Turns Out, Millennials Actually Don’t Want Your Feedback!

It’s conference season and I got a chance to see the ever-popular, Marcus Buckingham.  Marcus has the great English accent, high energy and great leadership content to share. He’s strong every time I’ve seen him, going on way too many times at this point in my life!

Here was the money-shot quote Marcus dropped on the audience this time:

“Millennials don’t want feedback!”

We’ve all been told by thought leaders and Millennial experts for a decade that all Millennials want is feedback and work-life balance!  They don’t want money or power or ice in their beer.  Just feedback and time off.  Marcus put a stop to all of this, and had the data to back it up!

In reality, Marcus told us the truth.  Millennials and the rest of us don’t want feedback, we all just want attention. Pay attention to us!  Stop by frequently and see how we are doing, give us some insight into our near future, help us get our jobs done.  But, please, don’t give us feedback on what we are doing wrong!

No one wants that.  The whole reason performance reviews fail is because they don’t deliver what we truly want, attention, not feedback.  So, our “HR” answer to this is to do what?!? Let’s do more frequent, smaller, feedback sessions! NO!

Unfortunately, this is going to be big old Titanic to turn around.  The wheels have been in motion too long to stop what we’ve already started.  HR technology platforms and your processes are already in place. Your managers have already been trained, and now you want us to stop?!?

Basically, yes.

Those organizations with high engagement are not the ones who are giving more feedback. They are the ones who are paying more attention to their employees.  Yes, there is a difference.

This is fraught with issues for most HR pros and organizations because it feels a little pie in the sky-ish.  There is an assumption that you pay attention to your employees and they’ll just magically do what they’re supposed to do, and we live happily ever after, cats and dogs living together.

We know that isn’t reality.

Some employees need to be managed to get the most out of them.  They need to be held accountable. I do think there is a balance that we can get to when it comes to paying attention to our employees like they want, and being able to ‘manage’ them like the business needs.

Managers need to know that even with those employees they’ve worked with for a long time, it’s critical that they don’t stop paying attention to what they’re doing, professionally and personally. Also, our employees need to understand that, yes, we care about you, but that doesn’t mean you can just not perform the job you were hired to do.

I don’t need engaged employees that don’t do the job they were hired to do. I want engaged, productive employees.  It’s all about balancing your approach, and I love that Marcus put to bed the concept that Millennials just want feedback!

Cybersecurity is Teaching Organizations How To Fix Their Talent Shortages

Cybersecurity jobs are the hottest thing on the planet. Hackers out to do bad are growing as fast as the need to combat them and at this moment the bad guys are winning!

Every single organization I speak with have needs for Cybersecurity talent, or they are in denial of their needs for Cybersecurity talent!

Here’s the main problem, there are basically very few formal programs teaching cybersecurity. You can’t go to your local state college and get a degree in Cybersecurity. Even if you’re lucky enough to have a program like that close, this is such a ‘new collar’ field that the supply can not even come close to keeping up with demand.

So, what are organizations to do?

Build your own! Old school is the new black! Remember when if you needed an Electrician, no you wouldn’t because it’s been decades, you wouldn’t go hire one, you would hire an ‘apprentice’ and basically teach someone how to be an Electrician, and for this training they would give you 35-40 years of great service and you would give them a Timex gold watch and a bad back!

Remember when if you needed an Electrician, no you wouldn’t because it’s been decades, you wouldn’t go hire one, you would hire an ‘apprentice’ and basically teach someone how to be an Electrician, and for this training they would give you 35-40 years of great service and you would give them a Timex gold watch and a bad back!

Cybersecurity is bringing back the modern day equivalent of solving a talent shortage by having organizations actually solve their own problem, and not wait for higher education to catch up and fix the problem.

The new modern day fix to labor shortages involve a number of things the personnel departments from the 1960s and 70s didn’t have, but in some ways are still trying to catch up with a modern equivalent of the old apprentice programs.

IBM is on the forefront of building their own Cybersecurity workforce and they’re basically giving you the blueprint to do this on your own.

Steps you should be taking to build your own talent:

Step 1 – Reexamine your workforce strategy. You better know what skills you need three to five years down the road, you’re too late for the skills you need right now. The only way to solve that current problem is through a big checkbook because you will have to pay your way out of that problem!

Step 2 – Get really close with your community. You’re going to need training help, so start investing in programs at the high school and community college level. Your money goes further in these places than at State U., and you’ll have more direct control. You need to build a recruiting base.

