Category Archives: Succession

The NCAA Transfer Portal in the New College Athlete Job Board!

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If you are into college athletics, you have heard of the NCAA Transfer portal. If you are not into college athletics, basically the transfer portal is the technology used for an athlete of one school to let everyone involved know they intend to move from their current school to a new school.

There are over 500,000 student-athletes at NCAA sanctioned schools.

For the most part, we only hear about athlete transfers for the big sports of football and basketball, because that’s what the media covers, but it’s happening in all the sports.

So, what’s the big deal? 

Let me give you a quick history lesson. For centuries these NCAA schools have pretty much held all the power. Kids want to go to school to play sports, coaches at these schools recruited the athletes they wanted, and once they got that kid to sign his/her letter of intent that kid was basically stuck. Of course, they could leave, but if they did the transfer rules were so restrictive they almost always had to sit a year at the very least.

The coaches could leave for other schools, without any waiting period. Could be fired, etc. All the while the kid just had to stay and put up with whatever was thrown at them.

Recently though, the transfer rules have been relaxed allowing the vast majority of kids to transfer without having to sit out, if they are willing to give some reason that the NCAA feels are remotely close to being true and in the kid’s best interest.

“Oh, Johnny, didn’t get to play this year and he’s upset. Oh, his Mom is stressed out!? Well, we better let Johnny leave State U and go to HomeTown U so he can close to her and play football.”

So, yes, it’s become a complete cluster of movement!

What if this was your company? 

Now, I know what you’re going to say. Tim, this isn’t one company, this is thousands of schools that compete against each other, it’s just fair market dynamics at play. But, that is not quite true!

While we like to think of schools competing against each other, they’re all still staying in the NCAA! All the money is still being split up amongst the NCAA institutions. And just like a real company, some “divisions” are getting more resources than others, even though we talk about “equity” all the time!

HR gets less budget than sales because guess what, sales makes us money.

Football gets more resources than Men’s swimming because guess what?

D1 gets more resources than DIII because guess what? Turns out, some things are more important than others, or at least someone at the top made that decision.

This is more like one organization with 500,000 employees who all of sudden went out to all 500,000 employees and said if you don’t like your current job, or boss, or team members you work with, go ahead and apply for any job in the company, and we’ll let that manager determine if they want you or not!

Can you imagine the chaos?

All that said, I love it! 

The recruiter and leader in me love the transfer portal! I work hard to attract great talent and get them to sign on the line that is dotted. I then have this obligation to live up to what I sold this recruit on. If I don’t, I lose. If I do, well, that’s what the hell I was supposed to do, right?!

Too often, we are asking 17 and 18-year-old kids to make decisions on their life that isn’t reality. We wine and dine them, they show up to campus and learn that real life isn’t the recruiting trip. But then we expect them to live by this decision their adolescent mind made. This makes zero sense when you put into play that all these coaches lie and say whatever it takes to get them to sign.

Traditionalists in college athletics hate the transfer portal. They want it back to where they can control kids through a contract. I think this is the best, long term, for all involved. It is less likely you’ll have a few elite programs stash away all the great athletes. Once these athletes get to school and find out they won’t be playing any time soon, they can make a move that better fits them.

College coaches will have to be more transparent to recruits, or risk having a roster they need to rebuild each year. Kids will have to take more time to think about their long term future, or risk being seen as the kid who just jumps around when they don’t get their way.

This has all kinds of angles to corporate internal mobility! 

We love talking about internal mobility in corporate HR, but rarely can we point to organizations where it works great. Why? No, it’s not about technology. It’s about the same thing college athletes are facing. I thought I signed up for “X” and I got here and it’s “Y”, but oh, hey, great, I see “Y” over there in that department, let me move!?

Well, sorry, you can’t move, at least, not right now. First, you need to stay here for a year, and perform great, and get your boss to like you, and… “But, I just want to move over there and be great!?” Yeah, no.

It leads to the question, why don’t we allow employees to post and move jobs whenever they want? You hired them believing they would be great. They show up and almost immediately determine that the position they have isn’t right for them, but another one is. If you hired them believing they would be great, we should let them go be great, without waiting, right?

