So you’ve gone through the entire recruiting process, received a signed offer letter and hired the perfect candidate.  If you think your role in the hiring process ends there, you are sorely mistaken.  Besides undergoing a satisfactory onboarding process, all new hires must properly complete government forms which enable them to legally call themselves employees of your company.   Out of all the new hire paperwork that needs to get done, one of the most familiar — our good friend the I-9 — is the most important to complete and maintain correctly.  Proper I-9 completion and compliance is a matter that the government takes very seriously, as demonstrated by the current Administration’s renewed vigor in audits for compliance enforcement.

Abercrombie and Fitch.  Chipotle.  Subway.  Macy’s.  All four of these mega-businesses have recently been penalized and fined hundreds of thousands of dollars by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) for noncompliance of I-9 laws.  Mind you, some of these businesses were pegged not for hiring undocumented workers, but simply for incorrectly filling out the forms.  Just this past week ICE issued 1000 Notice of Inspections to companies requesting Form I-9 documentation for all current employees and any employees terminated within the last 3 years. In the past, 80% of companies that have been inspected by the ICE ended up paying considerable civil money penalties for incorrectly filling out an I-9.

If ICE were to send your company a Notice of Inspection tomorrow, would you be ready?  All I-9 form documentation must be in accordance with 2006 interim final regulations.  I-9 forms must not only be complete, but also filled in properly, accurately and in a manner that is easily accessible by ICE.  Creating a customized company compliance plan for form I-9 documentation is your best defense against an ICE inspection.  A good plan should include:

• A training session on how to properly handle and fill out I-9 forms
• Consulting a third-party to audit your system to make sure it would pass an ICE inspection
• Regular audits completed in-house
• A system (automated or otherwise) to ensure that forms are completed correctly within 3 days of hire.

While the government may offer some leniency through its Good Faith Compliance provision that allows companies up to 10 days to fix I-9 documentation errors that are considered minor, you do not want to take any chances.  Do your due diligence and get a process in place to collect and maintain proper documentation.

In this case, it is not about what you do, but how you do it.

As the end of January quickly approaches a lot of us start thinking about those new years resolutions... Moises over at the Sourcing Corner asks whether there is some sort of corporate fitness program out there to get businesses into shape:

While that is very entertaining, the point we were making is that Jobby represents a generational difference, not an overnight sensation.

The other day we visited a relatively new entrant to the recruiting software space. We tried to get them talking about Jobby. "Hmmm, this is very bad." They said. How do you control it? People could spam the system.

check out this quote from randa newsome, head of staffing at defense contractor raytheon, regarding the challenge of finding top talent in today's tightening labor markets: "The biggest human resources, staffing challenge I have ever faced is this one."

Consider the case of recruiter Rich Carver. In February, he got a call from the U.S. unit of JSP Corp., a Tokyo plastic-foam maker. The company was looking for an engineer with manufacturing experience to serve as a shift supervisor at its Butler, Pa., plant, which makes automobile-bumper parts.

Within two weeks, Mr. Carver and a colleague at the Hudson Highland Group had collected more than 200 resumes. They immediately eliminated just over 100 people who didn't have the required bachelor of science degree, even though many had the kind of job experience the company wanted. A further 65 or so then fell out of the running. Some were deemed overqualified. Others lacked experience with the proper manufacturing software. JSP brought in a half-dozen candidates for an interview, and by August the company had its woman.

To JSP, taking six months to fill the position confirmed its sense that competition for top engineers is intense. Company officials "struggle to fill" openings, says human-resources manager Vicki Senko.

But for candidates facing 200-to-1 odds of getting the job, the struggle seems all on their side.  "Companies are looking for a five-pound butterfly. Not finding them doesn't mean there's a shortage of butterflies," says Richard Tax, president of the American Engineering Association, which campaigns to prevent losses of engineering jobs.

The better-than-expected profit the Dallas-based carrier reported Thursday morning would have been a loss without the benefit of fuel savings it locked in years ago.