Monthly Archives: October 2015

10 Solutions to Your Worst HR and TA Headaches!

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CareerBuilder did a funny thing at their booth at the HR Tech Conference this year and had people vote on their worst HR and TA headaches. CB then had a running total scoreboard on which headaches were the worst.  Kris Dunn and I loved the idea and we are putting on a webinar next Tuesday, sponsored by our friends at CareerBuilder, called, “Why Can’t All My Recruiting Tools Get Along?!” – which is one of our biggest TA headaches!

In this webinar, you’ll get our Top 10 HR and TA Headaches, but also the solutions to those headaches!  Basically, KD and I will give you are secret headache solutions!  Here are some the headaches we’ll be discussing:

  • “My hiring managers won’t give me feedback on candidates!” 
  • “I can’t get 100% of my employees to complete our mandatory training!?”
  • “We just had another candidate no call – no show! Our we allowed to shoot them?!” 
  • “Hey, Recruiter Tim, I ‘really’ like the candidate you sent me, but can I see just a few more?!” 
  • “I know I told you I would accept $75K for the job, but I really meant to say $90K!” 
  • And many, many more!

Do you need an aspirin? I do.

But, don’t fret, Kris and I will give you our guaranteed migraine knockout solutions, and none of which include you having to hire a hitman to ‘take care’ of business for you!  This webinar will be fun and lively, but like everything we do, also give you some real practical ideas and advice on helping you solve your worst HR and TA headaches!

WHEN:  Tuesday, November 3rd

TIME:  1 pm EST

WHERE: CLICK HERE! 

Having Fun at Work

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Mark Manson is a brilliant writer, one of my favorites. He recently wrote an article titled, “Screw Finding Your Passion” where he made a comment about fun:

“A child does not walk onto a playground and say to himself, “How do I find fun?” She just goes and has fun.”

I get asked a lot by HR Pros who are working hard to influence their work culture and raise employee engagement about how can they make their workplaces more fun.  I think the above quote will be my new go-to answer!

If you offer a fun environment, meaning you don’t stamp out the fun your employees naturally want to have, all you need to do is allow fun to happen.

Now, you know your problem.

You try and manufacture a certain kind of fund. A kind of fun that you and your executives feel employees will feel is fun. But, it’s not fun. Safe fun is not fun.

Did you want to use the safety scissors as a kid, or the big sharp ones the teacher had?  Did you want to play the game the parents put together at the birthday party, or just run around with the other kids making up something?  Planned fun, is the opposite of fun.

If you want a fun work environment, you have to allow fun to happen in a way your employees believe is fun. Sometimes that will make you nervous. That’s okay, that is what fun is all about.  If it didn’t make you a bit nervous, it wouldn’t be fun!

When I took my first job as an HR pro, I worked in an office where ‘fun’ wasn’t really something that was being had. I brought in one of those little indoor basketball hoops that hook onto the back of a door and put in my office door.  I would then challenge people to a game of “Pig”.  The office battles became epic!

One day the CHRO came down to the HR offices and saw the hoop and asked me to play.  No one, including me, expected this! He was the opposite of fun. He was a buttoned-up executive! But, he was letting us know, that he approved of us having fun! He wouldn’t do it often, but every once in a while, he would come down and challenge one of use to a game. People would gather, they would laugh, they would have fun.

How do you create a fun work environment?  Let people have fun.

 

If You’re Going To Do It, Do It Now!

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I have three sons, two of which are college age-ish (one if college, one on his way).  They can do anything right now!  If they wanted, they could fill a backpack and walk the earth. No one is going to stop them, in fact, many will congratulate them for taking this leap while they’re young.

In just a few years, people won’t say that.  They’ll tell them it’s crazy and you’re going to hurt your career, etc.

I’m 45 years old.  I have a feeling that I’m getting to an age where I no longer can make a change in my career path.

Before you start commenting with things like, “Tim, age is a state of mind”, or “You can do anything you want”, or “Follow you passion”.  Stop it. I’m a grown ass man.  I like to think I’m an adult, although my wife and kids question that frequently. I have adult obligations – mortgage, college tuition, kids to raise, health insurance. I can’t just go off and polish rocks.

