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If there's one thing that's tipping the scales for fresh employees and leaving the veterans out in the cold, it's salary compression. There's no room for loyalty to the company when market conditions have to be taken into consideration and new hires have to be paid according to industry standards. With the internal annual rate of increase between 4 and 7 percent and the industry annual rate of increase touching 10 to 15 percent, there's a huge disparity between what more experienced workers earn and what their fresh-faced counterparts just setting foot in the company make. The situation is compounded year after year, as those with the company for a longer period of time continue to earn comparatively less than those who've come after them. HR professionals and managers have been put in a bind by salary compression – they're forced to pay the going rate for the best of the new talent to hit the market even as they risk the ire and resentment of individuals wh...

Recently my interview appeared in SCOOP an online HR magazine , it covers industry news , analysis and features the latest from the HR world. The interview covered wide ranges of issues ranging from HR strategies, processes and various other issues which organizations are grappling today. Here is the first part the interview. On Benchmarking in the field of HR. Benchmarking in today’s business environment has different context for different organizations.HR practices have also been keeping pace with ever dynamic business environment and every industry presents unique challenges for HR professionals. There are two important aspects which every HR team must try and benchmark against: Innovative HR Practices: HR practices needs continuous change and innovation, it is key to the competitiveness of any industry. HR teams have to lead in setting new trends in attracting and engaging talent. Today the best places to work are those which have Innovative and engaging HR practices. If you are l...

Prioritizing key activities and focusing on strategic areas of concern continues to be a challenge for majority of HR professionals. Most of the studies which focus on challenges faced by HR professional continues to highlight the ever increasing pressure of attracting, engaging in retaining talent. In a recent study by i4cp when respondents were asked about the main barriers facing HR in 2008, 44% of the 355 responding companies rated lack of time as having a high or very high impact on HR’s ability to achieve its goals. “HR professionals are singing a familiar refrain,” said Donna J. Bear, senior research analyst at i4cp. “They’re citing not enough time, talent or money and too many conflicting priorities as top impediments to accomplishing their employers’ goals.” Besides not having enough time, nearly four in 10 respondents cited “conflicting organizational priorities, ” “scarcity of workforce talent” and “financial resources” as having a high or very high impact on achieving thei...

Here are some of the interesting posts from the HR blogosphere for the week. I’m sure readers will enjoy going through the posts. Career bright on working from Home and how it is important to be self-directed and self-motivated to be able to work from home completely. David Zinger has an interesting post on Employee engagement where he illustrates through this video on the concept of learned helplessness that contributes to disengagement at work. Heather Hughes shares her personal experience of how she escaped her newspaper job to start her own Business -- and how others can leaern from her experience as well. Rowan hosts the Carnival of HR 30 . A Bob Brady post on no I-PODs at work has most of readers disagreeing to the idea.

The new layout of this blog got some good news as well.HR funda got featured in the ALLTOP list under careers section. Guy Kawasaki took less than a minute to confirm the inclusion after my request. I also joined the HR Guru community (part of Monster group) and got the invite from TessaT to contribute as a featured blogger. Looking forward to share and connect with the HR community on HR Guru.

The evolution of web based social and professional networking has been quite interesting over the years. On an average I spend almost 40% of my time on net on many of these networking sites. In the early days we all started with Ryze and then linkedin , face book and today I get almost 2-3 invites every week from different networking sites. Although as a user I clearly distinguish between a social and professional networking site but now the lines between the two is getting blurred. So be it orkut or its own desi cousin Big adda our generation is increasingly getting hooked to web based networking. Linkedin recently launched its new version which has more upgraded features and better integration options and even access via mobile phones and PDA’s. Increasingly I see more and more recruiters using web based networking tools for hiring middle and senior level managers. Members are also directly approaching employees from different organizations to explore options in the organization of...

It was a nice surprise to find HR funda blog in the Top 100 Global Ranking of English-language Career Blogs. Currently the blog is ranked 47th and if you take 5 seconds of yours to vote for HR Funda it will help in improving the blog rating :D. Thanks and Wishing you the very best for the New Year ahead.

Interesting thoughts by Sullivan in his recent article on employee retention.Folks who are focusing on the monetary aspect of the new job are more likely to quit in near future even if you have hired them at a higher than market levels salaries. Incidentally, individuals hired from executive search firms can fall into this "money first" category. If they left the last job because an executive search professional presented a "better money" offer, don't be surprised when they leave again when the next executive search professional calls with slightly more money to offer. This makes me wonder, what is the validity of employee current salary as an indicator of his actual competency level? Sometimes recruiters and head hunters even create a “ Talent vacuum ” in the market for certain niche skills. This talent vacuum is especially seen in the Senior and middle managers levels as employees are not always on move and tend to be little reluctant to switch jobs easily. Ho...

HR Funda has been featured in the top 100 blogs on HR by Laura Miligan. She rightly says that as your small business grows you will undoubtedly find that one of your biggest challenges is finding smart talented people to comprise your staff. Even if you’re lucky enough to land great employees, however, there are a whole host of other human resources challenges that startups and small companies must overcome. In this article we highlight what we believe to be the top 100 HR bloggers, listed in alphabetical order by category. So take a look at the top 100 HR blogs .

