Canadian HR Reporter

CANADIAN HR REPORTER CANADIAN HR REPORTER February 24, 2014 February 24, 2014 22 22 INSIGHT INSIGHT A 'SUPER' EXPENSIVE RESIGNATION NEW YORK — GoDaddy, a com- pany that provides website do- mains, aired a commercial during the recent Super Bowl in which a 36-year-old engineer quit her job. "I quit, Ted... Ciao, baby," said Gwen Dean, from Yonkers, N.Y., in the 30-second spot, addressing her boss while mouthing the words with a blue furry hand puppet in a room full of puppets. GoDaddy put out a blind ad calling for people willing to publicly end their careers and Dean was chosen from 100, according to Reuters. Dean didn't identify her employer or give the full name of her boss in the com- mercial, and she intends to email a formal resignation to her boss, ac- cording to GoDaddy. It may have been the most expensive resigna- tion in history — Super Bowl ads in the United States cost about US$4 million for a 30-second spot. PENSIONS FOR PROSTITUTES AMSTERDAM — Prostitutes in the Netherlands, where prostitution has been legal since 2002, are fi ghting for better pension rights, according to the BBC. Prostitutes are calling for the same pension rights as soccer players, saying that — like athletes — they do "diffi cult, physical work" in their prime years and their careers are short-lived. "It's hard, physical work," said a lawyer representing the women. "You know by 40, you'll be doing something else." In the Nether- lands, soccer players are allowed to save 5,000 euros ($7,500 Cdn) per month tax-free. CREATIVE WAY TO PAY OFF STUDENT LOAN CAMBRIDGE, MASS. — When Ra- chel Kim graduated from Har- vard Business School, she faced the crush of US$60,000 in student loans. To pay back the debt, she decided to sell herself to investors, according to CNN. She asked for US$100,000 in exchange for six per cent of her pre-tax income for the next decade, uploading informa- tion to a website called Upstart. com, including her transcripts, test scores, pay stubs, resumé and a photo. She had the full amount within a month from 36 inves- tors and started her own business. Upstart was created by David Gir- ouard, a former Google exec, after he saw too many young people held back by debt. It uses an algo- rithm to predict a person's income over the next 10 years. YOUR ORIENTATION IS BETTER THAN THIS ROME — File this under "oops." Soccer squad Bologna F.C. sus- pended four employees after they apparently forgot to pick up Ibson, a Brazilian star the team recently signed, at the airport. Ibson ar- rived at the airport in Italy but there was simply nobody there to pick him up, according to Re- uters, and the club's president was furious. EXPATS BEHAVING BADLY SINGAPORE — Here's something not to do while on assignment in a foreign land. A British wealth manager in Singapore is facing death threats, government criti- cism and public anger after his social media posts about mix- ing with "poor people" on public transit and being reunited with his Porsche went viral. e manager, Anton Casey, has hired a public relations fi rm in a bid to fend off the growing outrage over his Face- book posts, according to Reuters. W EIRD ORKPLACE THE DO YOU WANT CRACK WITH THAT? PITTSBURGH — A McDonald's worker has been arrested, accused of H dealing heroin in Happy Meal boxes to drive-thru customers who used the code phrase "I'd like to buy a toy," according to Reuters. Shan- tia Dennis, 26, was charged with drug distribution after undercover offi cers conducted a controlled buy. ey also seized a 50-unit bag of heroin from Dennis, plus 10 units purchased by plainclothes offi cers. It's unclear how long the drug sales had been going on, and there was no indication the franchise owner was aware the drug deals were taking place. e worker was held on US$30,000 bail. Vol. 27 No. 4 – February 24, 2014 PUBLISHED BY PUBLISHED BY Thomson Reuters Canada Ltd. One Corporate Plaza 2075 Kennedy Rd. Toronto, ON M1T 3V4 ©Copyright 2014 by Thomson Reuters Canada Ltd. All rights reserved. CANADIAN HR REPORTER CANADIAN HR REPORTER is published 22 times a year. Publications Mail – Agreement # 40065782 Registration # 9496 – ISSN 0838-228X Director, Carswell Media: Karen Lorimer - (416) 649-9411 karen.lorimer@thomsonreuters.com Publisher and Editor: John Hobel - (416) 298-5197 john.hobel@thomsonreuters.com EDITORIAL EDITORIAL Managing Editor: Todd Humber - (416) 298-5196 todd.humber@thomsonreuters.com Senior Editor: Sarah Dobson - (416) 649-7896 sarah.dobson@thomsonreuters.com News Editor: Liz Bernier - (416) 649-7837 liz.bernier@thomsonreuters.com Employment Law Editor: Jeffrey R. 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Address changes and returns: Send changes and undeliverable Canadian addresses to: SUBSCRIBER SERVICES SUBSCRIBER SERVICES Canadian HR Reporter One Corporate Plaza 2075 Kennedy Rd. Toronto, ON M1T 3V4 ❑ From time to time, we make our subscriber list available to companies and organizations whose products and services we believe may be of interest to you. If you do not want your name to be made available, please check here and return with your mailing label. CUSTOMER SERVICE CUSTOMER SERVICE Call: (416) 609-3800 (Toronto) (800) 387-5164 (outside Toronto) Fax: (416) 298-5082 (Toronto) (877) 750-9041 (outside Toronto) Email: carswell.customerrelations@ thomsonreuters.com LETTERS TO THE EDITOR LETTERS TO THE EDITOR todd.humber@thomsonreuters.com CHRR reserves the right to edit for length