Here at Helios, I get numerous phone calls and emails each week from clients and coworkers with questions about their benefits plans. I receive questions from “Is my health insurance and HMO, PPO, or POS?” to “My employee worked a reduced schedule this month; do I have to take away their benefits?” and even as broad as “Is the recent health care legislation going to affect my organization?”. It appears as though people are increasingly confused and wary of making the wrong choice given the complications of the Affordable Care Act and the complexity of offering multiple benefit plans.

If you are a recruiter or HR professional working for a federal contractor, the recent changes to OFCCP recordkeeping rules have been challenging to keep up with. If you are unsure about the details of these rules, please see our recent blog posts on the subject.

Last month at the McDonald’s annual meeting there were thousands of protesters who gathered at the company’s headquarters to fight for higher wages. They were calling for minimum wage to be raised to $15 per hour. The protesters argued that at their current rate of pay (they receive on average $8 or $ 9 per hour), they cannot pay their bills.

Last month at Recruit DC, I had the opportunity to sit down with Neil Costa of HireClix to discuss the best ways to improve search engine optimization (SEO) in recruiting. SEO, according to Wikipedia, is the process impacting your job opening’s (in this case) visibility in a search engine’s or site’s (such as Indeed.com) “natural” (organic) search results. The better your visibility (earlier in the results), the more clicks your job opening is likely to get. SEO matters and can have impact on the effectiveness of your recruitment advertising and your employment brand. And, most importantly, it doesn't cost much to make improvements.

Did you happen to hear the news story last week about the young man who was applying for a job with Staples via the web and was shocked to have received a questionnaire offering him the opportunity to disclose if he is an individual with a disability? As a Human Resource professional with a background in government contracting compliance I knew exactly why the opportunity to disclose was given to the applicant, and quite frankly I was not at all surprised the applicant was not aware of the new requirements in place for government contractors. But I began to wonder how many of the employees working for government contractors are unaware of these new regulations.