president taylor: got HR?

For anyone who follows the nighttime drama ’24′, I’m sure you’ll agree wholeheartedly that the fictional Head of State, President Allison Taylor, has an epic nepotism fail on her hands.

In a reactive move following her Chief of Staff’s voluntary resignation, President Taylor, guided only by her biased, warm-and-fuzzy gut feelings toward her previously estranged daughter, Olivia (and only remaining offspring following the assassination of her son, Roger), promoted her to the vacant position.  Shortly thereafter, and to no one’s surprise, Olivia set about circumventing her mother’s administration in a bull-in-a-china-shop meets high-school drama queen approach, combined with the simple fact that the woman has no relevant experience or qualifications for such a high profile position, that is soon to bring everything down like a house of cards.

How could this have been prevented?  I have a few educated theories.

By engaging the Office of Personnel Management in advance of the catastrophic events of this particular day to establish a replacement chart outlining all the possible replacements for key roles within the administration that could become vacant through attrition (read: assassination or resignation), she would have had an automatic successor trained, briefed and ready to step into the role of Chief of Staff and pick up where Ethan left off.

It has been proven that the worst hiring decisions are almost always made when managers are faced with time constraints or where there are criterion-deficiencies present that prevent the job candidate from being appropriately assessed for a role.  Where there is no policy in place for how and when a candidate can be hired or promoted, and judgments can be based on minimal or contaminated evidence, you are almost guaranteed to offer the job to the wrong person.  Inevitably this leads to significantly high direct and indirect costs to the organization, that include the cost of having to replace the individual, fix their errors, and manage the reduced departmental and/or organizational morale and public relations damage that would result.

And I think we can all agree, this gross error in succession planning is one problem that even Jack Bauer can’t solve.

my NKE strategy

OK so the big countdown is on and I and all my HR peeps have two weeks to go before writing The Big One.  If you’ve stumbled upon my blog at this time it’s likely that you are a frenetic HR student like me who is presently scouring the web for any morsel of advice on how to maximize your chances at passing this exam, which most of us believe is the most difficult exam we will ever have to write.

Now please keep in mind that this is my first (and, with any luck, only) attempt at writing the NKE, so the advice I’m about to impart upon you, dear peer, is what I feel is the best strategy that I have come up with at this crucial point in the preparation phase, and not based on previous experience with writing.  Rather, I would hope that you will somehow benefit from what insight and wisdom it might contain.  Also it would be worth mentioning that I am not a FT student, and thus have not had the luxury of spending my days in the classroom immersing myself in the material.

Having said this, I have found the prep course I took to be a great review of all of the coursework and given me the opportunity to see where my knowledge gaps lie.  Unless you are fortunate enough to be receiving daily guidance from an HR professor, a prep course or some set of review modules is imperative to refresh you on the coursework.

Some will tell you that the best way they feel to prepare is to guide your studying by the Required Professional Competencies, or RPCs.  Personally I found this approach to be somewhat overwhelming and confusing.  A one-day workshop that I took at my college was helpful as well.  It was facilitated by a CHRP, BComm, BA who had been facilitating this workshop for a number of years and found that his students’ success rate on the exam was over 90%.  His workshop was based more on strategy than content, and he had some really good tips on how to ‘play the odds’ as it were when you are unsure of the correct answer and have to hazard a guess.

Some tips were:

1. The LONGEST answer is most often* the correct one
2. Do not choose an answer with a typo in it as it is usually not the correct answer.  Conversely, when the exam proctor advises the group that there is an error in one of the answers, this is usually the answer to the question!
3. When in doubt, choose B
4. When two answers are opposites, one of them is usually the correct answer
5. When asked to give the correct number or figure in a statistical question, you can usually discount the smallest and the greatest figures
6. The answer ‘None of the above’ is rarely correct, as they want to test you on what you know, not what you don’t
7. The answer ‘All of the above’ is usually the correct answer, especially if you know that more than one of the options to be correct

I must issue a word of caution here: in my experience with using these tactics I have found that they will work best only after you have carefully read each question and given it some serious and clear thought before resorting to playing the odds.  I believe this strategy is only meant to be used as a way to either narrow down between two answers that you think are correct, or when you have absolutely no fricken idea what the answer is.

Good luck to everyone!

*the odds will be in your favour when using these techniques approximately 80% of time according to this professor

PHOTO: jackhynes

time for GM to call time of death?

With the future of GM teetering on oblivion, it’s no wonder that Lewenza is posturing more voraciously than ever on the tired subject of wage concessions to the point he is prepared to cut of his nose to spite his face.  Clements has advised that the choice they have is clear: cut back to the tune of $19 per hour or face Chapter Eleven.

A no-brainer, right?

Apparently not to Lewenza, who is more fixed than ever on retaining existing wages for those employees who have managed to survive the rash of cutbacks that have drastically thinned out the workforce.  What do you suppose the retirees are thinking of all this while they wait in the wings to see if there is going to be any pension funds left for them after all is said and done?

I think if I was running the show I would realize that the times are calling for some new tactics, and I would be encouraging my workforce to embrace the changes that would be necessary to keep as many of us employed as possible.  But then it’s easy to say when you haven’t been living in denial for the past few decades, isn’t it?

Ontario: the pink slip province

Poor Ontario…battered and bruised more than any other province so far, it has lost over 160,000 jobs since October 2008 and the numbers keep climbing.  One estimate has our provincial deficit climbing to $5 billion when all is said and done.  We have gone from being the economic powerhouse of the country, a ‘have’ province, to the polar ‘have not’ opposite.  For the first time ever we are accepting, hat in hand, federal financial support that our sister provinces have received for years.  It is quite humbling indeed.

Some would argue it’s about time that Canada paid us back.

A recent story in the Globe leads us to believe that the Maritimes are the new land of milk and honey.  However, before we go rushing out east to follow the siren song of exciting, new employment opportunities, don’t forget that everything’s relative: sure PEI is showing the lowest number of job losses (1,100), but what does that really mean when you consider the province’s population is just 115,300.  Now let’s look at the stats:

At 8.7% Ontario may now have the highest unemployment rate since 1997, but the Maritimes are still faring worse overall as of February 2009 figures.  Sitting at 8.8% Nova Scotia and New Brunswick are tied at the lowest, and Newfoundland/Labrador has the dubious honour of having the highest amount of unemployed, at 15.1%.

Not so sure I’d be in too much of a hurry to get a piece of that pie, but that’s just me.