It’s messy. Like the transfer portal. Messy isn’t always wrong, it’s just messy as we work through it and figure it all out. The reality is, overall, the number is way lower than we think.

There Is a 75% Chance of Selecting Better Talent if You Only Hire…

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ME! No, I’m only joking. I’d be way higher than 75%! 😉

You all know I love data and some of the fun things we can pull out of studies about performance and selection. A 2014 study on world-class athletes found that the top-performing athletes had older siblings in 75% of the participants studied!

So, want to hire better performers? Ask this question:

Do you have older siblings? 

Ironically, those only children, the super great ones all those parents love, only have a 5% chance of being world-class! Oldest kids get the other 20%, and middle kids, well they don’t get anything but to continue to complain it’s unfair! 😉

Why do people with older siblings tend to perform better? 

Okay, I get it, we are talking about world-class athletes and performance, but really the same foundations are set by older siblings no matter what the skill or profession. Want to be a better cook? It probably helps to have older siblings who were cooking around you and showed interest, which made you interested, etc.

Siblings tend to compete with each other, and the youngest will always be at a disadvantage until they are not. If you’re kicking little Timmy’s butt all over the court, you won’t work as hard to continue to get better, but little Timmy will never stop until he beats you. (By the way – this isn’t a “boy” thing, the study was done on female world-class athletes – it works across all genders)

The youngest kids get all the advantages of being pushed harder and getting knowledge transfer from seeing older siblings fail and succeed. On average, they are more likely to gain from being in an environment where older siblings are performing.

Does this concept transfer to the world of work? 

I don’t have hard data from a study that it does, only anecdotal evidence to say it depends! I’ve worked with brilliant people who come from all kinds of family dynamics. I do find, on average, that those people who were raised as younger siblings bring competitiveness to the workplace that if channeled appropriately can be very good.

I do think it also depends on how close in age they are to their siblings. The closer the better in my experience. My younger brother is 15 years younger than me. He’s more only-child than younger sibling grinding it out trying to beat me. My two oldest sons are twenty months apart, one year apart in school age. They are strong competitors, and my youngest you is four years younger than his brothers gets competition shoved down his throat, by his brothers in everything he does.

So, today, younger siblings who have taken all the beatings from your older siblings, smile bright! You probably have a better shot a being great, because of those beatings!

Does Having 2 CEOs Work? Also, Ginger Superiority on #HRFamous

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In episode 38 of The HR Famous Podcast, longtime HR leaders (and friends)  Tim Sackett, Kris Dunn, and Jessica Lee discuss whether having two bosses or two CEOs (dual leadership in major corporations) ever works, superior genetic traits and dress codes in a WFH environment.

Listen (click this link if you don’t see the player) and be sure to subscribe, rate, and review (Apple Podcasts) and follow (Spotify)!

Show Highlights:

3:00 – Tim found an article about genetic superiority and the fact that redheads are superior (seems a little biased that Tim found this one). Redheads feel 25% less pain and run hotter in addition to other superior traits.

6:30 – JLee brings up the genetic superiority that Koreans have such as dry earwax and a  lack of body odor when sweating. The HR Famous crew is full of genetic superiorities!

8:30 – Do you find that the redheads in your life run hot in temperature and anger?

9:20 – Next topic: Business Insider reported on the two CEOs of Netflix and dual leadership at that company. They said that this resembles a family where there are often two CEOs leading a single-family.

13:00 – Tim gives an example of his work at Applebee’s and how the CHRO and the CEO had a co-CEO like relationship where the CHRO was very beloved by employees but the CEO was running a lot behind the scenes.

16:00 – JLee thinks it might be a little ridiculous to give out the compensation packages that a CEO of a company like Netflix would get to two different people. She also doesn’t know if a two-parent analogy is the best comparison because she thinks often one parent is doing more than the other.

20:30 – KD mentions two different places that dual leadership can go haywire. He thinks that who makes the final decision may be an issue in addition to the issue of an “I don’t know who my boss is” sentiment among employees.

24:00 – Next topic: dress code policies for virtual working. Some HR departments are trying to reconsider what a dress code looks like in a virtual environment.

25:30 – KD thinks that dress code violations tend to come more in the vain of overdressing rather than underdressing.

