Monthly Archives: January 2015

Are You Staying In Your Lane?

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I think there are two types of people in the world:

  1. People who stay in their lane
  2. People who don’t stay in their lane.

The first group, lane stayers, are the type of people who follow a natural life path.  Basically, these are the people who don’t push the natural evolution of their lives. I started at this company. I worked my job. In a certain time I’ll get promoted. There is a sequence of life that I’ll follow, and for the most part, things will work out.

Those leaving their lane, don’t agree with their natural order of things. Nope, I don’t want to wait for my things to happen. I’m going to make my own things happen.  I don’t believe there is a path for me, so I’m going to create your own.

We have both of these types of people in our organization.  Unfortunately, we try and sell to people that those leaving their lane are somehow better.  When in reality, if you diagnose the best organizations you will usually find a higher percentage of people who stay in their lane.

The natural order of organizational effectiveness relies on people staying in their lane.  If we had everyone leaving their lane, it would cause chaos.  Our organizations would be in constant turmoil.

Staying in your lane is a weakness.  I started out in my career as that person who couldn’t stay in their lane.  I wanted to leave my lane constantly because I thought that was my way to success. As I got more tenured in my career, I realized that those friends and peers, who stayed in their lane, tended actually to reach a higher level of success faster!

Part of it is patience.  Part of it is loyalty.  Part of it is confidence in your abilities in the environment you’re in.

Staying your lane isn’t easy to do.  We get so much media thrown at us that tells us to get out of our lanes.  They call it a challenge.  They say we are pushing ourselves to a higher level. They are ones who also believe they need to get out of their lane.

Those, who stay in their lane, don’t usually feel a need to tell people about it.  That’s why it’s not popular. That’s why you don’t see books about it, and TED talks about it.  Staying in your lane is the new black. Try it out.

Talent Isn’t Fair

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We have a big problem with this concept in HR.

We want everything to be fair. At the core of what we do, though, is the most unfair dilemma that we can do nothing about. Our people come to us with talent.  It is never equal.  We can try to help our employees leverage the talents they have, but in the end it’s their talent, their desire.

I work my butt off, but Mary makes more sales than me, and she doesn’t put in half the effort I do!  Yep, she has more talent.

I am loyal to this company, and Bill hates this place, but he got promoted! Yep, he has more talent.

I just can’t seem to find a solution to our problem, then Sue finds it after working on it for ten minutes. Talent.

Everything we do in HR and Talent Acquisition comes down to us managing the inequalities of talent in our organizations.

Turns out, talent isn’t fair.

 

 

The Irresistible Power of Being Wanted

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It’s not 100%, but it might be close.  Some will deny this, but it’s pretty much universally accepted. We all want to be wanted by someone.

It makes us feel good to be wanted.  Not the crazy stalker kind of wanted. The kind of wanted where you know the other party wants you for all the positive reasons that are you.  That feeling is so powerful it could light up New York!

In a nutshell, that is talent acquisition.

You want someone. They may want you, they may not.  Either way, you are holding in your possession one of the most powerful feelings of all time!

People want to be wanted.

When you call someone and tell them, “I want you”, I can guarantee they will listen to what you have to say next.  100% of the time.

“Hi, my name is Tim. I want you.”

I now have your attention.  I might not have it for long, but I do have it in that moment.  That’s the key for successful recruiting. What you say next determines your success.

I have had four jobs in my entire career, over 21 years.  I’ve probably had upwards of 500 calls from recruiters wanting to talk to me about a job they have open. Each time I listened to what they had to say, initially, because it makes me feel good that someone wants me. That is a normal response. That is a majority response.

In recruiting you should never underestimate the power you hold in your hands.  Never believe the hype that people don’t want to be called or contacted about jobs. “Oh, those IT guys get ten calls a day, they don’t want to be contacted!” Yes, they do. That’s ten times a day they get a stroke to their ego. Ten times a day they feel wanted. Ten times a day where you might be offering them their dream job.

“Hi, my name is Tim. I want you.”

T3 – Avature

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T3 – Talent Tech Tuesday – 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 space and I wanted to educate myself and share what I find.  If you want to be on T3 – send me a note.