We all get to certain points in our life where you can no longer just go do ‘it’. Whatever ‘it’ is for you.   I feel like I’m at a point where I can’t change careers, not because I don’t think I could, but because society doesn’t look well upon 45-year-old dudes looking to change careers. Something is now wrong with me if I wanted to change careers. BTW – I don’t want to change careers, I actually think what I do is pretty cool. Or hip. Or On Fleek. Or whatever the kids are saying.

If I decided to go back and become a nurse, right now, at 45 years old, with all of my responsibilities. People would say something is wrong with me. You know what? I would think there was something wrong with me.

My question is more around what is ‘that’ time when if you’re going to do it, you better do it now?

For traveling the world: I think it’s 18-22 yrs old, or after 60.

For completely changing careers: I think you have to do it around 30-35 years old. Later, and you just look like your reaching. (I think most people won’t agree with this, but it comes from my recruiting background and how hiring managers look at older candidates who have made this move)

For having kids: this one has changed a bit, but before 40 seems safe. Otherwise, you’re just tempting science to give you problems. One caveat, if you’re adopting, I’ll push out this age because those kids just need someone who will love them.

For completely your high school or college education: I’m really open on this one – I would say anytime before death! I’m a huge advocate of lifelong learning!

For having grandkids: After 45 years old for sure. If you have grandkids prior to becoming 45, you did something wrong as a parent.

For getting your nose pierced: 17-28 years old. Yeah, I’m looking at you 37-year-old mom with the kid with a mohawk not wearing his seatbelt in the back of your Ford Mustang.

So, hit me in the comments with your age ranges on when you think it’s no longer socially acceptable to change careers!

 

 

T3 – @ElevatedCareers by eHarmony

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This week on T3 I take a look at new careers site being developed by dating site eHarmony, called Elevated Careers. Elevated Careers was one of the new companies this year at the HR Tech Conference in the startup pavilion. While their peers in the startup pavilion didn’t really like this, Elevated is actually being run like a startup, they just have one really big investor!

Elevated has taken the successful compatibility matching technology of eHarmony that is responsible for 438 marriages per day – that’s 4% of all marriages in the U.S. per day! – and applied the same scientific methods to match employees with jobs and companies. Just as eHarmony came about because Dr. Neil Clark Warren knew there had to be a better way to finding love than just luck, Elevated believes that if jobs and employees are matched based on compatibility, people will be much more satisfied and fulfilled in their jobs, and companies will have higher rates of employee retention, motivation, engagement, and productivity.

If you’re like me, the first time I heard of Elevated Careers, I chuckled a bit. I admit, I’m sophomoric and a twelve-year-old at heart! Once I got a chance to see the product, and smart minds behind it, I was chuckling for a different reason. These folks know what they’re doing, and they have a giant captured audience to leverage. Think what you want about dating sites, but they know how to build trust, get massive amounts of data on their members and at that point is just a matter of leveraging that data.

5 Things I really like about Elevated Careers:

1. Elevated Careers gets what most career sites don’t even focus on – Fit Matters!  Their backbone is a freaking dating website; they’re going to be better at matching and fit than almost anyone!

2. eHarmony has been public about making this work. This bodes well for ensuring they’ll get the investment needed to make a great product. The UI is already very tight and intuitive. They made a very easy to use product.

3. Elevated will have a unique talent pool to leverage, that is unlike any other product on the market. You won’t be able to contact dating website members, that would kill that brand, which they have to very protective over, but you will be able to market to those members through Elevated.

4. Their fit technology will give candidates a Compatibility Score. This will help candidates know how well they will potentially fit with a potential company, but also show them where and why they fall short.

5. The job function is more than just an aggregator, as organizations will have to validate themselves before their jobs will show up in search. This way candidates know the jobs they’re applying for are current and up-to-date.

Elevated Careers is in Beta and hopes to be completely live end of first quarter of 2016, but it shouldn’t stop you from jumping on the Beta is you can get in.  One thing I wasn’t excited about is there is a piece of their product that will have candidates “buy” for certain functionality. Before you go down The Ladders path, you have to understand where they’re coming from – Dating Site.

Their data shows that people don’t value free sites.  If you offer a dating site membership for free, no one shows up. If you make them pay, add some exclusivity to it, people will pay for it.  While that works on dating sites, I don’t know if it will work on a career site, but we’ll see. I didn’t get from them that they’re married to this idea, and it might change out of beta.

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

Does Buying Sex Go Too Far In Getting The Best Talent?

