While drinking is a fire-able offense at plenty of workplaces, it seems to have a place at some offices, according to Bloomberg.

Employees at Yelp Inc. in San Francisco can gather ’round the company kegerator–as long as they use an iPad app that records their intake. Perhaps being atop that leaderboard isn’t the best idea.

But booze seems to be part of the culture at Silicon Valley. Mark Zuckerburg reportedly served appletinis after screening The Social Network for his employees.

In the film Startup.com, leaders at Govworks.com are seen boozing throughout the movie. (I still blame the .com bubble burst and poor management for the company’s collapse, not the alcohol.)

Proponents say it’s all part of blending work and life at those companies, especially when putting in long hours. 

Others have thier doubts.

“Alcohol is sort of a slippery slope, because obviously you’d think it might impair their performance,” said Dalton Conley, social sciences dean and professor at New York University. “Many people can work after one beer, but I doubt many people can do serious knowledge work very productively after four or five.”

Still, Joe Beninato, chief executive officer of app developer Tello Inc. in Palo Alto Calif., told Bloomberg that his employees are responsible when drinking.

“When you’re working at a startup, you’re working 24/7 and it takes over your life,” he said. “It’s not like it’s a wild fraternity party or something like that — we’re all adults.”

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Behind the news desks, fancy suits and snappy quips is a dark side of ESPN including drug use, rampant sexual harassment and a frat house atmosphere, according to excerpts of a new tell-all book.

A CNN story has excerpts of Those Guys Have All the Fun by James Andrew Miller and Tom Shales. (Skip to the fourth paragraph for the juicy stuff.)

Sexual harassment, for example, was so rampant at the Bristol, Conn. headquarters that “in the late ’80s the problem got so bad that anchor Karie Ross actually stood up in front of 200 or so people in the cafeteria and demanded that it stop. Her plea didn’t have much impact. ‘No fewer than 50 cases of sexual harassment were reported by women on the staff to ESPN management in the first half of the 1990s,’ the authors write.”

Sex and drugs were also rampant in the early days, according to former reporter Sal Marchiano who’s quotes ran on CNN.com

There were a couple of [sex in the] stairwell stories…. There were drugs in the building, that I knew. There was one guy who dealt pot.”

The sleepy town of Bristol didn’t help matters much.

According to CNN: “I think part of the sexual harassment stuff was location,” says former ESPN chairman Steve Bornstein. “It’s 100 miles from real civilization, and you got the kind of testosterone, jock mentality, frat-house approach that’s pretty much a recipe for stupid decisions being made.”

On his radio show Tuesday, former SportsCenter anchor Dan Patrick said the book is also likely to detail ESPN’s backstabbing corporate culture.

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A year’s supply of Pabst Blue Ribbon, Buddy Holly glasses, skinny jeans and $10,000. Sounds like hipster heaven, doesn’t it?

But those are actually the offerings from a San Francisco-based tech start-up looking for the best and brightest. 

The company’s name: You guessed it …  Hipster.

If you don’t know what a hipster is, well, it’s a young person inclined to wear Buddy Holly glasses and skinny jeans while drinking a PBR and listening to either brand new music you’ve never heard of or some ironic song from the 1980s.  Trust me, I live in the hipster capital of Philadelphia.

Hipster (the tech start-up) is a website that allows users to post questions (Anybody know a good bicycle shop in Atlanta?) then allows people to answer them. 

So far Hipster’s recruiting strategy is paying off, according to Newser, as they company has already received applications from top-level candidates at Google and Twitter.

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The candidate experience has long been the Achilles heel of the recruiting process. But thanks to the efforts of HR Technology® Conference regulars like Elaine Orler (The Talent Function), Gerry Crispin (CareerXroads) and Ed Newman (Accidental Entrepreneur blogger), that’s beginning to change.

For the first time, this year’s conference featured a session recognizing the winners of the Candidate Experience Awards. Twenty-four companies were honored for creating a superior experience. Five of the winners were on hand to share their experiences.

Earlier in the year, Orler, Crispin and Newman, along with The Talent Function’s Mark McMillan, created the award to recognize candidate-experience excellence.

“The core goal of the Candidate Experience Awards is to elevate the value of the candidate as a true partner in the recruiting process,” says Gerry Crispin, co-founder of CareerXroads. “We believe that organizations that embrace this paradigm flourish, in part, because their transparency in the recruiting process leads to more engaged employees and a more competitive recruiting brand.”

Simplifying the process was at the heart of many of the winning entries. During the session, one of the winners, Sage, noted that it makes it clear to applicants that the application process takes two minutes to complete, and follows up with candidates after they’re finished to ensure that the time frame was successfully met.

A representative from another winner, State Farm, talked about a formal survey of job candidates—both those who secured a job and those who didn’t—that it regularly conducts to identify pain points in the process.