28:00 – JLee thinks the charade of putting a suit on for one call or presentation is a little bit ridiculous and not very genuine.

31:00 – Let JLee wear her ripped jeans! KD asks JLee what is actually inappropriate to wear on a video call. JLee thinks T-shirt and athleisure are 100% OK.

33:30 – Tim says that he’s gotten better about asking what is appropriate to wear for meetings instead of shooting in the dark.

Is Someone In Your Organization Hoarding Top Talent?

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#3 of HR’s Biggest Lies – Mr. Smith in our West Region is hoarding talent and won’t allow them to move to other regions/departments/etc.   Why is this the #3 biggest lie?  Because I haven’t come up with the other ones yet and three seemed like a good middle number to start with.  I could have also called it HR’s biggest excuse for not doing their job, but lie seems more appropriate because that’s really what it is.

Here’s why saying your leaders are hoarding talent is a lie, because it’s not their job to workforce plan for the organization, it’s yours!

I’ve met some great leaders, who were great at one of two things, either: 1. selecting great talent or 2. developing great talent.  I’ve never met a great leader who was good at giving up great talent.  I’ve also never sat in front of a leader in any of the companies I’ve worked for and had a leader look me in the eye and say, “No, you can’t have that person.” Wait! I take that back I have had that happen, once.

Here’s how that conversation went:

Mr. Leader: “Hi Tim, nice to see you again. Something must be wrong for HR to come all the way out here to see me!”

Mr. Tim: “Mr. Lead, nothing’s wrong at all. I even left Grim Reaper cape and scythe at home this trip!”

Mr. Leader: “So, what is our pleasure of having you visit?”

Mr. Tim: “Mr. Lead, we need to talk, Ms. Lead back East is in need of a regional director and you have a regional manager who is ranked #1 in the company and I want to offer them the east regional director job.”

Mr. Lead: “Tim, that can’t happen. That manager has family here, says he’ll never leave, just found out his dog has cancer, his wife is prego and he has a rare disease that won’t allow him to travel past the Mississippi!”

Mr. Tim: “Wow, I had no idea that YOU were holding him back so much!”

Mr. Lead: “Sackett (now he’s getting serious) I don’t have anyone who can take his spot!”  BOOM! Now we are getting somewhere, this is really what holds back any leader from wanting to give up talent.

Now as an HR Pro there are exactly two ways you can take this conversation from here, yes, only two. if you still want to get your person:

#1 – Trust – If you have a relationship with the person (which you should) then you have to get them to trust that you will not leave them on an island with no talent and you will “personally” make your life’s goal to find the replacement that is better than who they had before.  And, you better make it happen.  I prefer this option.

#2 – Muscle – This will work with a relationship or not, but it goes a little something like this, “Mr. Lead, I have a meeting when I return to corporate with Mrs. COO and we are going to talk about our regional leaders and who is producing talent for the organization.  As you know Mrs. COO values those leaders who are adding talent to the organization and is critical of those leaders who are always taking talent.  This would put you in a very good light, don’t you think?”  Done. The message was sent, you’ll get your person and Mr. Lead won’t feel good about it, but you gave him away to spin this to his organization as a positive to the company.

HR TIP ALERT: When you get back to corporate have Mrs. COO call Mr. Lead and thank him. You’ll be amazed at how far that will take you the next time you need to have that conversation.

Thank me later, folks!

Leaders Secretly Hate Succession Planning!

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Do you want to know what you’ll never hear anyone on your leadership team say publicly? Well, let me stop before I get started, because there are probably a ton of things leaders will say behind closed doors, off the record, and then open the door and say the exact opposite. Welcome to the PC version of corporate America.

One of the obvious, which always causes a stir is veteran hiring. I’ve written posts about Veteran Hiring many times, in which I state that companies will always, 100% of the time, publicly say they support veteran hiring, but behind closed doors they don’t really support veteran hiring. At best they want to offer veterans their crappiest jobs, not their best jobs.

If they did truly support veteran hiring, we would not have a veteran hiring crisis in this country! If every organization who claims they want to hire veterans, would just hire veterans, we would have 100% employed veterans! But we don’t. Why? Well, it’s organizational suicide to ever come out and say we don’t really want to hire veterans.  The media would kill that organization. Yet, veterans can’t get hired.

