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How to tell if your staff is planning to jump ship

No sensible employee would alert their co-workers or boss about when they want to move on.  But finding out whether staff are on job hunts is something that many bosses want to know, and the demand for such information is growing.

With the use of technology, companies can tell whether employees using work computers or phones are spending time on career websites, and research shows that more firms are paying attention to these things.

According to the Harvard Business Review  some companies are monitoring how often employees swipe their badges in and out of an office building or tracking how much time they spend on career sites from their work computers to determine if they are planning their way out.

Companies also employ outside firms to monitor employees’ social media activity for indications that people are looking for opportunities elsewhere.

Making use of information available on social media, New York based startup Joberate produces the J-score, a figures that represents the intensity of a person’s job seeking activities on any day.

Here are the key facts that Joberate look into to implying that an employee is planning to move on.

1. A person starts following company accounts on Twitter, clicks through to articles about resume writing

2. A person is constantly reading career-related content in their Facebook feed

3. A person begins making a bunch of professional connections on LinkedIn.

Based on tracking these activities, Joberate produces the J-score to help employers see much of a risk is there for their employees to leave.

The score also help companies identify  departments or locations with high “likely to leave” scores so that they can work on team building and overall engagement.

"Society has been able to quantify a lot of things about people's life events," said Joberate co-founder and CEO Michael Beygelman. But "one thing we don’t really have much understanding of is job search activity. Before, whenever someone resigned, it was a shock: 'Oh my god, Mary’s leaving." he told The Washington Post.

The obvious concern for the software is privacy.   The Next Web reporter Bryan Clark certainly thinks Joberate is bad news.  He called the company's product a creepy software.  "Generally a good reason we don’t know someone’s leaving until they do: it’s none of our damn business. We make trade-offs with privacy for convenience, but Joberate offers us neither, at least at the surface," he wrote.

Whether such software products are creepy  is up for debate.

Lori Hock, CEO of the Americas for Hudson, a talent consulting firm, said she had done done presentations at H.R. conferences that debated whether such technology was "creepy or competitive.  But she thinks the concerns will dissipate over time as more and more companies started to use such tools.

Or as how  CareerXRoads'  consultant Gerry Crisipin puts it: "Stalking has become a profession."

ALSO READ: How technology helps bosses track staff’s health

Photo/ 123RF

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