Step 3 – Own the local talent pool you need most. If there are local groups, you support them in every way they need. Bring in national level development opportunities for those skill sets and give it away for free. Build a complete talent ecosystem with you at the center. This isn’t to say you won’t let others in on your market, let’s face it, it’s simple supply/demand economics. If you’re all building this talent, the overall price will come down!

Step 4 – Build Apprentice 2.0 for your Company. This is heavy lifting and hard work, but it’s the only way you can fully build the talent you need. This means great training, mentoring, hiring manager and peer ownership, continual development and upskilling, etc. The difference between old school apprenticeships and new school is you can’t just grow them and forget about them, or they’ll just leave you and waste your investment.

Step 5 (but should probably be #1 but you wouldn’t have paid attention to it!) – Forget about 4-year degrees! Your unfounded need to have college graduates in every role is silly and now hurting your company. IBM has shown you don’t need to be this ‘traditional’ peg to fit in the round hole. You can actually redrill the hole in any shape you want if you find the right attitude and willingness to learn.

But, Tim, we don’t have the money for this!

You will either pay for this, or you’ll pay at least 40% more to lead the market in wages and steal talent. I tend to believe this is the cheaper and more effective outcome because if you grow your own talent from puppies, they tend to be really, really good at your business and your problems. Hired guns might have talent, but you still have the issue of getting them up to speed at a much higher cost.

The Number One Reason Employees Fail

“Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid.”

Albert Einstein

It’s about that time when the HR conference season gets into full swing, so I’m beginning to prepare myself for the hundreds of conversations I’ll have with great HR Pros all over the world.  One thing that I will hear over and over and more than anything else is: “HR just doesn’t get…”  To be honest,  I think HR gets a whole bunch, but I think many of us lack the courage it takes, at the right time, to show how much we actually get.  So we sit there with our mouths closed, and others then have this perception we don’t get it.  But we do. We just weren’t able, or ready, to put our necks on the line, at that moment.

I do agree, though, that there are still certain things we struggle with in HR.  For me, the above quote from Albert sums up what we still struggle to appreciate in HR. We hire people for one set of skills than upon arrival, or at another point in their tenure, expect them to perform a different set of skills.  This behavior happens every day in our organizations. It’s a classic reason at why most people fail in your organization.

I bet if you went back and measured your last 100 terminations in your organizations, 60% of your terms would fall into this category: the person wasn’t performing, but the job they were asked to do was different from what they were hired to do originally.

So, what is it that we still don’t get in HR?

We don’t get the fact that we hire for a certain set of skills and the job changes, so we now need a new set of skills.  Training and Development are still living in this dream that they can drastically change adult learners by having a 44-hourtraining session and having each participant sign a sheet saying they received the training. Then, we all sit around a conference table analyzing our turnover and wondering what happened, and why all these people magically turned into bad performers.  It’s not them, it’s us!

So, what can we do about it?

The first step is realizing HR, and the organization, are part of the problem.  You can’t hire a bunch of fish because you need great swimming skills, then change the skill need to climbing and expect your fish to turn into monkeys.  It has never worked, and it will never work, even if you change your department’s title from Training to Organizational Development.

So, do you just fire everyone and start over?

Maybe, if the skill needed to change is that drastically different. More realistically, we need to have better expectations on the amount of time and effort it is going to take to get people back to “average” performance, not “great” performance.

Setting realistic expectations with your operations partners will give you a better insight to what route your organization is willing to suffer through.  Either way, there will be some suffering, so plan on it and prepare for it. Then go buy a bunch of bananas, because if want those fish learn how to climb, they’re going to need a lot of incentives!

What if you could predict all of your Turnover? #UltiConnect @UltimateHCM

Out at Ultimate Software’s Conference, this week and one of the cool features that Ultimate has within UltiPro is Retention Predictor. Ultimate has done a really good job at going out and buying some great data analytics companies and implementing that tech and talent into their organization.

So, what’s Retention Prediction? 

The concept is that if you analyze enough of your employee’s data points you’ll see trends that show if someone is highly likely to leave your organization as a voluntary term. As an organization, we really want and need to know data this to help retain our best performers.

UltiPro delivers a ‘score’ of each of your employees showing if someone is a flight risk based on their level of performance, so that you can filter, if you want, by high performers to low performers. The notion being, you definitely want to ‘save’ your high performers.

