In the first month of 2012 there is a tremendous amount of talk about Dodd-Frank and Say on Pay from the discussion of regulatory change to results from last year to predictions of what will happen in the coming proxy season. Institutional Shareholders and shareholder services are coming out with tallies of their voting patterns for last year and policies for the coming year so stay tuned for a lot of content for the next several months including a webinar that I just did with HR.com on Tuesday. The archived recording is available here. We also have a say on pay white paper which includes content from our executive compensation trends survey that can be downloaded here. What we have...

“Your employees are your brand” is more than just a cliché, as we were reminded this week, with a national pizza chain’s unfortunate customer experience, when an employee typed a racial slur on the customer receipt. As expected, apologies were made and the employee was fired. A month ago, a similar incident with a different national chain led to another employee termination. Sadly, these stories are not unusual. As an Asian-American woman, former restaurant manager and an HR practitioner, I was able to relate to this story in a myriad of ways. Could these incidents have been predicted or prevented? Who owns this problem - HR? The Hiring Manager? What kind of e...

In 2011 we saw some high profile separations at large public companies.  Yahoo! let go of CEO Caroll Bartz in rather dramatic fashion (reportedly over the phone).  Hewlett Packard also released their CEO Leo Apotheker after less than a year worth of work.  Both were removed after sub-par stock performances that would likely have led to poor pay-for-performance payments even if they had stuck around. Along with these moves came some pretty significant post employment payouts.  The New York Times reported that Apotheker and Bartz received roughly $13.2 million and $10 million respectively exclusively in severance.  The reality is that the majority of large pu...

By Sheila Doherty, Senior Product Marketing Manager, Kenexa 2x BrassRing   Social media integration and mobile functionality are at the top of the holiday wish list of recruiters this year. Just in time for the holidays, we’re excited to roll out Release 13 of Kenexa 2x BrassRing. Highlights of the release include expanded functionality for social, mobile, on-demand video interviewing, SMS/Text Messaging, user interface advances and candidate relationship management.      EXPANDED SOCIAL MEDIA CAPABILITIES We’re committed to market leading social recruiting capabilities. You may remember Kenexa’s formal partnership announcement with ...

Personally, I feel that, despite all the turmoil the world is experiencing, we should feel quite hopeful. In the past decade or so, we as a society lived in an illusionary climate where we were pushing ourselves and extending ourselves in ways that weren’t healthy. Matters came to a head in 2008-2009, and I believe that, hard as the Great Recession was for us all, in the long run it will stand us in good stead in terms of learning from our mistakes as a society. And so, I would say that the times we’re getting into now, while somewhat stressful, while changing, are some very optimistic times. This correction, I believe, is going to be extremely healthy for us as a species and...