All posts tagged HR

Offshore Drilling Employment Your Cover Letter Must Have These 3 Elements

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Both your cover letter and your resume are important when looking for offshore drilling employment. You need to get HR to read both, otherwise it’s all for nothing. First, you need to attract their attention. This is easy – your email (cover letter) subject just needs to state the job title (and code, if any) in the advertisement. Then your cover letter must make them read your resume. Finally, getting you the interview is the job of your resume. For your cover letter, here are three elements necessary to make it powerful…

1. Do You Have Any Relevant Job Experience?

If you had one working week to select 20 candidates out of 500 for interviews, and all you had to go on was their cover letters and resumes, how would you do it? Whether you start from the earliest job applications, or the latest, or randomly open the emails, you would not read every cover letter and resume in detail. When you open the email (cover letter), you’ll only have time to look at the first half-page. It must give you a reason to read on and open the candidate’s resume, otherwise you’ll just move the job application to your trash folder.

So what makes the HR staff decide whether or not to read the rest of your cover letter and resume? The most important factor is relevant job experience. Unless you are going in through the back door, or the company is desperate for workers, your previous job experience is critical to selection. That means you must quickly and concisely state the most relevant points in your job history and tie it to the scope and requirements stated in the job advertisement.

But what if you have never worked in the oil industry before? During the oil boom, experience didn’t matter. But that is not the case during a recession. However, there is still a chance if you can get some relevant training under your belt. Oil is of strategic importance to many nations, and governments have training programs in place to provide workers for the oil industry. While the actual training may take place in technical or community colleges, the syllabus is designed by the oil industry.

Training can be expensive, but the oil industry still pays very well, so it is worth it. Before you pay for your own training, though, you should check if qualify for any form of subsidy. For example, disadvantaged youths in the US may qualify for the JobCorps program, while ex-servicemen in Britain have special training programs to prepare them for offshore oil rig jobs.

2. Do You Have Any Outstanding Skills?

Besides meeting the scope and requirements of the advertised oil rig jobs, is there any other thing that might make you special? Do you exceed the requirements in any way? For example, if the advertised roustabout jobs say they need people with 2 years of working experience, do you have 5 years? If you can add this kind of depth, and successfully make your case in the cover letter, you’ll have a better chance of getting hired.

However, depth is not the only way. How about breadth? Do you have any extra skills? Let’s take that same roustabout job. Perhaps you have scaffolding experience? Then say so. Companies always want people with some extra skills, as long as they don’t have to pay for it. Every boss wants his workers to be able to back each other up. He cannot afford to have critical jobs left undone just because the only guy who can do it broke a leg or something like that.

3. Can You Start Work Immediately?

Being able to start work immediately is always a strong point in your favor. If you can start work immediately, you can sometimes trump a rival with better experience. However, this does not just mean not having a job right now. You need to clear a lot of red tape before you can work on an offshore oil rig. If you have already dealt with the necessary paperwork, this saves the human resource staff a lot of trouble and they will be more willing to call you up.

While they aren’t supposed to behave this way, they are also human. In any case, this is a list of government paperwork you often have to deal with:

Firefighting certificate

First aid certificate

Helicopter underwater escape training certificate

Offshore survival certificate

Vaccinations

Passport

Visa

Relevant local union membership(s)

There is no fixed format for a cover letter. Neither is there such a thing as a perfect cover letter for offshore drilling employment. However, one thing is clear – your cover letter must have the above three important elements to persuade HR to read your resume.

Hiring A Professional Pre Employment Background Screening Company – Advantages For Human Resource

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With increasing competition in job market, there is also an increase of fake credentials and forge documents provided by the candidates to get a higher position. These types of candidates not only deprive of the right of other candidate who have the original credentials, but also dangerous for the company itself. Therefore, the importance of pre employment background screening has been increasing with every single day.

Background screening of an employee is primarily a work of Human Resource department of a company. But most of the companies hire professional background screening companies to do the task for them. There are several good reasons for hiring a professional company. We will discuss few of them in little detail.

First and foremost reason for hiring a professional screening company is that, if a screening company is good, it will certainly have years of experience in employment verification, criminal background screening, educational document verification and so on. Hence, these companies can screen the background of a candidate far better than the in-house screening done by the human resource department.

Another good reason for hiring a professional background screening service provider is that they do it very fast. A first priority of any HR department is to complete the hiring process as quickly as possible. And if HR gets involve in screening of a candidate, the task may get slow because of other human resource related course. It can become a hassle for HR and for candidate both. So HR prefers to hire a background screening company do the process fast.

