By Cheryl Barbato

So you need to do some hiring.  You want to do it quickly, but at the same time you need full confidence that you are bringing the very best talent into your organization.  Recruiting should be viewed as a business strategy, not just an operational task.   I recommend taking a step back from the constant need to “put out the fires” and examine the engine you have in place for recruitment at your organization. 

Increasingly, companies are turning towards a unique solution, particularly in these times of uncertainty.  Working as an extension of your company, an outsourced recruiting partner is quite valuable.  Whether you fully outsource or augment what you already have in place, they will get to know your culture, take the time to understand your business goals and help you to streamline your process to ensure optimal hiring. 

A properly managed outsourced recruitment solution offers many benefits that can improve your business. 

Decrease Time to Hire

Due to the efficiencies that are brought into the mix with an outsourced provider, you will save time.   You will avoid the need for hiring, training and retaining an internal team.  While streamlining your recruitment process, you will also see the development of best practices which will cut out time in the process, leading to less lost candidates and the ability to bring the most desired talent on board more quickly. 

Increased Candidate Quality

Because contingency fees are not involved when working in this capacity, it automatically sets up a more pleasing scenario for a candidate.  Candidates often say they feel like they are just a dollar sign and being bullied into jobs that just don’t feel right.  Not only isn’t this the case, but because of the approach of many outsourced partners, you will be able to receive honest and open feedback through this unbiased intermediary. 

Reduce Cost

Outsourced recruitment decreases not only your direct recruiting costs, but also can save on recruitment search tools and advertising.  Additionally, you will be able to cut back or even completely eliminate those skyrocketing third party agency fees. 

Flexibility and Customization

Often, outsourced recruitment programs can be customized and offer flexibility.  As your needs evolve, many programs can usually be adjusted to coincide with changes.  A solid recruiting partner will not be static.  They will provide continuity of the team and at the same time be able to bring on professionals with varied subject matter expertise as needed.

Whether you are an emerging company, a mid-sized firm or a Fortune 500 organization, you have options!  I encourage you to take a look at your current situation and don’t be afraid to get creative on your approach to strategic and effective hiring.

About the Author

Cheryl Barbato is a founder of Talent Retriever, a recruitment consulting firm. She can be reached at 781-425-5571 or cheryl.barbato@talentretriever.com.

      By Jeffrey Siegel

Employers doing business in New Hampshire must now be aware of a state law requiring employers to provide written notice to employees in advance of a mass layoff or plant closing.  The New Hampshire Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act (“NH WARN Act”), took effect on January 1, 2010.  See RSA 275-F:1, et seq.  The NH WARN Act is patterned after the Federal WARN Act; however, there are some important differences between the two laws.  For example, the NH WARN Act applies to employers who employ 75 or more employees, whereas the Federal WARN Act applies to employers who employ 100 or more employees. 

The NH WARN Act requires covered employers to give 60 days advance, written notice to employees if there is an employment loss at a single site during a 30 day period of at least 250 employees or at least 25 employees if that constitutes 33% of the full-time employees.  Employers must also give notice if there is a permanent or temporary shutdown of a single site of employment in New Hampshire if the shutdown results in a loss of 50 or more full-time employees.  Employers must give notice to the affected workers, their union, the chief elected official of the municipality in which the mass layoff or plant closing occurs, the New Hampshire Attorney General, and the New Hampshire Commissioner of Labor.  The NH WARN Act provides limited exceptions to the notice requirement in the following circumstances:  (1) the employer is a faltering company and was actively seeking capital;  (2) the need for notice was not reasonably foreseeable; (3) the plant closing is the result of completion of a particular project and the employees were hired knowing that their employment was limited; (4) the mass layoff or plant closing was necessitated by a natural disaster, act of terrorism, or physical calamity; or (5) the layoff or closing constitutes a strike or lockout not intended to evade the NH WARN Act.   

