First Comment

I was forwarded a job description for a position at Capital One by someone I know. They didn't want to know anything about the job or my advice on taking it or anything to that effect; they wanted to know what this note meant at the bottom of the posting:

As a recipient of TARP funding and under ARRA regulations, Capital One will not sponsor new H-1B petitions or transfer existing H1B Visas.

I was curious myself. So I did some research. The Washington D.C. Employment Law Update laid it out in March:

The United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) announced that employers receiving funds through the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) or under section 13 of the Federal Reserve Act (covered funds) must meet additional requirements before hiring foreign nationals to work in the H-1B specialty occupation category.

These new requirements were established by the Employ American Workers Act (EAWA), a component of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) – otherwise known as the stimulus package – signed into law on February 17, 2009. Under EAWA, companies receiving covered funds must guarantee that they will not displace citizen employees

And if you still want to hire that person, you need to answer some more questions that basically guarantee the government that you didn't displace a US worker for this job.

This makes sense in practice (with all the taxpayer money going to the banks, you want them to hire US tax-paying citizens), but I was surprised (probably wrongly so) to hear it was being done in this manner, with disclosures like that in postings.

Here are some more details on this from U.S. Citizen and Immigration Services.

We're reading all the articles so you don't have to...

-BizTimes talks about Human Resources filling the gap with interim executives

-Vault has job descriptions. They're not as good as the ones we do at Astron Solutions.

-WebProNews says that Yahoo! is putting a new spin on the recruiting process by launching pay-per-candidate for their Yahoo! HotJobs

-Workforce Management talks about how an economic crisis is creating an opportunity for the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM). "As companies slash payrolls and tighten their belts in other ways that squeeze employees, the association is trying to make itself indispensable to HR professionals."

-Lastly, the Chicago Sun-Times talks about President Barack Obama being pressed on healthcare during his ABC special by an Human Resources executive:

One questioner -- Marisa Milton, vice president of health care policy for the HR Policy Association, a public policy advocate for human resource executives -- said that "other industrialized nations provide coverage for all their residents" with "high quality care" without spending more money.

"A lot of those countries employ a different system than we do," the president said. "Almost all of them have what would be considered a single-payer system in which the government operates what is essentially a Medicare for all."

The president said he didn't think it wise to attempt to "completely change our system root and branch" since health care is one-sixth of the U.S. economy. It "would be hugely disruptive," he said, arguing that citizens would be forced to change their doctors and insurance plans "in a way I'm not prepared to go."

End-of-life issues were raised as well; right now it is estimated that nearly 30 percent of Medicare's annual $327 billion budget is spent on patients in their final year of life.

Jane Sturm told the story of her nearly 100-year-old mother, who was originally denied a pacemaker because of her age. She eventually got one, but only after seeking out another doctor.

"Outside the medical criteria," Sturm asked, "is there a consideration that can be given for a certain spirit & and quality of life?"

"I don't think that we can make judgments based on peoples' spirit," Obama said. "That would be a pretty subjective decision to be making. I think we have to have rules that say that we are going to provide good, quality care for all people.

"We're not going to solve every single one of these very difficult decisions at end of life," he said. "Ultimately that's going to be between physicians and patients."

If you're thinking of banning social networking from your company, you may be making a very costly mistake according to employee evolution: click here

If you're thinking of skipping those MBA recruiting sessions, you should read this Wall Street Journal article about more and more people who are doing just that: click here

If you're getting ready to retire, you should read this Journal article about planning your exit strategy: click here

If you're worried about whether you need to have a required lunch break, read this Q&A from the Human Resource blog: click here

If you're wondering the best way to leveraging talent into your company's competitive advantage, read this book review from the HR Practitioner: click here

If you're trying to figure out what the role of Human Resources should be in employer branding, read this PUREcommunications article: click here

And if you're looking for an HR job, who are we to ignore social networking after we talked about it's importance, so here's a LiveJournal entry on a website for HR jobs: click here