Monthly Archives: July 2012

Recruiting’s 2032 Nightmare

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According to a recent USA Today article the U.S. birthrate is in sharp decline and is at it’s lowest levels in the past 25 years.   Here’s probably a few facts you don’t know:

– Projected 2013 birthrate in the U.S. is estimated to be 1.86

– Birthrate needed to maintain a population over a 20 year period is 2.1

Why should this concern you?

There are a number of reason – one might be that you need as many young people as old for the simple fact of having enough young people to take care of your older population.  If you turn that equation upside down (Taiwan 1.1 or Portugal 1.3) you have a society full of older people and not enough young people to fill the jobs needed to keep running your society.  The U.S. already has 3 Million jobs left unfilled because of lack of skilled employees – today. Imagine if you now have millions of less workers to even choose from – and by the way – skilled workers aren’t coming from other countries because their societies are growing and need them.  That is what our country’s employment picture will look like in 2032.  I know for many people right now this sounds very good – because of our high unemployment – but this will be a HR/Recruiting nightmare for those young HR/Talent Pros starting out their careers in the next 20 years.

Being the Futurist that I am -I’ve already provided a solution to this problem back in 2011 over at Fistful of Talent- Should You Encourage Your Employees To Have Babies – check it out. Basically my advice remains the same – as U.S. employers we need to create a positive, encouraging environment for our employees, with family-friendly policies that make our employees feel like starting a family is a good thing, and that if they do start a family their job and ability to get a promotion won’t be compromised.  This is not the case as many U.S. employers right now – for both men and women in the workforce.

As HR Pros and organizations we tend to think this isn’t our issue.  It will take care of itself – but as we look at countries with low birthrates, the issue doesn’t take care of itself and those countries have a worker crisis going on right now.    We need to change our ways right now – we need to be family friendly employers – we need to, as HR Pros, be concerned and find solutions for our employees around daycare, flexible schedules and other practices that will help our employees with families.   I know it sounds a bit the-sky-is-fallingish, but the numbers don’t lie we are headed for some of the hardest hiring this country has ever seen.

One solution I’ve thought of, that I didn’t bring up in 2011, is baby sign-on bonuses!  We do it for college students – I think we start doing for babies of our best employees.  I mean if parents can arrange their kids marriage, what stops us from arranging their first job?  Nothing! That’s what.  Imagine how happy your employees would be to cash a $20,000 check to help with baby expenses for the simple task of forcing their kid to come to work with your company upon college graduation.  It seems so simple – I’m not quite sure why no one has started this yet!

#3 Lyric That Shaped My Leadership Style

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For the background of this list – see my original post from 2-10-12.

The #3 Lyric That Shaped My Leadership Style comes from Nelly and his 2001 song “#1” off the soundtrack from the movie Training Day.  Here’s the Lyric:

“What does it take to be number one?
Two is not a winner and three nobody remembers”

It seems cocky doesn’t it?  But let me ask you this question: Why do you go to work?  I think there is probably a number of answers to that question: “I have to”; “I love what I do”; “I love the company”; etc.  I’m a scoreboard guy – I love to win.  I come to work each day to win.  I want my team to win – I want people on my team you want to win.  I hear you – “Well, what the hell are you winning in HR?!?!”

That’s a good question.  No matter what organization I have been with – retail, casual dining, health care, recruiting – I wanted to beat our competition at every level.  When I show up in the morning until I leave at night – I want to beat my competition.  When I go into designing a new employment branding project, or designing a new compensation model, or creating a recruiting strategy it all starts with one mindset – how is this going to make my organization stronger, and how is it going to make my competition weaker.  My competition is always top of mind.

Back in the 90’s there was a sportswear company called No Fear who mostly became popular for printing t shirts with funny motivational sayings like: “He who dies with the most toys, still dies” or “I’ve never lost, I’ve just been a little bit behind when the time ran out“, but my favorite was always “2nd Place is the 1st Loser”.  In a nutshell that sums up my feelings – I play and work to be #1 and try and surround myself with others that have that same winning desire – it’s natural 5 hour energy that doesn’t stop at 5 hours!

58% of College Students Are Willing to Lie

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According to a recent study by NetImpact – What Workers Want in 2012 58% of College Students (1,726 total in the study) would take a 15% pay cut to work for an organization who’s values matched their own.  In another study, I’m willing to coach the Los Angles Lakers for less than half what they are paying their current coach (1 total in this study)!

