After I wrote my last entry with my own little whimsical (but only half-heartedly.. the other half was dead serious) disclaimer, I also had a commentor with a discclaimer. My e-mail signature has a disclaimer. My fax covers have disclaimers, and every offer letter, NDA, policy booklet and so on have disclaimers.

My point?

While I initially got into HR for other reasons, I find myself getting entrenched more and more in legal matters. Some days I feel more like a lawyer than an HR professional. I need to know the Labour Relations Act, the Occupational Health & Safety Act, the Employment Standards Act (often in several difference provinces), the Canada Labout Code, the Quebec Civil code, pension legislation & requirements, and the list goes on.

What other professions (aside from law) require such a vast knowledge base of such a large and diverse set of legal standards? Well, not many anyways.

Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy every moment of it. Heck, I even thought for a short period of time about becoming a lawyer – but for various reasons, did not pursue that field as an area of expertise. Now, here I set, part strategist, part business professional, amateur accountant and semi-practising legal wrangler.

Kids, if you want to excel in your HR career and run with the big dogs, start reading up on your case law and snuggling up with those Acts & Statutes at night.

As many of you who follow my blog will know, I watch the site stats and will often write about topics that appear in the search terms – especially where particular searches land people on blog entries which may not entirely cover the topic searched. While I don’t believe that the processing of declining or refusing an offer of employment is all that exciting, I am surprised at the number of searches that have landed on my site since I wrote an entry comparing the Godfather movies to aspects of networking. Specifically, the searches picked up on some of the terms related to “making an offer you cannot refuse”.

While I believe the searches are focusing on people looking to advise on formally turning a company down, I believe the opposite may be true as well – small companies looking to ensure that all the T’s are crossed when an offer is refused, or perceived to have been refused.

Well, in my time I cannot say I have seen it all, but I have seen a lot. I have always been amazed when candidates go through a recruiting process to be presented with an offer, only to not show up on the first day of work. Quite frankly, the simple act of a formal letter of decline (or even a courtesy phone call) would go a long way in not buring any bridges for the future. I would be likely to re-consider for hire someone who declined an offer in advance, or accepted and later declined formally, rather that what is essentially job abandonment.

What to do? From an employee or candidate perspective, when you receive that offer to consider but decide to accept another or even a counter offer from your current employer, a simple phone call to the recruiter to explain the situation would be nice. However, to go one step further, since the potential employer took the time to make you a legal formal letter of offer, it would be ideal for you to reciprocate with a formal letter declining the offer. Simply create a letterhead, use the current date, reference the date of the offer and a few brief pertinent offer points (position, company name, etc) and indicate in the letter that at that you you respectfully decline the offer as presented, that it is your final decision, that you harbour no prejudice towards the company, and that you would like the opportunity to be considered in the future should circumstances change.

You can perhaps expect the company, whether you contacted them verbally or by written letter, to want to know why you are declining, and perhaps even sweeten the original offer (especially if they deemed you a top or had to find candidate) – but assuming that your final decision is made, and you communicate that effectively and respectfully, you likely will not have burned that bridge for future consideration with that company.

From an employer perspective, there are a number of things you can do to make sure first off, that your offers are accepted, and secondly, that you don’t create future legal problems for yourself. (Note, these are simply my ramblings and are not to be construed as legal advice – go find yourself a lawyer for legal advice)

Working towards ultimate acceptance – as a recruiter or prospective employer you should be probing your candidates all the way through a recruitment process to understand their “hot buttons”. What is important? Salary, flexible hours, vacation time, awesome manager, corporate culture, office location, flexible benefits, conferences/seminars, training & development, an office vs a cube, interesting projects, etc? Pay attention to subtle cues dropped regarding interests or aspects of prior employment that the candidate is very passionate about. Try to accommodate as many wants as possible in writing in that first offer you make – if it is cultural or training type items that are important, make sure you speak to the candidate while presenting the offer and the “sales pitch”. And yes, in many cases, attracting potential employees to your company often parallels that of product/service sales. You need to be aware that the candidate is assessing you, your company and the behaviours of you and your interviewers all through the recruitment process. Treat your candidates how you would like to be treated if you were on their side. Now, I could go on for hours talking about tips for improving recruitment processes and the candidate experience, but we’ll save that for another day. The take away here… Know what your prospective employee is looking for so that you can structure an offer of employment that will not be refused.

