper labor in places like China. With that being said globalize business is still a challenge. Trying to get people to keep their business in America is important. “If you go into China and think you’re going to drop in an American or Australian solution consultant, you’re dead,” he said. “You need a local person who speaks the language and understands the cost structure.” When people do take their business overseas, it’s not as easy as just putting an American in there. In order for your business to succeed, you have to put a local in place.

Social media is on the rise and that is how a lot of employers are doing their hiring. Some companies go as far as finding their employees through social media like Facebook. It adds a sense of reality and allows employers to check out their potential employees before hiring. However, it may be easy to find employees that way but it’s not easy to keep them.

There is a trend happening among social media as well. If an employer has had a successful run with one person, they may have them refer other friends through Facebook. Facebook is the biggest social media site that investors spend the most money on. Human resources may be the ones really struggling. It’s important to have a proper ratio between human resource staff and other employees. Throughout the past 20 years that ratio has really changed. Some say the ratio used to be at least 60:1.

Human resource professionals are the ones having to make the difficult hiring choices. If employers want employees to last, then they need to pay close attention to the human resource department. Feeding that department is more important than almost any other department. They need the proper resources in order to hire people that will last a long time with the company. It shouldn’t matter if the human resource manager is hiring through social media or through the newspaper because a closer eye still needs put on it.