Monthly Archives: October 2015

Who Will Your Pallbearers Be?

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I had lunch last week with a good friend of mine.  We’ve been trying for six months to get this lunch set up, but just haven’t been able to make it happen.

This is a guy I love!  We worked together at Applebee’s, spent basically every day together. He’s the best operations person I know, great leader, and one of the few people I would ever go to work for.

So, why haven’t we been able to find time to get together more often?

Well, he told me, “Tim, you know I think you’re great. You are the best HR person I’ve ever worked with. But, I’ve been trying to focus on who my Pallbearers will be!”

What!?!

He’s been trying to focus on six relationships. The six people who will carry his casket when he dies. His Pallbearers!

His theory is I can’t keep up with everyone. I’ve probably got six relationships that I can really focus on in my life. These six people I call my Pallbearers. They are the ones who will carry me to my final resting place, and given that, I better focus on having a really good relationship with them.

So, two things:

  1. I didn’t make his Pallbearer list. Which I’m actually okay with. I loved hearing the philosophy to behind why he’s dodged me for six straight months, and how he selected his six!
  2. I don’t have six!

It really got me to thinking.  Who the hell would my Pallbearers be?  If you take out family, because I really don’t want them to work to hard the day I go six feet under, who would carry my casket? Sadly, I couldn’t come up with six.

I’m 45 years old, and I couldn’t think of six people who would carry my casket. Not if they were asked. I’ve been asked to be a pallbearer, and you can’t say No, even if you really don’t know the person. I mean six people who wouldn’t allow anyone else to carry my casket because they wanted the honor!

In my mind, I’m thinking six men.  I have some close friends that are ladies, but I’m a little traditional in that you don’t normally see ladies carrying a casket. I’ve either got a bunch of relationship building to do, or I need to lose a bunch of weight! If I’m super skinny, maybe I can get away with just four pallbearers!

Another thought was cremation. If I get cremated I really only need one person to carry the ashes.  That would be way easier to find just one!

I still kept coming back to the pallbearer six.  Why don’t I have six male relationships in my life who would really want to carry my casket?  Need to change that.

In the end, it comes down to priorities.  For the better part of 19 years I’ve put my time into my family and raising kids. And, I don’t regret a moment of that! But, my friendships suffered because of it. Pallbearer type friendships take time and effort. Time and effort I didn’t give.

Do you know who your pallbearers will be?

 

5 Signs You Shouldn’t Make That Offer

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If I have learned anything at all in my HR/Recruiting career it’s that everyone has an opinion on what makes a good hire. If you ask 100 people to give you one thing they focus on when deciding between candidates, you’ll get 100 different answers!

I’ve got some of my own. They might be slightly different than yours, but I know mine work!  So, if you want to make some better selections, take note my young Padawans:

1. Crinkled up money. Male or female if you pull money out of your pocket or purse and it’s crinkled up, you’ll be a bad hire!  There is something fundamentally wrong with people who can’t keep their cash straight. The challenge you have is how do you get a candidate to show you this? Ask to copy their driver’s license, or something like that!

2. Males with more selfies on their Instagram, than all other photos. I don’t even have to explain this.

3. Slow walkers.  If you don’t have some pep in your step, at least for the interview, you’re going to be drag as an employee.

4. My Last Employer was so Awesome! Yeah, that’s great, we aren’t them. Let’s put a little focus back to what we got going on right here, sparky. Putting too much emphasis on a job you love during the interview is annoying. We get it. It was a good gig. You f’d it up and can’t let go. Now we’ll have to listen about it for the next nine months until we fire you.

5. Complaining or being Rude to waitstaff.  I like taking candidates to lunch or dinner, just to see how they treat other people. I want servant leaders, not assholes, working for me. The meal interview is a great selection tool to weed out bad people.

What are your signs not to make an offer?  Share in the comments!

New for 2016 – Organizational Micro-Cultures

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It’s actually not new, it’s been around since Culture, we just kind of ignored it.

