The HR News Wire: 3 Key Stories You May Have Missed This Week

Welcome to our new blog series: The HR News Wire where we recap all of the biggest HR news and research from the last week that you might have missed. Let’s jump right in.

Everyone wants to do a great job at work. However, it can be a slippery slope, especially for perfectionists because self-doubt may start to creep up and cause impostor syndrome to take root.

As a refresher, impostor syndrome – also called the impostor phenomenon – is when typically head-strong workers or professionals start to doubt themselves, sometimes leading them to believe that they are fake or not as skilled as they truly are.

A new team of researchers has found that perfectionism that leads to the impostor phenomenon also suffer at home with their families.

“When employees, usually high performers, start to doubt their abilities too much it can turn into impostor phenomenon, causing fatigue, dissatisfaction, and the inability to maintain a healthy work-life balance,” the Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology reports.

“Employees experiencing impostor phenomenon have trouble recognizing and believing their own success and tend to overcompensate, which takes an emotional toll.”

After their analysis, the team found that impostor syndrome can lead to unhappiness at home, which – in turn – can also impact job satisfaction. In other words, it can become a vicious cycle that feeds upon itself.

“The most important point of our study is showing employees who experience persistent thoughts of feeling like a fake are not only experiencing detrimental effects at work but also at home,” said team member Lisa Sublett, from the University of Houston-Clear Lake.

“These accomplished employees are emotionally drained and struggle maintaining family and work demands. Our study also adds legitimacy to discussing impostor phenomenon as an important talent development issue, especially for high-potential employees.”

In the end, managing perfectionism should become a priority, especially for managers who have high-performing staff members. If they don’t, it could spiral out of control.

Learn more about this study on the Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology’s site.

We’ve talked about the world of side hustles before. Now, a new study by Randstad US and Apartment Guide has some more data to share about the current gig-economy.

According to the survey, 50 percent of Gen Z workers work multiple jobs to pay for living expenses (like rent, utilities, etc.). This is nearly double the rate of other generations.

So what’s going on?

First some figures:

44 percent of all respondents say that living expenses outpace raises. This figure jumps to 53 percent when only looking at Gen Z respondents. 42 percent of all respondents say that they would not be able to live where they want if they didn’t earn at least $60,000 and 31 percent say that that figure should be $100,000.

“Tight budgets are nothing new for young people just starting out in their careers, but today’s increasingly high cost of living coupled with slow wage growth means that, despite low unemployment, Millennials and Gen Zs are faced with at least two variables negatively impacting their financial well-being,” said Jim Link, chief human resources officer, Randstad North America.

“Working from home can offset some of their transportation and living expenses, but it can also lead to loneliness and increased risk of disengagement. It doesn’t have to, though. Managers with remote workers can take steps to promote as much collaboration and face time as possible with teammates to combat isolation.”

All of this is also tied up in how much rent has increased over the past couple years. For example, the average increase was four percent. Even without additional data, it’s clear to see how this can price out a lot of younger workers (even older workers, too).

Because of this, many workers are leaning heavily on the gig economy to make ends meet.

Read the full report here.

A new report suggests that many hiring managers are too indecisive with their hiring decisions, taking too long to send job offers, which is causing lower quality hires in the end.

The study, conducted by Gartner, finds that three-fourths of hiring managers fall into the ‘indecisive’ category. They also found that decisive hiring managers hire 10 percent more qualified candidates than their slower counterparts and hire 11 percent less lower-quality candidates as well.

“In today’s hypercompetitive market, the stakes are high when it comes to getting hiring right. Decisive hiring managers hire 10% more high-quality candidates and 11% fewer low-quality candidates than typical hiring managers.Additionally, organizations that drive decisive hiring manager behaviors reduce time-to-fill by 17%,” they report.

The research shows that there is a typical job offer ‘lag time’ of 33 days after a candidate interviews, meaning that applicants who have been interviewed have to wait over a month to finally get an offer. This, they say, is to do indecisiveness and it’s causing sweeping talent problems in its wake.

“Our research shows that the amount of time it takes a hiring manager to make an offer after interviewing is now 33 days — an 84% increase from 2010 to 2018,” said Lauren Smith, vice president in the Gartner HR practice.

“This longer decision-making stage is causing a 16% reduction in candidates’ accepting offers. Ultimately, hiring managers are losing out on prime candidates because of this lag in decision-making.”

Smith also says that this shift is partly because hiring managers are not certain about what qualities they are looking for in candidates. In the past, she says, hiring managers knew their needs well and waited for recruiting to get them a short list. Those days are long gone. Now, hiring managers are forced to make more timely decisions, which – if the study is to be believed – they are having trouble doing.

The takeaway here is that, when it comes to hiring, managers need to act swiftly and decisively unless they want their ideal candidates to move on. A lag time of 33 days is far too long for someone to wait around after an interview. It stands to reason that those individuals likely came to the conclusion that they were not selected and moved on.

Read the full report here.

This week was a mixed bag of HR issues and topics. First, we should all be on the look out for colleagues or workers suffering from impostor syndrome, which can pop up in people who are generally perfectionists. If we ignore these issues, things can start to implode at home, which – in turn – influences job satisfaction and can lead to retention issues.

Also, when it comes to raises, the new Randstad survey shows that they aren’t keeping up with the cost of living. On average, a typical raise is two percent. However, in today’s world, rent is outpacing that number alone, rising by an average of four percent. This forces workers to take on extra roles and/or side hustles in the gig economy.

While gigs can be beneficial to organizations because it may allow employees to foster skills that they typically wouldn’t get a chance to in their day-to-day role, if employees are burning the candle at both ends just to put dinner on the table and have a place to sleep, how are you ever going to increase their engagement levels or boost retention rates?

Finally, Gartner’s study about decision-making is something all organizations should pay close attention to in today’s tight labor market. With talent already hard to come by, hiring managers must act quickly and offer jobs to ideal candidates as soon as possible. If they wait, they will likely hire a lower-quality fit.

We hope you enjoyed this edition of The HR News Wire. See you next week!

Josh Hrala

Josh is an HR journalist and ghostwriter who's been covering outplacement and offboarding for over six years. Before pivoting to the HR world, he was a science journalist whose work can be found in Popular Science, ScienceAlert, The Huffington Post, Cracked, Modern Notion, and more.