kathy.gurchiek

Food, glorious food. Like adding a pinch of salt or a splash of sauce to a recipe, organizations find that breaking bread together—or throwing back a pint—can spice up the workday and feed corporate culture as well as hunger pains.

And it’s not just large or high-tech companies such as Zappos.com, DreamWorks Animation, Facebook and Google where free meals are served up. Employees at AFN Logistics, a third-party logistics provider outside of Chicago, tuck into a free lunch every Friday.

Building a strong employer brand is the first step in recruiting employees with a disability, Laura Wilhelm pointed out during the Feb. 13, 2013, webinar “Best Practices in Disability Recruiting.”

Think Beyond the Label.com (TBTL) hosted the hourlong webinar, moderated by Brazen Careerist, that showcased tips on how organizations can find highly skilled, college-educated professionals who have disabilities.

The U.S. Army kicked off its “Hire a Veteran” campaign Nov. 19, 2012, during a press conference with the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM). The campaign is aimed at debunking employer misperceptions about the impact of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and traumatic brain injury (TBI) on veterans’ job performance, and at educating employers on what reasonable accommodations involve.

Millennial job seekers just wanna have fun, and employers looking to recruit and retain recent graduates should make workplace fun a “central focus of recruiting efforts,” according to recent academic research.

The findings hold up even at a time when a sluggish economy is leaving many graduates under- or unemployed, says John W. Michel, Ph.D., assistant professor of management at Loyola University Maryland.

Benjamin Braddock, who walked away from a career in plastics and a fling with Mrs. Robinson in the 1967 movie “The Graduate,” could be the grandfather of high school students who graduated in the spring of 2012.

Born in 1994, these entrants to today’s workforce and college campuses come with a different set of cultural touchstones and references.

An increasing number of U.S. workers who take vacation are performing work-related tasks on their so-called off time, according to a Harris Interactive survey of 2,212 U.S. adults.

More than half of employed Americans will perform some type of job-related task while vacationing—reading work-related e-mails and taking phone calls—according to findings released July 16, 2012. That’s an increase of 6 percentage points from a similar survey in 2011.

Bon Secours Virginia Health System, Citi, JPMorgan Chase & Co. and USAA are the winners of the Work Life Legacy Military Award from the Families and Work Institute (FWI).

Recipients were singled out by a 14-member panel of judges for their outstanding efforts to hire and support transitioning service members and their families. It’s the only award, said FWI.

The percentage of employers that conduct credit background checks on potential employees has dropped since 2010, according to a 2012 survey of 544 U.S.-based HR professionals.

Among organizations that do perform credit history checks, 80 percent have hired someone despite a poor credit report, according to the 2012 findings.

The growing problem of long-term unemployment among older workers in the U.S. was the focus of a Senate Special Committee on Aging hearing on May 15, 2012. The hearing coincided with the Government Accountability Office’s (GAO) release of a report that found the number of workers age 55 and older who have been unemployed more than six months has doubled since the recession began in late 2007.