Talent and HR News Weekly Roundup: What's Been Happening This Week?

It's Friday, and summer is coming to a close. We hope you enjoy this last weekend in August. Before you head out, here's a roundup of some of the week's highlights. There's some news and some other interesting finds sprinkled in our post this week. Enjoy!

1) Chipotle Plans One-Day, 4,000-Worker Hiring Binge from The Wall Street Journal

"Chipotle Mexican Grill Inc. plans to hire 4,000 employees in a single day next month, seeking to counter a tightening market for restaurant labor by dangling the possibility that high-performing recruits could someday earn six-figure salaries and stock in the burrito chain. The planned Sept. 9 hiring binge—which would expand Chipotle’s 59,000-member workforce by nearly 7%—is one of the starkest examples yet of restaurant chains stepping up recruitment efforts as the industry struggles to attract and retain employees. A stronger economy, rising demand for restaurant meals and a string of minimum-wage increases imposed by cities and states have shrunk the pool of available workers."

2) Should Hiring Be Based on Gut – or Data? from Knowledge at Wharton

"How do you decide whether or not to hire someone? Can you predict how successful they would be? How do you know if they’ll stay? How useful is data in human resources as opposed to “trusting your gut”? These are questions a lot of companies would like better answers to, considering the critical importance of people to a business’s success and the high costs associated with recruiting, onboarding, hiring and firing. At a recent Wharton People Analytics Conference, panelists from business and academia talked about some innovative new ways to apply data analytics to predict employee performance. Two panelists from JetBlue — Andrew Biga, the director of talent acquisition and assessment, and Ryan Dullaghan, manager of people assessment and analytics — described how they apply people analytics to hiring flight attendants."

3) Why You Should Ask New Employees What Most Shocks Them from The Wall Street Journal

"Pride can cause you to overlook dysfunction in the company. In addition, a strong culture can make it harder to recruit successfully senior executives. You want someone who fits the culture and will work well with the rest of the leadership team, but you also want someone who brings his or her own strengths and a fresh perspective to the game. That’s essential when your company is growing and your new hire was recruited to supply expertise that your company doesn’t currently have. During a recent discussion about recruiting challenges with Chinese company founders in Shanghai, they mentioned a common tool they use that addresses both challenges described above: They ask each senior recruit for a rapport d’étonnement after a set period, usually 100 days."

4) Want A Tech Career? LinkedIn Finds 12 Eye-Catching Paths from Forbes

"If you’ve got a liberal-arts degree, is there any room for you in the booming tech sector? A few weeks ago, in a Forbes cover story, I argued that the answer is: “Yes!” Now, LinkedIn data scientist Alice Ma has crunched the numbers. In a new blog post, she highlights 12 eye-catching ways that non-technical strivers can be welcomed into the coders’ lair. Mention the name of any fast-growing tech company, particularly glamorous ones like Google and Facebook – and many people conjure up movie-like scenes of well-paid software engineers creating the future on their laptops. This stereotype leaves hardly any room for non-technical people, except maybe as kitchen help. But that’s not the world works, Ma finds."

5) Coursera Pivots to Focus on Job Training from Fast Company

"Back in 2012, we welcomed the dawn of the massive open online course (MOOC) and its promise to democratize learning with open arms. Stories like that of Christos Porios, a 16-year-old living in Alexandroupoli, Greece, who discovered a Stanford computer science class on online platform Coursera and soon mastered machine learning, captured our collective imagination. The learning experience was new, but the brand-name institutions providing the content were familiar, with universities like Harvard, MIT, and Stanford leading the way. Fast-forward to 2015, and the dynamics shaping online learning have changed dramatically. The typical student is not a teenage genius, but a mid-career working professional. And the brand names lending credibility are no longer vaunted educational institutions, but rather private companies on the lookout for new talent."

Lexi Gordon is a Lead Consultant for exaqueo, a workforce consultancy that helps organizations build their cultures, employer brands and talent strategies. Contact exaqueo to learn more about how we can help you build a workforce that’s aligned with your company culture and develop an employer brand that will allow your business to scale and grow the right way.

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