A third winner, RMS, detailed a chat capability it added to its process that allows job candidates to connect online with recruiters.

Though their approaches may vary, Crispin noted that all of the winners did have one thing in common: When it comes to improving their experiences, none of them consider themselves finished.

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Intriguing post by John Sumser on his HRExaminer site recently. His premise — I’m pretty sure — is that there’s good recruiting and bad recruiting … and way too many companies are still doing the bad recruiting.

In his piece, “On Being Attractive,” he likens this bad recruiting to “catching the horse after it’s left the pasture.” Here’s his description:

Recruiting, as currently practiced, is a defensive and reactive process full of promotional techniques. Placing an ad on a job board, hiring a staffing or search firm and filling a requirement after it is identified are all reactive behaviors executed in defense of a set of circumstances that happen out of the control of the recruiter. The industry that has grown up to support recruiters and other HR professionals assumes that a reactive posture is the starting point.”

Attraction, on the other hand, gradually and interestingly introduces the prospect [of working at your company] with no threat of immediate sales pressure. Usually, attraction-oriented tools and processes give the prospects something of value well in advance of the sales pitch. … It is friendlier, with a relaxed pace.”

I reached out to Sumser to get a little more clarity on what these recruiting techniques that attract candidates are, what he describes as “the best ways to convert so-called passive seekers into active seekers.”

From what I gleaned in his response to me, it has to do with reputation, walking your talk rather than talking it:

The trick, for every company, is to figure out what makes people want to work for you. You can start getting a sense of this by talking to your best employees and really understanding what they like. In some cases, it will be as simple as perks. In most cases, it will be a complex package of social status (in the larger community), growth potential, opportunities to learn and develop, and a reputation as a great place to be from. That’s a particularly useful technique … . By always working to get your best people promoted out of your organization, you can create an amazing talent flow. If working for you is a gateway to an even better job, people will want to join to take advantage of the dynamic. … You build this over time by putting your employees’ futures ahead of your temporary inconvenience when they leave.

Oh and by the way, Sumser holds little love for Best-Place-to-Work contests. Those BPW plaques, he says, “are easily purchased by companies with enough funds to spend … . It’s a form of advertising.” I tend to agree.

Granted, the importance of establishing your credibility and authenticity as a great place to work, as opposed to banging your drum, is not necessarily a new concept. Neither is the importance of helping high performers excel in their careers, and not necessarily just in your confines. But I, for one, have never seen these concepts laid out in such interestingly opposing terms.

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HR hears a lot of talk about the importance of building a solid employer brand in order to lure top talent, and to make the company known as much for its cool, unique culture as the products and services it provides.

There’s no doubt that establishing and maintaining a reputation as a great place to work is extremely important. And, working for an organization with a fashionable employer brand may indeed be important to some job seekers. But not nearly as important as the work they do and the people they work with, apparently.

In a Monster.com survey of more than 2,400 visitors to the site, job seekers were asked the question, “Aside from salary, benefits and location, which of the following would most likely attract you to a new job?”

The most common response, by a wide margin, was “the opportunity to work in an industry I’m passionate about,” at 61 percent, followed by “the opportunity to work with people I professionally admire,” at 17 percent. Thirteen percent cited “a lively and energetic office environment” as the biggest selling point for a potential new gig, with 6 percent and 3 percent saying the same about “the opportunity to work for an aspirational/cool brand” and “an innovative office design,” respectively.

“Job seekers are naturally most concerned about salary, benefits and convenience to their home,” said Mary Ellen Slayter, career advice expert at Monster, in a statement. “But once that’s settled, the intangibles come into play. People are craving ways to bring meaning to their work, and they want to work in an industry they feel passionate about. Employers can take an active role in supporting these positive feelings by helping people see the connection between the work they do and how it benefits others. No fancy office can replace that sense of satisfaction.”

From touting their freewheeling work environments to overhauling their “conventional” office spaces, some organizations are forever looking for new ways to present themselves as cool and progressive employers. And while there should always be room for innovation, it seems that coolness quotient still doesn’t quite trump passion for their work and respect for their peers in the eyes of most prospective employees.

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Came across an interesting blog post with the same title as my header here,  written by Rick Conlow, leadership expert and CEO/co-founder of Minneapolis-based WCW Partners. He believes customer service has been ailing for some time now and employers need to put the function on “life support” and “invest heavily in bringing it back to health” before it fells you at your knees.

Customer service, he writes, “passed away quietly [and] the wake is at the next quarterly meeting, and the funeral will follow shortly.” Each year, he writes, “companies worldwide struggle for sales growth and profit, yet a conservative estimate of their loss from poor customer service comes in at a staggering $338.5 billion a year.”

