Top Payroll Software for Small Businesses

Jeffrey Pfeffer

Professor of Organizational Behavior, Graduate School of Business, Stanford University

What is your top HR tip?

Emphasize well-being. The Gallup data show that well-being in all of its dimensions, including financial well-being, psychological, and physical health, matter for organizational performance and human sustainability. HR should and indeed must emphasize people and their well-being, not just economic outcomes.

Professor Jeffrey is an author of books, articles, and chapters with topics ranging from organizational design to power, as well as human resource management. He has also presented seminars in different countries and served on the boards of several human capital companies, both for nonprofit and for-profit organizations.

Matt Charney

Chief Content Officer and Head of Thought Leadership, Allegis Global Solution

What is your top HR tip?

Hire for potential, develop skills. It’s easy to bring in someone whose experience fits a short-term need. Like any good sports team, you should always draft the best available players and figure out how to fit them into your organization so they can help you succeed in the long run. It’s hard to find great people or at least way harder than training them once they’re on your team.

Matt is the Executive Editor and Partner for Recruiting Daily and also the Chief Content Officer at Allegis Global Solutions. He runs a blog called Snark Attack which was named one of the top 20 business blogs in the world by WordPress. Some of his work has appeared in publications such as The Wall Street Journal, Wired.com, The Harvard Business Review, Outsourcing Magazine, and HR Magazine.

Craig Fisher

Head of Global Marketing, Allegis Global Solutions

What is your top HR tip?

Be human! Don’t be so buttoned up that your audience can’t get to know you. Share something personal about yourself even on places like Linkedin to ensure you are memorable and personable before someone ever has to decide whether to call you back.

Craig leads marketing and employer brand at Allegis Global Solutions RPO. His digital branding, sourcing, and talent attraction methods have been adopted as best practices by companies like Linkedin, Zappos, YUM! Brands, HootSuite, and many more. He’s the author of Inbound Recruiting, and a popular keynote speaker at tech, social media, HR / recruiting, and sales conferences worldwide.

Greg Savage

Principal, The Savage Truth

What is your top HR tip?

‘Manager’ is what you have on your business card. ‘Leadership’ is how you influence attitude and behavior. Success in your career will never be just a matter of qualifications or skills. It will always be a matter of motivation. A career without passion and enthusiasm will have no meaning, no joy, and little hope of long-term success.
Greg has four decades of experience in the global recruitment and talent industry. He has worked with starting, growing, and leading staffing companies across the world.

Jane Sunley

Business Author and Founder and CEO, Purple Cubed

What is your top HR tip?

Ensure leaders at all levels are accountable for employee engagement. People do not only work for people (i.e. their line managers) but also with their teams. Organizations should ensure that they have constantly growing leaders who can create great teams, support them, and grow their capabilities. The days of the elite talent pool being sent off-job to learn are coming to an end.

Jane is a best-selling business author and founder of boutique consultancy and employee engagement experts, Purple Cubed. She is an authority on creating great places to work and a pragmatic people expert and career guru. A frequent media commentator, she is a visiting fellow at two UK Universities and features on more than one ‘100 most influential’ listings.

Eugenio Pirri, FCIPD

Chief People and Culture Officer, Dorchester Collection

What is your top HR tip?

Measure real data. Take the time to understand your outcomes and then decide what measurements to put in place to ensure you achieve them. Don’t just do what everyone else does – make it work for your own business and do not simply follow trends because it’s what you should do. Do what makes sense and relates to your company vision.

Eugenio has over 30 years of operations and people resources experience. As Dorchester Collection’s Chief People and Culture Officer, he’s responsible for all aspects of Human Resources, Learning and Development, Employee & Guest Engagement, Innovation, Corporate Responsibility and The Dorchester Collection Academy Centre.

Laszlo Bock

CEO and Cofounder, Humu

What is your top HR tip?

Connect people with a mission that matters. The power of purpose doesn’t just increase a sense of meaning and happiness in employees. It’s well-documented in the field of organizational psychology that a connection to mission improves productivity as well. The fact that the most thoughtful organizations are waking up to this truth is a great thing for anyone who’s ever had a job.