It’s similar in concept to Micro and Macro Economics.  Big and Little.  In terms of culture, it’s the main reason changing your overall company culture is so hard. You don’t just have one company culture, you actually have tens, hundreds, thousands of cultures, that make up your big over culture.

The problem we are having advancing our company culture is we keep doing it top-down. Get the guy with gray hair, or the lady with the navy blue pant suit, to tell us his/her vision and we’ll shove that culture down everyone’s’ throat and tell them what our culture is now.

Obviously, this doesn’t work, but we don’t know of another way, so let’s keep trying, it will work eventually, right?

Take all these functions, divisions, departments, regions, subsidiaries, locations, mergers and acquisitions, etc. and let’s tell them what their culture will be now. Until we have new leadership, than we’ll just do this all over again.

The reality is you don’t have ‘a’ culture. You have many cultures. HR has a different culture than IT. Albuquerque has a different culture than New York. Manufacturing has a different culture than Sales.

These microcultures added up, make your company culture.  It’s not top-down, it’s bottom-up.

So, what can we do?

You need to get down to the lowest level of leadership that you can. The frontline leaders of your organization are the ones creating your organization’s microcultures.  These are the people ultimately responsible for your overall organization’s culture. Your CEO is a puppet to this process.

To influence these microcultures you need to start planting seeds at the frontline leader level. Don’t worry about even driving this down from the top. Skip the C-suite, skip the SVPs, skip the VPs, skip the Directors, skip the managers, go right to the supervisors. You know the folks, the ones doing the work. The ones who have 8-15 direct reports they see everyday, talk with everyday, work side by side, everyday.

The builders of culture in your organization are not executives and they are not HR.  Executives and HR are framers. The builders are your frontline leaders. 90% of your time and resources spent on building culture need to be spent at this frontline level.

It’s not easy. When you get down at that level, you’ll see what your organization is really about. Most of your executives will disagree with what they see, and not believe this is your actual culture.  That is very typical of most organizations. Executives and HR are the worse at creating and judging culture, because they’ve drink the koolaid.

Influence culture from the bottom, not the top.

T3 – @HalogenSoftware #HRTechConf

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This week on T3 I’m taking a look at Halogen Software. Halogen is a market leading provider of cloud-based software solutions for performance management, succession planning, learning, compensation, and recruiting and onboarding.  Years ago when I first ran into Halogen I knew them as ‘the’ company for performance management, but they’ve grown so far beyond that!

As a Talent Management vendor, they built all their own stuff to make implementation seamless. This is unlike many HR Tech vendors who buy up smaller technologies, then cobble it all together. At Halogen every module relates back to improving and supporting employee performance – from job descriptions and applicant tracking through to succession, learning and compensation, all parts of the suite are linked to supporting performance.

They are deeply focused on improving the areas that matter most to employees and managers when it comes to performance. They give them tools and training to simplify the process, and focus on the things that make performance management ongoing – for real. Feedback, goals, development and coaching convos are at the heart of their performance management solution – including 1:1 Exchange – to really make the process ongoing, forward-focused and effective.

5 Things I really like about Halogen:

1. Halogen’s 1:1 Exchange.  Look at this point we all already know that performance feedback should not be a once a year deal. Halogen not makes it easy for your managers to provide ongoing feedback, but the software actually teaches them and helps them with wording on how to do this most effectively!

2. Halogen’s 360 Multirater. I’m a big fan of providing 360 feedback to all of your employees, executives to mailroom. It has been some of the greatest performance and development feedback I’ve ever gotten in my career. Again, Halogen, makes it easy and inexpensive to do in-house on your own. I love this!

3. Halogen’s Job Description Builder. I like this module because it’s something 99% of us need right now!  Let’s face it, your JD’s suck! But, guess what? So do 99% of JD’s in the industry, and that is why this part of Halogen’s software is so useful.

4. Halogen Succession.  This is another thing that almost all companies are doing an awful job at, and something most need help with right now based on your workforce’s demographics.  The research shows that HR departments biggest need right now in HR Tech is Succession solutions.  Halogen embedded theirs right into Performance Management. Hey! Wow, that makes sense!