So, how do you save an employee that shows up as a High Risk? 

UltiPro will then deliver to the manager of the employee at risk specific “Leadership Actions”. These actions are recommendations of things the manager can do to help retain this employee. Currently, UltiPro has over 50 actions built into the system, and you can build in your own actions if you want for specific things you might want to do in your organization.

Does this really work? 

I spoke with multiple Ultimate Software customers who raved about how this one feature has literally changed their entire culture! One great example is Gregg Paulk, an executive at Anderson Center for Autism in New York.

Anderson had high turnover of their support staff, and also had an issue of lack of quality leadership training. Before they began using UltiPro’s Retention Predictor they had 30% turnover. In the two years since turning on the prediction feature, they’ve lowered their turnover to 15%! That’s giant! That’s real money that can now be used in other ways to better their organization and increase student care.

Anderson also saw higher engagement with their managers because they were now being able to deliver each manager specific actions to help them retain their staff, and ultimately help them become better managers of their team.

Paulk said one of the challenges in implementing anything like this is always the potential of false positives. One of your employees comes up a high flight risk, but in reality, they’re not. Yes, this can happen and will happen.

He said the key for them was to get their managers to understand how data prediction works. Yes, we’ll have a few false positives, but the majority of the data will be highly accurate and the percentage that is correct is so high, you can’t ignore what the predictions are telling your team.

What I really like about this feature is it puts HR into an immediate strategic position within the organization. It helps to make your entire team proactive and stop reacting to turnover as it happens. Your organization can finally become proactive in developing your team and leaders, which will naturally just help you drive a more dynamic culture.

What’s next? 

Ultimate Software is not just sitting on this, their data team is off the charts brilliant and they’re already working on their next generation product called “Perception” that will add in even more unstructured data into the algorithm and make these predictions more accurate, faster.

Check it out. I was super impressed by the accuaracy and real-life outcomes of this. It’s definitely a game changer for organizations.

Who Knew the World’s Best HR Technology Talks Happened in Cleveland!?

That’s right kids! I’m coming to Believeland!

Wednesday, April 12th, from 4-6pm, I’ll be speaking at Cleveland SHRM’s – HR Technology SIG.

This will be a great night of learning and fun. It’s awesome that the HR and TA community leaders in Cleveland are putting this on, I can’t tell you how forward thinking that is for any city around the world, to the HR and TA pros and leaders in a great position to be successful! I follow my friend and HR technology guru, Steve Boese, who came out in February to speak at SIG!

The event will be held at Great Lakes Science Center in Cleveland, a great venue, and you will receive HRCI and SHRM credit for attending.

What’s the talk?

“See What’s Next! Be What’s Next! The Future of HR, TA, and Technology” 

Where I’ll present on where I see the future of HR and TA going over the next few years from a practical perspective of “what is the stuff you might actually do in your own shops!” I’ll also highlight a ton of tools that are new to the market and things you might want to take a look at, plus talk about some of the most innovative things happening in HR and TA, and if those are things you can do yourself!

If you attend this event, we’ve got 2 extra tickets (GREAT SEATS!) for that night to see Lebron James and the Cleveland Cavaliers play their last regular season home game with Me! Okay, you might not want to sit next to me, I tend to yell at the referees, a lot! But, if you do, I’ll buy you drink or popcorn and we can take selfies and try to get Lebron in on it!

It’s only $25 bucks to register for Cleveland SHRM members, $40 for non-members, and Students and Transitioning folks can get in for $15! Food and open bar at the event, so come on over and I’ll buy you a drink! Thanks to the great folks at Willory for sponsoring and taking me to see Lebron! (it’ll be my first time seeing him play live, I’m kind of excited!)

REGISTER FOR THE EVENT HERE!

Hope to see you in Cleveland! (boy, you don’t say often!)

How to Create an Employee Handbook that Doesn’t Suck!

At every single company I’ve ever worked for, at some point in my tenure, I’ve gotten yanked into helping in some way rewrite the employee handbook. I’m sure most HR pros have been in the same boat!

There’s really only two camps when it comes to employee handbooks:

Camp #1 – We’ve had the same employee handbook since the beginning of time. It’s written on stone tablets.

Camp #2 – We rewrite our employee handbook each year because it’s the most important document on the planet.