Succession planning is on a similar path. Your leaders say the support succession planning. They’ll claim it is a number one priority for your organization. But, every time you try and do something with succession planning, it goes nowhere!

Why?

Your leaders hate succession planning for a number of reasons, here are few:

1. Financially, succession planning is a huge burden on organizations, if done right. Leaders are paid on the financial success of your organization. If it comes down to Succession Planning, or Michael getting a big bonus, Succession Planning will get pushed to next year, then, next year, then, next year…You see Succession Planning is really over hiring. Preparing for the future. It’s a long term payback. Very few organizations have leadership in place with this type of long term vision of success.

2.  Leaders get too caught up in headcount. We only have 100 FTEs for that group, we couldn’t possibly hire 105 and develop and prepare the team for the future, even though we know we have a 6% turnover each year. Organizations react. Firefight. Most are unwilling to ‘over hire’ and do succession in a meaningful way.

3. Leaders are like 18-year-old boys. They think they can do it forever!  Again, publicly they’ll tell you they’re planning and it’s important. Privately, they look at some smartass 35-year-old VP and think to themselves, there is no way in hell I’ll ever let that kid take over this ship!

So, what can smart HR Pros do?

Begin testing some Succession Planning type tools and data analytics in hot spots in your company. Don’t make it a leadership thing. Make it a functional level initiative, in a carve-out area of your organization. A part of the organization that is highly visible has a direct financial impact on the business, and one you know outwardly has succession issues.

Tinker. Get people involved. Have conversations. Start playing around with some things that could have an impact in terms of development, retention, cross-training, workforce planning, etc.  All those things that constitute succession, but instead of organization level, you are focusing on departmental level or a specific location.

Smart HR Pros get started.  They don’t wait for the organization to do it all at once. That will probably never happen. Just start somewhere, and roll it little by little. Too often we don’t get started because we want to do it all. That is the biggest mistake we can make.

It’s International Women’s Day! Is Your CEO Female? #ReferHer #BalanceForBetter #IWD2019

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6% of CEOs in the S&P 100 are female. 50.8% of the population is female.

I’m not super at math, but that seems like a disconnect, right?

Today is International Women’s Day and a young lady (Tatiana Hollander-Ho) reached out to me this week. She’s an entry level marketing pro for The Ladders, 2018 grad from NYU and she said, “Hey, you have a passion around women in the workplace and I want to get this #ReferHer going and make a difference. Can you help?” (FYI – go connect with her – she’s going to be a great one in our industry!)

I can do what I do, which is write about and socialize it and support it! #ReferHer is an awesome idea. We need to refer more women to leadership positions, period.

I’m not one of these dudes who just goes out and flies the female flag because it’s the politically correct thing to do. I’m also not one that buys into the bullshit studies that say “Female CEOs return better financial returns!” – those are bad studies with flawed data – you can’t run a regression on companies run by women and the financial performance and call that good data.

There might be a correlation, but there is absolutely no causation. If you believe in those studies, you also believe in the study that says if your name is Mike and you’re over six foot and you are the CEO of a Fortune 500 company, you will have higher financial returns than anyone else, not named Mike. Those two studies say the exact same thing.

That’s the problem, right!? You see it, right!? You can’t just throw out garbage and expect smart people not to get it and just blindly support females. The opposite actually happens. Smart people see that and go, that’s not what that says, so now I don’t buy any of it. Smart people – both women and men.

I’ve worked for great women. Strong women who are great leaders. These women, in my opinion, had many traits that most of the male leaders I’ve worked for didn’t have. In most cases, these traits made them leaders employees wanted to follow, not forced to follow.

We have this awful bias that says white dudes over six feet make better leaders. It’s literally been drilled into us for 100 years. Look at the Presidents all the way up to Obama and after. White dudes over six foot have nothing buy stature. We are betting that the trait of stature is the most important thing for running a high functioning organization. It’s insanity, right?

The reality is we can solve this. We can. Not overnight, but little by little.

It starts with flooding your leadership ranks with women. That means we have to give opportunities to women to move into leadership in ways we haven’t before. We have to develop Women Leadership Councils in our organizations who can tap on the shoulders of female employees and invite them in and mentor them into leadership roles. We have to purposeful about doing this. It won’t happen organically, we’ve been waiting for a hundred years for it to happen organically.