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Louisville’s basketball program is under fire because of recent allegations by former recruits and players who claim that Louisville paid for strippers to entertain them on recruiting visits, that included paid sex.  From ESPN:

“Five former University of Louisville basketball players and recruits told Outside the Lines that they attended parties at a campus dorm from 2010 to 2014 that included strippers paid for by the team’s former graduate assistant coach, Andre McGee.

One of the former players said he had sex with a dancer after McGee paid her. Each of the players and recruits attended different parties at Billy Minardi Hall, where dancers, many of whom stripped naked, were present. Three of the five players said they attended parties as recruits and also when they played for Louisville.

Said one of the recruits, who ultimately signed to play elsewhere: “I knew they weren’t college girls. It was crazy. It was like I was in a strip club.”

Before you come down on Louisville, the reality is, this is probably happening at many institutions. Jalen Rose, former NBA player, University of Michigan Fab 5 and ESPN Commentator, also said his recruiting visits to UofM, MSU, Syracuse and UNLV were like bachelor parties and all included having sex and alcohol.

I think most of us would completely agree that taking seventeen and eighteen-year-old boys onto a college campus for this type of activity is wrong.

My question is where does recruiting cross the line when it comes to adults and working for your company?

I can’t imagine ever ‘paying for sex’ for a recruit, since it’s mostly illegal, unless you’re in certain counties in Nevada.  I also can’t imagine providing drugs to potential recruits for any company I might work for, but then you see what’s going on in Colorado and Oregon.

I think you cross the line in how you recruit when you cross the line of your moral makeup of the majority of your employees and stakeholders. Some companies are very comfortable taking recruits out to bars and getting drunk. Many companies can’t even fathom that kind of behavior!

But, doesn’t wining and dining have a place in professional recruitment?  If you could get a great software developer, one that might cost you a $25K headhunting fee, doesn’t it make sense to drop a few hundred dollars on a potential candidate?   It certainly does, if you know who your best candidates are!

That’s the problem, right?  Many of us don’t know ‘better’ talent when we see it.  So, giving out hundreds of dollars in recruiting swag doesn’t work when you give it out to everyone!  It only works when you give it to the best.  Then, it also doesn’t work every time. It’s like the famous line from Anchorman, “60% of the time, it works every time!”

Louisville didn’t get every recruit who they paid hookers to have sex with them, but they landed some of those recruits.

Buying Beats headphones with your logo and sending them to software developers won’t land everyone you send them to, but it will attract some to take that next step.  Those cost $199.  Is hiring great talent worth $199?  Oh, hell, yes it is!  But, no one is sending Beats to software developers.

I’ve always said that college athletics is always on the forefront of what true recruiting is.  Highly sought after talent. Hard to attract to your organization. They find ways to make the best candidates feel extremely special. This is way beyond candidate experience. This is closing.

Paying for sex goes beyond what I’m willing to do, to get the best talent to come and work for me.  But, I’m willing to do alot of other stuff to attract the best talent! What about you?

Sustainable Talent Acquisition

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Here’s what I know.  A sustainable talent acquisition process can’t happen if it’s human run. A manual, human run talent acquisition process eventually falls apart.

Think about your employee referral program.

It was an awesome program when you launched it last month, last year, etc.  Now it’s dead in the water. Why?  Because it’s almost impossible for you, and your team, to keep it going on your own.  Other things become a higher priority, things move fast, eventually, even the best programs get pushed to the side, or forgotten about completely.

I’m not just talking about employee referrals. Every part of your TA process is exactly the same.  Sourcing, assessments, background checks, onboarding, exit interviews, etc.

To make talent acquisition sustainable, you need to integrate technology, it can be human driven.  TA technology allows you to automatically sustain these efforts simultaneously without you actually having to do anything.  Technology can reach out and source and attract. Technology can screen and assess. Technology can drive employee referrals 24/7/365, without you ever touching it. Technology can interview.

Basically, technology allows you to sustain and ongoing recruitment effort without you ever taking your foot off the gas.  The best of us fail at this. We have the best intentions, design the best programs, then life happens and things fall through the cracks. We then come to a point, where we do it all over again.  This is where and why most talent acquisition processes and functions fail, because they are just not sustainable.

Everything is going great, then Mandy leaves for a new job, Sue goes on maternity leave, and Tim who used to be great, has now lost his mojo, and we can’t seem to do anything right. Humans screw up your process! We need them, because humans also make hires, but boy can they make it difficult sometimes!