He sums up the problem pretty convincingly:

“Excellent customer service is seriously lacking in most places we spend our money. Think about it — can you recall a recent experience where the customer service was really bad? Sure you can. Think of other places you have spent your hard earned paycheck: grocery store, bank, restaurant, a fast-food chain, a department store, a gas station, a hotel, an airline, an online merchant and the list could go on. How many of these had poor to average service? Probably most of them. How many really stood out and had outstanding service? Very likely, it was only a few.”

Here are the top four reasons why Conlow thinks customer service is essentially dead, as itemized in this release about his blog post:

1.    A Lack of Civility — People have accepted poor manners and have become used to rude behavior. “The general perception by most adults is that people are less civil than in days past,” Conlow says.
2.    Employees Treated as Commodities — “Many companies treat employees as commodities,” he contends, “not as valuable partners. Most employees don’t get the training and support they need to deliver superior customer service. Company leaders have little loyalty to their employees, and, in return, employees have little loyalty to them and their customers.”
3.    Public Accustomed to Poor Service — The public’s expectations have become lower as mediocre service has become rampant. Conlow points out that many big companies with poor customer-service ratings still thrive.
4.    An Increase in Technology — The increase in technology today means a decrease in personal interaction. “Service technology loses the human touch — the empathy and compassion that is vital to creating loyal customer relationships,” he says.

Conlow warns that “consumer discontent is a sleeping giant. It will only take so much, and its wrath can go viral today in minutes.” He also says customer service is becoming more important than ever, and companies need to put more effort into improving it.

Such as? Well … a leadership mind change, for one. As he describes:

“Maybe the real issue is that too many business leaders don’t value delivering better service and don’t buy into the bottom-line benefits. So most organizations do just enough to get by. The American Customer Satisfaction Institute at the Ross Business School at the University of Michigan rates some 240 companies across 34 industries on a monthly basis. The airline industry has a 67 average, which is awful. The average rating for all companies is 76.8, which is a C average. This means only two of 10 companies have a significant level of highly satisfied customers. Those few companies with excellent ratings have discovered that excellent service is really their leading product that drives everything else.”

Conlow cites a Customers 2020 report saying the customer experience will overtake price and product as the key brand differentiator in the future. Those organizations that adapt will survive and thrive, he says. Then he issues this warning:

“As more companies begin to ail painfully, customer service must be resurrected as it becomes more important than ever.”

So … better customer-service training, perhaps? More money in the customer-service-training pot? Conlow’s take: By all means.

Maybe this news analysis we posted in June gets to a better solution for today’s workforce (which now includes many younger workers, and they’re only going to increase). Invest in the things these workers believe in, including corporate-social-responsibility initiatives, and watch your customer-service ratings climb.

Share your CSR visions and values with them, make sure they reflect some of what these younger workers are passionate about, encourage them to connect with like-minded customers on the same issues … and, that story indicates, you really can right this customer-service ship.

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Editor’s note: Correction appended below.

Will they ever learn?

Amid all the talk recently about the need to re-engage employees and strengthen your employment brand against the backdrop of an improving economy and tightening labor market, Ford Motor Co. decided to downsize 90 workers from its Chicago assembly plant — via a robocall (and on Halloween, no less).

Many of the workers assumed the call — which they received at home –was merely a prank, and showed up at the plant for their Saturday shift only to learn that their badges no longer worked: They were barred from their plant. Because they really had been fired. And that robocall had not been a prank.

In a statement to AOL News, Ford said that it did not normally fire workers via robocall and that it expected the layoffs to be temporary: “As part of our business process, we have temporarily adjusted our workforce numbers at Chicago Assembly Plant by approximately 90 team members. Our goal, as always, is to return the workers back to their positions as soon as possible based on the needs of our business.”

And to think, those workers had probably assumed they’d be getting a welcome break from annoying robocalls, now that the mid-term elections are finally over.

Ford is hardly the first company to bungle a layoff announcement, of course. Just a few months ago, Microsoft executive Stephen Elop received plenty of well-deserved criticism when he announced a massive layoff near the end of a long, rambling email to Microsoft employees within his division. Layoffs are often a necessary evil, of course, frequently dictated by business cycles over which the company may have little control. But a company — HR, in particular — does have control over the manner in which the announcements are made, and the remaining employees won’t soon forget how their ex-colleagues were treated.

In summarizing his thoughts about the Microsoft email, Bill Rosenthal, CEO of New York-based Communispond, explained it to reporter Jill Cueni-Cohen this way: “It’s tough to make hard decisions, and I don’t think what Microsoft did was a bad decision; it was the message that was bad. It was the way he delivered it.”

Note: An earlier version of this post incorrectly referred to Stephen Elop as the CEO of Microsoft Corp. Satya Nadella is the CEO; Elop is an executive vice president.

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It’s not 2010 anymore.