So, how do you start?

It’s super simple!

Step 1 – Tell your c-suite you are starting a Women’s Leadership Council in your organization and you need their support. 100% will give their support because if they don’t the backlash would be tremendous.

Step 2– Be inclusive, not exclusive. If a woman in your organization shows any sign of potential leadership you pull them into your council.

Step 3– Focus on hard leadership skills, not soft skills. Give them the inside information around how the company makes money or doesn’t make money. Show them how to budget and write a budget. Teach them how to performance manage. Show them how to balance themselves for great success. Show them how to support each other in this drive upward.

Step 4 – Make your C-suite come, present, participate, and watch. They need to see your smart females in action.

Step 5 – Draft your high potential leader internal mobility charts and scoreboard it publicly within the c-suite. Tell them the minimum goal is 50/50. Show it to them monthly.

Step 6 – Make female leadership goals/hires part of your c-suite annual bonus. At least 30%.

It can be done. This isn’t hard. But it has to be purposeful.

Check out LinkedIn’s Gender Insights Report as well it’s loaded with great information on helping solve this problem!

Career Confessions from Gen-Z: What is Gen-Z looking for in a Mentorship Program?

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Hey everyone, I’m back! I took a week hiatus (finals week man) and more Gen-Z posts are coming your way! (Dad editor’s note: I didn’t give him a week off for finals! Buck up, son! Welcome to the show! It’s called multi-tasking! Sure I’m paying you nothing, but I still expect a post each week!) 

For my freshman year of college, I wanted to get away from Michigan and the Mid West. So, I decided to move to New York and attend a school called Marist College. At Marist, I was on the swim team and was immediately overwhelmed. Swim was hard, being away from my Mom was hard, having no friends was hard. It was a rough time.

Before I had gone to college, I had signed up to be apart of a student-athlete mentorship program, where upperclassmen athletes at Marist got paired with freshman athletes of different sports. I got paired up with a guy from the cross country team and I immediately knew that I didn’t want to be apart of the program. The purpose of the program was to meet up, maybe get lunch or coffee, and talk through any problems you’re having at school and in your sport. After a few forced hangout sessions, we stopped talking altogether and went our separate ways.

Now, I think that mentorship programs are a great idea. Having gone through a program myself, and not getting much out of it, I have gathered my own list of how to make a successful mentor program and what I would like to get from a mentor:

  1. Be Relatable: A key characteristic of having a good mentor relationship is being able to relate to them. The mentor needs to be able to relate to their “mentee” and vice versa, or there won’t be any necessary help given or received. This is the main reason that my mentor relationship wasn’t successful. We had absolutely nothing in common and neither of us could relate to the other. 
  2. Be a Role Model: As a mentee, I would like to be able to look up to my mentor. I want my mentor to have some quality that makes me want to be like them. Although it would be nice, it isn’t vital for a mentee to want the same exact position as their mentor but is vital that the mentor possesses some qualities that the mentee aspires to have.
  3. Share Advice: This feels like a no-brainer, but it relates back to the type of mentor/mentee relationship you have. In order to give worthwhile and helpful advice, you need to be able to relate to your mentor/mentee AND the mentor needs to be a role model figure. In my mentor relationship, I received a lot of advice but none of it was necessary to my experience. The things that I needed advice on, like how to choose a major or how to handle being far from home, weren’t areas that my mentor had any advice to give.

****Bonus factor! Experience: This is my extra little bonus factor to making a mentor program top notch. Any experience that a mentee can directly gain with their mentor by their side will not only be the best form of “advice” they can get, but it will help to strengthen the relationship. Something that a mentor/mentee duo can do together to gain experience is a group project in whatever field the mentee is interested in. This may feel a little intern-y but most of your Gen-Z employees will be interns anyways!

You can follow as much or as little advice as you want from this but the bottom line for a successful mentor program is effort. If both sides are willing to try and get something positive out of the experience, then they probably will! Not every mentor you have can be like Yoda (I know very little about Star Wars but hopefully this analogy works), but just be willing to try and make it a worthwhile experience!