These studies are silly – it’s hypothetical, college kids still believe in things – like fairness and equal opportunity and you’ll always be able to drink 12 beers and get up the next morning and run 3 miles.  Let’s wait for all 1,726 college students who took the study to get a job and then 5 years from now when they are employed we’ll go to them and force them to make a choice –

1. You keep your current salary and stay with your current job

2. You take a 15% pay cut and move to Employer A which happens to have the same values as you, under the current leadership team

I will bet my entire life savings that less than 58% of those people would choose to leave their current employers (no matter what job they have) and take a 15% pay cut!  In fact I would be fairly confident to say only about 10% would take us up on our offer, and they were already looking or getting pushed out. So, what does the study really say? That college students being asked silly hypothetical questions for a study about how they will act in the future, are willing to lie.

Why do I think these studies are silly?  Because solid, well meaning, HR Pros will go out and start recruiting folks to their organization who have the same values that “they” have.  “They” being the key word.  Who is “they”?  Well, Tim, we went to our leadership and our managers and our employees and we did value assessment and we found that 73% of our folks valued honesty and integrity over 67% that valued hard work and a fun work place.  Oh, you’ve got it figured out…

Here’s what I’m thinking – values are hard to hire – but you think they aren’t.  I can hire for skills, I can hire for past performance, etc. When it comes to values and morals, I’m really throwing myself down the rabbit hole.  Hiring for values and morals puts the selectors values and morals into play way too much.  If Peggy is your main screener – you better damn hope Peggy shares the exact values and morals you’re trying to hire for – or you’re going to be in for a surprise down the road.

I’m not saying don’t do it – I’m saying you better weight it appropriately with some other criteria.  I seem to be in the minority who still believes having the fire power to do the job, and some past performance to back it up, is still fairly important when selecting candidates. And if Humility doesn’t seem to be a part of their value chain, I think I might be able to work around that – if they can perform!

3 Reasons Good Recruiters are Good at Recruiting

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I was reminded this past week that recruiting is very hard.  No, it’s not hard to post a job on your careers page and wait for a resume, that you won’t screen, and just pass along to the hiring manager -that’s not hard.  Recruiting is hard – when it comes down to finding talent that really doesn’t want to be found and has no desire to go to work for your bad culture and crappy manager who turns over people constantly – that’s when recruiting is hard!

I think there are 3 main differences that separate good recruiting from bad recruiting.  They are:

1. Good recruiters have the ability to change your mind about an opportunity, before money is even discussed.  Bad recruiters lead with the money.  Good recruiters believe in their organizations, believe in the position, and believe in the hiring manager as a great leader.  Then they make you a believer!

2. Good recruiters know your rejections before you know them and address them as such.   Relocation is probably the toughest one that comes to mind – next to relocation and a spouse who doesn’t want to relocate (that’s like Kryptonite to a Recruiter!).  Getting someone to relocate for a new position, new company – when they are a great talent with a great organization – takes a recruiter with an exceptional ability to connect the dots for the candidates.  This becomes the – this is why you need to be here, right now kind of moment that great recruiters come up with instead of just hanging up the phone and calling someone else.

3. Good recruiters know how to dig, and love to get dirty.  Let’s face it, you mining the Monster database isn’t recruiting – I can easily find a $10/hr admin type who can do that and they’ll actually be more engaged doing it!  Good recruiters love the search – yeah, it can be frustrating and heartbreaking, but when you uncover that hidden gem – it very much is worth the work!

The last four or five years have given us an environment where newer recruiters just coming into the industry, didn’t have to be good – they had to be present.  Being present isn’t a qualification, necessarily, to becoming a good recruiter.  High unemployment and low jobs, gives you an abundance to candidates and usually qualified candidates as well.  This doesn’t make you a good recruiter – it makes you a good screener.  In many industries we are now seeing the value of good recruiters come back, as certain job markets are opening up in a big way and candidates, even bad ones, are no longer advertising themselves as available.

Good recruiting is invaluable to a good HR shop – and bad recruiting is the quickest way for your HR shop to lose credibility with your leadership. So, what can you do?  Don’t allow bad recruiting to live in your barn! Good Recruiting is hard, and it shouldn’t look easy and it doesn’t work 40 hours per week, 8 to 5 pm, Monday thru Friday.  But, bad recruiting is betting on the fact that you don’t know the difference, or you are to lazy to do anything about it.

Can You Hear Facebook coming LinkedIn?

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This is old news but – last week Facebook announced that Facebook Jobs is coming! You can almost hear the Jaws theme music playing in the background, can’t you!?  CareerBuilder, Dice, LinkedIn, etc. – all the job boards – you can bet are taking note.  900 Million users – everyone from your Grandma to your Mom to your cousin Mary – from Brain Surgeons to Alligator Wrestlers – Facebook has got them.