Furthermore, cost saving is one thing that make a company to hire screening company. If HR does it by itself, it will need in-house professionals to do the screening of candidates. Means company has to pay these professionals to do the screening, other costs are also involved. On the other hand, HR finds services of background screening companies cost effective. The reason of cost effectiveness is that these companies already have established networks; they are specialized in their work. They find no hassle in doing background screening of an employee anywhere in the world, and hence become cost effective.

Conclusion

Pre employment background screening is one most important task which no company wants to overlook. But this work needs specialization, and background screening companies usually have years of experience and are specialized in executing the task efficiently. Therefore, HR department should think about hiring a good background screening company before establishing an in-house section for screening of a job candidate.

Requirements For Singapore Employment Pass Eligibility

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There are three categories of Employment Passes in Singapore: the P1 Employment Pass, P2 Employment Pass and Q1 Employment Pass. Before considering to apply for a particular employment pass, it is important that you possess all the required criteria to be eligible for the employment pass you are applying for.
The basic requirements to be eligible for a Singapore Employment Pass is that the foreigner applicant must have a fixed monthly salary of at least S$2,500 and must possess the recognized qualifications which includes acceptable degrees, professional qualifications or specialist skills. The Ministry of Manpower (MOM) is the authority that evaluates each EP application and qualification, based on a criteria that includes the following: global and country institution rankings by independent accreditation boards, hiring history by top companies in Singapore, validation by HR consultants in listed countries, employment outcome of the institution’s graduates, and the institution’s enrollment standards.
In addition to the foregoing basic requirements of monthly salary and recognized qualifications for a Singapore EP, each of the three categories of EPs have specific eligibility requirements and this article will discuss each of these categories briefly:
P1 Employment Pass
A P1 Employment Pass can be given to an applicant who performs a Professional, Managerial, Executive or Specialist job and has a fixed monthly salary of at least S$7,000.
P2 Employment Pass
A P2 Employment Pass can be given to an applicant who performs a Professional, Managerial, Executive or Specialist job and has a fixed monthly salary of at least S$3,500 and not more than S$7,000.
Q1 Employment Pass
A Q1 Employment Pass can be given to an applicant who performs a Professional, Managerial, Executive or Specialist job and has a fixed monthly salary of at least S$2,500 and not more than S$3,500. An applicant who does not possess the recognized qualifications as discussed in the first part of this article can still be eligible for a Q1 EP provided he possesses compensatory factors such as skills and years of experience, depending on the discretion of the MOM. A minimum of 5 years of relevant work experience is a plus factor.
A fixed monthly salary, as discussed above, refers to the total regular income of a foreign employee earned from his job, including his basic salary, and this income must be paid to the employee on a fixed monthly basis, regardless of his performance.
A fixed monthly salary and/or basic salary does not include the following: additional payment by way of overtime, bonus or commission; any form of reimbursements or in-kind payments; any sum paid to an employee or contract worker to defray special expenses incurred by him owing to the special, unusual or hazardous nature of the employment; any productivity incentive payments and any allowances which are variable in nature; any contributions paid by the employer or employee to any pension or provident fund; or any gratuity payable on discharge or retirement.

Review Of Kenexa, Supercandidate, Brainbench & Articulate

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It is a known fact that any useful HR department or employment agency have tools to test a persons skill set. This could be a practical skill, technical skill or behavioral skill. However, has time changes, a flexible HR department or employment selection agency, will need to move forward with more powerful technologies that help them further in their area of expertise, candidate selection! In the early 90s online filtering was not really appreciable and the technologies employed were generally a database full of resumes from which to select people for possible interview.

Late in the 90s LMS (Learning Management Systems) broke like wildfire and many corporate firms started to see the logic in a organized approach to employee training, recruitment and retention.

As the 90s went by and the Internet started to reach a larger audience, many of the firms being reviewed were formed to try and offer solutions to firms from an outsourced net solution. These firms continue to improve products with technology and these firms reviewed are no different. However here is our review of their current state of play and how you could benefit from reading the review and finding which one suits your corporate or small business environment.

We reviewed several factors that are to our opinion ( Having worked both in HR and employment in large industries), very important in choosing the best tool for you.

The factors were:

Price.

Ease of use

Features against uses

Integration to your own platform

Server based storage, result notification and record filtering

Some of these features are easily comparable while others have variations that make it more difficult to quantitatively give you a clear result. When this happens, explanations will be around the similarities or differences from a customers hiring and practical perspective.