How can you make your talent acquisition sustainable for years in your organization?  Utilize your technology to it’s fullest. Add technology to the parts that give you the biggest headaches. Then, utilize your humans to build relationships with candidates and hiring managers. Let the tech run the process, let the humans run the people.

Will Recruitment Marketing Automation Make Sourcing Obsolete?

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I keep hearing about companies that are increasingly struggling hiring the talent they need currently and for future growth. The one solution that continues to be thrown out is adding a sourcing function within their talent acquisition department.

Adding sourcing to your talent acquisition team is definitely an option to help you obtain the talent you desire.  It’s also a really expensive option! Anytime you’re adding headcount, you’re adding the most expensive resource to your team of all options.

I was at the HR Tech Conference this past week and one thing was for certain, talent acquisition technology is coming after your sourcing work!  Recruitment marketing and recruitment automation technology was clearly the fastest growing segment of technology vendors at the HR Tech Conference.

Large companies can get some of the best tech on the market to help them source and attract candidates for about $25-$100K per year, ballpark, depending on what you need and choose. Your average Sourcing Pro is going to run about $75K on average. One person, no technology.

I know the biggest and best firms will have both.  I also know that most of us will have to make a choice between these two options. Some will try and do both, by limiting the spend on both sides, get some tech and an entry level kid to bang on the internet to find talent. I believe you’re probably best by going all in one way or the other, if you have limited resources.

Based on what I saw at HR Tech this year, and the growth from just last year, I can tell you I would bet my resources on buying the tech!

Recruitment marketing and automation technology can provide you with much of the attraction muscle that you need, plus continue on the backend to retarget and continually connect with potential candidates you don’t even know you need yet.

It’s hard for me to write this because I have a bunch of friends who are great sourcing pros, and do excellent work.  I think there will always be a place for great sourcing pros in the world, like most great talent. The problem is most sourcing pros aren’t great, they’re just average. Technology is better than average. Which is why I ask the question if the technology will make most sourcing obsolete as we know it right now?  I think it probably will.

By the way, I also heard non-stop all week at the conference how technology is also going to make Recruiters obsolete. Which begs the question what human interactions will be most valuable to Talent Acquisition in a future technology driven attracting and hiring process?

It’s going to be the ability of one person talking to another person about why they need to come and work at your company. Sounds simple, but the best Sourcing Pros and best Recruiting Pros do this exceptionally well. They build relationships with candidates, build trust, find ways to make candidates believe working for your company is better than any other option they have.

So, they can sell.  The tech will run the process, screen, test, assess, communicate the basics, etc. What the tech can’t do is sell. The future of sourcing and recruiting is selling. Ironically, it’s also the past!

The Uber of Recruitment #hrtechconf

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Apparently, the new marketing message for Talent Acquisition technology is to call yourself the “Uber of Recruitment”. I have had six different companies actually use this phrase to explain what their product is, and how it works.

Marketers love to play up being a ‘disruptor’, like Uber did to the taxi industry.  I love using Uber, and I think most people that use it really like it as well. So, making the jump in marketing to use that positive image and tying it back to your product makes perfect sense.

Lazy, but I get it.

Here’s the bigger story, companies are trying to cash in on the multi-billion dollar recruitment industry. Okay, it’s not a big story, it’s been happening for decades, but we are getting to a point where you can see technology making a serious play at truly changing the way companies interact with traditional recruitment agencies.

This is my game, so I’m definitely interested in checking out all these new Uber of Recruiting plays.

Here’s how most of these technologies work:

Step 1: Use our technology to connect with candidates

Step 2: We charge you about 75% less than traditional recruitment agencies

Step 3: We cut out the middle man

Step 4: You get same talent, faster, cheaper, happier.

The basic premise is Uber simple. Put the power of recruitment into the hands of the candidate.  Let them easily connect with those companies that seek their expertise.

Here’s why this is hard.  All of these Uber of Recruitment plays don’t really have an answer on how do we get people and/or companies to use their product.  The need to use Recruitment Agencies are based on a few main premises:

1. The most desirable candidates are not looking, and must be found.

2. You don’t have capacity or skill in-house to find this talent.

3. Agencies can find better talent, than other options (remember this is the premise of use!).

The Uber of Recruitment plays don’t necessarily address all of these premises. I do believe that this technology is going to have an impact to a part of recruitment industry market segment that has issue with cost.

