Where should Michigan employers go on domestic partner benefits? If the latest statewide poll results are an indicator of where Michiganders stand on the question of same-sex marriage, many Michigan private-sector employers will feel the need to take a fresh, hard look at whether or not they should be offering domestic partner benefits to their unmarried employees.
Michigan, like many states, depends on new college graduates to bring their learning and fresh ideas into the workforce to sustain and hopefully grow their state’s economy. Just like Human Resources professionals on the ground, many states find it difficult to retain some of their talent. Michigan has been suffering from a widely-perceived “brain drain” for several years now, although it is certainly not the only state afflicted with the problem.
Under Michigan law, employers cannot discriminate against people on the basis of weight, but this discrimination appears rampant in the U.S. According to studies at the Yale Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity, up to 50% of all Americans are considered overweight. Being overweight is linked to coronary heart disease, stroke, diabetes, and some types of cancer and is estimated to cause 310,000 - 580,000 deaths and cost $71 billion annually in health care. According to the center, if current trends continue, every person in the U.S. will be obese by 2230. Not good news.
The war for talent in the U.S. is a good problem for recruiters to have. According to Bureau of Labor Statistics, the U.S. unemployment rate in 2012 for those with Bachelor’s degrees is 4%. Education in the U.S. has value; even high school graduates have seen their unemployment rate go down
A new research report on the Michigan employment market identifies some of the talent recruitment challenges employers in the state will face in the mid- to long-term future. Business Leaders for Michigan (BLM) is a roundtable group of senior executives from the state’s largest employers and largest educational institutions. The group released a report, Business Leaders’ Insights: Michigan’s Workforce Strengths and Challenges, on March 20. The report focuses on how many students the state’s educational institutions are preparing for the jobs that Michigan employers have open now and those they will have open in the future.
Last week an article appeared in The New York Times giving a different take on why so many open positions are going unfilled these days despite record numbers of candidates vying for them.
A newly-published survey says that about half of new hires experience “buyer’s remorse” on the job. The same survey says that staffing directors know their selection systems produce wrong hires, and they even believe they know why they produce wrong hires. But they insist their selection systems are strong. They do so even as the way they evaluate those systems exposes a glaring disconnect between how they should be selecting new hires and how they actually are selecting them.
Some companies, like large consulting firm McKinsey & Co., are reaching out to mothers who left the workforce to start families years ago and may now be ready to come back.
When writing a job posting, it is important to identify the basic qualifications correctly; otherwise, any non-hiring could be considered discriminatory. Recruiters many times experience that pain when hiring. Hiring managers either don’t give important information up front, or they decide they want to change the posting midstream. At that point, the wrong actions can lead to EEOC charges.
Though potentially buried in the mountain of political rhetoric surrounding immigration reform, higher visa limits for highly skilled workers may also come out of this attempt at broad immigration overhaul. And employers are taking notice.