Assessments | The Aristocracy of HR

#ProOpinion: Closed Mouths Stagnate Progress

by Janine Nicole Dennis | May 18, 2015 | Business, Featured, Sponsored Post, Surveys and Assessments

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Campaign/FTC disclosure: I will receive compensation for promoting this campaign. I only work with companies I feel have great products, services and offerings. In accordance with my blog disclosure statement, I will only work with and showcase products and/or companies I believe my readers will benefit from. Pro Opinion has hired me as a brand ambassador for this campaign because of my influence on social media and in business. I am not formally employed by Pro Opinion. I am disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255: Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising.

Working in HR you get your fair share of discussions around the need to have a town hall or to administer a survey. I’m pretty sure most of the workforce is over surveys, because two things happen: 1) They end up answering questions leadership knows the answers to and 2) There is usually no action behind the surveys- making employees’ efforts fruitless. I believe in soliciting feedback from the very people we serve: employees and customers. Despite the stigma around surveys, they still have an important use in many areas of business when utilized appropriately. It is clear that, businesses focused on new ways to serve their customers and employees are poised to see continuous growth in their organizations. It goes back to the old saying:”You can’t manage what you can’t measure.” How can businesses stay ahead-of-the-curve while operating their businesses blindly? The truth is they can’t and many CEO’s are adjusting to this new reality of data-driven decision making.

A 2015 Global CEO survey by PWC found that 60% of CEO’s are concerned about threats to their businesses given the increased transparency around business operations in the past few years. Additionally, they found that 67% of US CEO’s feel their are more opportunities for their business today than three years ago. Even in this instance, you can see the power in surveys and soliciting feedback. We simply have no way of knowing where we have been, where we are currently and where we are heading; unless we ask the those connected to our markets how we are doing.

You can question the efficacy of surveys, but what I do know is closed-mouths stagnate our progress in business. If a product is terrible and doesn’t do what it purports to do- the business never knows they need to make a change unless consumers speak up. If a business process is slowing down the productivity of employees, leadership has no clue and carries on as usual- if none of the employees speak up. One of the ways we get people to let us know where we can improve is via surveys. Per my earlier sentiment, if those customers and/or employees don’t think their voice is important enough to record their thoughts in a survey; nothing will change.

This is why I am so happy to be working with ProOpinion as a brand ambassador. ProOpinion allows business professionals to make data-driven decisions that will drive results. Essentially, they are a survey partner for businesses that need to get feedback on their products or market behavior from professionals like you and I. I just completed a survey today about business communications, the providers I use and why I use who I do for my communications needs. I have had so many trials and tribulations with phone and internet providers that I was actually happy to provide some feedback on my experiences. Will my feedback change certain providers behaviors? I certainly hope so. However, I can rest easy knowing I didn’t sit in silence when my voice and opinion could have made all the difference.

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I need a favor from you. You all are professional rockstars and have shown up for me in the past. Sign up for ProOpinion here. It is free and will enable you to have input into some of businesses most pressing concerns. Additionally, you have the ability to earn rewards like Amazon.com Gift Cards and gift cards from many other retail outlets. In addition, you will have access to their infographic vault and blog filled with timely business information and metrics. Your initial profile creation will be around 20-25 minutes, but that is just so they are clear on what surveys to send you. Surveys come straight to your email inbox specifying the time it will take to complete it and the amount of reward points you will earn for your efforts.

Join me on ProOpinion and start allowing your voice to have an impact on business while earning great rewards. After all, it isn’t often that you get so much for free. The only thing that isn’t free is your time, but what better way to spend a few minutes than to chime in about topics that are important to you. Check it out you won’t be disappointed.

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“I am Revolutionizing HR”- The One-Page Proposal

by Janine Nicole Dennis | Sep 8, 2014 | Business, Featured, Guest Post, HR Innovation, HR Technology, HR Technology Trends and Tips, Life

In 2002, Patrick G. Riley published “The One-Page Proposal” that became a bestselling self-help book in North America, China, Japan, and Korea, which described how the author succeeded in helping businesses all around the world using one-page proposals. In 2011, Patrick G. Riley and Joanna Weidenmiller co-founded 1-Page. The co-founders wanted to take the successful approach and founding principles of the book, and leverage technology to tackle the largest demographic with the biggest communication problem: companies and job seekers.

For every job post it is reported that companies receive an average of 250 resumes, with leading brands receiving up to several thousands of resumes every week. The problem goes beyond quantity, as the content received within a resumes doesn’t provide any indication on the future performances, fit and motivation of a candidate. HR departments and hiring managers need a new system of engagement to identify top candidates before the interview, enabling job seekers to pitch their value instead of simply providing a list of their past accomplishments.

1-Page provides the Challenge-based Assessment Platform that gamifies hiring, giving recruiters the access to predictive data for enhanced decision-making on talent. With 1-Page, companies engage candidates to compete for jobs based on their ability to solve real-time business challenges, to achieve company’s strategic objectives. Candidates’ ability to pitch their value to the company for that specific role, and propose their solution on a 1-Page Job Proposal, is at the core of the process.

Some of the largest US and global companies like First Republic Bank, BevMO!, UST Global, Orange, rely on the platform for:

Hiring talent
Engage passive candidates
Internal promotion
Open- source innovation

The platform helps the talent acquisition team to turn job descriptions into real-time business challenges that are unique and specific to the role, and share them through their ATS, customized email invitations, referral lists, and social media. Companies can track in real time the status of candidate’s progression, and leverage collaborative and automated proposal scoring (powered by Natural Language Processing technologies) to identify the best. Thanks to the innovative approach to hiring, the technology behind the scoring model, the great candidate experience delivered, and the results achieved by their enterprise clients, 1-Page has been awarded as one of the top three HR technologies in the US (HRO Today, iTalent 2014). 1-Page has also been endorsed by some of the leading experts in the field of HR technologies:

– “While I always ask candidates to describe how they’d solve a job-related project as part of the assessment, the folks at 1-Page.com have taken this idea a few steps further … candidates submit a one-page proposal summarizing how they’d handle some challenge likely to be faced on the job.”- Lou Adler, Best-selling author and CEO of The Adler Group.

– “The idea of a company engaging with a candidate through evidence of what he or she could do, rather than for what they have done in the past, is a very bright light in recruiting.” –Bill Kutik, Founder of the HR-Tech Conference, on HRE Online.

1-Page’s clients have been able to lower cost per hire by 70%, increase retention by 75% and reduce time to hire from an average of 13 to 4 weeks. With 1-Page, companies have significantly increased the quality of interviews and hires, while delivering the greatest candidate experience.

Author Biography

Joanna Weidenmiller is CEO and Co-founder of 1-Page, the next generation hiring solution that revolutionizes talent acquisition.
Successful and active woman in tech, prior to launching 1-Page Joanna was CEO and Founder of Performance Advertising, responsible for building one of the US leading outsourced direct sales and marketing firms for two Fortune 500 companies, with a successful exit in 2007. Joanna moved back to the US after spending 5 years in China where she developed and led technologies in the mobile and e-commerce fields. On top of building 1-Page, Joanna most recently served as Managing Partner for Hubert Burda Media (one of the largest magazine and digital publishers in the world) in China, where she headed the expansion and led all strategic operations. Joanna earned her BA degree in Foreign Affairs from the University of Virginia where she was a Full Scholarship athlete and National rower. Joanna was recruited to the FBI out of college, where she trained police in the Middle East.

Currently she lives in San Francisco, CA.