Laszlo is the co-founder and CEO of Humu. He was the Senior Vice President of People Operations at Google. He is also the author of the New York Times bestseller, WORK RULES!.

Karin Volo

Chief Joy Bringer and Director, EvoloshenAcademy.com

What is your top HR tip?

Cultivate Gratitude. Make it a conscious habit to cultivate gratitude in your life. Whether you are appreciating your employees or looking at what is going well in your own life, gratitude is one of the most powerful emotions that bring positivity and well being into your life.

Karin is an expert in employee engagement, organizational development, and also a bestselling author. With over 15 years of experience working with Fortune 500 companies globally, she has insights on business building, cultural transformation, and high performance. Her purpose is bringing joy to the workplace.

Hung Lee

Curator of Recruiting Brainfood and @WorkShape.io, CEO

What is your top HR tip?

Just keep going. Persistence is key. You can have all the strategy, tactics, hacks, hot tips, whatever you want to call it, but the most important thing is just getting up and doing it. Brands can’t exist without consistency – if you think about it, what brands really are symbols of persistent value.

Hung Lee is the founder of WorkShape.io and an industry professional with over 15 years experience as an agency recruiter, recruitment manager, internal head of talent, recruitment trainer, and strategic advisor for rapid growth businesses in the London Tech Startup scene. He also curates Recruiting Brainfood, a weekly newsletter for the talent industry.

Tim Sackett

President, HRU Technical Resources

What is your top HR tip?

Don’t assume candidates know who you are. 90% of businesses just post their jobs and pray someone will apply. You have to have a marketing strategy around recruiting talent. It’s the lifeblood of your company. No one is sitting around looking at your boring career site waiting for you to post a job.

Tim has over 20 years of experience in HR and talent leadership. He is a husband, father, author of the new book, The Talent Fix. He’s also a highly sought after speaker around the world on the topic of Talent Attraction, HR Technology, and HR execution.

J.T. O’Donnell

Founder and CEO, Work It Daily

What is your top HR tip?

Brand or be branded! Make sure you’re branding your company so candidates know who you are, what you do, and what it’s like to work at your company. If your company is not branding itself, then people are thinking you aren’t tech savvy, there’s nothing great about working at your company, or you’re hiding something. It’s important to take control of your brand, otherwise, people will make their own assumptions about what it’s like to work there.

J.T. has over 18 years of experience in the development of professional HR tools and resources. She has delivered more than 200 presentations on a wide variety of career topics. She has been featured in several publications including Inc. Magazine, Fast Company, The New York Times, and more.

Dave Ulrich

Rensis Likert Professor, Ross School of Business, University of Michigan and Partner, The RBL Group

What is your top HR tip?

Make talent, leadership, and organization a priority. Spend time (our research said 20%) on these issues. Make sure that your talent, leadership, and organization work starts with adding value to key customers. Model (through your leadership behaviors), the right leadership style.

Dave is the Rensis Likert Professor of Business at the Ross School, University of Michigan, and a partner at the RBL Group. He has published over 30 books and 200 articles/chapters that have shaped the fields of leadership and human resources.

Perry Timms

Chief Energy Officer (CEO), PTHR

What is your top HR tip?

Never underestimate how people feel when they know they make a really good contribution to something and make progress towards being a better person/professional. Development and performance are two sides of the same coin – motivation, sense of worth, and confidence.

Perry is an international and TEDx speaker, consultant, and award-winning writer. His work in progressive thinking in HR and the workplace of the future was recognized by his inclusion on HR Magazine’s HR’s Most Influential Thinkers List for 2017.

Cathy Brown

Operations Director, Employee Ownership Association

What is your top HR tip?

Treat people as individuals – and as adults, not children Trust us to do a good job, let us do it in our own way as much as possible.

Cathy is currently the Operations Director for The Employee Ownership Association. She has wide-ranging experiences across the public, private, and third sectors in raising awareness and providing practical guidance to organizations looking to improve employee engagement through many different business models.

Jim Citrin

Leader, Spencer Stuart’s North American CEO Practice

What is your top HR tip?