This week I’m excited to review the recruiting technology platform Avature.  I have to tell you I had at least five people send me private messages, from my network, requesting I review Avature once I started doing these T3 reviews.  As always, my tribe was right, I love recruiting and technology, so Avature was a perfect fit.

Most people who have heard of Avature probably think of them in one of two ways: CRM and/or ATS (Applicant Tracking System).  CRM is a marketing acronym for Customer Relationship Management.  It’s basically a fancy name for a system that automatically keeps in contact with people. Candidates are people, so CRM became a perfect fit for talent acquisition.  The reality is, though, Avature actually started out as a RPO (recruitment process outsourcing) company and platform, by the founder of HotJobs (remember them!?).   So, Avature was in the recruiting business before deciding to become a recruiting technology company.

What Avature is best known for is their CRM product and it’s extremely powerful.  The use of CRM in recruiting is life changing for talent acquisition. The Avature system can get a candidate to apply in under a minute. It can automatically send out communications to possible candidates, but also skip that one candidate you are already working with, so you don’t look like a fool when the person you are about to make an offer to suddenly receives a “please apply” email from you.  You can import lists and spreadsheets, and the system will automatically create records.

Throughout the entire process everything is always tied to one candidate record.  Every time stamped communication. Who sent it. Who spoke to them. Where they came from. Where they are in the process.  It is fully integrated with your Outlook, but all of those communications still show up within the one candidate record as well. Source external databases (CareerBuilder, Monster, Dice, etc.) from Avature as well, and one click the person into your database.

Avature also has a great ATS, and they are finding most of their CRM clients are migrating to their ATS as legacy contracts fall off.  If you demo Avature, you’ll see why. The CRM is so ridiculously powerful, you can’t help but want to keep it all together within the ATS, but they integrate with Taleo, Kenexa, SuccessFactors, etc.

5 Things I Really Like About Avature:

1. Configuration within the CRM is amazing, intuitive and couldn’t be easier.  This is where their background of actually being a recruiting company, first, shows up.  The system is designed and thinks like a recruiter thinks. No one client of Avature uses the system exactly the same.

2. Application process that can easily be designed based on position. How many of you only have one application process? Most of you! But what about the job that has hundreds of applicants versus the job that you get no applicants?  Those should be different, right? One you need a lot of filters to get to the right candidate. The other you want no barriers of entry in hopes of getting a candidate!

3. Avature can re-engage applicants that fall off in your process.  Many times those drop off rates are 60-70% of those looking at your jobs.  Most of us don’t even know those numbers! Avature will tell you this, plus it’s designed to go out and get those people to come back.

4. Truly global company. They have non-US clients who don’t even have employees in the US.  Multiple data centers globally. Being used in 100 different countries.

5. Because of their history in recruitment, the entire process is designed around candidate experience. Company started in 2008 and 7 original developers are still with the company in 2015!  They designed the product not to be a suite of products, but one platform, thus one record throughout.   What does a candidate expect when they come to apply to your organization? What do they expect from the communications you send out? Etc.

I joke with the folks from Avature that they are one step away from eliminating recruiters altogether! They then shared a story of how Starbucks, an Avature client, actually has hired baristas without any personal contact from a recruiter within the Avature platform!

Just as CRM was the future of marketing a decade ago. Products like Avature are the future of high performing talent acquisition shops today.  Check them out. At the very least you better do some research into CRM technology for your talent acquisition function.

5 Reasons I Got My SHRM-SCP

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I’ve been known to rail against the man (SHRM) once in a while.  I only do it, because I care.  If I didn’t care about my professional organization, I could really care less how bad they come off, or the bad decisions they make.  When they decided to ditch HRCI and bring HR certification in house, I thought they butchered the communication.  Maybe one of the worst rollouts I’ve ever seen by a professional organization.

I also thought, though, that it was a smart business decision.  Why let HRCI rake in all the dough, when you can do it just as well yourself.  In fact, I wish they would have just come out and said that, originally. We don’t see any reason why as stewards of our business, we should give all this cash to some other organization. I would have loved that!

So, at the time of that announcement, in May 2014, SHRM was going to force all HRCI certified members to pay and take the new SHRM certification. This made complete sense if SHRM was doing what they said they were doing, which was to create a ‘new’ assessment of HR based on competency, because that’s what was really needed for the profession.  I was cool with that, but I wasn’t going to pay and take another test.  I’ve reached a point in my career where I don’t need letters after my name to prove my proficiency.  So, I was riding the HRCI train until it ended.