The problem is both camps usually write the employee handbook that reads like a welcome packet to prison! If you forced candidates to read your employee handbook before actually accepting a position with your company 99% would decline your offer!

Gustoan SMB HRIS provider, recently sent me a copy of a 54-page guide they put together to help organizations develop an Employee Handbook that is actually readable and engaging for your employee. It’s a really solid resource and after reading it, I’ll also pass along some of my own advice on how you can make your Employee Handbook not Suck:

1. Tell Your Story. If you can write your employee handbook in story fashion, people will actually read it. I know, I know, that takes creativity and you’re in HR and not creative! Someone in your organization is a storyteller. Have them help on the story, and you help on all the details you need to make sure get into the handbook.

2. Give them the ‘why’. We put some really dumb rules in our handbook that don’t seem to make any sense. Just give them the why. It might not make the rule any less dumb, but at least they’ll know. “No sock Thursday is because our CEO has an ankle fetish. Yeah, we know it’s weird, but it is what it is.”

3. Engage a graphic designer. Color and pictures matter to the readability of your handbook. Make it look pretty and engaging and that might cover up some of the boredom of the legalize we are required to put in our employee handbooks.

4. Use your handbook to communicate your culture. Your real culture. Don’t have a funny and engaging handbook when you have a buttoned-up culture, it sends a mix message. Also, don’t write this boring legal document of a handbook if you have “No Pants Wednesdays” in your office. It doesn’t fit your culture!

Gusto is giving their Handbook How-To Guide out for free in a download. Check it out, it has some really good information. They didn’t pay me to say this, I just liked it and wanted to share (that shouldn’t stop them from sending me these new Nike LunarEpic Low Flyknit 2‘s in size 9 as a thank you!).

 

 

The Dumb HR Guy Guide to Recertifying for HRCI & SHRM

“My three years is up!”, he said as if it was a prison sentence. If you’re a regular to the professional recertification process of HRCI (SPHR, PHR, GPHR), you know this feeling well. Your HRCI certification lasts for three years and you can then retake the test or turn in continuing education credits for recertification. The first round of the new SHRM recertifications won’t take place until later this year for the SHRM CP and SCP certs.

It’s pretty simple. The first time you got your HR certification you took a test. For most of us, it sucked! It was hard, we had to study for weeks and months, and in the end when you walked out of the room you had no idea if you passed or not! It was at that point you made a pack with yourself, “I will never take that exam again!” With that statement, you signed yourself up for the three-year sentence!

Most professionals certification in other fields work in a very similar manner. In lieu of taking the certification exam over, you can do continuing education and receive credit. If you get so many credits over a certain period, you don’t have to take the test and you continue to have a valid certification. It’s a good business deal for both sides. I don’t want to take a test again, and the professional body would rather keep collecting my money.

With the breakup of HRCI and SHRM, we HR pros now have a decision to make:

  1. Maintain my HRCI certification only.
  2. Maintain my SHRM certification only.
  3. Maintain both certifications.
  4. Screw them both, this is too confusing!

I’ve maintained that having both certifications is ridiculous. You don’t need both, there isn’t enough differentiation in the eyes of employers, and there is still confusion in the market over which one you really need.

February 20th is my birthday. My SPHR certification through HRCI will expire. So, now I have a decision to make. I’ve maintained my SPHR certification since 2001. I still remember sitting in that room taking the test, finishing, and having no idea what the heck some of those answers were! I was proud when I got certified. It’s a hard certification to get and give up.

Most of you aren’t like me. In fact, I did a quick poll of some of my HR friends to find out how they recertify. It came down to three basic ways to HR pros recertify:

  1. You put in your recertification credits immediately as you earn them. This is 40% of you. These are my smart friends.
  2. You have a set schedule for inputting your earned credits (Monthly, quarterly, bi-annual,etc.) This another 40% of you. These are my slightly less smart friends.
  3. Dumb HR Guy way – you wait three years then put them all in at once. This is about 20% of us.

So, I made the decision to recertify my SPHR through HRCI. I go to and speak at a lot of conferences, I lead webinars, I get enough credits in one year for all three years, so this should be super simple!

Okay, let me stop for a second and explain, it wasn’t. But, it’s mostly my problem and my Dumb HR Guy way of doing things! Also, I think HRCI and SHRM could make this process a little easier, so I’ll give you some tips that I hope will help you not be dumb like me!