and clarity. HR is still under the domination of bean-counters. Positive thoughts alone will not help, reality will. The consumerist model has people wanting more for less and companies are all too willing to oblige, pushing employees to do more with less. This causes many issues that bean-counters have not come to recognize because they do not fit well in the P&L statement — demotivation, work-induced burn- outs, violent episodes, etcetera. When the situation explodes, we might see industrial psychologists with some business knowledge, instead of lawyers or glorified accountants, running HR depart- ments. This is assuming we can sidestep the consultant gadflies who pull out statements like "We have to realign human asset manage- ment to reflect the company strategy, vision and mission" at the drop of a hat. Until then, don't expect the "rah-rah team!" mantra to help much. It'll take a while for things to sink in in the boardrooms. — Peter Karahalios, commenting on Dave Crisp's blog "Let's get posi- tive about human resources" Join the conversation online. Comment freely on any blog on www.hrreporter.com. READER COMMENTS Todd Humber Editor's Notes Credit: Cristina Muraca/Shutterstock Zero gravity with no room for error Zero gravity with no room for error e mission to Mars outlined on the cover of this issue may never actually happen. But we put it on the front page because it's the ultimate recruitment challenge. (Plus, when you were a kid, weren't sto- ries about missions to Mars the type of headlines you expected to see in 2014?) When you're recruiting people for a one-way trip to Mars, you can't aff ord to make a hiring mistake. Because, really, once they get past the moon, it's pretty tough to fi re them — with or without cause. ey're not coming back to pick up a pink slip. So you had better make the right decision upfront, and I think it's very telling what the advisors to the project have suggested as a way to ensure the Mars One proj- ect gets the right talent. Raye Kass, a professor in the department of applied human sciences at Concordia Univer- sity in Montreal, said the criteria around the mission's recruitment is still being developed. But what's clear is that personality is going to trump everything else. Skills, after all, can be taught. But if you're a jerk, you're always going to be a jerk — regardless of your talents. Sure, training can temper that darker side some- what. But it's eventually going to resurface — maybe in the heat of the moment or maybe after a long period of frustration has passed. e most important skill on a mission to Mars is, undoubtedly, teamwork. The first mission is going to cram four people into a spacecraft for the seven-month journey, and since it's undoubt- edly a one-way trip, those people absolutely have to work together and get along. But let's step away from the realm of science fi ction for a few minutes and think about how that scenario compares to today's workplace. We know the Mars One proj- ect simply can't aff ord to hire a bad astronaut. It could be disas- trous if somebody snaps dur- ing the mission — but does that really differ, at all, from your organization? Putting personality ahead of skills Teamwork and collaboration are two of the hottest buzzwords in human resources — frankly, they've occupied that space for as long as I can recall. And yet it's not that easy to fi nd organiza- tions that, when hiring, act as if personality is truly more critical than skills. Every HR professional knows the tremendous hit the bottom line takes when a bad hire comes onboard — if you account for re- cruitment time, training time, lost productivity, morale and damage to reputation, the price tag can be stunning. e consequences may not be as apparent as they are for the Mars One mission, but they're just as real. Sure, you can jettison an em- ployee here on Earth — unless you're talking about a worker with a lot of seniority at a union- ized workplace or a professor with tenure, in which case they might as well be beyond the moon. But why make that hiring mistake in the fi rst place? If you've ever made a bad hire — and most HR professionals and hiring managers have — then no doubt you wished you would have spent a bit more time upfront dur- ing the recruitment process. Per- haps they could have brought in more candidates, contacted just one more reference or conducted a better test. ere's little doubt that every person involved in hiring can learn something from the Mars example. In some situations, skills will be critical — a hospi- tal can't very well teach a doctor medicine, nor can an oil sands producer teach the fi ne art of engineering. But in many roles, skills can be taught on the job. And in an era where teamwork and collabora- tion should be paid more than lip service, perhaps more weight should be placed on a worker's personality than on skills. e question, though, is how that gets measured. There are some decent tools on the mar- ket now, including some basic ones that have proven to be far more accurate than I would have guessed. But to get a level of perfection demanded by the Mars example, we need a bulletproof method of predicting personality — you might call that the holy grail of HR. Whether the mission to Mars ever gets off the ground remains to be seen. But let's keep an eye on the recruitment model they devel- op — it could be out of this world.

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