What is the ratio of HR team to Employees ?

Q: How valid is the 1-to-100 ratio of HR staffing?

- Keeping Up With Changing Times, HR manager, services, Raleigh, North Carolina


A: The ratio of human resource person for every 100 employees has been around
for at least 20 years and is still cited as being HR gospel. But a lot has
changed in 20 years, not the least of which is automation of much of the
traditional HR functions.

For example, staffing has always been one of the most labor-intensive HR
functions-placing ads, poring over paper resume submissions, calling to set up
interviews, sending paper interview responses and offer letters, administering
pre-employment tests, etc. Today, a good applicant tracking system can easily
replace a majority of traditional staffing function positions. Rather than
taking hours to place newspaper advertisements, an applicant tracking system
(ATS) can post jobs to multiple online job boards in a matter of minutes. Resume
submissions can be automatically screened, chosen applicants can be contacted
immediately by e-mail, interviews scheduled with multiple managers quickly
online, pre-employment tests done by the applicants at their own computers, and
onboarding packages compiled and delivered within minutes electronically. One
recruiter with an ATS and a computer can easily do the work it took four people
to do 20 years ago.

Automation of HR functions in other areas produces similar productivity
increases. Compensation and benefits functions have certainly benefited from
advances in HR systems. Performance management has been automated with software
that allows organizations to assign, manage and report on each employee's
business objectives and results with much more limited HR involvement than 20
years ago. For better or worse, it's no longer necessary to have HR employee
interaction with line managers for the 90 percent or so of traditional HR
activities that are transactional in nature. Managers don't need to come to HR
to review most of an employee's file-most of it is accessible online through
intranets or internal computer systems. Pay increases can be proposed, approved
and implemented automatically. A supervisor who is overdue on employee reviews
is sent a computer-generated reminder. Training programs are delivered to
employees at their convenience via computer and
testing is done online.

As axiomatic as "one for every 100" may once have been, today it could easily be
"one for every 300" or 400 or even 500 or more given today's automation
opportunities. And by automating these functions, HR is freed to focus more on
consultative and development activities and produce more with fewer resources.


[Source: Carl Norcross holds a master's degree in human resources and has more
than 20 years' experience leading HR departments. He has worked for several
midsize and Fortune 500 firms, including GRID Systems, Colorado Memory Systems
and Nortel Networks.]

How to assess critical thinking of a candidate ?

What Steps Can Help Us Determine an Applicant's Ability to Think Critically?

Q: As a CPA firm, we find that many of the accountants we hire are fine for
routine compliance issues. However, many seem to lack good analytical skills.
They are unable to project or think beyond the basic answers. It's easy enough
to test for and teach basic skills. Good analytical skills can't be taught. How
do we test or look for that ability in applicants?

- At a Loss, office manager, services, Plantation, Florida


A: You're right: Soft skills are very hard to teach. People either have the
capacity or they don't. Although they can be developed with coaching, it is
always more effective to hire someone with the right skills for the job. To do
this, it is important to include a personal skills assessment in the selection
process. A validated assessment that measures soft skills often leads to results
that indicate the level of analytical problem-solving.

Or you could simply incorporate very detailed interview questions that truly
reveal whether an applicant has the analytical skills you are looking for.

Interview questions to assist in identifying analytical skills include:

a) Describe a situation when you anticipated a problem. What, if anything, did
you do about it?

b) Give an example of when your diagnosis of a problem proved to be correct.
What approach did you take to diagnose the problem? What was the outcome?

c) Describe the most difficult work problem you've ever encountered. What made
it difficult? What solution was implemented and how successful was it in solving
the problem?

d) What steps do you take toward developing a solution?

e) What factors did you consider in evaluating solutions?

Including an assessment in the selection process will determine whether the
candidate has the analytical skills needed, but what about other qualities that
you have not pinpointed? To make the hiring process even more effective,
consider benchmarking the job to truly understand other skills, behaviors and
motivators needed for superior performance-and then assess candidates to see how
they compare.

Currently, my preliminary research on personal assessments indicates that people
with analytical problem-solving skills are somewhat unique. They usually also
have a passion, or motivation, for knowledge and the skill of continuous
learning. Often, they also are described as suspicious, incisive, critical,
exacting, organized and of high standards.


[Source: Bill Bonnstetter, Target Training International Ltd., Scottsdale,
Arizona, August 1, 2008]