Alan Momeyer, vice president of human resources at Loews Corp., delivered that helpful message to attendees who came to check out yesterday’s “HR Tips and Trends” session at the HR in Hospitality Conference & Expo at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas.

Momeyer, who was accompanied on stage by HR peers from Four Season Hotels & Resorts, Fairmont Hotels and Resorts, Destination Hotels and Resorts/Lowe Enterprises, and Cornell University School of Hotel Administration, was referring to how quality job candidates seek jobs now versus five years ago.

In the past year or so, Loews saw approximately 300,000 job applicants come just from a partnership with indeed.com, the popular employment-related meta-search job engine, according to Momeyer.

“That didn’t just happen. It happened because we paid to be visible,” he said, urging the HR leaders in attendance to get more aggressive in seeking out quality candidates via sites such as Indeed as well as ever-more popular social networking sites.

Momeyer and his colleagues on the panel also stressed the importance of taking a more active role in managing your employment brand online.

For example, panelist Robert Mellwig, senior vice president of really cool people (that’s right) at Destination Hotels and Resorts/Lowe Enterprises, says the organization views employer-review sites such as Glassdoor.com similar to the way its customers look at tripadvisor.com.

According to Momeyer, his introduction to Glassdoor came via his millenial-age daughters.

“When they graduated college and started talking to companies about interviews and job openings, they went straight to Glassdoor to find out more about these companies.”

HR can help the organization have a bigger say in what candidates find when they (inevitably) visit such sites, said Momeyer.

“A lot of times, it’s unhappy employees complaining on these sites,” he said. “You should think about approaching your employees who would have something good to say, to share their reviews.”

Panelist Carolyn Clark, senior vice president of HR at Fairmont Hotels and Resorts, “knows how important our external brand is for our guests, and what differentiates our guest experience.”

But, equally as vital, she said, is determining what makes the Fairmont employment experience a positive one for its 45,000 global associates.

To “differentiate our colleague experience, increase our job applicant flow and increase employee engagement, we really want to tell our colleague experience, and [show candidates] what it’s like to work here.”

Doing so requires “fishing where the fish are,” she said, noting that Fairmont has recently undertaken an initiative to “identify [the most used] channels and best candidates, and seek them out and ask them what’s most important to them in their jobs and careers.”

Clark and her HR team have asked the same of current Fairmont employees, surveying associates to find out what attracted them to the company, what has kept them there and what about their jobs makes them happy, she said.

What Clark and company have gleaned from this process is that, above all else, employees (and potential employees) value a connection with their co-workers as well as the organization.

“What we’ve learned from hearing our employees describe their work experience is that they look at their jobs as if they were working with their families.”

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Starbucks, the Seattle-based coffee giant, announced yesterday it was doubling its free college tuition plan for employees to cover a full four years of college instead of two. Starbucks will offer employees faster tuition reimbursement–after every semester instead of after completing 21 class credits.

The program, in partnership with Arizona State University, offers all eligible full-time and part-time employees full tuition coverage for a four-year bachelor’s degree though ASU’s online degree program. Starbucks says it will invest up to $250 million or more to help at least 25,000 employees graduate by 2025.

Nearly 2,000 Starbucks employees have already enrolled in the program, which offers 49 undergraduate degree programs through ASU Online.

“By giving our partners access to four years of full tuition coverage, we provide them with a critical tool for a lifelong opportunity,” says Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz, in a statement. “We’re stronger as a nation when everyone is afforded a pathway to success.”

And in a LinkedIn piece announcing the move, CEO Schultz talks in a video interview about the importance of education and his company’s role in making the American workforce a more robust and agile one within the next 10 years.

“We have a long history of under-promising and over-delivering,” he says. “We think we’ll do the same there.”

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Now here’s one worth watching. Glassdoor.com, the career website that lets employees trash or praise employers anonymously (with more doing the former than the latter), has just opened its doors to employers to defend themselves, if you will.

Actually, companies don’t respond to specific complaints. Rather, they’re now invited to join a new program called Glassdoor Enhanced Employer Profiles that lets them post their company profiles on the site — in exchange for a $495 (and up)-per-month subscription.

Problem is — and the Wall Street Journal lays it all out pretty nicely in this recent story (subscription only)  — Glassdoor’s going to have to somehow prove to all its users and visitors that those advertising dollars aren’t swaying decisions to filter certain reviews, or affecting the site’s employer-rating system.

Hmmm … this could get a bit dicey. Welcome, Glassdoor, to a dilemma journalists and media holdings face every day: how to ensure and uphold their objectivity in reporting on industries and organizations at the same time they’re inviting many of those organizations to adverstise.

 It’s not easy, but that advertiser/customer (reader) line is one we here at HRE endeavor mightily to never cross. Can’t say every competitor does the same. But can say our readers seem to appreciate it, from what I hear in my travels and discussions with them.