An employer who fails to give proper notice is liable to each employee who lost his or her employment for back pay, the value of the cost of any benefit that the employee would have been entitled to, including the cost of medical expenses incurred, that would have been covered under an employee benefit plan, and attorneys’ fees.  In addition, the Commissioner of Labor may asses a civil penalty of up to $2,500 and/or $100 per employee for each day of noncompliance.  Lastly, unlike the Federal WARN Act, failure to provide sufficient notice under the NH WARN Act allows state officials to place liens on the business revenues and real and personal property of violators.

Employers must carefully review the requirements of the Federal WARN Act and state plant-closing laws, including the NH WARN Act, when determining the proper course of action during a mass layoff or closing of a facility. 

About the Author

Jeffrey S. Siegel, Esq. is an attorney with Morgan, Brown & Joy, LLP and is a member of the bars of Massachusetts and New Hampshire.  Jeff may be reached at (617) 523-6666 or at jsiegel@morganbrown.com.  Morgan, Brown & Joy, LLP focuses exclusively on representing employers in employment and labor matters.

         By Mark Burak 

The number of employment-related lawsuits continues to rise, and new theories of liability are always emerging. Even something as innocuous as reimbursement of expenses can result in costly litigation.

Two real-world examples prove the point.

In Tedesco v. Innovo Group, Inc. , Michael Tedesco was the vice-president of sales and marketing for Innovo. After Innovo terminated Tedesco's employment, he filed suit for, among other things, the reimbursement of expenses he claimed were due. Specifically, after he was fired, Tedesco turned in receipts and claimed entitlement to $31,038 in reimbursements. In defending the claim, Innovo presented evidence to “suggest” that some of Tedesco's expenses were personal rather than business expenses. For example, there was evidence that Tedesco arranged a trip to visit a friend and that some of the expenses were “questionable.” Nevertheless, Innovo's evidence was insufficient, the jury awarded Tedesco $27,000 in expenses, and the Texas Court of Appeals upheld the jury verdict. Had Innovo's controls on expense reimbursements been better, it probably could have avoided both the $27,000 and the legal fees associated with defending the claim.

In Gattuso v. Harte-Hankes Shoppers, Inc. , the employer required its sales representatives to drive their own automobiles on sales calls and compensated them by paying higher base salaries and/or higher commission rates. One of the sales representatives filed a class action lawsuit, arguing this method of expense reimbursement was unlawful. The California Supreme Court ruled the employer's method of reimbursement was permissible, but the employer still had to identify the amounts representing payment for labor performed and the amounts representing reimbursement for expense reimbursement. In other words, the employer still had to track and document expense reimbursements carefully.

Summary

About the Author

Mark Burak is a shareholder in the Boston office of Ogletree Deakins, a labor and employment law firm with 35 offices across the country. Mark has been named as a "Super Lawyer" by Boston Magazine (ranked as the top 5% of lawyers in New England). This information is not intended to constitute legal advice and should not be relied upon in lieu of consultation with appropriate legal advisors in your own jurisdiction. It may not be current as the laws associated with the subjects of the article change frequently.

      by Michael Rodgers

Did your company’s healthcare expenses rise last year?  If the answer is YES, there may be some good news on the horizon.

Really?  What is it?

Today, there is new technology available to you and your benefits professionals that is rapidly changing the way companies manage their healthcare program costs. These changes, if implemented correctly, can have a material impact on your company’s bottom line. Predominantly available in the Midwest and West coast markets for over 10 years, this technology is now available in the Northeast and its use is earning vast praise by financial and HR executives who identify its value.

The technology is based on the concept of data-mining a company’s claims utilization information. The executive consults a professional to decipher the data and assist him/her with the successful negotiation of lower renewal premiums.  This method is vastly different from the conventional, i.e. less transparent, approach used by most carriers when developing renewals for their customers because it offers your own independent evaluation and record of the claims utilization which, for groups over 100 employees, is what directly drives the increased cost of the medical program renewals, regardless of whether the plan is fully insured or partially self-funded. 