Some of the interesting links in the past week on HR issues. How training programs helps in employee retention. Know when you are getting old in HR The painful divide between Generation X and Boomers. HR talent crunch Madhukar’s views on HR transition from backroom to Boardroom Flexibility at work : Good or bad

Employee communication through informal means works fastest and rumor mills always reach faster than any formal channel of communication. Grapevines has been always considered as a powerful communication network and as per wiki a study quoted in Forbes magazine concludes that 75 percent of employees hear about matters first through rumors on the grapevine. Robbins states that rumors flourish in an organization because of three elements. They are a response to situations that are important to employees, where there is some ambiguity, and under conditions that arouse anxiety. From a management perspective, the grapevine acts as a filter and a feedback mechanism to identify issues that employess consider important and relevant. The Political Calculation blog has come up with an interesting tool which can help you decide if, and also how, you should join in the guilty pleasure that is office gossip at your company.

I'm sure some of us have seen or heard it before in our profession. Makes me wonder how many of us come forward and take ownership of our actions. Accept failures when things go wrong. Come forward and say yes this is my idea and I have a plan to achieve this result and have this target in mind for this action plan. One can't expect HR to be a leading indicator unless we have leadership which is driven by metrics and linked to bottom line results of the organization. I’m sure we need more HR leaders who lead by end results rather than mere thoughts. In case if you are doing this then you need to share your experiences and train the rest of the HR folks around. I’m sure we can do better as a professional community by sharing our learning and experiences on this account and raise the levels of HR benchmarking and best practices.

As organizations grow they face the challenge of attracting and retaining top talent. Talent strategies may work fine when the organization is small and has the space to offer challenging and fast growing opportunities. It becomes difficult to sustain the organizational growth and continue to offer the same kind of challenge and career growth for talents.WSJ reports how the Google is also facing this challenge of attracting and retaining top talent. Google had more than six times the number of workers at the end of the first quarter than it had at the same point in 2004, which some former employees say tends to slow decision-making and make it harder for individuals to feel like they're having an impact. Google stock option are beginning to finish vesting for thousands of employees brought on during a big Google hiring spree in 2003 and 2004, lessening the financial incentives to stay. On top of all this, a new generation of Internet start-ups has matured enough to attract top tech...

“The definition of HR transformation has evolved out of a number of perceived and real pressures on the HR function. The function is expected to support the business, provide the right direction for the people management strategy and then execute the strategy. It also has to demonstrate an improvement in value, yet at the same time carry out cost-heavy administration. In response to these challenges, the transformation process that many companies have embarked on involves examining the HR strategy and how it supports the business strategy, and then changing the HR operating model to achieve optimum delivery.” According to the 2006 Global HR Transformation Study by Mercer Human Resource Consulting, half (50%) of organizations are in the midst of transforming their HR functions, while 12% completed a transformation within the past year and another 10% plan to begin the process within the next year. HR transformation is the process of recreating or reinventing the HR function with the spe...

Can HR ever win Nobel Prize? Joseph Rasquinha and Mohammed Zaheer Hussain opine that the problem with HR is that the overdose of irrelevant jargon and a lack of objectivity, measurement and empirical study. What HR desperately needs is a new body of thought which should be termed quantitative HR.’ This should be independent of what present practitioners and theorists of the subject are doing. Quantitative HR should look to take a leaf out of the Economics’ book and start by incorporating ‘measurement of the residual’ which is a major part of econometrics. Today, everyone accepts that HR is important. But very fewcompanies actually practice what they preach and put HR people in strategic positions. If Quantitative HR is in place this will happen automatically, as the statistics will show that the HR people have made a difference to the company. Finally, it is people who make a difference to a subject. The Nobel prizes have been given to people. The possibility of larger numbers of peop...

There’s always this great debate on the outsourcing of jobs to India and other Asian countries from US and European countries, but the times are changing and we are seeing the reverse of brain drain as Indian IT companies are hiring more locals in US. The growth of IT industry has truly lead to flattening of global talent marker as well, we now see talents across different nations are being employed by Indian MNC’s. So with the likes of IBM’s and Accenture’s ramping up fast and increasing talent strength at an all time high pace the war for talent also getting interesting. Business week reports on offshoring in reverse . In the past, Indian companies almost always transferred Indians to work in the U.S. on temporary visas. But now Infosys and other Indian outfits are hiring aggressively in the U.S. The Indians are recruiting a combination of fresh college grads and experienced vets who have worked at American companies. They're especially active at campus job fairs, and unlike a...

SAPPHIRE Weekly News from the HR World XLRI Jamshedpur 25 January, 2007 School of Business & Human Resources NEWS-OPINION Work Force Management Job hoppers go absconding Easy job openings, desperate employers coupled with young workers and their frequent job hopping are bringing in a new kind of casualness about jobs and resignations in corporate India. Absconding workers - workers who do not resign, but just disappear - are becoming common . As a result resignation is losing its value. Some simply SMS and move on. Some do not even bother to inform. Some fall ill and never turn up. Submitting formal resignation letters is becoming rare. Serving notice period? Even rarer. Growing India needs a right mix of work & play It's been a ceaseless endeavour for India Inc for the last couple of years — to bring down costs, boost efficiency and raise productivity even as it moved up the value chain. While it meant revamping production processes and bringing in new technologies, perhap...