Recognize the life-changing power of small things. Small things, when applied consistently and over long periods of time, have the ability to change your life. They also lead to massive success. Examples of this are compound interest (of course) and making one concrete improvement each week in your work based on what you’ve learned. Keep this in mind both for your own career and as you operate your business.

Jim leads Spencer Stuart’s North American CEO Practice. During his 25 years with Spencer Stuart, he has worked with clients on more than 750 CEO, board director, and other top management searches and succession assignments. He received his M.B.A. from Harvard Business School in 1986.

Kathryn Minshew

CEO and Founder, TheMuse.com

What is your top HR tip?

Keep your candidates informed. Be transparent and communicate expectations throughout the entire hiring process. That means letting them know their application has been received and, more importantly, reaching out as soon you’ve decided not to move them on to the next round of interviews. Treat your silver-medal candidates with courtesy and respect—because they might just be your dream hire tomorrow.

Kathryn is the CEO and Founder of TheMuse.com. She is the author of “The New Rules of Work,” a Wall Street Journal national bestseller. She has also been named to SmartCEO’s Future50 Visionary CEOs and Inc.’s 35 Under 35.

Andy Spence

Workforce Advisor, Glass Bead Consulting

What is your top HR tip?

Work out the impact of emerging technology on your business. From mobile, Artificial Intelligence, blockchain and augmented reality – these technologies will change industries and the way we manage people. Keep up to date by learning and experimenting with emerging technology.

Andy is a human resource and workforce transformer with a mission to help develop better organizations. He has over 20 years of experience of innovative transformational change programs in banks, energy, health organizations, public sector, and retail. Andy is an author and contributes to better organizations with his consulting, writing, research, speaking, and training.

Matt Manners

CEO and Founder, The Employee Engagement Awards

What is your top HR tip?

Listen and react. Keep the channels of communications with your staff open. They are your greatest source of ideas on how to improve and innovate. They know your business better than anyone.

Matt founded the Employee Engagement four years ago. In that time, the business has evolved into not only recognizing great work but becoming a catalyst for change as well. It now operates on four continents – North America, Europe, Africa, and Australasia. His mission is to drive the world of work forward.

Dorothy Dalton

Talent Management Strategist and CEO, 3Plus International

What is your top HR tip?

Don’t be afraid to have the difficult conversations and ask tough questions even if they are the bill payer. That can be a real challenge. There is no added value to being a “yes” person – unless you genuinely agree with your client.

Dorothy is an international talent management strategist who specializes in identifying, attracting, and retaining top talent. As the CEO, she focuses on strengthening the female talent pipeline via strong diversity recruitment, coaching, and training programmes.

Henry Stewart

Chief Happiness Officer, Happy Ltd.

What is your top HR tip?

Understand that your role as a leader or manager is not to be the expert. Be more concerned about showing how clever your people are than how clever you are. Focus on helping them find their strengths, and then coaching them to be their best.

Henry is the founder and Chief Happiness Officer of Happy Ltd. He was listed in the Guru Radar of the Thinkers 50 list of the most influential business thinkers in the world. His book, The Happy Manifesto, was published by Kogan Page in 2013 and short-listed for the business book of the year.

Kevin Grossman

President, Talent Board

What is your top HR tip?

More communication with candidates and current employers is key. Every year the Talent Board Candidate Experience Awards benchmark research shows that communication and feedback loops are a competitive differentiator in recruiting — and I would argue the same in retaining your current employees. We have to continuously re-recruit to retain your current employees, so keep ongoing reciprocal feedback about their performance and the business’s performance is critical. And not just 1-2 times per year.

Kevin has over 19 years of domain expertise in the human resource and talent acquisition industry. He is the Talent Board president and board member responsible for all aspects of the Candidate Experience Awards worldwide. He also produces and hosts “world of work” podcasts.

George LaRocque

Founder and Principal Analyst, HRWins by LAROCQUE, LLC

What is your top HR tip?

Network. Get out and meet with your colleagues. Collaborate and communicate with them online. Attend industry meetups and events. Participate in roundtable discussions. You’ll learn more about HR and people strategies from your peers, and help them solve problems while you’re at it.