My good friend Lance Haun wrote about his over at TLNT last week – What Is Facebook Thinking? Do We Really Need Another Job Board? From Lance’s post:

“The strength is obvious: imagine you’re applying for a job at XYZ company and you find out that a friend’s family member works there. Or what if some sort of robust search capability were added to the site? Or what if Facebook could recommend certain career options based on your activity beyond career-related postings?

The problem is that it would also come at the expense of privacy and the sort of digital wall that many people have put up to differentiate between their Facebook life and their LinkedIn life. Yet, the sheer numbers potential is attractive in it’s own right.”

This is the argument that LinkedIn has been hoping you will buy!  And so far you have been! LinkedIn is for Professional, Facebook is for Personal.  It’s a 2008 argument.  Most people don’t want to live two lives – they would prefer to live one, but they feel they can’t be themselves professionally – they need to be this watered down version of themselves – at least when not at a conference – then anything goes.  Let’s get real for a second – everyone is on Facebook – Your Mom, Your co-workers, Your boss, the owner of your company, your HR Manager, your ex-boyfriends, your current boyfriend – everyone.  Your not hiding anything – even with your ‘privacy’ settings.  It’s time to stop living the double life and be yourself.

Here’s what is really exciting about Facebook Jobs – We finally get access to everyone!  Well, almost everyone – at least 7 times more than LinkedIn – and all those ‘Passive’ candidates!  Even if Facebook only goes for the quick cash grab and does postings for a fee – it’s still better than just posting on a Job Board or LinkedIn.  People like to look, lurk and see what’s open – it’s human nature.  Facebook is the perfect place for this.  Just like when LinkedIn started and HR Pros were actually encouraging their employees to get on, to ‘network’ (don’t we look stupid now!) – no one will consider a person on Facebook to necessarily be job hunting.  It’s the perfect safe environment for this to happen.  Plus, it easily allows people to engage their personal networks when they see something interesting that someone in their personal network would have interest in.

LinkedIn should be nervous – good talent is already leaving or ignoring them at this point – recruiters have taken it over – it’s become spammy.  Facebook is an open frontier – the best recruiters are already finding ways within Facebook to network and source.  Facebook Jobs – or whatever they decide to do – could be a big game changer for recruiters.

Why Only HR Managers Feel Busy: An Economic Theory

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The Atlantic had an interesting article recently (Why Only Yuppie Feel Busy: An Economic Theory) based on a study by an economic professor at the University of Texas.   The basis of the study was this:

“It turns out that if you hold the hours people spend at their jobs and on household chores constant, individuals who bring home bigger paychecks still feel more stressed for time. Increase a husband’s income, and his wife begins to feel busier.”

This got me to thinking! About HR. About how crazy we HR/Talent Pros act sometimes in Corporate settings  More from the article:

“We all live on two things: time and money. And people who have extra income don’t get much, if any, extra time to spend it. As a result, Hamermesh argues, each of their hours seems more valuable, and they feel the clock ticking away more acutely. Much the way it’s more stressful to order dinner from a menu with 100 items than 10, choosing between a night at the symphony, seats at the hot new play, or tickets to Woody Allen’s latest flick is in some senses more stressful than knowing you’ll have to save money by staying in for the evening. There’s a lot the rich could be doing and too few hours to do it all. 

That isn’t to say the rich are necessarily more stressed overall. While the poor are less likely to complain about a lack of time, they are much more likely to complain about a lack of money. “One of them is always going to be scarce for you. If you’re rich, it’s time that’s scarce. If you’re poor, it’s the money that’s scarce,” Hamermesh says.”

Let’s put this into an HR example.  HR Pros want to feel important Strategic.  They see their operational partners running around with real important stuff that needs to get done – new product launches, assembly change overs, new marketing campaigns, etc.  Because they are so busy, we (HR) equate busy with strategic.  So, we become busy, we run around stressed with too much to do.  I mean the processes aren’t going to re-process themselves!  So, we add – for the sake, many times, of adding – we equate busy with strategic (importance to the organization) – I mean, hell, if we are this busy, how would the organization ever live without us!

Corporations are funny – if you would survey your organization about who is the busiest (doing the most stuff) – it would always look like everyone is always busy.  In reality your senior leaders would say they are the busiest, and then they would go down by levels from highest to lowest on the busiest meter.  If you brought in a third party and had them force rank who was busiest, you would find something different.  The lowest levels of your organization are actually the busiest (leaders are trained to delegate, delegation rolls down hill, it has to stop eventually!) – as you move up, you get less “busy” more strategic – probably more boring meetings, a lot of wasted time at higher levels of leadership.  Ask any senior leader and they will tell you probably 1/2 of their time is wasted in meetings where no decisions are being made and mostly they are just “updating” or “getting updates”.