Glassdoor has already decided to allow paying companies to have their uploaded “company photos appear first when a job seeker is scanning a Glassdoor profile for a company, requiring a bit more work for site visitors to see the unofficial photos posted by employees,” the WSJ story says. Glassdoor CEO Robert Hohman tells the paper he doesn’t believe the order of photos will matter much.

Hope, for his sake, he’s right.

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OK, a bit of soft news, but worth sharing: This recent release from the University of the Rockies suggests week-long vacations aren’t long enough for optimal benefits to occur — for both employee and employer.

The study — conducted at the Colorado Springs, Colo., graduate school that specializes in master’s and doctorate degrees in psychology — maintains the benefits of vacation length peak at about 10 days, which supports previous research findings that 10 to 14 days of vacation may be the optimal length.

What are the benefits to taking, or granting, a vacation of optimal length, you ask? According to this release, an increase in job satisfaction, a reduction of and protection against job stress and burnout, and an increase in professional well-being (which, of course, boosts employee engagement and morale and, in turn, boosts customer service, your employer brand, the list goes on).

I’ll be interested to see if anyone cares to comment on this, but it’ll have to wait awhile. I leave Thursday for vacation. I’ll be gone 10 days.

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So everyone’s got the post-holiday blues, especially at the office. What to do? Luckily, Bob Kelleher has some suggestions. Kelleher, the former CHRO at AECOM (a big consulting firm based in Massachusetts), is the recent author of Louder Than Words: 10 Practical Employee Engagement Steps That Drive Results.

Here are some of his tips for re-engaging your employees:

Consider establishing a “Communication Promise,” a detailed communication protocol in which your organization’s leadership team creates a schedule of communications over the next year that will be cascaded down from the CEO to first-line managers.

Build a learning culture, even if you have limited funds. Even if you’ve cut your training budget, writes Kelleher, things like stretch assignments, mentorships, cross-sectional task teams and lunch-and-learns are all relatively inexpensive ways to foster learning and development.

Analyze your employment brand. Keller suggests getting a cross-section of top-performing employees together to determine why people work for your company. Many companies, he writes, actually have a problem with hiring, not engagement—they’re hiring the wrong type of people to succeed in their cultures.

And, finally, host a YouTube video contest. Send out Flip cameras to every company location or department and request that employees be given a chance to pick a company value and explain on-camera “what that means to me,” and award prizes for the best videos. Hopefully, no one will produce a video like the ones from this Navy captain.

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I admit the following with a recently delivered dash of remorse: I am an avowed Amazon Prime customer and I always get a “warm fuzzy” when a product I ordered in the morning arrives on my front porch before I even get home from work.

With that said, reading the New York Times‘ recent in-depth look at Amazon’s corporate culture definitely left me with a “cold prickly,” or what the company calls the feeling customers get when they are informed their packages will not arrive as scheduled.

In case you haven’t read the piece yet — and I highly recommend you do — the Times “interviewed more than 100 current and former Amazon employees, including many who spoke on the record and some who requested anonymity because they had signed agreements saying they would not speak to the press.”

One of the few employees Amazon allowed to speak on the record (via email) for the piece was its vice president of HR, who defended the company’s attitude toward open confrontation in the workplace:

“We always want to arrive at the right answer,” said Tony Galbato, vice president for human resources, in an email statement. “It would certainly be much easier and socially cohesive to just compromise and not debate, but that may lead to the wrong decision.”

The story about the company that has just been valued at $250 billion has generated enough controversy that founder and CEO Jeff Bezos, who declined to be interviewed for the original story, nonetheless felt compelled to push back against some of the more damaging claims made in it, according to a follow-up piece by the Times:

In a letter to employees, Mr. Bezos said Amazon would not tolerate the “shockingly callous management practices” described in the article. He urged any employees who knew of “stories like those reported” to contact him directly.

“Even if it’s rare or isolated, our tolerance for any such lack of empathy needs to be zero,” Mr. Bezos said.

The NYT piece quotes Jason Merkoski, a 42-year-old engineer, who worked on the team developing the first Kindle e-reader and served as a technology evangelist for Amazon, who left the company in 2010 and then returned briefly in 2014.

Among the many disheartening stories of uncaring — or even malicious — co-workers, Merkoski’s quote perhaps best sums up the queasy essence of how work gets done there:

“The sheer number of innovations means things go wrong, you need to rectify, and then explain, and heaven help you if you got an email from Jeff,” he said. “It’s as if you’ve got the CEO of the company in bed with you at 3 a.m. breathing down your neck.”

Jason Averbook, CEO of The Marcus Buckingham Co., and one of the top thought leaders in the space of HR, workforce and enterprise technology — as well as being named as one of the 10 Most Powerful HR Technology experts by HRE — says the Amazon story offers a few powerful lessons for HR leaders everywhere.