5. Customer Service. One thing I’ve learned jumping in with both feet into the HR Tech pool, is that there is some really, really cool technology available on the market.  I’ve also learned that many of these companies bomb when it comes to implementation and ongoing support. Halogen is the exact opposite of this!  I’ve talked with Halogen users on my own, and 100% of the time, they rave about Halogen’s customer service. This matters.

Halogen will be out at the HR Tech Conference next week at booth #2335. Make sure you check them out if you’re going to be in Vegas.  If you do, stop by around Monday at 2:45pm, I’ll be interviewing some of their customers in the booth, and finding out what real problems they solved after implementing Halogen.

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.

You Don’t Have to Solve Problems in HR to be Succcessful

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I keep hearing everywhere that all organizations want from employees is people who are problem solvers! Executives when asked what they are looking for in future and current employees will wax poetically about we just need ‘good’ people (which is really slang for more people who look and act like ‘us’) who can ‘solve problems’.

Even my kids teachers and the public education system constantly talk about how we are just working to teach our kids how to solve problems.

If we just had more problem solvers in our work environments, everything else would take care of itself!

Wrong!

Our reality is everyone ‘can’ solve problems, but you don’t want their solutions. Most people have no ability to really solve problems, they usually just end up causing the problem to be bigger, or creating new problems that are worse in the long run.

In HR you don’t need to solve problems to be successful.  You do, though, have to one thing very well.  You can’t create problems!

This is tough one.

Most HR pros I know love to create problems, under the disguise of then being able to solve those made up problem. By the way, HR isn’t alone in this quest, every other function has their fake problem solvers as well.

The one I hear recently is companies that are having this candidate experience problem.  You know the drill. HR can’t find enough good talent to fill the jobs they have open (real problem), so they go to their executive team and tell them it’s because our candidate experience is awful (fake problem). The reality is HR is doing an awful job attracting talent, candidate experience isn’t the real issue, things like having recruiters pick up the phone are, but those are just details.

To be successful in HR,  you just have to not create any new problems.  You’ll have plenty of problems crop up on their own without your help! If you do nothing but come in and do the work of HR and not create new problems, you’ll be better than 90% of HR pros in the world. That’s pretty successful.

Success in HR = not creating new problems. That seems simple enough. Now getting into the top 10% means you might have to solve some of those existing problems you have, but we’ll save that for another time.

Your CEO is a Better Recruiter Than You

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Lou Adler, a great thought leader in the recruiting industry (I love to refer to him as “Uncle Lou” – endearingly), has one of the best recruiting articles of the year up on Inc. titled, “An Open Email from a CEO to All Outstanding Candidates“.   The concept of the email was getting your CEO to send out an email directly to candidates you are trying to source.

Just that idea alone is a brilliant strategy, because 99.9% of organizations will never do it!  That means, you’ll standout from the crowd. That’s good recruiting practices.

The article goes on to give you how you should actually write the email and what you should say:

1. No silly, classic job descriptions.  Instead tell them about what they’ll actually be doing.

2. Describe why the job could be a career move to the candidate.  They’ll believe this from coming from the CEO.

3. Don’t tell them to apply. That can actually be the last step. Get them interested first. Applications scream we have no idea what we are doing.

4. Provide an open invitation and a direct way to have a real conversation with someone with direct knowledge of the opening.

5. Let them know what the process would look like and next steps, if they are actually interested in moving forward.

6. Make sure the candidates have access to your hiring managers as well.  I’m assuming if your CEO is this involved, your hiring managers will be onboard as well!

Great stuff, right?!

It probably doesn’t work for high volume hiring when you have a lot of candidates. This isn’t meant for that, it’s meant for hard to find, critical to the business type positions.

I absolutely love this technique!

Here’s what I know. Most companies, and most CEOs, will never do this. Those who do, will have great success in getting candidates to respond. Put yourself into your candidates shoes. You’re sitting there some idle Friday and an email pops up from a name you don’t recognize. You open it and find out it’s coming from the CEO of a pretty good company in town. You better believe you’ll read it.