‘Surprisingly’ SHRM changed direction last week and created a new pathway for already certified HRCI members to gain the new SHRM certification by following a simple process that takes about an hour, and costs nothing. Again, brilliant, now no one really has any reason not to get the new SHRM certification, and convert over.  It’s what they should have done originally, but they couldn’t because they were trying to keep up the illusion they needed a new and improved certification, not just a money grab. Thankfully, someone came to their senses, and grabbed the money!

All of that being said, here are the 5 reasons I decided to get my SHRM Sr. Certified Professional certification:

1. We all hate conflict, and I wasn’t picking sides in some fight over money. SHRM is my professional organization.  HRCI is basically a testing center. I’ll stick with SHRM.

2. No one knows HRCI. Everyone knows SHRM. Let’s get real for a second, up until May most people thought HRCI was a department within SHRM. No one had any idea they were a separate company, unless you were deeply involved in SHRM.  Outside our industry, no one knows HRCI. SHRM is a brand for HR.

3. Ultimately, SHRM is right. Competencies assessments are better than knowledge based assessments.  Anyone can memorize answers. It takes critical thinking to answer competency based assessments correctly.

4. It was free! I wasn’t going to pay a dime to get SHRM certified and tested.  Well, maybe a dime, but not a quarter.

5. It’s hard being a pimp. Running a professional organization like SHRM and getting everyone to move in one direction, is tough! I want HR to move forward. SHRM has an advantage because of its size and scope to make this happen. Ultimately, I love the career I chose and want to see the function move forward and not fractured.

Does Hank and the crew still need to get their shit together? Yes.  A first year communications student could have launched the new SHRM cert better.  It’s a common issue that crops up for SHRM continually, and obviously is a blind spot.  They need to fix that.  You don’t need more opinions on how it should be communicated, and more input. You just need to get the right input.

Not getting this right, the first time, made our industry look like a bunch of idiots, “same old HR”.  SHRM has to do better moving forward.

Now, go get your SHRM certification, you would be silly not to.

 

How Much Will Your Raise Be in 2015?

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Some great data coming out this morning from Glassdoor on what your employees are expecting in 2015. It’s always nice to know what someone is expecting beforehand, otherwise things tend get awkward.  It’s like that time you showed up at your girlfriends house in college right before the holidays and she bought you a $50 Tommy Hilfiger rugby shirt and you got her a $4 box of chocolates shaped like Santa. That level of awkward.

In 2015 your employees are expecting a raise. According to Glassdoor’s Employee Confidence Survey they are expecting:

– Between 3-5%.

Not bad.  Most companies probably expected this.  2015 will be a good year for many companies, so the 3-5% annual increase is something that will be doable.

Here’s what you might not expect:

– 35% of your employees will look for a new job, if they don’t get the pay raise their expecting.

This can be a major issue, individually.  This is why you need to manage expectations early. If your top performer is expecting 10%, and you have 5% in your back pocket, this will be a negative increase.  I hate giving negative increases.  I feel bad. The employee feels bad. I would rather almost not give the increase at all.

Another expectation that came out of the survey is that both men and women believe women get paid less. Not a huge surprise, but why let that belief live in your environment if it is not true?  I’m a big proponent of sharing pay equality by department or division within an organization, if the data is favorable to you.  I don’t want employees believing we have equity issues, when we don’t.  Make it a celebration that you’re not like all the rest.  If you are like all the rest, fix it!

Lastly, all these surveys come with a bit of scare tactic.  This one is around turnover! Glassdoor’s employee confidence survey found:

– 48% of your employees are confident they can find another job if they need to. (highest in 6 years)

– 13% fear they will be laid off. (lowest in 6 years)

What does this mean to you?  Nothing, if you’re a good employer!  It could mean a big headache if you’re a bad company to work for.  People have options.  Our reality is most employees still won’t leave, if you’re a decent company. That’s just life.  People hate change.

It does mean that you probably have to wrangle in some of your leaders who have been getting a little to command and control over the past 5-8 years. People don’t leave companies, people leave horrible bosses that are assholes.  You know which ones you need to fix. Fix them, or fire them, you can’t afford to have bad leadership in an employee driven marketplace.