George has more than 25 years in the HCM industry. He is an HCM market analyst and advisor focused on users and developers of HR technology. He is also the publisher of HRWins research and reports on workforce trends and related innovation in tech.

Shally Steckerl

Founder and CEO, The Sourcing Institute (TSI)

What is your top HR tip?

My wisdom, coming from experience in making mistakes, is that it is a big drain on resources to hire the wrong person. You can’t be like a big company and look for a candidate who is an exact match on skills, experience, and prerequisites; the exact match will be harder to find and exponentially more expensive. Look for someone that is dedicated and passionate about what they do, and take a chance on someone that doesn’t have all the right experience, but has transferable skills – hire for potential and aptitude. Give someone an opportunity to grow and they will be much more dedicated to your company.

Shally Steckerl is an author and the President of The Sourcing Institute (TSI). With 21 years of recruiting experience, he has served as corporate sourcing leader for many Fortune 500 brands like Microsoft, Google, Coca-Cola, Cisco, and Motorola.

Natal Dank

Director and Founder, Southern Blue Consulting

What is your top HR tip?

Experiment, learn, adapt, repeat. Create a psychologically safe environment where it’s okay to offer edgy ideas, experiment, and to ‘fail fast, learn fast’. Co-create with your people and incrementally deliver value to your customer, moving away from best practice, and blueprinting ‘one-size-fits-all’ solutions towards building a personalized employee experience instead.

Following over a decade of working in senior HR, Talent, and Organizational Development roles, Natal is now a leading figure in Agile HR. She coaches clients across all industries, from innovative tech companies, global banks to not-for-profit. Her passion is helping leaders, organizations, and brands build awesome places to work, where talented people want to be.

Natasha Persad

HR Executive and Co-Founder, Pengo Strategies

What is your top HR tip?

Develop your People Plan in alignment with your Revenue Goals to hire the correct amount of positions to meet your revenue needs. Employee cost is one of the highest costs on a company’s budget. It is important to know which positions are needed to achieve your revenue goals to avoid redundancies costs including termination, replacement, and training of a new employee which could cost up to 60% of the position’s salary. Hiring an HR Consultant to help you create a People Plan is a one-time cost that could save you in the hiring process with limited to no interruption in achieving revenue goals.

Natasha has a passion for surpassing financial and business objectives. With experience spanning several diverse industries, she possesses an exceptional perspective of the elements that go into making businesses profitable through the application of best practices. A hands-on entrepreneur and human resources leader, she has been successful at tackling business problems resistant to previous efforts while driving culture change.

Allan H. Church, Ph.D.

Senior Vice President, Global Talent Assessment and Development, PepsiCo, Inc.

What is your top HR tip?

Have a clearly defined talent strategy to grow your business. While many small business leaders think talent management is only for large companies with tons of resources, that’s not true. Small firms need great talent both now in the future to keep them vital and innovating. Even if you don’t have big plans to expand now, ask yourself these two questions: Do you have the right people/skills you need to grow the business if you wanted to? And, do you have successors to important roles if something were to happen to you or one of your key leaders? If the answer to either is “no” to either of these get your thinking cap on and build that strategy.

Allan is an author and the Senior Vice President of Global Talent Assessment and Development at PepsiCo, Inc. He is also a Fellow of the Society for Industrial-Organizational Psychology, the American Psychological Association, and the Association for Psychological Science. He is on the Board of Directors for SHRM’s HR People & Strategy, and also teaches Talent Management on the side at Teachers College Columbia University.

Lou Adler

CEO & Founder, The Adler Group

What is your top HR tip?

Dig deep into the person’s major accomplishments and compare these to the KPOs. The best predictor of future performance is not past performance, it’s consistent past performance. By digging into a person’s major accomplishments, you can uncover competencies and trends to establish a track record of success.

Lou is the CEO and founder of The Adler Group. He is an author of award-winning and best-selling books. Adler holds an MBA from the University of California in Los Angeles and a BS in Mechanical Engineering from Clarkson University in New York.