6 Ways to Save Time Money Managing Your Payroll

6 Ways to Save Time Money Managing Your Payroll While the majority of employees count down the days until their next payday, this isnt quite the case for HR professionals unfortunately. For them the very thought of payday approaching brings about  quite different emotions and what can be a very lengthy and frustrating process fills them with dread. In fact, 25% of payroll leaders spend more than 50% of their time on day-to-day payroll activities, so theres no wonder its not exactly their favourite task. Managing the payroll doesnt have to be such a nightmare, however, and a lot of time and money could be saved if a few changes are made. Namely have put together some of their top tips for making your Payroll process more efficient. Heres what they recommend: How can you save time on payroll? 1) Switch to salaried positions Employees with fixed pay save a lot of time calculating hours worked, overtime and time off. 2) Give employees unlimited holiday   Not only will it make employees happy, but giving them unlimited PTO  will reduce the number of pay-codes you have to deal with. 3) Make direct debit compulsory   88% of employees are paid by direct debit, which payroll professionals feel helps them to meet their payroll needs. 4) Offer prepaid FSA cards With and FSA card, employees are more likely to spend pre-tax dollars which lowers their taxable income meaning youll spend less on Social Security payments. 5) Automate tax filings   1 in 5 people handling payroll taxes  internally report spending more than 6 hours a month on the task. 27% of small businesses report spending more than $10,000 on the admin of federal tax. 6) Move payroll to the cloud   45% of companies plan to move payroll to the cloud in the next 2-3 years. Doing so helps to eliminate manual work and makes it possible to integrate with other HR software. [Image Credit: Shutterstock]

Recruit Like a Marketer, Never Stop Looking for Candidates

Recruit Like a Marketer, Never Stop Looking for Candidates One of the biggest challenges companies have when they recruit is  getting  enough candidates to choose from. In addition, they also struggle to attract the correct sort of candidate. The flow on effect of this is feeling forced to  spend significant amounts of money advertising jobs and engaging recruitment agencies, which can result in lost productivity. Ask a business development person or marketing professional when they start looking for their next deal or customer. The answer will be that they never stop looking. So why do companies not look for employees until they have an urgent requirement! Never stop recruiting The act of recruiting a person often starts with the financial approval of a particular position. If  we take a leaf out of a sales/marketing persons book, then the act of recruiting would never end and you would always be looking for your next employee. This begs the question, what if you are not recruiting? Employer branding for sustainability To ensure sustainability in your recruitment efforts, you need people to learn  what a career with your company actually looks like.  One of the greatest  costs for a talent acquisition team often comes from employment advertising or using recruitment agencies. The challenge here is that both of these actions are often reactive; you only use them when you have an immediate need and neither support your  employer brand ventures. Sure, they promote your jobs, but  what about your reputation as an employer? Building a reputation or employer brand takes effort. The  right behaviours and cultures within your organisation have to exist, and you then  need to spread the message about what a caree rwith your company entails. You can’t build a reputation on what you are going to do. Henry Ford To build an employer brand you cannot just shout from the rooftops when you desperately need to recruit people. You need to tell the story of your business and if your story is genuine, people will start to believe your story and will follow your business. Your followers become your talent pools, your talent pools become your employees. Your future employees will have understood the culture and behaviours of your business long before they start and will often stay for longer than someone who had not experienced your brand beforehand. The best part is, promoting your employer brand can be extremely cost efficient, if not free! Its all about content In everyday business, there is a huge number of opportunities for you to create engaging stories about your employees, careers and successes. Here are a few ideas: Employee profiles A day in the life of CEO’s blog Live speaking events Social responsibility efforts Graduate program stories Employee career stories Now we just need some channels to promote our stories: Social media Social networks like Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter are by far the biggest but be careful not to intrude on peoples personal space. Many people see Facebook as a personal social network and will be reluctant to engage with their current employer, never mind a potential future employer. Talk to your employees, find out which networks they use and understand how they could be engaged and which networks would be suitable/unsuitable. Offline media Offline media like newspapers and TV are much more likely to pick up on good news stories like contract awards, the creation of new jobs and social responsibility efforts. Consider submitting articles to local newspapers and your local chamber of commerce to begin with. Email campaign With a few well-placed calls to action in your content, you can grow an email list of potential future employees. Once you have this you can engage them with content which will help the learn about your company values, culture and behaviours along with promoting your jobs. Future talent Long term success means you need great talent now and in the future. To ensure you have great talent in the future you need to start engaging tomorrows talent today. Consider engaging with university students and possibly even younger school kids, there are lots of opportunities to do so if you look for them. Programmes like Developing the Young Workforce are great ways to engage the next generation of the workforce. People who WANT to work for you By engaging your talent pools you are ensuring that in the future you will be able to recruit the people you need to continue your businesses a success. Attracting people into your ATS or talent pools is not enough, you need to engage them. By engaging with your talent pool you will help them WANT to work with your company instead of just applying for a new job.