HR Managers feel busier because they are trying to show their business partners that they also have real important stuff to do – so they add.  A better way?  Stop adding HR stuff – start using that time to help your business partners on their stuff.  You will be amazed at how much time you have when their stuff becomes your number #1 priority.  You’ll still probably feel busy – but it will be the right busy!

 

 

#4 Rap Lyric That Shaped My Leadership Style

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For the background of this list – see my original post from 2-10-12.

The #4 Rap Lyric that Shaped My Leadership Style comes from a man that is making his second appearance on my countdown the one and only Shawn Carter, or as he’s better known – Jay-Z!  The lyric actually come from a remix he did for Kayne West on the song Diamonds From Sierra Leone.  Here’s the Lyric:

“I’m not a businessman/ I’m a business, man.”

To often as leaders we talk about wanting to be more strategic for our organizations, or wanting to have more impact within our organizations, but I see people going about it all wrong.  You can go into a corporate setting and “act” the part, but you’ll never reach your full potential as a leader until you make the conscience decision to fully commit to making yourself that person you desire.  That is the essence of this lyric.  I don’t want to be businessman, I want to be the Business, man.  People don’t follow posers – they follow people who are completely committed and passionate about what they do.

It might sound altruistic, but think about those people who you really consider to be the greatest leaders.  Almost always you can differentiate those people from the brand they are supporting.  You hear it all time – “Oh, she is Nike.” or “He bleeds UPS brown”.  Entrepreneurs get this – they are their business, but most corporate folks don’t really understand the true meaning of this.  Sometimes in corporate settings these people are actually mocked because people believe “they drank the kool-aid” too much – which is a shame, because they are probably your most engaged employees, but you are resentful over their seemingly high satisfaction.

The only advice I give people on this topic is if you can’t truly support your organization (which means referring friends and family, going the extra mile for your company, and being honest with yourself to love what you do and who your doing it for) you need to find an organization that you do feel this way about.  You owe it to yourself, but more importantly you owe it to the business and all those other people who do want to be here and be successful.

Bootstrap Your Employment Brand with FOT

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****Unpaid Endorsement****  But KD and Steve better buy me dinner the next time I see them! (that doesn’t count on my W2 does it?)

Fistful of Talent is back with the July installment of the FOT webinar, brought to you by our innovative friends at TweetMyJobs. Join hosts Kris Dunn and Steve Boese, as they deliver: Bootstrap Your Employment Brand the FOT Way, and serve up the following:

– A Quick-Hitting Approach to Building Your EVP. Forget what you think your employment brand is. FOT’s going to break down a low cost way for you to determine your EVP and get some fresh ammo for your recruiting brand.

– How to Create Cool Content to Support Your EVP. The FOT team will walk you through how to develop a low-cost, low-pain way to develop quick hitting content that supports your EVP.

– How to Deliver Your Cool EVP Content via Social Media, with the Usual Suspects and TweetMyJobs. Now that you’ve identified your culture via an employment brand-supporting EVP, it’s time to package your message and ship it out to the public via mobile, photos, video, social apps, etc.

– What You Should Focus on When Gauging Your ROI, Ignoring Clicks and Other Measurement Gibberish. FOT will bring in TweetMyJobs Co- Founder, Gary Zukowski, to tell you what really matters when it comes to measuring your return on investment in relation to your employment brand – it’s more than click deep.

– 2-Way Conversations or How to Eat the Dog Food and Ease it Down with a Kool-Aid chaser. We’ll wrap up the webinar by walking you through how smart companies get team members fully engaged with the EVP and on the front lines of building a talent pool that wants to work for you.

Don’t call it a comeback – your EVP has been there for years. You’ve just never asked the right questions to figure out what people think is in it for them to work at your company.  Join FOT and Tweet My Jobs for this webinar and we’ll show you how to determine your real employment brand via the EVP and share it with the world.

Click Here To Register For This Webinar – it comes with the FOT Guarantee – 60% of the time, it works every time!

 

4 Annoying Ways To Follow Up After An Interview

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Jenny Foss (@JobJenny) had a good article over at Forbes recently, 4 Non-Annoying Ways To Follow Up After An Interview, where she gave some tried and true job seeker advice out for post interview contact.  If was what you would expect from a Forbes article: Ask about next steps, send a thank you note, connect via LinkedIn, etc.  Safe stuff.  Not knowing Jenny, I looked her up on her blog – JobJenny.com and after learning a little about her – I think she probably wanted to write the 4 Most Annoying Ways – but didn’t want to throw her Forbes gig out the window – so I’m here to try and do it for her.  Let’s face it – Forbes isn’t asking me to write any time soon!

