And now comes a story out of an Ohio community about a Deputy Sheriff walking the halls of an elementary, junior high and high school, carrying his 40 caliber handgun and assisting in maintaining order. One slight problem, he was not a sheriff’s deputy!
Stan Donaldson, a reporter for the Cleveland Plain Dealer states that the suspect, a 21 year old security guard for a local mall, somehow obtained a deputy’s uniform and interacted with students and staff while roaming the halls.
The school district is, according to the article, working with the local police department to reevaluate it’s safety plan. According to Ken Trump, a national school safety expert quoted in the article, there have been only a handful of this type of incident reported. Indeed,and quite fortunately, the last time an event of this sort took place was in New Mexico in February of 2007. In that instance a sexual predator entered school grounds impersonating an officer and carrying a 6 inch folding knife. Thanks to the actions of the schools staff, who reported what they thought was suspicious behavior,specifically his appearance at all three schools in the same day, the suspect was apprehended and charged with impersonating an officer, possession of a deadly weapon and criminal trespassing. Apparently the suspect walked into a classroom and when the teacher asked if she could help him, he stated that he had the wrong classroom and walked out. One student became alarmed when he/she overheard him say that he would be back. The suspect had previously attended the high school in 2006, according to the Akron Suburbanite Newspaper.

Article written by Jack Thomas

Third in a series of four articles by Jack Thomas Mr. Thomas is a Manager for a National Company, Certified Facilitator for Advanced Management, and a Consultant to other Agencies.

We are finally down to the application itself. (Don’t breathe a sigh of relief yet!) This is supposedly the easy part after sweating out the resume. After all, the resume, if you did it correctly, was labor intensive, and time consuming. (Please tell me you devoted a lot of effort to your resume.)

Great! Now let’s discuss the difference between a good application and a poor one. Many people have the misconception that because the application is usually strictly formatted, there can’t be much difference among them. This is simply not true. You may notice a parallel between the interview process and the application itself. Good! You should notice! Here’s the scoop: During many discussions with other managers and business owners,we talk about the things that are humorous or just ridiculous that people do on their applications. Here are the top few: ( Followed by and explanation of how they hurt your chances, no extra charge for this info!.) Read more…

In the following article, a city has finally decided that it might be a good idea to conduct background checks on all new hires, because of the 12 or so employees that have arrest records, and of those individuals, half were convicted. In this day with information so readily available it is just plain negligence not to conduct criminal background checks. Read more…

There are several issues that I have with this article, because while it is a factual statement that background checks aren’t foolproof, there is a better method of conducting them. I really do not think that everything is being done to protect the children, if they are not exhausting all avenues of background checks, instead of relying on a cursory check at the beginning of their employment. There is a new trend out there, called progressive screening and has the same methodology as random drug screening. This could be a suggestion to the school district. Read more…

This is the second article in a series by our Guest Blogger Jack Thomas.

In the first of this series, I asked you to keep separate notes on each job or educational experience. Now you’ll find out why. Whether you decide to proceed with the resume yourself, or if you have to decided to have someone else do it for you, I want you to follow the same instructions. Part of selling yourself is to see things in a bigger picture frame of mind. You need to really focus on each experience and describe in detail, or at least expound on what the experience is. If you do it yourself, you should write it out first. If you’re having someone else do it, be sure you can at least explain it to them for the purposes of putting it in writing. Read more…

This article comes to us from our guest blogger Jack Thomas. Mr. Thomas is a Manager for a National Company, Certified Facilitator for Advanced Management, and a Consultant to other Agencies.

With all the changes in the way people communicate, we knew it was just a matter of time before the face to face applying for a job would become a thing of the past. There are a few exceptions out there, but far and large, more and more companies are using electronic media to at least start the process. So, how does this pertain to you? This is the first in a series of articles about how to address the process. Over the next few days I hope to share enough with you to make the process less cumbersome and more productive.  Let’s get started. Read more…

California legislature is dangerously close to passing a law that changes the use of pre employment credit reports by employers. 

The current law allows for the usage if it is substantially job related.  Under the reason of substantially job related, the current reasons are as follows:

• The position is a highly compensated or managerial one
• The position is one in which there is access to customer or employee personal or financial information.
• The position involves fiduciary responsibility or the handling or managing of money or requires travel.

