eResponse Recruitment

Working Mums

Most workers feel their bosses do not do enough to encourage women on maternity leave to return to work, according to research by Monster.

The poll found that only 17% of workers felt their employers did everything to encourage women back to work, but a further 36% believed that their employer would discourage mothers to return to work because they would rather employ someone without commitments.

Employment legislation provides new and expectant mothers with special rights and protection, including: the right to takes time off for antenatal care; maternity leave and pay, return to work to the same job; request flexible working and protection from suffering a detriment or dismissal on pregnancy grounds.

However Julian Acquari, Managing Director of Monster UK and Ireland , said the measures were not enough.

He said: Our poll demonstrates that, despite legislation, there is still a feeling among workers that new mothers do not receive the support in coming back to work that they deserve from their employers.

"Women's careers don't end with having children - many women look forward to rejoining the work force, not to mention that raising a child can be expensive and many new mothers still need to work to provide the vital added income."

Job Interviews

Personal Hygiene has been cited as a key problem among job hunters with 47% of recruiters questioned said they had received negative feedback from employers found a survey recently conducted by the REC.

The survey also revealed anecdotes such as acandidate turning up in a ball gown for an interview with a fashion company, another candidate claimed he was very proficient at Sony Playstation, several candidates tried to charm their interviewer by offering them sweets and one candidate was too cain to wear her glasses at interview and mistook a cupboard for the exit on her way out.

Almost all respondants (93%) had received feedback from employers about a job hunters interview appearance with 16-20 year olds identified as the worst offenders for dressing inappropriately. Casual clothing was an issue according to 63% of recruiters with one in four (23%) mentioning inappropriate footwear, one in three (29%) citing revealing clothing and one in five (19%), excessive jewellery.

BlogCatalog Listing

Just listed our blog in BlogCatalog which looks a really useful resource for finding blogs on most topics. Take a look at:

http://www.blogcatalog.com/directory/business

If you can suggest other places we should list our blog please leave details in a comment.

Managers not managing underperformance

According to research by Watson Wyatt Managers need to do more to help poorer performing staff.

"Managers find it easy to motivate high performing indviduals but are not so adept when it comes to supporting poorer performing employees" says Carol Hathaway of Watson Wyatt.

"Some of the greatest opportunities for improved organisational performance lie in helping Managers raise the bar for moderate and poorer performers but it appears from our study that few employers are doing this".

In it's 2007/2008 Global Strategic rewards study Watson Wyatt found that only a third of poor performers said their Manager does a good job in commuicating expectations for organisational financial performance, of establishing goals for their individual performance linked back to business objectives or of providing direct feedback on their personnal performance.

However, a top performer was 66% more likely to say that their immediate Supervisor does a good job of communicating organisational and performance management issues than a poor performer would, the survey found.