“We need to be able to understand the pulse of employees much better than we do today,” he says. “It should never get to the point where employees see news media or social media as the only resort.

“And for a metrics-driven organization such as Amazon, it’s a shame and a shock that neither Bezos nor team leaders across the organization have quality people data that shows what’s at work in their teams. Because of this dearth of people data, we cannot truly know what their culture is like, and this situation emphasizes the need for reliable, real-time measures of team-level data for companies of all sizes.”

Averbook adds that companies need to “be doing a much better job of putting tools into the hands of team leaders themselves to empower them to take action.”

With the volume of millennials entering the workplace — even in managerial roles — “we need to provide both the training and tools to allow them to lead effectively,” he says. “It’s a reminder for companies to take a look at their current processes and identify how they need to improve now.

“This is the kick in the pants HR and companies need,” he adds. “If there was ever a question about the return on investment of HR tools and processes, the Amazon debacle should resolve those concerns as long as they are the right tools and processes.”

But, despite the public-relations black eye the story has caused Amazon, it certainly appears the company will continue to grow toward being the first trillion-dollar retailer in history, regardless of how we feel about the way our packages and products ultimately get to us.

Indeed, in Seattle alone, according to the piece, “more than 4,500 jobs are open, including one for an analyst specializing in ‘high-volume hiring.’ “

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If at some point today you feel overwhelmed, take a second to consider what hiring managers at Chipotle Mexican Grill are up to at the moment.

As you might have heard, the Denver-based casual eatery chain has declared its intentions to bring on 4,000 new employees today, as part of its first-ever National Career Day. According to the company, management teams at each of its 1,800-plus restaurants in the U.S. will hold open interviews for up to 60 applicants between the hours of 8 a.m. and 11 a.m. this morning, with interested candidates invited to register for a sit-down at the Chipotle of their choice by visiting www.nationalcareerday.com.

Most of the openings are for entry-level crew jobs, which primarily entail taking orders and preparing food, Chipotle spokesperson Chris Arnold recently told USA Today.

Nevertheless, the people who ultimately fill these positions will have opportunities to grow and advance within the organization, according to Arnold, who points out that Chipotle promoted more than 10,000 of its people into management roles within the last year.

“When we hire crew, we look to identify individuals that we think have the motivation and the capability to move into management or leadership positions,” Arnold told USA Today, adding that this is the first time Chipotle has attempted hiring in such large numbers in such a short timeframe.

It’s certainly an ambitious undertaking that may net Chipotle scores of valuable new employees. And, from a PR perspective, it could be a tremendous (if short-term) boon for the company. But the initiative may wind up having some unintended consequences as well, says Claire Bissot, HR consulting manager at Leawood, Kan.-based CBIZ Human Capital Services.

By offering an extreme number of open positions, “[Chipotle has] the potential to attract individuals from other restaurants who are not currently looking for a job, as well as individuals looking to apply for Chipotle, resulting in a significant increase in their hiring pool.”

At the same time, mass hiring “may also cause individuals who wouldn’t normally make it through the recruiting process to be hired and later terminated.”

The problem with this approach, she says, “is the lost resources for training and onboarding these individuals, causing low retention and high turnover cost. Ultimately, what they are trying to achieve may be counteracted, and what looked like a quick solution could financially impact the company in the near term.”

Marketing would seem to be “the key focus” of a hiring effort like this one, continues Bissot, noting that many organizations could stand to be more efficient in their recruiting and onboarding processes, and more creative in positioning their companies as great places to work.

All that said, however, “adding volume is not always a good solution, and while forcing mass hiring of this volume appears to provide short-term results, doing so could end up hurting companies more.”

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Yesterday the New York Times ran a story that examined Starbucks’ attempts to rectify the difficult working conditions uncovered by an earlier Times investigation, which profiled Starbucks employees who were forced to do “clopenings” (staying late to close stores only to have to rise at the crack of dawn to open them again) and who were given very short notice of work schedules and schedule changes.

The latest piece reports that the Seattle-based coffee chain seems to be falling short in changing these practices, which it had promised to do in the wake of the earlier report. What I find notable is that the story cites a report by the Center for Popular Democracy, which had reached out to Starbucks baristas via a website called Coworker.org.

You’ve no doubt heard of the employer reviews posted by workers on Glassdoor and Simply Hired, in which employees can grouse about the managers and working conditions at their company. Coworker.org, which was founded in 2013, lets disgruntled workers take things a step further by organizing campaigns to address those complaints. It’s similar to Change.org, which lets users launch campaigns to attract supporters for their cause.