Female Inclusivity in the Tech World

Female Inclusivity in the Tech World With talks of female representation becoming increasingly popular in public arenas, you may have noticed a lot of pushback. This rarely comes in the (public) form of “that’s a man’s job!” nowadays, but more likely disguises its prejudice with sayings like “there aren’t any women who can do the job,” or “women just aren’t interested in this line of work.” We know that neither of those statements are valid, however. In fact, there’s a pretty high number of women elsewhere in the world involved in tech. So this begs the question â€" how do we get to a point where the tech industry is more inclusive? Here are some ways this may be possible. Close the Tech Skills Gap Technology isn’t an option now, it’s a necessity. And if you’re not aware, the technology skills gap is growing â€" i.e. we are not teaching or embracing new technology as it becomes vital to our operations. One way to create an inclusive environment is to simply give young women the tools to operate efficiently in the world that they wish to inhabit. This can start in schools. Teaching children â€" male and female â€" how to use, fix, and troubleshoot technology is a must. Updating curriculums on a semi-regular basis to meet such changes can also implore children to decide for themselves whether the tech world is what they want to be a part of someday. Once young girls have been given the proper tools to pursue a career in technology, there can be no argument that states they simply “cannot do the job.” Of course, this doesn’t mean you only focus on the technical side of the classroom â€" there has to be a good balance. You can also take this to the workplace, offering training for those who want to learn new skills within the tech sector. Internal classes or time spent to teach identifying tech problems, data management, and troubleshooting to employees, for instance, could open up more opportunities for a lot of women in your workplace. Make Technology Accessible Of course, for technology to be learned, it must be accessible. In the workplace, training isn’t enough without the proper tools and equipment. The aforementioned troubleshooting classes will be benefited with teaching software to learn on, programs to practice tech skills with, and the like. Newly learned skills and accessible training only go as far as an employee is able to do them. However if we focus on inclusivity early on in young women’s lives, we again must go to the classroom. In the digital age it’s pretty vital that students have access to the internet and computers to use in some form during their educational experience. While many schools are offering this to children, parents at home may want to employ free software that teaches typing skills. Making sure their young girls are able to use the computer and the internet responsibly is a start in the right direction. Again, technology is a must in today’s culture.   So the first step to inclusivity is making sure women have the same opportunities that men do. Encourage It! Encouragement is key to inclusivity in the workplace and the tech field. It’s vital to both encourage employers to keep their minds open to tech-savvy females and encourage females to go into these fields if they seem to take a liking to it. Again, the gender differences people like to talk about aren’t biological, they’re cultural. And so we must start by changing the culture. It’s important as well to make sure women are present in all decision-making. Ways  to encourage more diversity in your workplace include: Including females on conference panels. Assuring that everyone’s ideas are heard. Utilizing everyone’s unique skills. Encouraging women to speak up when they have objections, questions, and solutions to workplace problems. One last thing: there are particular organizations that work for more inclusivity in the tech world that may be worth partnering with. Huffington Post recently posted an article about five of these groups that are killing it right now and doing important work in this field. If you’re a male business owner, then this may be useful to you in creating a truly inclusive work environment. Remember, there’s a difference between inclusivity and token diversity. Choose the former. How do you propose we encourage and help women be more represented in the American tech sector? Let us know in the comments below! This guest post was authored by Brooke Faulkner Brooke  Faulkner is a writer, mom and adventurer in the Pacific Northwest.  She spends her days pondering what makes a good leader.   And then dreaming up ways to teach these virtues to her sons, without getting groans and eye rolls in response.

Eat Like A Local The Five Greatest Not-So-Famous Local Cuisine

Eat Like A Local The Five Greatest Not-So-Famous Local Cuisine Any traveller knows that the most important â€" and most conflicting â€" part of visiting any new city is savoring the local cuisine. Sometimes you’ll ask about a certain food and the locals’ eyebrows rise, having detected a tourist in their midst. The first rule of any proper traveller is “When in Rome, do as the Romans do.” This means that you should seek out not only the obvious choices, like cheesesteaks in Philadelphia or chowder in San Francisco, but also find the fare which the locals love and appreciate. Eating like a local helps you appreciate local culture, so step away from the easy and obvious, and enjoy some of these lesser-known local cuisine  favorites. Buffalo Obviously, the first local cuisine  that comes to mind associated with Buffalo, New York, is the crispy, saucy chicken wing. We believe these wings are perfect the way they are, so we’ll make them the exception to the “no tourist food” rule. If you’re in Buffalo, hunt down some wings. But the second-most beloved original buffalo fare is doubtlessly Sponge Candy. Buffalo’s signature confection is a light combination of caramelized spun sugar and chocolate with a crisp, airy texture and molasses-like flavor.  Watson’s Chocolates has been making sponge candy for three generations, and still produces the best sponge candy â€" and sponge candy ice cream â€" worldwide. Disclaimer: Portions of this article were made possible  by Visit Buffalo-Niagara. All opinions are those of the author.  For more information, see Ms. Career Girl’s  disclosure policy. photo credit: slgckgc via photopin cc photo credit: Chinkerfly via photopin cc

