Double the Trouble, Double the Pain

Here are a couple updates on two recent rants - performance appraisals and online recruiting practices:

Regina, over at HR's Brand New Experience, offers this great example of good thinking that goes terribly wrong in the execution relating to online recruiting and brand alignment. The post is called Cool Job - Director Employee Brand Engagement. Here's a great slice of Regina's post:

I wonder if potential candidates have the patience and wherewithal to cut and paste their resumes into the black hole and all the meanwhile destroying their own personal brand by doing such a thing… So I thought - any smart candidate would go directly to website and apply there or find a name, etc.   Unfortunately, I actually couldn’t get the careers section of Enterprise website to work.  Ironically, their own employer brand at risk, yet again!!

This job sounds like it could be a good job but the process already has me baffled. It leads me to question how a company claiming to engage employees can do it when they themselves deliver a very questionable recruiting touchpoint and experience.  DETAILS MATTER!!

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On to my favorite topic.....

Talk about double the pain! This article from Management Issues. called Appraisals on the Increase, makes me want to scream. Apparently many companies are so fond of their performance appraisal system, they are subjecting everyone to twice as many reviews per year. Here is a disappointing quote:

Although the link between appraisals and pay is rarely a major reason for setting up an appraisal scheme, half the organisations surveyed use the results to help decide pay rises and almost a third to determine bonuses.

Ugh!

1. There is no good major reason to set up an appraisal scheme (perfect word, by the way).
2. Connect pay raise decisions to the appraisal and you might as well hire robots.

Adrian, over at the Coyote Within has taken up the cause and is doing a series of posts trying to defend the reasons for appraisals. So far, performance appraisals are getting a "does not meet requirements" rating from Adrian. Here's the conclusion from post #1.

Clearly, the argument that performance appraisals accurately tell employees about their performance over the previous period is untenable. Performance varies all the time. If the purpose of feedback is to aid development, the only sound practice is to give it immediately after each event, when it's most likely to be accurate. Besides, with all the circumstances fresh in everyone's minds, it's much more likely lessons can be learned and suitable coaching give. Doing anything else is a waste of time and a gross distortion of reality.