In yesterday’s Advisor, we covered legal issues related to contact management, or how to avoid turning “contacts” into “applicants,” courtesy of Peopleclick ® Research Institute’s Lisa D. Grant Harpe. Today, we’ll cover the rest of her discussion and take a look at a unique training system for supervisors and managers.
Harpe, an industrial psychologist and senior consultant at the Institute, is the author of Peopleclick’s e-book, Using Contact Management in Compliance with Federal Regulations.
Criterion 3—The contact meets basic qualifications.
(Go here for discussion of Criteria 1 and 2.)
Until you have a specific opening in mind, you won’t really know whether an individual meets the basic qualifications for a position. However, since you will likely use contact management to facilitate communication with individuals you have identified as having high potential, these contacts likely meet some standard of qualifications, says Harpe.
The more you screen individuals before entering them into your contact management database, she says, the more likely they are to meet the basic qualifications of positions that you fill. It requires a little bit of thought before you can definitively say that a contact does or does not meet criterion 3, she notes.
Criterion 4—The individual has not withdrawn from consideration.
Contacts who withdraw from consideration are no longer applicants.
If contacts meet all four criteria for an Internet applicant, you are required to solicit race and gender information from them as well as fulfill extensive recordkeeping and reporting requirements.
The safest way to avoid turning your “contacts” into “applicants” is to avoid searching on qualifications, Harpe says. “You can search on preferences without triggering recordkeeping and reporting requirements. You may also conduct general searches on qualifications to fill pipeline requisitions, not particular positions,” says Harpe.
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If you use contact management to send individuals general information, such as newsletters, articles of interest, or notices about upcoming events, or if you send them an invitation to visit the company career site and ask them to look for positions that might interest them, you are OK. These are not contacts about a particular position, Harpe says.
Getting a little closer to that line, you may send a request to a contact to look for a certain type of position opening, such as retail manager positions, which may be open in the near future. Because you have not indicated a particular position (e.g., manager of the bakery department at the Lakeland Heights store), you are OK.
Harpe offers one important caveat: If people from your contacts database are given preferential treatment in the hiring process, and your contacts are predominantly of one race or gender, the tool could be seen as a means to give preferential treatment based on race or gender.
“Therefore, it is critical that all jobseekers for each requisition are given equal consideration and go through the same process. If the contacts are truly more qualified, they should quickly rise to the top during the standard screening process,” Harpe says.
If you maintain a formal contact management program, or even an informal one, your managers and supervisors need training on how to manage it and your hiring system. Come to think of it, they also need training on your firing system—and everything in between.
Training is especially critical for supervisors who are new to the job. They don’t know how to handle hiring, they don’t know how to handle other basic tasks like appraising and firing, and that’s to say nothing of handling intermittent leave or accommodating a disability.
It’s not their fault—you didn’t hire them for their HR knowledge—and you can’t expect them to act appropriately right out of the box. But you can train them to do it.
Train your line managers with BLR’s 10-Minute HR Trainer. There won’t be time for classroom boredom. Try it for free.
To train effectively, you need a program that’s easy for you to deliver and that requires little time from busy schedules. Also, if you’re like most companies in these tight budget days, you need a program that’s reasonable in cost.
We asked our editors what they recommend for training supervisors in a minimum amount of time with maximum effect. They came back with BLR’s unique 10-Minute HR Trainer.
As its name implies, it trains managers and supervisors in critical HR skills in as little as 10 minutes for each topic. 10-Minute HR Trainer offers these features:
- Trains in 50 key HR topics, including manager and supervisor responsibilities under all major employment laws and how to legally carry out managerial actions from hiring to termination. (See a complete list of topics, below.)
- Uses the same teaching sequence master teachers use. Every training unit includes an overview, bullet points on key lessons, a quiz, and a handout to reinforce the lesson later.
- Completely prewritten and self-contained. Each unit comes as a set of reproducible documents. Just make copies or turn them into overheads, and you’re done. (Take a look at a sample lesson, below.)
- Updated continually. As laws change, your training needs do as well. 10-Minute HR Trainer provides new lessons and updated information every 90 days, along with a monthly Training Forum newsletter, for as long as you are in the program.
- Works fast. Each session is so focused that there’s not a second’s waste of time. Your managers are in and out almost before they can look at the clock. Yet they remember small details even months later.
Evaluate It at No Cost for 30 Days
We’ve arranged to make 10-Minute HR Trainer available to our readers for a 30-day, in-office, no-cost trial. Review it at your own pace and try some lessons with your colleagues. If it’s not for you, return it at our expense. Click here and we’ll set you up with 10-Minute HR Trainer.
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