One quick final note on the legal stuff – especially for all you smaller employers out there. Create an offer letter template and have a lawyer review it. You need to make sure that you adequately cover off on several key points in an offer, and in a way that will not turn off your prospective employees. Make sure that you put an expiry date in the offer. (What if the employee never accepted within a week or two and you moved on to another candidate, only to have the first person come back after 3 weeks and accept?) While you might be able to make the case for a reasonable amount of time passing – you likely don’t want to get into a situation where you formally have to revoke one offer of employment or the other.

That’s all I have to say for now. Just scratched the surface – I know. Hopefully all offers are mutually accepted, but I know that is not reality. So, employers and candidates… Respect each other and treat every relationship as though you may be doing business together again in the future. Who knows – you may not have a future employment relationship, but rather a future commercial product/sales/service based partnership.

Predictive Attrition – Sounds like something out of the Tom Cruise Movie Minority Report. In fact, it is a term, as used in a recent Canadian Business article that better describes a new methodology at Google for measuring the likelihood of retaining an employee. The article goes on to say that Google is doing what it does best, using data to drive management decisions (one of its 10 Golden Rules), while critics say that just doing something because it can be done does not always make business sense.

So the quandary is, can data points and “unintrusive intelligence” replace the act of simply asking an employee “are you happy?” or conducting the traditional more in-depth employee opinion survey.

While I am someone who loves data and would welcome the opportunity to test drive Googles “predictive attrition” algorithm, which is likely to pull data from the HRMS systems, e-mail, surfing habits, performance data, PBX records, etc – I question what I might possibly be able to do with the data? In many cases, I’m sure approaching an employee at risk with a retention conversation may raise some privacy concerns, perhaps using the data at an aggregate level to design retention programs may be a viable option.

Or, perhaps as employees begin to know that a company is using “predictive attrition” methods, could it become a self fulfilling prophecy – that is to say, that employees may not want to work in an environment of employer snooping.

Either way, technology is here to stay, and I look forward in the future to experimenting within the boundaries of the law and what is acceptable to employees.

So, I happened on over the the HRPA site today to get my exam results. (Yay… I passed the NPPA and have my CHRP designation now) And, what did I see splashed right at the top of the main page?

“HRPA is pleased to announce the Senior Human Resources Professional (SHRP) designation–a new HR designation reserved for senior HR executives that have made significant impact on their organizations and the profession.”

Well, if you recall back in June, I had an entry about the recent changes to the CHRP designation process and some comments that followed. In one of my comment responses I spoke about the following:

“If you recall back in the day, I believe that the HRPAO officially used the CHRM and the CHRP to signify varying stages of completion on the certification process. Perhaps the solution would be to have more than one recognized level of certification where the CHRP is the top tier indicating proficiencies in knowledge AND experience, while there is one or two levels below (perhaps a CHRM) that might indicate technical competence, but without the experiential component.”

What a great idea. While I was a little off in the titling of each of the levels, the basic concpt is there. This, however, does not change the fact that the CHRP is going back to experiential and now there is the new gold seal approved SHRP for well season and experience true HR leaders.

Guess that begs the question then… Should there be 3 levels? CHRM for theoretical knowledge (test based and maybe without the BA requirement), CHRP for experienced mid-level HR practitioners (perhaps having the CHRM plus the re-introduced experiential process) and the SHRP for the well-respected elite of HR (which, I do think is a great way to recognize, reward and respect those who have worked hard to further themselves, their companies and the profession).

While represented by different granting bodies, I have mentioned before that the financial profession has CGA, CMA and CAs. (pretty much in that ranking from lowest to highest) Why not us?

Guess I’ll dust off that crystal ball again and see what the future holds? Or, maybe I should go out now into the world with my fancy new CHRP designation and become involved with the people who make the decisions. Do I get re-cert points for doing that?