This post was written by Cameron Sackett (not Tim) – you can probably tell because it lacks grammatical errors!

HR and TA Pros – have a question you would like to ask directly to a GenZ? Ask us in the comments and I’ll respond in an upcoming blog post right here on the project. Have some feedback for me? Again, please share in the comments and/or connect with me on LinkedIn.

The Latest Dating Trend has Always been a Leadership Trend!

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Have you heard of the dating concept called, “Stashing”?

Here’s the Urban Dictionary definition of stashing (editor’s note: you know you’re about to read a great HR post when it starts with a definition from Urban Dictionary!):

“Stashing is when you’re in a relationship with someone and you refuse to introduce them to your friends and family; mostly because you view the person as temporary, replaceable, and/or you’re an assh@le.”

There are other reasons you might ‘stash’ someone. Maybe you know your friends and family would approve of this person, so you stash them because you still like them, but you don’t want to upset your friends and family. Maybe you’re worried your friends might try and move in on this person themselves, so you stash them.

But, usually, stashing has more to do with there is something about the person that embarrasses you, most likely because you’re a shallow, horrible person, so you stash this person you’re in a relationship with. On the leadership side, stashing actually takes the exact opposite effect.

Leadership Stashing

Leadership stashing is when a leader purposely makes sure one of their direct reports doesn’t have a high profile, so that other managers within the same organization won’t know you have a rock star on your team and then try to steal them to their team.

This happens all the time, especially within large organizations!

Here’s how it works. I’m a leader of a group, my name is Tim. A year ago I hired Marcus right out of college. Your basic new hire grad. Green as grass, just like every other new graduate. I quickly came to understand that Marcus had ‘it’. He was a natural. I know Marcus will easily be better than me in the near future if he’s not already better than me.

As a leader, I’ve got a decision to make. Keep Marcus stashed on my team and reap the professional benefits, or position Marcus for promotion, in which I’ll probably lose him off my team. With Marcus on my team, I exceeded all my measures last year, and Timmy got a big bonus. So did Marcus.

When asked in leadership meeting what I’m doing with my ‘team’ to exceed all my measures, I let everyone know some of the ‘new’ leadership accountability strategies I’m using, and how it really comes back to setting great measures and then holding your team accountable to meeting those measures. Marcus, specifically, doesn’t come up.

Am I a bad leader?

Yes, and this is happening in every organization on the planet.

We love to frame this around, “well, Marcus just needs some more seasoning, and I’m the right person to give it to him”. “Marcus is young, and not quite ready.” “Under my leadership, Marcus is thriving, but under some of these other yahoos, who knows what might happen.”

The right thing to do is obvious and simple. My group is doing well, I let the organization know, it’s a team effort, but you all have to know, I hired a rock star, and we need to get Marcus on a fast track to leadership. That’s the right thing, but it’s not as easy as it sounds when you’ve been struggling to climb your own ladder.

What we know is leaders stash talent.

It’s our job as HR pros and leaders to find that stashed talent and elevate that talent within the organization. If we don’t, that talent will most likely leave because being stashed sucks in life and in your career.

 

The Weekly Dose of HR Tech: Foresight – Workforce Planning Tech

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Today on the Weekly Dose I review workforce planning technology, Foresight.Foresight is billed as the world’s first Recruitment Forecasting technology.It creates an accurate forecast of hiring need across a specified tactical time frame.

About once a year I’m completely shocked and surprised by a technology and this is the case with Foresight. I told the Foresight team, and I’ll tell you, this is the most impressive piece of HR Technology I’ve seen in a long time!

Foresight was built by some corporate talent acquisition professionals that got sick and tired of putting out fires. What we know if TA has very little control over workforce forecasting it comes from hiring managers, CFOs, CEOs, etc. So, they built a technology that kept that in mind, and got them out of fighting the recruiting fires of ‘we need to hire 100 engineers in thirty days’, ‘oh, wait, we need to layoff 300 now instead’, ‘check that, hire 1,000 total across all functions’!

What I like about Foresight:

– The platform sends out an internal email to each hiring manager from the executive explaining what needs to take place, and takes them into the systems and walks them through a very short forecasting process (15 min.) set of questions (executive can also speak to the team via video as well).