Will 2015 be the year of the Quotas?

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We still haven’t really made a dent in this diversity/inclusion thing have we?  The numbers don’t lie.  81% of healthcare workers are female, less than 18% of leadership positions in healthcare are filled by females.  The same is true in the service industry, the restaurant industry, etc.  Similar numbers can be said about African Americans and Hispanics in almost every industry.

The world is changing and we keep doing the same thing.

HR shops are trying to change our behaviors and how we think, but they are working against thousands of years of ingrained behaviors.  A few training courses aren’t going to change this level of programming.

People hate quotas in hiring.  They view the word ‘quota’ in the same vane as they view other words that lead to hate speech.

No one wants quotas.

That’s the problem. Quotas work.  Quotas are a measure that organizations can see and do something about.  Oh, we need five more females. We better go hire them. It’s straightforward. It’s simple to understand.

I get what’s wrong with them, we talk about that all the time.  Rarely, do we ever talk about what’s right with quotas.  When I was in HR at Applebee’s I had a ‘diversity quota’ on my leadership staffing.  It was measured as a percent of the overall staff and our diversity in leadership was measured as females, African American, Asian, Hispanic, etc. Basically, the only thing that didn’t count was white guys.

It was frustrating to me because I had very high diversity within my leadership team, but to continue to get high ratings I had to keep hiring diversity, even if it meant that one day I would have 100% diverse leadership. This rating was important to me because I got bonused on this rating. Having a diverse leadership team was very important to Applebees.

What Applebee’s leadership knew was that I was never going to get to 100% diversity.  It wasn’t their goal.  But, they knew to move the needle on diversity we needed to start measuring the color and kinds of faces we were hiring.  Quotas.

It worked.  It showed those working for our organization that we were serious about hiring diversity, so much so, that we were going to ensure this number moved.

Quotas are bad when they are used for bad purposes and good people get hurt by this.  I wasn’t passing over better white guys when hiring leadership at Applebees.  I was searching for better diverse candidates overall and hiring them.  Our leadership makeup needs to reflect our employee makeup. That is better hiring.

Don’t discount quotas in 2015.  If you truly want to move the needle in your organization, measure it.

What do you want to hear?

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I think I might be on the cusp of the next great employee feedback mechanism for leadership.  I’ve been thinking about this concept for a long while. You see, for years I’ve had the opportunity to test out my various theories on employee feedback.  I’ve watched my own feedback theories change over the years, but they always were grounded in people truly want feedback about their performance.

That is mostly true.  People do want feedback about their performance.

Here is what also is true:

1. People want feedback about what they’ve done well.

2. People don’t want critical feedback. Someone asking you for critical feedback is really just testing you to see if you are either:

 1. Upset with them for how bad they did

2. Just seeing if you have the guts to them how bad they did

3. People really just want you to tell everyone else how great you think they are.

I think a better, more effective, way of delivering feedback to employees should start with this one question:

“What do you want to hear about your performance?”

At this point the employee will say stuff like, “I just want to hear how well I did”, or “Tell me that you appreciated my work”, or “Tell me I’m the best employee you have”.  This will then drive the conversation appropriately and keep everyone fully engaged.  “Alright, Timmy, you are doing really well. I can’t tell you how much I appreciate everything you do. You are the best employee I have.”

Timmy leaves feeling great and satisfied.  You don’t have to deal with someone losing their mind about how they are really performing. Everyone goes back to work with minimal disruption.

Yeah, I know what you really wanted to say was, “Timmy, you can do better. While I appreciate the work you do, I wish you would actually do more of it. You are like most employees hear, nothing special, but you could be.”

How does that conversation end?  Timmy is pissed. He creates a scene.  He usually ends up disrupting the work environment and kills productivity. He might even go out and find another job with someone else.

Is that what you wanted? Probably not.

So, make it easier on yourself.  Just remember to start every feedback conversation out with that one question: What do you want to hear?  They’ll tell you. They’ll be happier. You’ll be happier. Everyone can get back to work.

Feedback is is the leadership sucker test.  No one really wants to hear what you think about them.

T3 – QueSocial

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T3 – Talent Tech Tuesday – 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 space and I wanted to educate myself and share what I find.  If you want to be on T3 – send me a note.

