News
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ASTD
Ann Pace
Read MoreEmerging Challenges in Employee Engagement
A lack of formal engagement programs and generational differences are the main barriers to employee engagement.June 8, 2013
In a recent online survey by cloud-based social talent management solutions provider SilkRoad, 781 HR professionals revealed their companies' employee engagement practices.
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HRE Online
Steve Boese
Read MoreA Small Reminder of HR Tech’s Greatness
For small to mid-size businesses, even basic HR technologies can drive meaningful business value -- a reminder to us all of HR tech’s real promise.June 7, 2013
Recently, at an event put on by HR software provider SilkRoad, which focuses on the SMB market segment (lots of customers in the under-1,000-employee category), I was reminded again how so many seemingly easy or simple or "How is it in 2013 you are still doing that on paper?" kinds of technology applications remain incredibly relevant for many, many employers. I sat in on presentations from small organizations about the value of moving new-hire processing online from stacks of paper, and the cost and time savings involved in making that switch. Other HR leaders shared how, prior to having an automated tool for performance management, they had never been able to even conduct formal performance reviews.
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HRO Today
Debbie Bolla
Read MoreTechnology Reigns
The top disruptors were crowned at the HRO Today Forum in Philadelphia.May 31, 2013
To select our 2013 TekTonic winners, HRO Today magazine identified top providers throughout the HR industry and solicited nominations through a Web-based research tool for each category. After submissions were received, the HRO Today staff conducted research and read submitted documentation to determine the winners.
HRMS Suite Winner.
Solution: HeartBeat
Provider: SilkRoad -
Baseline
Samuel Greengard
Read MoreBuilding-Clouds-That-Are-Flexible-and-Secure
At the heart of the cloud issue is how to design and build clouds that deliver maximum flexibility and agility, while providing the highest level of security.May 30, 2013
In many instances, clouds are helping companies gain collaboration and workflow capabilities that wouldn't have been possible only a few years ago. In addition, many of these organizations benefit from lower CAPEX costs, as well as an ability to plug in new infrastructure, software and platforms with minimal IT staff and resources.
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TechTarget
Emma Snider
Read MoreOffboarding automation reduces risk, manual labor
May 10, 2013
In the midst of today's "war for talent," recruiting and onboarding are top priorities for HR departments. But experts stress that the opposite end of the employee lifecycle -- offboarding -- is equally important. But many HR departments do not have an automated process in place, which can create risk.
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SmallBiz Technology
Carolyn Crummey
Read MoreTake Human Resources (HR) Past Payroll and Turn It Into A System That Grows Your Business
May 6, 2013
April knows that HR is not the first thing that small businesses focus on, especially when starting out, but knows that as most businesses grow, the desire to automate core HR functions through the use of technology begins to fall to the forefront. Manual processing of HR functions is time consuming and with new regulations coming into play with the Affordable Care Act, which requires businesses to report on benefit offerings and their affordability, businesses face more processing and reporting and failure to report accurate information could lead to additional time and cost ramifications.
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Fox Business
Emily Driscoll
Read MoreHow Grads Can Negotiate a Salary and Benefits Package
May 6, 2013
Salary negotiations are hard for even the most seasoned workers, but for college students fresh on the job market, the process can be intimidating. While talking about money can be uncomfortable, the discussion is necessary because it will determine grads’ starting income and potentially set the bar for future earnings.
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Fox Business
Emily Driscoll
Read More4 Interview Mistakes Grads Should Avoid
May 6, 2013
According to a 2012 study conducted by York College of Pennsylvania concerning professionalism in the workplace, 29% of college grads show up late for job interviews, 40% don’t dress appropriately and nearly 1 in 4 show poor verbal skills including grammatical gaffs.
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ERE.Net
Dr. John Sullivan
Read MoreTop Performers Produce 4x More Output and Higher Quality Referrals
May 6, 2013
Just like on the business side of the enterprise where the 80/20 rule prevails (80 percent of your profit comes from 20 percent of your products) there should be a similar 80/20 rule covering employee performance. This disproportional impact means that despite the fact that many in HR are enamored with the practice of “treating everyone equally,” it turns out that that approach may be well-intentioned but misguided because in business, just like sports and entertainment, top performers have a significantly higher business impact than the average. Top performers need to be prioritized.
