Compliance is often the greatest challenge when administering your company's leave policy. Employees are entitled to time off in certain circumstances, such as family emergencies, jury duty, military service, or dealing with a medical issue. But the leave laws that grant these rights are a complex mish-mash of local, state, and federal legislation.

It seems like everyone I speak to these days is seeing a spike in requests for PTO leave, parental leave, FMLA, and the like. After a year of lockdown, it makes sense that people are now jumping at the urge to take some time off. And, if the requests haven’t started coming in yet, everyone on your team will need time off in the future, whether it’s planned vacation time or an unplanned absence due to personal circumstances. Yet, despite the ubiquity of this task, leave administration can be one of the most complex processes to manage in HR when you have a large employee population.

Unemployment rates are at an all-time high, which might make you think that employers hold all the cards in today’s recruitment market. In fact, many businesses are finding it harder than ever to fill vacant positions, and competition is especially ferocious at a senior level. Landing a top-tier candidate is a real challenge that requires an airtight recruitment process.

In today’s candidate-driven market, there is a stigma around securing elite candidates, and that it takes paying them top dollar to come to work for your company. And if you cannot, then your pool of prospective employees starts to dwindle.

I was recently reminded of a time when I was serving as the HR leader in an HR outsourcing engagement and one of my client's employees came to me with a query about family leave options available. This employee was about to become a mom through surrogacy, and she was unsure about what kind of benefits she could claim. Questions like, can adoptive parents claim short-term disability leave, like other employees do after childbirth?

Whether an executive or a mid-level manager, the majority of candidates generally hate panel interviews. If you’ve ever experienced one during your job search, you probably understand why. It’s overwhelming to find yourself outnumbered by strangers who are taking turns lobbing interview questions at you as they make their hiring decision. It’s a lot of pressure both in-person and even preparing for a panel interview, and that kind of pressure can be counterproductive as candidates get too flustered to give detailed answers.