PRICE

As price is an important factor we discuss it here. Obviously people tend to gauge this first before feature looking at what is under the hood.

A cost comparison was created based on what might typically happen with a job post on the internet ( where 99% of firms now actually post jobs). Please note we stated one job post. Obviously you will need to multiply that by the number of jobs you target each month to get a realistic estimate of your actual costs.

So for the one job, what was done, was the actual cost of running similar test platforms over a period of a month using the minimum of 50 tests. This would be a fair representation of just one job placement that a HR or employment firm with approximately 50 possible applicants. Again this may be very conservative to the number of people who reply to your job posts but let us use it for reference sake.

Testing Firm Cost

Kenexa Proveit $1250 for 50 tests

Supercandidate $29.99 for unlimited tests

Brainbench $2500 for 50 tests

Articulate $499

Comparing these price factors, we see that Kenexas Proveit is the most expensive while Supercandidate is the least expensive by over 97%. This could make a major difference to who can afford the services. Overall Supercandidate is significantly less then any of the others reviewed. We will go into further detail about features shortly to see if that has relevance to pricing.

Ease of Use

When looking at ease of use, we took into consideration:

The GUI (Graphic User Interface)

Learning curve time.

In looking at the GUI we found that only Supercandidate had a built in video tutorial which allowed for step by step learning. The other three did not have this so the learning curve increased. With Proveit and Brainbench, we found that the dashboard was often confusing with many features leading to places that left us confused. This definitely could do with a training session which is offered by the firm at an additional cost.

Articulate was the hardest of all to understand as you needed to have experienced Adobe Flash style products before to easily work with the interface. Our opinion is, that someone without that knowledge would have to spend about 2 days to learn this product.

Features against Uses

This is a very important factor as it determines exactly how the products will benefit you in the real world. Having worked with HR and recruitment, we understand that there are many products out there with so many features to impress. However like many software products, you only really use certain features which work productively for you.

Proveit, Brainbench and Supercandidate offer the most number of useful features, such as premade test banks of Relevant tests, easy reporting features essential to fast decision making. Provit and Brainbench offered some more tests but we found that many were not relevant to the majority of users. Supercandidate offered direct access to create own questions which technically meant that you could add, remove and integrate your own questions in. This is ideal for customizing any job spec. This made this product more relevant for practical use as by integrating your own questions, you could keep up to date with any skill you choose making its test making limitless.

Articulate and Supercandidate offer the most media integration, allowing for video, sound and various media files such as image files, pdf documents(Supercandidate). These you can add directly to the questions. As the age of video integration is here with large bandwidth being the norm ( as seen by the likes of popular sites e.g. YouTube), it offers greater accuracy in job areas that require in-depth skills knowledge, these two products really shine above the others here. Of the two, we think that Supercandidate approach of browse click integration, rather then add to interface using a menu and several steps offered by Articulate, makes it the preferred choice for the majority of users, who look for ease of use and fast integration.

Provit, and Articulate offer the most question types, e.g. multiple choice, true false, checkbox. Now this initially seems an obvious reason for choice. However consider this, 85% of firms and institutions use the standard multiple choice format above all else, so it is likely that you can easily get by asking questions in that format and be well respected in your questioning techniques. If you compare price, the amount you pay is significant for these other question types even though the majority of tests will not need them. Besides tools like Supercandidate offer other options to create those question types using its strong media integration features.

For example, if you use the integrated media types such as a word doc, or jpeg, you can literally add whatever question feature you want. For example you ask a question that requires several answers (typical of a checkbox answer), you could open up your MS word doc and type in the different variations upload that to the question to offer a question that asks them to choose which set of options is best similarly you could have created a image file to do this.

Integration to your own customer facing platform

Kenexas Proveit, Articulate and Brainbench do not allow you to host the tests directly from your site. For example you will still have to send your clients to their site for the test e.g. provit2/acme (say if your name was acme). Not very professional for branding purposes.

Supercandidate does offer the testing platform to be integrated to the clients own site with a small charge associated. So if you are Acme company , it integrates straight to your site e.g. acme/testarea

This consideration is needed for those who want to keep applicants on their own site rather then going to another companys website. It also portrays the firm as a bigger firm due to the cost associated with such technologies which only the largest of firms can afford.

Server based storage, result notification and record filtering of results

All the products reviewed offered some sort of storage based setup. However not all storage are the same. While Supercandidate, Proveit and Brainbench offer tests based on their limits:

Supercandidate unlimited assessments including premade assessments Provit 900 assessments Brainbench 600 assessments

Articulate allows up to a maximum of 100 assessments.