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Corporate Compliance Insights
April Escamilla
Read MoreAre You Ready for Health Care Reform?
April 22, 2013
When President Obama signed the health care reform bill, or Affordable Care Act (ACA), into law in March of 2010, an initial swell of concern swept over the business community. Employers were left asking themselves what this meant for the bottom line and which offerings and processes would need a complete overhaul.
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VentureBeat
Flip Filipowski
Read MoreSmall businesses: Here's how to prepare for health care reform
April 16, 2013
A central feature of the new Affordable Care Act is the government’s new health care exchange. While the finer details are still being worked out, the goal of the exchange is to empower citizens to choose affordable benefits from an array of state-sponsored plans.
So what does this mean for small business owners? It means that the onus is on you to ensure that your employees are offered an employer-sponsored plan and offered information on the exchanges as an alternative option. Having a systematic way of tracking, reporting and communicating this data will be essential to the bottom line. -
ZDNet
Brian Sommer
Read MorePUREs and how to stop them
April 15, 2013
Almost simultaneously last week, Wowzer, Silkroad, and Nobscot all announced new capabilities to help companies in their War for Talent. Wowzer now has a Match functionality to go with its video interviewing, and SilkRoad has teamed with Nobscot to better understand why people leave companies, especially those who leave shortly after joining the company.
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Training
Lorri Freifeld
Read MoreBridging the Skills Gap
Employers want certain skills. Employees don’t have them. Why? And what can organizations and Training, employees, and the educational system do to eliminate the disconnect?April 3, 2013
With the U.S. unemployment rate hovering around 8 percent and millions of people desperately looking for jobs, why are many employers claiming they can’t fill their vacant positions?
The answer: A skills gap that threatens the sustainability of businesses around the world. And while a big part of the skills gap is a shortage of people skilled in the STEM (science, technology, education, and math) industries, there also is a gap in soft skills such as communication and advanced leadership skills. (See sidebar below for skills gap statistics.) -
Forbes
Karsten Strauss
Read MoreTech Startup City: G2 Crowd in Chicago
March 27, 2013
"The vibe here is very supportive of high tech startups," Gorniak said. Since the business community in Chicago is not as saturated with tech as Silicon Valley, New York and other cities are, there’s a novelty surrounding such startup ventures that creates buzz. "Here there’s a general interest to understand what the startup is about and when you ask for help, to get help."
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SHRM
Dawn S. Onley
Read MoreSocial Recruiting Opening More Doors for Job Seekers
March 20, 2013
One in three employees will leave a current job between 2013 and 2014, but not solely for more money or a shorter commute or because of a challenging manager.
Certainly, these are all contributing factors, but, according to a new study, the most common reason respondents left their job was a lack of growth opportunities. Of those job seekers who left, two in five secured the coveted interview after applying online, the survey revealed. -
Workforce
Read MoreCompanies Turning to Tools to Manage Contingent Labor
Sarah Fister GaleMarch 19, 2013
In 2012, more than 1 in 4 employees were contingent labor, according to the Aberdeen Group in Boston. And that number is likely to jump to 30 percent in 2013.
As those dramatic statistics suggest, contingent workers such as staffing agency temps and independent contractors have become a large and permanent part of the workforce. As a result, companies need to think carefully about the tools they use to manage these workers so they can maximize productivity while minimizing compliance issues. -
Business Insider
Julie Bort
Read MoreVCs Are Throwing Money At These 10 Enterprise Startups
March 17, 2013
It's clear that enterprise tech is currently a hot area for investors. But which startups have reeled in the most VC funds in a single round in the past 12 months? We scoured TechCrunch's Crunchbase database to find out.
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Human Resource Executive Online
Read MoreFYI: Talent Management
March 12, 2013
Not quite half of major organizations consider talent management a top priority, according to a survey of 537 senior managers and HR professionals, conducted by Milwaukee-based Right Management. Indeed, 49 percent of respondents to the survey, The Struggle Over Talent Management Strategy: A North American Progress Report, said leadership at their organizations regard talent management as a top priority. Thirty-eight percent said talent management is not a priority at all, with 13 percent reporting it to be a secondary priority.