Recent campaigns launched on Coworker.org include an effort to push Netflix to add its hourly DVD workers to its recently announced unlimited-leave policy for new parents (it’s garnered almost 8,000 signatures of support so far), a petition for US Bank to rehire a whistleblowing employee (about 6,400 signatures) and to push Starbucks to do away with clopenings (about 10,500 signatures). Other campaigns seem to have a more millennial vibe (let supermarket employees wear beards, restaurant employees show their tattoos).

Coworker.org is funded via the Citizen Engagement Laboratory, a liberal foundation based in Berkeley that’s been the target of ire from conservative news sites such as Breitbart News. Its co-founders are Michelle Miller (whose experience includes a decade at the Service Employees International Union) and Jess Kutch, whose experience also includes a stint at the SEIU (notice a theme there?).

Regardless of its affiliations, Coworker.org represents just one of a growing number of platforms for employees to sound off about mistreatment (real or perceived) and unfair labor practices — and for companies to find themselves the target of negative, and possibly viral, publicity.

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REI made news recently with its announcement that its stores will be closed on Black Friday this year. “Instead of reporting to work, we’re paying our employees to do what we love most — be outside,” said REI’s CEO, Jerry Stritzke. The outdoor-apparel retailer’s website won’t be processing customer orders that day, either — instead, the day will be a paid holiday for all of its 12,000 employees, it said.

Seems like a bold move — although retail analysts note that Black Friday isn’t quite the sales juggernaut it used to be, what with the rise of online shopping and deals that are spread throughout November and December. Still, REI’s announcement resonates with a significant portion of the public who’ve expressed outrage at the recent trend among retailers to open early on the evening of, or stay open throughout, Thanksgiving Day itself, requiring employees to work instead of spending time with their families.

Although REI appears to be the only national chain so far that will be closed on Black Friday, at least 24 national retailers have announced they will remain closed on Thanksgiving Day. These stores include GameStop, T.J. Maxx, Marshalls, Sam’s Club, Home Depot, Burlington Coat Factory, Jo-Ann Stores, BJ’s, Costco and Nordstrom.

Could REI be shooting itself in its (Teva hiking sandal-clad) foot? Black Friday is still very important for retailers, even for REI — spokeswoman Stephanie Hettick told The Oregonian that it’s one of the top sales days for the company. But REI is also making sure it’s getting massive publicity for its decision: It’s created a website, optoutside.rei.com, as well as hashtags on Twitter to encourage shoppers to be outside on Black Friday (did I note that REI sells outdoor merchandise?) rather than clogging store aisles.

“Black Friday is the perfect time to remind ourselves of the essential truth that life is richer, more connected and complete when you choose to spend it outside,” said Stritzke in a press release. Hmmm, maybe he’s on to something.

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You may not “Like” this much, but the warning shot from a recent ruling broadening the definition of protected concerted activity is still reverberating and worth keeping front of mind as you go about your 2016 planning when it comes to social-media approaches and policies.

In the ruling, the Second Circuit Court of Appeals — covering Connecticut, New York and Vermont — upheld the National Labor Relations Board’s finding that two employees at the Triple Play Sports Bar and Grille in Watertown, Conn., were wrongfully terminated after one posted on Facebook, and the other “liked,” a disparaging criticism of the company’s income-tax-withholding policies.

An NLRB judge found, and the Second Circuit agreed, that both activities were protected and concerted under Section 7 of the National Labor Relations Act  because they involved multiple employees and were related to workplace complaints.

“It didn’t matter that there was no union to be found on the premises,” Carmon Harvey, a shareholder in national law firm LeClairRyan’s Philadelphia office, writes in a blog post at EPLI Risk.

“It also didn’t matter that customers could see the public employer-bashing,” she writes, “because the content wasn’t directed at customers, was not defamatory and did not tend to disparage the employer’s brand, products or services. This meant that their subsequent terminations were a big NLRA ‘no-no.’ ”

To top it off, the court also affirmed the NLRB’s ruling that the employer’s expansive Internet and social-media policy went too far, unlawfully prohibiting activity protected under the NLRA.

Brian Hall, writing on the Employer Law Report, highlights two interesting points about the case: that the comment and “Like” were protected because they both related to ongoing employee concerns over their employer’s workplace-tax withholding and their resulting tax liabilities, and that the Facebook communications “were not so disloyal or defamatory as to lose the protection of the Act.”

“Specifically,” he writes, “the court found that the employees did not disparage the employer’s products or services and their communications were not ‘maliciously untrue.’ ” He continues:

“The court was not swayed by any profanity contained in the one employee’s comment because it was not made in the presence of or directed at customers and did not reflect the employer’s brand. According to the court, accepting Triple Play’s argument that the Facebook discussion took place ‘in the presence of customers’ could lead to the undesirable result of chilling virtually all employee speech online. [As the ruling states,] ‘almost all Facebook posts by employees have at least some potential to be viewed by customers.’ “

As a result, the court upheld the board’s order requiring the employer to offer reinstatement and full back pay to the terminated employees. It also, as mentioned above, called into question the company’s social-media policy, which states that:

“[W]hen internet blogging, chat-room discussions … or other forms of communication extend to employees … [by] engaging in inappropriate discussions about the company, management, and/or co-workers, the employee may be violating the law and is subject to disciplinary action, up to and including termination of employment.”

