Well, it’s officially a trend: Employers are increasingly using personality tests for hiring decisions.
At least according to a recent The New York Times article which describes this as a burgeoning $2 billion industry.
While not new, personality tests are finding new traction as employers hire for remote work positions that have a different skill
Over the weekend, The New York Times ran a surprising (at least to me) article about how Idaho has implemented a legal framework that gives employers a great deal of flexibility in an area getting a good deal more publicity of late: Non-compete agreements. (H/T to a post by Suzanne Lucas in Inc. too.)
Back in May, I talked about how data privacy was becoming a bigger issue for companies. Included in that, is the notion that human resources will play a key role in protecting information.
Today comes work of a massive coordinated effort by Chinese hackers to seek personal information on tens of thousands of government workers.
The New York Times this morning has an article that suggests that non-compete agreements are being used increasingly in a broader array of jobs.
His evidence? Well, the article doesn’t cite that.
Though, to the reporter’s credit, in noting the discussion going on in Massachusetts over legislation
Over the last few weeks, I’ve been seeing more tweets from human resources types and mainstream reporters using the phrase “wage theft”. Two recent examples? William Tincup (who runs the popular online DriveThruHR show that I appeared on a while ago) recently tweeted:
RT Wage Theft Another Assault on Workers’ Compensation http://t.co/iXmbHnASUL @jongelman
— William Tincup, SPHR (@williamtincup) April 23, 2014
And The New York Times labor reporter, Steven Greenhouse yesterday tweeted:
NYT Editorial: Wage Theft Across the Board–Sorry to say, wage theft hits low-wage & middle-class workers alike. http://t.co/4xnMqgtyEr
— Steven Greenhouse (@greenhousenyt) April 22, 2014
Yes, even The New York Times Editorial Board is beginning to use the term with surprising carelessness suggesting “law enforcement officials” (a term typically reserved for police officers, not Department of Labor officials) routinely use it.
It’s time for employers to beware this phrase and fight its usage because, in my view, it’s really an attempt to turn something often unintentional, into something nefarious and intentional.
Or as Mandy Patinkin’s character in The Princess Bride said: You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
What DO I mean? Well, think of the word, “theft” and most of us think of the intentional taking of something that belongs to someone else. Like your jewelry, or your iPhone. Even your company’s trade secrets.Continue Reading “Wage Theft”: The Trendy Phrase That May Not Mean What You Think It Means
For those of us that have been practicing for a while, it had seemed that the days of the big settlements for race discrimination cases were behind us.
After all, when the Coca-Cola and Texaco settlements were announced back in the late 1990s and 2000, many companies took notice.
But the news today is
In Tuesday’s The New York Times, an article (that, as of Monday evening was one of the lead pieces on the NYTimes.com website) argues that age discrimination continues to exist in society and that it is hitting the baby boomers particularly hard. (Indeed, the article’s tag is “for-laid-off-older-workers-age-bias-is-pervasive”.)
I do not challenge the assertion
Yesterday, The New York Times — about a gazillion years after this blog and other employment law blogs talked about it ad nauseum — wrote their definitive piece entitled on how “federal regulators” are “ordering employers to scale back policies that limit what employees can say online.”
The headline? “Even If It Enrages Your Boss, Social Net Speech Is Protected.”
Are you scared yet? Hopefully not, because if you’ve been following this blog at all, you know that such pronouncements are misguided and overblown.
That’s not to say that you shouldn’t review your policies to make sure that they are appropriately tailored. And that’s not to say that you shouldn’t exercise caution before firing an employee who just said something about someone at work on Facebook.
But, it is far past the time when we should treat each pronouncement or each article on social media as this huge development that requires employers to change everything time and again.
Social media — like the telephone, fax machine or e-mail before it — is now just another communications tool that is here to stay in one form or another. If you don’t get it yet or look at those who use it with disdain, you’re simply missing out on a tool that can be useful to your employees and to you. The one billion people who use Facebook aren’t suddenly going to wake up tomorrow and decide that its not useful.
Let me give you a real-world example outside the workplace and how I’m convinced that social media is for everyone now.Continue Reading The Last Post About Social Media & Employment Law Ever. (Maybe.) (Not Really.)
Back in 2010, at the same time the U.S. Department of Labor was making a big publicity push on its interpretation of rules regarding unpaid interns, the New York Times ran piece noting how employers were skirting the law when it came to internships:
The Labor Department says it is cracking down on firms that
The New York Times loves spotting trends. Here’s the latest: Workplaces are moving from smoke-free to "smoker-free" places, particularly in the health care arena.
I hate to break it to The New York Times, but this is far from new. Indeed, nearly three years ago, I blogged about it, noting "there’s been a lot