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Workforce
Read MoreSuccession Planning Roadmap
March 11, 2013
If your CEO has a sudden heart attack, do you know who will take the chief executive's place? What if your top executives are wooed away to another firm? Do you have the next generation of leaders ready to fill those roles? If not, you may end up with an empty C-suite—or worse, underqualified people moving into leadership roles because there is no one better to take over.
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Workforce
Sarah Fister Gale
Read MoreRecruiting Software: The Key to Global Sourcing
March 4, 2013
Talent management software with global capabilities can go a long way to helping human resources teams ramp up their international recruiting program.
"It speeds the hiring process, and makes it easier to process large numbers of candidates in a short time," says Richard Wellins, senior vice president at Development Dimensions International in Pittsburgh. That speed can be vital in countries such as, Brazil, India and China, where talent is scarce and competition is brutal. -
Fox Business
Emily Driscoll
Read MoreHow Grads can Increase their Online Visibility and Job Prospects
March 4, 2013
According to a recent report by SilkRoad on the most successful sources for generating candidate interviews and hires, the top three places where companies find candidates online that they actually hire are their own websites (14% of more than 150,000 hires), Indeed.com (9% of hires) and CareerBuilder and LinkedIn (5% of hires).
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Business Performance
Tim Hird
Read MoreLeveraging Social Learning to Improve Compliance Culture
March 4, 2013
For most organisations, traditional training is a major component of their compliance strategy. As mandates from regulatory agencies become evermore demanding, companies are dedicating more and more resources to compliance training.
Whilst companies can use a tick box approach to demonstrate that employees are completing their necessary compliance training, they are still open to massive fines from regulators as tick box measures don't go far enough and certainly don't necessarily instill a compliance culture. -
Human Resource Executive Online
Tom Starner
Read MoreDodging HRIS Disasters
February 20, 2013
April Escamilla, San Francisco-based director of product management at SilkRoad, which offers an HRMS called HeartBeat, says configuring the workflow to adapt to an organization's policies and procedures is critical. In essence, changing over to a new HR system is the time to improve, validate and confirm every business process.
"That includes everything, from how you approve changes to benefits to how you process a termination," Escamilla says. "There are smart ways to enforce and improve business processes, and that should be part of an overall best practices approach." -
Mashable
Samantha Murphy
Read MoreHow to Find a Jedi Warrior for Your Company [INFOGRAPHIC]
February 15, 2013
According to new data from SilkRoad, companies continue to shell out big dollars to bring in talent. In fact, the cost to find top-notch employees (Jedi warriors, if you will) costs about $3,500.
While recruiting costs go towards various online tools, not all of these platforms are created equal. Indeed.com far surpasses other sites including CareerBuilder, Monster and LinkedIn in terms of landing interviews and getting hired. -
Becker's Hospital Review
Sabrina Rodak
Read MoreMoving to a Centralized Hospital Compliance Training System
February 7, 2013
As healthcare reform provisions continue to roll out, it is critical for healthcare leaders and staff to be educated on regulations and compliance in areas such as HIPAA and quality. To facilitate this process, SwedishAmerican Health System in Rockford, Ill., moved its training system to an online, centralized program. Toni Thompson, director of organizational development for SwedishAmerican Health System, explains how a centralized training program helps improve efficiency in the organization.
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information management
Justin Kern
Read MoreHR Taking Ownership of the Cloud
February 6, 2013
HR software provider SilkRoad released the results of its survey, “The State of Talent Management 2013,” a compendium of questions on technology and trends it asked of executives and human resources practitioners during the previous year.
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The Stevie Awards Blog
Liz Dean
Read More5 Ways HR Awards Winner Achieved $2 Million in Savings
February 6, 2013
Fazoli's Italian Restaurants of Lexington, Kentucky, USA, won the 2012 Gold Stevie® Award for Human Resources Department of the Year in the HR awards categories of The 2012 American Business Awards, the premier business awards competition in the U.S.A. (The entry deadline for the 2013 ABAs is March 27, request your entry kit here and it will be emailed to you right away.) Here we look at the human resources awards winner's progressive and innovative practices which helped lead to an annualized savings of $2,192,000.