Tip #1 – Each thing you do for recertification comes with a “Program ID #”, turns out these numbers, and remembering these numbers are pretty important to the simplification of recertification! Also, both HRCI and SHRM have different numbers, which adds to the complexity of this. My suggestion to both would be to each have a simple search function on their recertification website allowing you to look up these program ID #’s so you don’t have to save all this documentation or find a way to remember them. Which leads me to Tip number two.

Tip #2 – Don’t be a Dumb HR Guy! Once you get your “Program ID #” input it into your recertification application right away. This is one million times easier! Now, SHRM also has made it super simple by providing a new mobile app so you can actually do this task in seconds while you’re at the event and you first get told the Program ID #. Super cool, super easy, go download it now if you have the SHRM CP and SCP. I’m guessing HRCI is probably not far behind in launching their own mobile app, it just makes sense for this kind of thing.

Tip #3 – Both HRCI and SHRM make it very hard for you to find Program ID #’s because they think you’ll cheat. Even though both audit and the reality is people applying for HR recertification would rarely cheat just based on their demographic and fear of being caught, let’s make it super hard for our ‘members’ to find the information you want. Even if you call them, they are not very forth giving on those IDs! Basically, we HR pros are untrustworthy to the associations we belong to. Oh, what’s the tip? It’s not one, I was just still upset over not easily being able to find the Program ID #’s of the events and webinars I attended to make it easier for me to fill out my recertification! Okay, rant over.

Tip #4 – HR blogging is pretty much worthless in the eyes of HRCI and SHRM. You get a max of like 6 credits over three years. I write every day, doing research, keeping up on the biggest HR topics on the planet, working to advance the HR profession, but somehow I don’t get credit for that. Instead, I go listen to Charlie at a local SHRM monthly luncheon talk about 401K participation for the third straight year, with the exact same presentation, and I’ll get three credits for attending those three exact presentations over three years. Doesn’t seem equitable, does it?

The moral of this story is this. SHRM and HRCI have figured out there is one really good way to recertify and if you follow their way, you’ll find this process easy and awesome. If you’re a dumb HR guy like me, you’ll find it painful.

The other moral is this, I’m recertifying for both, even those I still think it’s ridiculous. Until employers show us which certification they prefer you can’t be left not holding the one that will be most valuable to you. Unfortunately, right now, you don’t know which one that is!

 

Real-World HR – A new eBook from @SHRM

SHRM recently launched a new eBook to help build more an awareness around what the SHRM competency model looks like in the real world of HR. I’m on pages 36 and 37 sharing my brilliance on how to impact the “Relationship Management” competency, make sure to check it out!

Spoiler alert: I basically tell HR pros it’s a great idea to jump on the corporate jet and fly around the country with your executive team! See simple, straightforward advice!

I don’t talk about the SHRM competency model hardly ever, because quite frankly it’s boring and most people don’t care, but the launch of this book got me to re-look at it and you know what? It’s pretty solid:

  • HR Expertise – You have to have the HR chops if you want to play the game.
  • Business Acumen – Your executives care about this, they want to know you understand the business of what your organization does, more than your HR chops. They figure if you get the business, you’ll be smart enough to figure out the HR stuff.
  • Communication – It’s usually the biggest weakness in most organizations, so if you can kill it here, you can really add some value to your executive team.
  • Consultation – I love this one most of all. You should be the expert in your organization of people. Which means you should be using a consultative approach in helping all of your leaders be better at the people side of their business.
  • Ethical Practice – Someone has to be above the fray and ensure our organizations stay above it as well.
  • Global & Cultural Effectiveness – This one has never been more important as we move to a world economy and our organizations will thrive from a global perspective.
  • Leadership & Navigation – The most successful organizations know where they are going and have strong leaders guiding down this path.
  • Relationship Management – Your employees will do amazing things if you get to know them, and they get to know you. Without this, we are all just commodities.

I’ve given Hank some crap over the years, but I think he and the SHRM got this right. I truly believe that corporate executives want these things from their HR leaders. If we could all master these competencies, the HR profession would have a much different image across the world.

It’s a quick read. Take a look, I really liked the practitioner point of view:

Dear Timmy: How Do I Get Into Talent Acquisition?