My Top 10 Posts on LinkedIn for Personal Branding and Executive Job Search - Executive Career Brandâ„¢

My Top 10 Posts on for Personal Branding and Executive Job Search

What Is Powerfully Positive Thought Leadership To You - Kathy Caprino

What Is Powerfully Positive Thought Leadership To You Im active on LinkedIn group discussions, and I find that sharing ideas, dialogue and conversation there is a powerfully enriching experience because of the diversity of thought that LinkedIn members offer. With 330+ million members, LinkedIn gives us all a global worldview that opens our eyes, minds and hearts to different ways to understand the world and our lives. Just today, an individual asked a question in one of my discussions that made me stop in my tracks.   He asked, What IS thought leadership? The term thought leadership is bantered around a million times a day online, but do we all know what we mean by it? Ive been honored and thrilled to highlight the work of what I believe are top thought leaders in our world today, through my various blogs on Forbes, Huffington Post, LinkedIn, and this blog.   But I realized this morning that Ive never sat down and actually defined for myself what I believe great thought leadership is, and what I see as the highest form of it.   So I took a stab. Heres my definition of the highest version of a thought leader: Thought leaders are informed opinion leaders and go-to experts in their field of expertise. Their perspectives, work and ideas move the understanding, implications and applications of their topic forward. They are trusted sources who with integrity, authenticity and passion move, educate, enliven and inspire people with innovative ideas that motivate positive change.   They help turn ideas into reality, and have done the work to develop a teachable point of view that shares with others how to replicate their success. They are motivated not by being right but by helping and being of service. I believe that the best thought leaders also possess the 9 core traits of people who positively impact the world: 9 Core Traits of People Who Positively Impact the World from Kathy Caprino But Im interested in your interpretations and definitions of a thought leader.   How would you describe the best of the best thought leaders in the world? What do they do, inspire, and create for us? How do they impact the world in a positive way? Please share your definitions below! I know that putting a stake in the ground and defining the best thought leadership helps me create a vision for what I want to strive to offer and become. How about you? (For more about developing your own authentic thought leadership, visit my new coaching program Build Your Authentic Thought Leadership.)

Writing a Science Resume is Not Hard If You Follow These Tips

Writing a Science Resume is Not Hard If You Follow These TipsWriting a science resume is not a difficult task if you follow the tips given in this article. If you follow all these tips, you will be able to write a science resume that is impressive and effective.Writing science resumes is an important task as this is the first step to get admission in various programs and universities. Though many people believe that resumes are not useful to get admission in a particular college or university, many people also believe that they are important. This is because science is the area where a person can make outstanding contributions and be an asset to the society.Though it is true that a person cannot afford to be poor at a particular academic level, the fact still remains that a person who excels in one area in his/her life can be a winner of the professional career. The same holds true for the science field as well.A person who excels in one science can be an asset to the entire field. T herefore, one must first prepare a sample resume and draft it accordingly. Though it is necessary to know which kind of science you have studied, it is equally important to be aware of which fields you have studied before applying for a particular job.Science also demands that the person to have a background in some form of research or mathematics. Though it is difficult to find any one in the society who has no background in mathematics, it is also important to choose a program that has a strong mathematics component.Although science majors usually study subjects like physics, chemistry, biology, biology and mathematics, the competition level is such that an individual can be qualified for any one of them. However, it is always advisable to apply for a specific major in order to ensure that your chances of getting accepted are better. For instance, if you have completed a degree in biology, it is advisable to try to get admission in a field that is related to the study of zoology.T here are several areas of the study, where a person who has some degree in the particular profession can be of great use. For instance, an individual who has a degree in microbiology can be very useful in a laboratory environment. Similarly, one who has a degree in general microbiology can be helpful when working with pharmaceutical companies.As mentioned earlier, writing a science resume can take you through the whole process of getting admission. There are various experts available who can guide you through the whole process of writing a science resume. So, it is always wise to employ the services of a reputable resume writing service.