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CMS Wire
Barry Levine
Read MoreReport: Talent Management in Age of Cloud and Social Media
February 4, 2013
Social tools and cloud computing are emerging as key strengths for talent management, while learning compliance is an Achilles heel for many organizations. Those are some of the key takeaways from a new report.
Entitled "The State of Talent Management 2013", the report by SilkRoad is based an online survey last year of more than 5700 professionals, representing a wide range of corporate positions. SilkRoad is a provider of cloud-based social talent management software. -
Workforce
Michelle V. Rafter
Read MoreWant Cloud HR Software to Be a Breeze? Follow These Steps
January 30, 2013
If you're contemplating moving human resources functions from homegrown or other on-premise software to the cloud, here's advice from managers who've done it on making a smooth transition,
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Human Resource Executive Online
Tom Starner
Read MoreIs 2013 the Year HR Takes Analytics Seriously?
January 25, 2013
Tracy McCarthy, chief human resource officer at SilkRoad, the Chicago-based provider of talent acquisition and social talent-management solutions, says the ACT Bridge survey results aren't very surprising and probably accurately reflect reality. "Measuring some of the less tangible aspects of HR, or of any discipline, can be tricky – and for some downright impossible," she says. "It really depends upon the practitioner's access to the right data and their understanding and comfort level with metrics."
To McCarthy, the most important reason why RTI isn't measured is because it isn't demanded or important to the executive leaders of the 56 percent of companies who responded that they don't measure return in the ACT Bridge study. "I suspect that if measurement was expected, like it is with financial data, the percent would be higher," she says. -
Human Resource Executive Online
Andrew R. McIlvaine
Read MoreNo Link Between HR Technology and Strategic Gain, Say Researchers
January 25, 2013
Many of the studies cited by Marler and Fisher examined "point" solutions rather than integrated talent-management suites that make it easier for HR to do things such as tracking and developing high-performing employees -- things that can help a company gain an edge over its competitors, says Vesely.
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TLNT
John Hollon
Read MoreWeekly Wrap: A Good Look at the State of Talent Management in 2013
January 25, 2013
Yes, I’m a sucker for these kind of surveys — and this is a big one, with more than 5,700 talent management professionals responding to eight (8) different surveys between January and October 2012 — and they always seem to provide some insight that is useful for most every talent management professional in their day-to-day work.
And in this survey, there is a tremendous amount of details and deeper insights that I just can’t do justice to in a brief blog post like this. You should get a copy of the report from SilkRoad (and you can download one here) if you really want to get under the hood of what all those talent management and HR pros had to say. -
Scientific American
Ariel Schwartz
Read MoreThe Future of Work: Quantified Employees, Pop-Up Workplaces, and More Telepresence
January 23, 2013
SilkRoad, a social talent management organization, assigns numerical values to employee influence based on algorithms. The next steps, says PSFK, are "a system that is constantly collecting and visualizing employee performance", letting workers constantly rank each other on contributions and skills, generating metrics for worker engagement.
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Fast Company
Ariel Schwartz
Read MoreThe Future of Work: Quantified Employees, Pop-Up Workplaces, And More Telepresence
January 23, 2013
For many people, especially those working at desk jobs, the workplace is very different than it was 20 years ago: there’s a computer at every desk, telecommuting is fairly common, and the traditional cubicle is giving way to more collaborative spaces. We’ve seen predictions about where we’ll go from here before; now PSFK, a popular blog that also happens to be a thriving consultancy, has come up with its own version of the future of work, described in a new 138-page report.
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Fox Business
Emily Driscoll
Read MoreWhat is More Important for Recent Grads: Salary or Benefits
January 23, 2013
For today’s graduates on the job hunt, the amount of numbers on a paycheck is becoming more important than benefits such as medical insurance and retirement plans when deciding to take a job offer.
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PSFK
Andrew Vaterlaus-Staby
Read MoreCompanies' Hidden Talent Revealed By Social Metric Score
January 20, 2013
Social talent management brand SilkRoad has developed a feature called Point that calculates a numerical valuation of an employee’s influence by analyzing how content is created, shared and received by individual workers. Metrics that Point analyzes includes how content is created or shared by an individual, how much validation their sharing has received, whether validation is coming from inside or outside their project teams and the expertise level of the people who are validating the content.