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Birthday Luck

Move over horoscopes, birthdays have a new prophetic power. According to a recent study, “The relative-age effect and career success: Evidence from corporate CEOs,” the month you were born in has a “long-lasting influence on career success.” The study, highlighted on Inc.com, found that babies born in March or April are more likely to become […]

hiring

When Hiring Temporary Employees Is Beneficial

Hiring temporary employees is a growing trend and not just around the holiday season. In 2018, 51% of employers surveyed by CareerBuilder were planning to hire temporary employees, compared to 44% that were seeking full-time talent.

Script Your Managers’ Critical HR Discussions

In sensitive HR discussions with employees, some of your managers will do best working from a script. But don’t try to write one until you’ve gotten the appropriate written policies backing it up. Yesterday’s article on the proper handling of terminations gave tips on what management personnel should and should not say in these circumstances. […]

Facing Adversity

My 12-year-old is facing a challenging situation for one of the first times in his young life. And as any parent can tell you, it’s tough to watch your child suffer. Now I don’t want to blow things out of proportion, I’m not talking life or death here, but he’s facing adversity and struggling with […]

Retention: Know why employees leave and how to make them stay

Not many HR professionals take the importance of retaining top performers for granted. Recruiting, hiring, and bringing new employees up to speed can bring on a sense of dread. Plus, having to slog through daily work while a position goes unfilled adds to the burden. So employee retention and engagement becomes a priority, and the […]

Women in Business: Progress Made and Challenges Remaining

March is Women’s History Month. Let’s face it, the business world has been dominated by men for too long. Episodes of Mad Men come to mind, where just 50 years ago the majority of women served as assistants or secretaries. Sure, we’ve made progress, but has it been fast enough?

The 3 Rules You Should Never Break When Writing Job Descriptions

Writing job descriptions is like going to the dentist. You know you need to do it, and you know it’s good for you, but it’s just no fun. Worse still, if you screw it up (the job descriptions, that is—not the dentist’s visit), you can put your organization at risk for costly job misclassification challenges—or […]

STEM

Boeing and NSF Program Aims to Increase Diversity, STEM

When comparing the United States to the rest of the world, we often hear that American students continue to lag behind much of the rest of the world—and other advanced, industrial nations in particular—when it comes to the so-called STEM subjects: science, technology, engineering, and math.

Maternity Leave: Arizona Employer Fails to Deliver

By Jodi R. Bohr, JD The Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA) creates two substantive employee rights: (1) to use a certain amount of leave for protected reasons and (2) to return to her job or an equivalent job after using protected leave. Employers are prohibited from interfering with an employee’s substantive FMLA rights or […]

“If I’m so good, why don’t I get a bigger raise?”

By BLR Founder and Publisher Bob Brady (Readers: A funny thing happened on the way to my writing today’s column. Another 800 email requests for my “perfect performance appraisal” engulfed us after last Friday’s column on the subject… that’s more than 1300 so far! So facing the possibility of an exploding in-box, we decided to […]