The one thing that all HR and Talent Pros can connect with is having to deal with stalker candidates who are relentless at contacting you after an interview.  The ironic part of this, is they are most likely following someone’s bad advice – usually a parent (If you don’t call them, they won’t know you’re “really” interested), or a grandparent (Back in my day we would go back the next day and knock on their door again to tell them how interested in the job we were) telling them what they needed to do.  Even worse – many times they are following the advice of a Pseudo HR Pro who is shoveling out free career advice like they actually know what they’re talking about – until you realize they haven’t actually worked in HR since the 1970’s.  For those of us in the trenches – having to deal with overly aggressive candidates following up can be the biggest pain of our day.

So, here are 4 Annoying Ways To Follow Up After An Interview (if you’re a candidate, stop doing this!):

1. Use Your Inside Connection in my company to get feedback. Nothing screams cheesy more than doing this! Hey, my uncle works in tech support, I’ll just have him contact Tim in HR to see how I did.  When this happens to me – I go overboard to the connection on how bad they did, so much so we are actually rethinking your employment because of your relationship.

2. Send me a Thank you note to my Home. Yes, this has happened to me – and yes it was way creepy.  The last thing I want to deal with when I walk into the door of my home is some crazy candidate from work.  No, it does not show initiative – it shows your propensity to be a stalker.

3. Ask me to be Facebook friends.  Look, I don’t even want to be work friends if we hire you, and I certainly don’t want you picking around my Facebook page.  I would rather you tattoo a picture of my on your chest and put it on a billboard before befriending you on Facebook. Don’t do this!

4. Leave me a voicemail everyday for 2 weeks.  Again, this doesn’t show initiative, it shows desperation – Like the veteran running-back who run into the end-zone and tosses the football to the umpire – act like you’ve been there.  You can follow up once – a quick “thank you” and a “I’m definitely interested” is all that it takes.

I can’t even begin to tell you some of the crazy ways that candidates have tried to stay in touch and get noticed over the years – but most bordered on insanity and just helped me screen them out as a possible selection.  The ones who seem not interested, are the ones I usually had to stalk myself! (Seem familiar ladies!?)  I would tell you to just use common sense – but that seems to be thrown out the window on most folks – so I’ll say less is more and be respectful of the hiring managers time.

When Work-Life Balance Comes Full Circle

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Did you see what RIM did last week?  What’s RIM? You ask. Makers of Blackberry, you know that phone we use to use before the iPhone came out.  Yeah, they’re still in business, barely, and trying to survive and save their company and thousands of jobs.  From the Ottawa Citizen:

“Research In Motion Ltd. is limiting summer vacations and ordering six-day work weeks for many of its Ottawa staff as it scrambles to push out its much-promised BlackBerry 10 operating system….

“The successful launch of the BlackBerry 10 platform, and the delivery of high quality, full-featured BlackBerry 10 smartphones, remains the company’s No. 1 priority; and we’re incredibly proud of the commitment shown by all RIM employees as we work toward this goal,” a RIM spokeswoman said in a statement.

The company is racing to complete quality control and bug testing on the new devices, which were originally expected to be released in the fall. On a conference call to investors Thursday, chief executive Thorsten Heins announced a delay to the release of the devices until early 2013 because making sure the phones work flawlessly is taking far longer than the company had hoped.”

Yep – we are on the precipice of our company either surviving or going under forever, and your going to have to work a little extra each week and miss out on your vacation to the cottage this summer!  That’s “real” work-life balance in a nut shell.

You want to measure your engagement of employees on an individual basis – do this and see who bitches about it and see who steps up and asks for more!  I’ve seen both happen.  Unfortunately, when your organization is at a critical point – either for survival, growth, major project, etc. and you need a little extra – work-life balance needs a little shift temporarily, you’re going to have employees who don’t care.  This is the Universe’s way of showing you who should be let go immediately – don’t wait!

Work-Life Balance doesn’t mean that the balance only works towards the employees favor.  It has to work both ways – to be “Balance”!  There are times when our employees will need extra time for their personal life – you need to understand that – also employees need to understand there are times when the organization will need extra as well (FYI to Employees: “Extra” is not defined as showing up on time and doing the job you’re getting paid to go).

I don’t have a Blackberry (that’s a lie, I do, but it’s in a drawer someplace collecting dust) – but I hope they make it, I hope they are widely successful – for the sake of the thousands of families who are getting their support from RIM and for all those employees who are giving it their all to help make their company successful.