With respect to result notification all firms offer instant notification of results to the administrator. On this review only Supercandidate, automated a serialized certificate to the test taker if they passed.

The record filtering is key to many who want to administer tests as it is the reason for the tests to see how someone performed in tangible ways.

All products offer filters. Proveit and Benchmark offer many unnecessary filters, where single tasks are broken down into several report formats. Supercandidate offers by group, by individual test results, with simple point and click methods.

All products offer CSV export features of the data on the online reporting point. Supercandidate and Proveit allow full data transfer to even email accounts.

A key reporting feature we believe is important for the HR person is based around reducing time. All of the products help HR and employment agencies reduce time by using tests to eliminate unqualified candidates. However, only Supercandidate takes into consideration that a live person does not always sit at their desk and has other things to do. For this they offer Cell Phone notification, which actually rings your cell when the best candidate is matched. You just head back to your desk and then call them up.

This is a very practical approach to free you from your desk and get on with other client calls, visits etc

Conclusion

Well our review looked at what we believe is key areas based on our 15 years working with HR, recruitment and the I.T industry related to the area of candidate selection. These 4 tools can definitely give you a step up in making sure you reduce time spent from tracking a candidate to placing one to a firm job.

Proveit and Brainbench seem to offer too little for those who want value for their money while utilizing a filter that will meet much of their needs. They have some fancy assessments but neither allows you to create your own tests or add to theirs. Any customization costs you even more if actually allowed.

Important features such as video and sound will play a more dominant role in tomorrows candididate selection as bandwidth increases and some features that were impossible outside face to face interviews, are now available to us via these elements. Both Supercandidate and Articulate allow these features.

Supercandidates cost of at least 90% less then all others, understanding of the need for quick learning, forward thinking features such as video in questions or cell phone notification on the go make this a really worthwhile product.

There is very little compromise with Supercandidate for those who want a effective filter to reach 95% of applicant testing. For this reason, we recommend the newer, more robust technology offered by Supercandidate Inc for the majority of users thinking of adding prescreening, or selection technology to their recruitment process. Also if you currently are using other forms, its time for an upgrade, especially when you are likely to heavily reduce your downtime and current spend.

Employment Background Screening

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About fifty years back, hiring a person was a simple process. All you had to do after receiving the application was a quick cross reference with previous employers and hire the person. In many cases, even that was not done; people were hired simply because a neighbor or a friend had something good to say about them. Hiring was a matter of gut instinct.

Not any longer. Today, this casual attitude towards hiring your employees could cost you billions of dollars in lost lawsuits.

A security agency had to pay $3 million after their guard had stolen from a client. Subsequent checks revealed that the employee had a colorful criminal record. ?A sales firm had to pay $175,000 in negligent hiring lawsuits when its sales representative was caught forging signatures.

Many companies have lost millions of dollars in negligent hiring lawsuits because they did not uncover vital information through employment background screening.

The Society for Human Resource Management says that 95% of HR professionals in charge of hiring employees conduct employment background screening before they hire. This is a whopping 35% increase from the 60% who used to screen employees in the 1990s. There seems to be a reason for this sudden jump: more than 40% of job applications submitted in the US contain false or fabricated data. More than 9% of the employees who have agreed to get their backgrounds checked are hiding criminal histories. Thus, it is obvious that hiring is contingent on successful employment background screening.

A thorough employment background screening exposes information that was intentionally withheld or mistakenly omitted. Often, employees embellish the truth, particularly when it comes to educational qualification, expertise or experience. Such hidden information may have serious repercussions if it is discovered in a tricky situation. Needless to say, access to such data will stop you from hiring antisocial elements.

Employment background screening consists of a number of checks: background checks, drug tests and psychometric testing. This helps employers ascertain claims regarding qualification, education, previous employment and criminal history. It also helps them uncover any blemished in the person’s character.

Background searching services are offered by a large number of online services and private investigators. When choosing the right company, select a company that has access to a wide network of information. Most screening companies retrieve data from a common pool of data stored with government agencies. They then dig further for criminal history, credit data, sexual offense registration information and other sensitive material. All the data collected on the potential employee is then compiled into a single background check report. The company you employ must be able to give you quick results, because you obviously don’t want to lose a good employee to your competition.

Whether you conduct an in-house background screening or employ the services of a background screening company, it is necessary to go through the claims of your potential employee with a fine-toothed comb. Companies that fail to perform their due diligence before hiring may have to close shop if the worst happens.