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Lance Haun

Lance Haun is Contributing Editor for TLNT and Community Director for ERE.net, a sister website to TLNT.com. His background includes seven years as a human resources generalist, recruiter, HR manager, and HR blogger. You can follow him on Twitter at http://twitter.com/thelance.

Articles by Lance Haun

HR News & Trends, Talent Management

Super Bowl Hangover? Yes, Employees May Be Less Productive on Monday

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If you’re in the U.S., this coming Sunday may as well be a national holiday. We’ll gather with friends and family, eat and drink too much, and watch football.

It may sound a lot like Thanksgiving, but the difference between that and the Super Bowl is that almost all of us have to go into work the next day.

I know, these are the choices we make. Certainly people can choose not to watch the Super Bowl (and many don’t). What I’m asking is that we stop wringing our hands over the lost productivity next Monday, and instead, start thinking about ways to handle it.

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TLNT Radio

Money Can’t Buy You Love … Or Change Your Culture

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Editor’s note: The TLNT Radio Show is a weekly podcast where we talk to the top minds in HR and talent management. New episodes are posted here every week. Make sure you subscribe to TLNT and get our daily newsletter for the latest, or subscribe to our podcast in iTunes to automatically get updates.

We all want the quick fix and easy do to cure what ails us in the business world. Unfortunately, it isn’t always that easy in the world of human resources. We’re dealing with people and people don’t respond uniformly to any action.

So when we talk about the world of incentives, recognition, culture and cold, hard cash, the incentive programs we design and put a huge amount of effort may not be making the most important change we need it to make: a shift in core values.

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Recruiting and Staffing

Twitter Just Made The Greatest Recruiting Video of All Time

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As a person who sees a ton of recruiting videos (and I just got done judging ERE’s Recruiting Excellence Awards so you can bet I’ve had my fill of these things), they seem to follow a few general rules:

  1. Have a friendly narrator talk to you about working for the company;
  2. Try to make it fun and approachable with real employees’ and,
  3. Give people a glance at a day-in-the-life.

All good moves by any measure, but Twitter took it one step further: they did all of those things while humorously demonstrating how not to pull off a recruiting vid. To say the least, it was brilliant.

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HR News & Trends

Politicizing Job Creators: Why It Won’t Help Create New Jobs

we-need-jobs

Ah, job creators.

You know it is election season when the buzzwords fly like the mosquitoes in the Florida Everglades, and certainly the term job creators has been on the forefront of the discussion about the economy, taxes, and the business atmosphere in the U.S. If you look at the recent buzz, you might think that some people have something against job creators.

I don’t quite buy that anyone has it out for business owners. By any measure, a politician, especially one seeking re-election, logically wants as many people to succeed as possible, job creators included. And although that doesn’t mean business owners have it easy, it doesn’t mean politicizing it is going to help make things better.

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TLNT Radio

Public Speaking For the HR Pro: It’s About Thinking, Doing, Being

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Editor’s note: The TLNT Radio Show is a weekly podcast where we talk to the top minds in HR and talent management. New episodes are posted here every week. Make sure you subscribe to TLNT and get our daily newsletter for the latest, or subscribe to our podcast in iTunes to automatically get updates.

I’m not a fan of public speaking. I can think of too many things I’d rather do than get in front of an anxious crowd looking for me to dance around and entertain them.

But even though I don’t like doing it, there’s a time and a place that I have to suck it up and do it. And if you’re an HR professional, you’ll probably have to do it too.

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HR Management, Recruiting and Staffing

Why Don’t We Do More About the Basic (But Less-Than-Ideal) Resume?

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Before the economy turned on its head in 2008, I received what seemed to be a pitch a week from a new company looking to revolutionize the standard resume.

If you worked in HR, you might have heard about these sorts of things, too. Turning your resume into a PowerPoint presentation, website, or video seemed to be the most popular ideas at the time.

Not much about those ideas stuck around. All of them took longer to review than regular resumes and often provided less helpful information. Still, you have to wonder why resumes continue to stick around. I haven’t met many recruiters that think they truly offer the value they could.

So why don’t we do more about it?

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HR News & Trends

Does The Future of Work Involve Crowdsourcing? Let’s Hope Not

crowdsourcing

I’m a big fan of the free market. I like negotiating deals, making money and buying services and deals in a voluntary, open market.

You don’t like my deal? You can go somewhere else. And even though we abuse the concept here in the U.S. (hello, corporate bailouts), I still think it is the best of many flawed systems.

That being said, every once in a while that foundation gets rocked a little by a new idea. Usually those ideas come in two forms: incredibly revolutionary or incredibly exploitative. The idea of crowdsourced labor clearly falls within the realm of the latter.

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TLNT Radio

The Three Secrets of Successful Organizations

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Editor’s note: The TLNT Radio Show is a weekly podcast where we talk to the top minds in HR and talent management. New episodes are posted here every week. Make sure you subscribe to TLNT and get our daily newsletter for the latest, or subscribe to our podcast in iTunes to automatically get updates.

Why does one company go bankrupt while another one succeeds beyond all measure? It’s incredibly easy to see the successes or failures after the fact but how do you try to line up your organization for success in the here and now?

That’s the question that has an easy answer but a much more clouded path.

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HR News & Trends, Talent Management

Second Chance: How ReServe Is Matching Older Workers, New Careers

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We’ve written about age discrimination on TLNT before and it’s a lousy path for those who have worked diligently for 30 plus years to be dumped unceremoniously into retirement.

But there is at least one non-profit organization that is trying to do something about it. ReServe is an organization that focuses on placing professionals aged 55+ with local non-profits and public agencies in New York City, Westchester County, NY and Miami.

There are a few organizations out there that try to help older professionals stay on their feet but ReServe makes a better case for older professionals landing on their feet in legitimate second careers.

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TLNT Radio

Five Predictions About The Future Of Careers and Workplace in 2012

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Editor’s note: The TLNT Radio Show is a weekly podcast where we talk to the top minds in HR and talent management. New episodes are posted here every week. Make sure you subscribe to TLNT and get our daily newsletter for the latest, or subscribe to our podcast in iTunes to automatically get updates.

The intersection of people’s careers and those in HR are easily intertwined. Whether people become more open to changing jobs mid-career (as has become the norm), certain industries beefing up while others are in decline, it impacts human resources professionals in a distinct way.

So what’s coming up in 2012?

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