Hiring

Question: My boss has promoted me, and I now manage five people. He wants me to do performance evaluations, but I have no idea what these employees’ salaries are. He feels that I don’t need to get involved in the “money” side of things. How can I establish my authority if I’m not given sufficient information to manage these people?

Q. Our software company is considering hiring a Canadian citizen for a computer systems analyst position. Does the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) allow us to hire this individual?

In a recent article, we pointed out several tax benefits for hiring a spouse. But your “better half” isn’t the only family member you can add to the payroll. Strategy: Give your children after-school jobs. By doing so, you can reduce the overall family tax bill and also avoid adverse "kiddie tax" consequences.

Good news for large corporations means bad news for small business owners: Instead of going after the big fish, the IRS is spending more resources on the small fry. A new study shows that the IRS reduced the number of hours agents spent auditing large corporations by one-third since 2005 and increased the hours spent on audits of companies with assets of less than $10 million by 30%.

If you’re truly looking for the best candidates, they’re sometimes the ones busy in their cubicles, while their résumés are sitting in cyber space. Low-cost “résumé mining” services can save HR time and money by searching online résumé databases for candidates that match specific qualifications. Here’s how résumé mining services work:

Bluegrass music icon Ralph Stanley is quick to share both what he’s done right and what he’s done wrong. One thing he did wrong was trade away his favorite banjo, a 1923 Gibson Mastertone archtop. A great decision Stanley made was hiring two teenagers, Ricky Skaggs and Keith Whitley, even though he already had a full band ...

Here’s a simple hiring best practice to follow: Advertise all your open positions internally and let employees and applicants know how to look for opportunities. Otherwise, you could be sued by an employee or potential applicant, alleging that she would have applied if she had only known about the opening.

A boss’s repeated failed efforts to woo a subordinate isn’t necessarily sexual harassment. But it’s often unclear for HR to tell when ineffective courting crosses the line into actionable harassment. To help you understand the line, courts have come up with a list of factors to consider when trying to determine whether an employee has been sexually harassed at work.

One of the country’s fastest-growing companies, LTC Financial Partners is looking for 300 new sales agents—and when those jobs are filled, more will open. Because the organization is constantly hiring, it’s also constantly trying to get new employees up to speed. So it created the LTC Insurance Training Institute to get recruits ready to work within five days.

Question: “My manager encouraged me to apply for a promotion to senior accountant. Unfortunately, after I submitted my résumé, the position was changed to one with supervisory duties.  Although I was one of four finalists, the job went to an outside candidate. I feel that I was set up to fail. Now, much to my dismay, I’m expected to train my new supervisor when he starts work.  At the same time, I am single-handedly running a critical project and also training another employee. I feel that management is taking advantage of me, so I have begun to look for another job. Am I wrong to resent this situation?” — Fed Up