The newly proposed law would eliminate the second two reasons, thus prohibiting an employer from pulling consumer credit reports for these types of positions.  We urge you to contact your state senator if you have business, employees or potential applicants in the State of California.  Below is a link to do so:

http://napbs.com/members_rep_letters.php

This article is a very scary reminder that the so-called statewide criminal databases are enough of a check for employment purposes. Far too often, employers rely on these “statewide” systems to make important hiring decisions and are not aware of the huge holes left in the system. Read more…

This article comes to us from our guest blogger Jack Thomas a HR manger from a large multi-national corporation.

There are a lot of buzz words floating around in business these days. Mentoring, Coaching, Paradigms, Teamwork, etc… But I’d like to give you the scoop on really impressing someone who is interviewing you for a position. I like to call it the New Buzzword- WORK ETHIC.

I’ve interviewed numerous people for positions and fellow colleagues ask me what it is that impresses me the most from applicants. It is too easy to ask people to tell if they’re a team player or if they’re coachable. There is really no way to verify the answer. The applicant can make up just about anything and you either believe them or you don’t. There’s also a lot of talk about generation X or generation Y personalities and how they determine how people will fit into the workforce.

While all of these have merit, the bottom line is this: A person has to be willing  to come to work, on time, do the job you’ve requested and trained them for, and help the company produce a profit from the work being done. That’s as simple as I can break it down. So when I’m interviewing someone, or if you are the person doing the interview, you want to find out what their work ethic is. What those in Human Resources are finding across the country is this- All the training and coaching mean nothing if you can’t retain people that won’t come to work!

A good work ethic, or lack thereof, also has great economic ramifications. Every time  anew person is hired, the employer assumes costs related to training, orientation, and a learning curve while the person becomes acclimated to their job. Every time someone fails to live up to the expectations, the process must repeat itself, costing the employer time and considerable resources. Think about it. Have you ever heard someone say of an employee, “They do a great job-when they’re here.” Then why are they still there? In these economic times, there are too many people who are willing to come to work to compromise and retain those who are not.

It is in many cases, however tough to get rid of people once they have their “foot in the door.” Therefore, it is imperative to select the right person in the first place. I’d like to give you some tips to assist in assessing someone’s work ethic, including your own. Here are some sample questions-

1.) Can you give me an example of when you went beyond the scope of your responsibility to either assist a customer or complete a task? Who can verify this?

2.) I want you to give me an example of what you consider to be good attendance.( Upon responding, ask the follow-up)- Does your work record reflect that you have good attendance following the guidelines you just described for me?

3.) Use an example- Employee A is an outstanding worker, but has a tendency to be late 2 or three times a week. Employee B is steady, but not outstanding, but is always prompt and pays attention to detail. Which employee would you describe yourself as? Give me specific examples from your previous employment that could verify this. (What you really want of course is the combination of both. The person who is outstanding AND has a good attendance record.)

4.) I’ve assigned a task to you that has a 2 week deadline. At the end of week one, you realize you may not get the job done in time. What would you do? ( This one allows them to be creative, and although you may not be able to verify the answer,a person’s true work ethic is exposed under pressure. If they can’t come up with a good answer now, they won’t when it comes to crunch time either.)

5.) Instead of asking if they are trainable, or coachable, ask them to describe a time when they were working and knew nothing about the task assigned. Have them tell you how they learned what to do and how the contributed to the success of the task.( This will encourage them to speak not only of how they were trained, and if it was effective, it also gives insight into how hard they tried themselves to learn. It may also bring out some personalities that show drive and initiative, which are things that are near impossible to teach!

I hope you’re getting the idea. WORK ETHIC involves the total scope of how someone views their employment and  responsibility to the task at hand. It relieves the pressure of having to find out,mostly too late, if the person selected really can fit into the position being offered. Of course use a quality pre-employment screening service so that nothing slips through the cracks, and to ensure there is not other reasons to pass on the hiring of the applicant. If you would like to read more tips about the hiring and interview processes, check out the free advice at http://www.safeemployer.com

The author of this article sites a problem with retention in the call center industry cites a FurstPerson white paper discusses methods of raising the retention rate for this industry. One the ideas is to conduct pre employment screening and offer various pre employment screening tools for a call center to employ. A pre employment screening program can give you a better understanding of who you are hiring. Read more…