I get asked a ton of questions via email. Some are from college students who ask a variety of things. Here’s a recent one:

Dear Timmy,

I’m a college student majoring in communications (editor’s note: why do college kids major in communications? Like 80% of college kids want to major in communications. You know there aren’t real jobs in communications, right!?) and I’m looking to get into human resources, more specifically I would like to work in talent acquisition.  What suggestions, or steps, do you suggest to help me get a position in corporate talent acquisition?

Thanks,

Communication major because apparently I’m an idiot (just kidding, she didn’t sign it that way!)

Here is my response:

If you want to get into straight HR you’ll need to graduate with a degree in HR. As I don’t know of an organization that hires entry level HR pros with non-HR degrees. If you want to get into talent acquisition follow these steps –

Step 1 – Graduate

Step 2– Apply for ‘agency’ entry level recruiting roles.

Step 3 – Do your time in the agency world, at least a year, maybe a bit more.

Step 4 – Apply for corporate Talent Acquisition openings

Here’s my reasoning for the steps above.

In talent acquisition no one cares which college degree you have, they only care that you can recruit. The reality is they shouldn’t even care if you go to college, but most corporate recruiter jobs will require it. Corporate TA departments rarely hire entry level recruiters because they don’t have the knowledge, processes, and capacity to train recruiters, which is why you need to get experience on the agency side of recruiting.

Agency recruiting is known to be very cut-throat and high burnout rate, but I’m only talking about a year or so. Anyone can handle that, and it will give you valuable experience. You might like agency recruiting and you can make a ton of money, but it’s high stress. Corporate TA is mid-level money, with no growth, but virtually no stress in comparison.

Once you get your experience in the agency world, even only a year, you’ll actually be considered pretty valuable on the corporate side of TA. Think of your agency time as your TA internship. You know there’s an endpoint, then you get into the job you want.

When interviewing for agency positions you should never mention that your goal is to get into corporate TA. They won’t hire you if they feel you’re just going to leave. Also, when you interview, most agency folks are only looking to hire two things: high energy, highly money motivated. So, drink three Red Bulls before you interview, and talk constantly about how much money you want to make. You’ll get hired by 99% of the agencies that interview you.

I might be joking a little, but only a little, that’s fairly close to reality. I mean agencies are also known to hire pretty people, so it wouldn’t hurt to be good looking.

 

The Biggest HR and TA Questions for 2017

I guess ‘biggest’ really depends on where your organization is with your HR and TA practices. My biggest might not be your biggest! I taking a run at this from the 30,000-foot view, not ground level.

2017 will for sure be a challenging year for both HR and TA leaders. With a new administration that is eager, to say the least, to make policy changes, both functions will be looked to for answers on how to deal with all of this, plus you have your normal day job to handle as well!

Here some of the biggest questions HR and TA will have to answer in 2017:

1. What will a repeal of Obamacare, in its current form, do to your benefit plan? If we’ve learned anything from Trump, it’s he doesn’t like Obamacare. So, you can pretty much guarantee that we’ll see changes to the Affordable Care Act. Which changes we’ll all have to wait and see!

2. How do we keep our talent from leaving us? It used to be, how do we keep our ‘best’ talent from leaving us? But, let’s face it, you have so many employees leaving now this isn’t about putting your finger in the dyke, this is about building a new damn! Retention will be one of the hottest topics in 2017, and probably 2018, 2019,…

3. What policies do you need to add, change or get rid of to make your organization better?  We always think about improvement in terms of adding, but in 2017 your greatest accomplishment might be to delete a policy or two that no longer have a positive impact in your organization. We added so many things during the recession that no longer make sense, but in HR and TA we hate deleting policies!

4. How do we fix Millennials? He didn’t say what I just think he said, did he? You need to watch this video by Simon Sinek. He thinks corporations need to fix millennials. His reasoning is solid. Corporations have the most to lose by broken millennials, they also have the most to gain. So, get ready to ramp up your development programs like never before, but these won’t be the same types of soft skill development programs from two decades ago! Millennials are broken. We can blame their crappy parents, at least that’s what Simon does.

5. How do we attract talent to our organizations? You don’t have to ping pong tables and free beer to attract great talent, but you do have to market to prospective candidates that you want them! This means that the post and pray strategy that 90% of organizations use, no longer will work (not that it ever worked). If I’m you, I have a serious conversation with my executive team about bringing marketing into help talent acquisition do some things differently. Yeah, you still need to sell whatever it is you sell, but if you don’t have talent to run the company, you won’t need marketing.

What are your biggest HR and TA questions for 2017?