So what are the takeaways for employers and HR? Hall says they’re twofold:

“To help avoid liability, employers should:

• Have their social-media policies reviewed by experienced counsel to eliminate provisions that can be reasonably misconstrued to restrict employees from discussing the terms and conditions of their employment with others; and
• Understand, before disciplining employees for any communication or activity on social media, that otherwise protected communications or activities will not lose their protection under the NLRA simply because they disparage or are uncomplimentary [to] the employer, [and] contain statements that are not true, or contain profanity.”

Is it just me or has social media made it exponentially harder for employers to protect their reputations and brands? Even if you can’t comment on an employee’s disparaging private Facebook discussion, you’d better start arming yourself with strategies for getting your good word out online, as this recent HRE feature by Staff Writer Mark McGraw explores.

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When your company — the largest privately held oil and gas producer in the country — also makes frequent appearances on Fortune’s 100 Best Companies to Work For list, chances are good that you’re doing something right when it comes to keeping your workers happy.

So maybe it shouldn’t have come as a surprise when, late last week, news broke that  billionaire Jeffery Hildebrand, owner of Hilcorp Energy, just blew the curve on holiday bonuses this year with a staggering, six-figure sum for each employee.

According to this post from Forbes’ site, Hildebrand’s year-end generosity has already been well-documented:

Five years ago, when Hilcorp achieved its goal of doubling its oil and gas production, Hildebrand gave every employee the choice of $35,000 cash or $50,000 towards a new car. This year, despite the downturn, Hilcorp doubled its output again, to more than 150,000 barrels per day. So Hildebrand doubled the bonus — to $100,000.

With about 1,400 employees, Forbes notes, “Hildebrand’s largesse will total more than $100 million (amounts are said to be prorated depending on how much of the past five years a worker was with the company).”

But no matter what the ultimate amount on the check actually is, Hildebrand’s bonuses have a tremendous effect on how employees view their work, as evidenced by this quote from Amanda Thompson, a Hilcorp receptionist (provided to Fox 4 News in Houston):

“It’s just a true gift, and I think myself, along with everyone, is not going to give less than 100 percent each day,” she said.

In this age of constant self-promotion and 24/7 branding, it’s especially refreshing to read that “Hildebrand has declined all of [Forbes’] interview requests over the years; a spokesperson did not return calls for comment about the bonuses.”

Indeed, holiday season or not, money always talks louder than words.

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A number of firms have reached out to us recently about their internal feedback tools, which they say can increase engagement and improve performance by letting employees send their colleagues kudos or offer constructive criticism. Now that “continuous performance management” is officially a thing, it would seem that the time is ripe for HR leaders to push for rolling out these tools within their organizations.

They might want to proceed cautiously, however, after reading Quantum Workplace’s Natalie Hackbarth, who reminds her readers that the New York Times’ less-than-flattering expose on Amazon’s workplace culture last August included details of how employees used the company’s Anytime Feedback Tool to slam and criticize each other, leading to what sources described as a “bruising workplace” and “purposeful Darwinism.”

Now if “purposeful Darwinism” is the sort of workplace culture that you and your CEO are aiming for, then have at it. For everyone else, Hackbarth included some advice and perspective from industry thought leaders on the lessons learned from Amazon’s experience.

Here’s Bersin by Deloitte’s Josh Bersin on the matter:

“Our research shows that companies that value open feedback and communication outperform their peers. This does not mean, however, that an anonymous feedback tool should let employees do away with respect, honesty, confidentiality, and fairness. We urge companies that use these tools to set guidelines in place, and communicate that nobody should say anything online that they would not say in person.”

And here’s Paul Hebert, an engagement and recognition consultant:

No one ever erred by underestimating human behavior. I’m sure that when Amazon did this some guru said it was the future of employee reviews—transparent and real time. This is why we shouldn’t blindly follow outliers and try to emulate who we ‘think’ is doing it right. Yes, even Amazon can make big mistakes. Transparency without accountability is a cesspool.”

And finally, here’s John Whitaker, of HR Hardball, whose last line I find especially memorable:

“Many business leaders will see this as a justification for not employing feedback tools that offer a wonderful way to build engagement. This story only justifies the paranoia many already feel about an open forum for employees to vocalize. Don’t bury the lead, though—the real story is the reflection on Amazon’s culture. When you create a culture of fear, don’t hand the inmates a shiv.”

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