The technology makes it easier for organizations to almost run their own type of agency in-house using this technology, and it makes it easy for candidates to connect.  But, the huge miss is that these technologies still don’t go out and sell a talented person, who is not looking for a job at your company or any company, on why they need to consider this job.

That’s called recruitment, or sales, which is recruitment. Uber of Recruitment technology doesn’t recruit, which is why these plays won’t end the industry as we know it. Uber as an example doesn’t really fit as a recruitment industry killer, but it might work in terms of disrupting and pushing bad agencies to get better.

 

Who Should I Connect With? #HRTechConf

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By far the question I get asked most often at the HR Tech Conference is, “Who should I connect with while I’m here?”  Both vendors and attendees ask me this. I probably face this question a half a dozen times a day, or more.

I really don’t have an answer for that. It’s a very personal question.

Who I might want to connect with, could be very different from who you want to connect with. It all depends on what you’re trying to get out of the interaction.  I know a bunch of people and connect with many more at each HR Tech Conference, which is why I enjoy this conference so much, but I don’t have your ‘secret’ connection list.

Here is how I usually respond:

1. Why are you at the conference?

2. What is your current pain point at work?

3. Ultimately, what do you want to leave the conference with?

Once these are answered you can easily come up with a hit list of who you should be connecting with.

The expo and the amount of sessions can be overwhelming, but if you focus on what you are really here to do, it becomes a little easier to handle.

The one thing I’ve found is that almost everyone I’ve ever met at HR Tech loves to make new connections, both attendees and vendors.  That puts it back on your back to be open to these connections as well

One Pro Tip: Leverage one contact to introduce you to a new contact. Repeat.

If you come here knowing no one, find a vendor that you use, and have them introduce you to another one of their customers.  Also, I find session speakers are usually really open to connect, just stop and say “Hi” and thank them for their session afterwards.  That makes for a good conversation starter!

So, whom should you connect with at HR Tech?

That’s a really good question!

 

Awesome New HR Technology #HRTechConf

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It’s that time a year again for one of my most favorite HR and TA Conferences – the HR  Tech Conference 2015!  On the first day of the conference this year Human Resource Executive Magazine announced the 2015 Awesome New Startups for HR.  These are are companies I’ll be checking out and keeping my eye in the near future:

Bridge US

Bridge US has reinvented how companies secure visas and green cards for foreign talent. The company’s cloud-based platform eliminates the time and paperwork associated with immigration processing, tracking and compliance. Bridge US streamlines the immigration process for hundreds of happy customers, ranging from leading startups to publicly-traded companies.

 Great Hires

Great Hires will showcase its mobile-first candidate experience platform that helps companies deliver an awesome on-site interviewing experience. By providing information about the company, job and people they meet with before they walk in the door, candidates are better prepared for their interview, ensuring a positive candidate experience.

 Kanjoya

Kanjoya Perception pushes the frontiers of workforce analytics with its integration of employee engagement, performance review and unstructured text data to understand and predict which employees will do well and why. Created with state-of-the-art natural language processing and machine learning, the solution delivers targeted intelligence to help businesses attract, retain and motivate the best employees for their organizations.

 One Model

HR applications use data but they don’t share it. One Model will demonstrate how it can help deliver a true HR data strategy across a company’s technology investments so that analytics, planning and integration can flow naturally from all of their data. One Model helps companies take control of their HR data, including the data’s history and predictive capabilities, and put them to work.

 OrgVue (a company I reviewed this past year on my T3 series) 

OrgVue is the leading tool for business transformation. It gives HR and OD teams a new and better way to design, transform and operate their organizations. From merger & acquisitions to organizational restructures, the company helps deliver change faster, fairly, with lower risk and lower cost.

 TMBC

TMBC’s StandOut is revolutionizing engagement and performance through next generation HR solutions. StandOut provides the technology to meet the needs of the present and the future with dynamic teaming, real-time statistically reliable measures of engagement and performance, and machine-learning algorithms to increase the precision of measurement over time and to deliver personalized, calibrated coaching to each user.

Besides these companies there is also a Startup Pavilion with twenty other up and coming companies I’ll be checking out as well. Stay tuned for more great information on HR Technology coming over the next few days, and of course all year on my T3 series every Tuesday!