– The process takes them through the main areas of: headcount planning, known active recruiting, potential growth needs, and interns/apprenticeships. Calculates everything in a roll-up, and gives the organization a predicted recruitment path for the next twelve months.

– Hiring managers have to follow the system, they can’t skip steps or change. They can leave comments to explain, but they have to put in something.

– Executives get updates on hiring managers not completely their forecast.

– The platform works off live, real-time data, as a position gets filled, everything is updated, someone leaves, another update. Real current recruitment needs are at your fingertips, across your entire organization. Update forecasts can be sent out monthly, quarterly, up to the organization.

– After hiring manager puts in the forecast, there is an approval roll-up that takes place, so when it all comes back to TA, the department is ready to go with full approval.

Basically, anyone in the organization, from TA leader to hiring managers, to executives, can get a list of every single role being recruited for and when that role needs to be filled.

I’m in love with this from the simplicity of how it works to how if used consistently it becomes a cultural driver around your talent strategy. Everyone is onboard and in the know of what’s going on. Clearly, this is an enterprise level technology. You probably don’t need forecasting tech if you’re hiring 100 employees a year, but 500-100,000 hires, across multiple locations and countries, you need this.

Well worth a demo if you find yourself in a very typical TA role of constantly starting and stopping, and not really having a great idea around what the organization needs to hire on an ongoing basis. Bad TA happens when you can’t get out of firefighting mode. Great TA happens when you have a plan and can go make real long-term strategies to attract great talent.

The Weekly Dose – is a weekly series here at The Project to educate and inform everyone who stops by on a daily/weekly basis on some great recruiting and sourcing technologies that are on the market.  None of the companies who I highlight are paying me for this promotion.  There are so many really cool things going on in the tech space and I wanted to educate myself and share what I find.  If you want to be on The Weekly Dose – just send me a note – timsackett@comcast.net

Should Employers Be Looking for Lifetime Employees?

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I think we all are being sold a big fat bag of lies!

Okay, not lies, but definitely a very narrow skewed view of the truth. Case in point, you are now supposed to believe that you don’t want to work for one employer for your entire career.

Do you know why you’re supposed to believe this?  Because idiots like me, and the media, keep spoon feeding you study after study that shows younger generations don’t want to work at the same employer for their entire career.

Okay, I get that. When I was 23 I didn’t know what I wanted to do next weekend, let alone 40 years from now!  But, because younger generations want this, now we all want this, apparently.

This isn’t just an employee issue either. Organizations are now supposed to believe they no longer want lifetime employees. You, as an employer, should just sit back and watch employee after employee walk out your door to do the exact same thing at your competitor. This is the world we live in, Tim. Why would I want an employee to stay with us for 40 years. I need to get fresh eyes and new experiences into our organization.

I recently met with a very successful employer in southern Indiana. A tech company that most people will never know, even though they have stuff in your computer you use every single day. They’re basically a ‘guts’ company. They put high tech stuff into stuff you use but never see. They want lifetime employees.

They take an extremely long time to hire. Fit to them is paramount.  If one thing doesn’t ‘feel’ right with a candidate, they’ll wait to find one that does ‘feel’ right.  It’s a strong culture organization. Proud people, almost zero turnover and they are highly profitable. They walk away from talented candidates all the time. Skill is important, but it’s not as important as fit.

There are not enough of these organizations left. Too many organizations today are only hiring for skill. When you only hire for skill, you get the work environment younger generations are telling you they want. One where they don’t want to stay forever!

When you hire for fit as your primary focus of selection. Meaning, skills are important, we want smart people, but all things being close to equal, fit will determine the hire. Fit is so important that if we can’t find the ‘right’ fit, we’ll leave the position open until we can, regardless of skill.

Here’s my deal, I think employees do want to work for one company for a lifetime.  I think the reason you see anyone leave your organization has very little to do with them not wanting lifetime employment  and a ton to do with how they fit in an organization. Sure, you’ll always have talent that is capped out and needs to move to grow, but even then I think those people would prefer to stay and grow.

Hire for fit. Teach the skill. Enjoy high tenure, high performance, and better profits.  So, yeah, start looking for lifetime employees!