There are 10 key areas of a medical program into which these tools are able to mine in order to help facilitate a deep analysis of a company’s overall claims utilization data. You can now analyze each individual area for network and plan design inefficiencies, model potential change, and track year-over-year performance of the concern areas.  This enables you to easily measure trends of problematic issues, address them, and create solutions quickly, without the calorie burn of yesterday. 

Just So You Know…

The key to the success of the data-mining process lies in the readability of the specific coding of claim reimbursements from physicians.  This coding (commonly known as CPT - Current Procedural Terminology) is the basis of reimbursement for all physicians’ providers from the insurance companies.  Every time a patient of any health insurance program receives a service, the physician provider must include these codes to submit the claim to the insurance company for payment.  The CPT codes capture all of the information in one line item such as: the type of service, the setting in which it was received, the length of visit, the charge, a rough diagnosis (ICD-9 code), and many more pieces of critical information.  So, who can read these codes anyway? The answer is, basically, hardly anybody.

The Solution

This process of analysis is rapidly changing the way benefits professionals work, plan, and recommend alternatives.  Armed with this data, benefits professionals can track material changes and work together with insurance carriers on an entirely different level.  The power shifts to you, the premium payer, and away from the premium collector! You come armed; the benefits professionals can disarm the insurer.  Actually, you no longer need to rely on the insurance carrier’s underwriter for estimates of trends, plan alternatives or hard copy reports (have you ever really tried to read those?).  With our help, as you analyze your specific data, you can observe both areas of weakness and strength. It becomes a much more dynamic, collaborative process of program management.  Plan design and network design can be specifically tailored for each group. 

Make no more mistakes.  You no longer need to rely upon marketing a census to carriers to receive their lowest cost bids.  That process, although still commonly used, is the old and inefficient brokerage technique of yesterday.  Instead, you are able to choose a plan design, a network and an administrator (carrier) before going to the market.  The benefits professionals know at that stage that they are only contacting the markets which they already know are solutions for our clients!

What’s in it for me?

Picking targeted plan design modification, or overlaying stronger network managers, to maximize the claims’ discount are just two examples of how benefits professionals help lower the paid amount of claims (utilization).  Of course, these may result in:

• lower costs and lower renewals
• enhancement of employee satisfaction
• changing carriers less frequently
• identifying longer-term strategies
• creating longer-term partnerships
• inflating your bottom line
• putting forth less effort

“I’m concerned.  Don’t reduce our benefits”. 

We’ve heard that too.  In fact, it doesn’t mean that benefits are reduced.  Since the data gathered from the carrier includes specifics with regard to the census data, utilization data, as well as plan design information, the modeling tools highlight changes that may not have normally been suggested.  There are many instances where increases of benefits in particular areas of the plan can lower utilization in others.  For example, emergency room visits, wellness benefits, co-payments, or even some outpatient services are smaller areas that can affect other larger parts of a program’s utilization.  This methodology will help you fine-tune each area and help you determine the right plan – for you.  If your data shows that that ER usage is extremely rare for your group, why would you choose a plan that has a high amount of coverage in that area?  You wouldn’t.  And you don’t have to.

While these new tools and processes are helpful during the renewal and plan year, it is important to realize that it is only one tool and no two analyses are alike. Without a doubt, these tools create a consistent, measurable process that can be repeated year after year. But it is still the benefits professional, your advocate, who reads and interprets this information on your behalf.  In many cases this new information will represent more information than is possessed by the actual underwriters or carrier representatives. Your benefits professional is the one that can articulate this information in a usable format to structure renewals, negotiate pricing and build programs with lower costs.

About the Author:

Michael Rodgers is a benefit professional with over 17 years of experience in the New England marketplace.  His firm, Axial Benefits Group (ABG), specializes in corporate employee benefits consulting and brokering for all size companies. ABS is located in Burlington, Massachusetts.