This week on T3 I’m reviewing QueSocial.  QueSocial is a social talent acquisition tool that was awarded Top Product of the Year in 2014 by HR Executive Magazine.  What do they do?  They solve a major problem most companies have when it comes to social recruitment, a system that allows your recruiters and employee brand ambassadors to share approved content easily and seamlessly.

So, what’s the big deal?  Here’s what really happens in most talent acquisition shops.  Someone decides they want to have a social recruitment strategy.  This involves engaging potential passive candidates in an ongoing manner. The only way to achieve success in this model is to have a content strategy that frequently touches these candidates.  That sounds easily, but in reality it is very difficult to maintain, and most organizations fail at doing this.  QueSocial takes care of this.

QueSocial is a platform that delivers your content to your recruitment team and other employee brand ambassadors (think hiring managers, your really active social employees, etc.) in a way that in one touch they can share it on their social streams.  This is social recruitment on steroids delivered in a way that makes is super easy for the users to share content with their tribes.  QueSocial also delivers metrics on your shared content to show you what’s working and what isn’t, which is another very powerful part of their platform.

5 Things I really like about QueSocial:

1. QueSocial is the only system I’ve seen that helps make recruiters better at converting social media into real business results. It’s taking something most executives see as subjective, and converting it to objective.

2. Extends your employer brand footprint exponentially into your employee social networks.  That’s the real power! How do you seamlessly leverage your employee’s networks to engage more candidates?

3. The QueSocial analytics engine can show you exactly who is using the system and how, but also what content are your employees and  candidates connecting with, so you can get really strategic with your content strategy as well.  Gone are the days of just throwing crap at the wall to see what might stick.

4. A system like QueSocial actually drives higher employee engagement.  The reality is your employees want to share stuff about where they work and why it’s great, but we don’t make it easy for them to do this.  QueSocial idiot-proofs this system and makes it super easy – one click easy.

5. There is a gamification element to QueSocial as well that will provide motivation and incentives to drive the social activity you want from your employees in getting the results you want.  This is key in starting and continuing a great strategy.

QueSocial already has some very big enterprise level clients who have shown the system can do what it says.  Plus, these clients have shown that for the most part the administrators of the platform are only spending 15-30 minutes per day in uploading and pushing content out to everyone else.  QueSocial is primarily an enterprise level tool and fairly inexpensive for what you get.  Definitely worth checking out if you have, or will be adding, a social recruitment strategy to your mix.

The Key Trait of Great Hires

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For twenty years, I’ve been hiring and firing people. I’ve been lucky enough to have some great performers, a bunch of good performers and an also a few crappy performers. It seems like every time I turn; someone has an answer for me on how to hire better. For years I have given the advice if all else fails, hire smart people. It’s not a bad strategy. For the most part, if you hire the smartest ones of the bunch, you’ll have more good performers, than bad performers. I’m talking pure intelligence, not necessarily book smarts.

But, just hiring smart people still isn’t perfect. I want to hire good, or great, people every single time. How do you do that? That’s the million dollar question.

To me there is one trait we don’t focus enough on, across all industries. Optimism.

Your ability to look at the situation and come up with positive ways to handle it. Think about your best employees, almost always there is a level of optimism they have that your lower performers don’t.

I can’t think of one great employee I’ve ever worked with that didn’t have a level of optimism that was at least greater than the norm. They might be optimistic about their future, about the companies future, about life in general. The key was they had optimism.

Optimistic people find ways to succeed because they truly believe they will succeed. Pessimistic people find ways to fail, since they believe they are bound to fail. This hiring thing can be difficult. Don’t make it more difficult by hiring people who are not optimistic about your company and the opportunity you have for them. Ask questions in the interview that get to their core belief around optimism:

– Tell me about something you’re truly optimistic about in life? (Pessimistic people have a hard time answering this. Optimistic people will answer quickly and with passion.)

– Tell me about a time something you were responsible for went really bad. How did you deal with it?

– The company has you working on a very important project and then decides to cancel it. How would you respond?

Surrounding yourself with optimistic people drives a better culture, better teams, it’s uplifting to your leadership style. I want smart people, but I truly want smart people who are optimistic about life. Those people change the world for the better, and I think they’ll do the same for my business.