You will also ‘trust’ what is in that email, over if the exact same thing is sent by a recruiter. Why?  You believe that a CEO would never put themselves in a position to lie.  Right or wrong, you believe this. Plus, you’re flattered that a CEO sent you a personal email, not some marketing email, from their ‘real’ work email address, with their contact information in it.

None of your friends have gotten an email from a CEO telling them they are wanted! This is cool. This feels good. This feels different.

This is a winning strategy.

Thanks Uncle Lou!

The Only Candidate Available

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Almost every single week of my life for the last twenty years I’ve had to deal with an issue that just seems to never go away. I didn’t matter if I was in a HR or TA role, I was always involved with working with hiring managers who always had some sort of opening, even in bad economic times.

The scenario went something like this:

1. Hiring Manager  has an opening. I/We find this hiring manager a really good candidate. Not perfect, but probably better than many we have already hired in the same position.

2. Hiring Manager interviews candidate. Likes Candidate.

3. I go to speak with the Hiring Manager.

4. You know what happens next…

5. Hiring Manager says she really liked the candidate, but (wait for it)…She would certainly like to see other candidates to compare.

6. I put gun in my mouth and pull trigger.

This same scenario has happened weekly for twenty years across multiple companies, multiple industries and multiple states. It’s an epidemic of enormous proportion across the world.

Here’s the real problem that we face with hiring managers, and it’s completely psychological. The Hiring Manager always assumes that the ‘last’ option, or ‘only’ option is a bad option.

Pretty simple.  We all do this.  If you go to a farmers market and you go to pick out some produce, let’s say a head of lettuce, and the farmer only has one head of lettuce left on the stand. We will assume something must be wrong with that one head of lettuce!  If the farmer puts three other heads around that one, you would gladly pick up the original head, now believing you ‘picked’ the best head of lettuce.

Candidates are heads of lettuce!

When you show a hiring manager one, they assume it’s not as good as the others they are not seeing.

This is actually pretty easy to solve, but very hard to do. Never present a hiring manager with one candidate.  HR and TA are classic economist when it comes to candidate generation. We are FIFOs! Do you remember your Econ class from college? First In, First Out.  The first candidate we find, we immediately send out to the hiring manager.

This starts the problem.

The hiring managers seeing one candidate will discount this candidate as bad. If you just wait a few days, put one or two other candidates with this candidate, not the hiring manager will ‘pick’ the best.  This works pretty well, most of the time.  But, it’s hard to do because we get so excited about finding a good candidate we want to show it the hiring manager as fast as possible.

Stop that!

Be patient. Find a good ‘slate’ of candidates to present all at the same time. Reap the benefits.

The only candidate available will always be that lonely head of lettuce on the farmers stand.  Find more heads, and present them together. No one likes to pick from a pile of one!

5 Tips for Creating a More Human Workplace #WorkHuman

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Better Than Robots: Why Your Employees Deserve a More Human Workplace

This is a Free Webinar sponsored by Globoforce – Register Here – Wednesday, October 14th at 2 p.m. ET | 11 a.m. PT | 1 p.m. CT | 6 p.m. GMT

This is going to be fun! We won’t be coming to live from my Camry, but we will be Live! Just two HR guys sharing the tips and tricks on making your workplace and environment more human!

Admit it. Life would be a lot easier if our employees were robots. They’d be more predictable, and a heck of a lot more manageable. As we seek to gain more and more big data in HCM it seems like that’s exactly what we’re trying to do. Measure and manage our cultures into a robot paradise. But that way lies danger. It is the humanity in our employees that provides the creativity, the innovation and the heart that makes our businesses really succeed.

We’re in the ‘real’ people business, and our employees need a real human workplace and culture to thrive and prosper. This webinar will give you the insight to what works and what doesn’t, and help you reimagine the concept of work-life balance.

You will learn:

  • 5 tips for creating a more human workplacGloboforce
  • A case study of how one company built a better culture
  • HR “best practices” that actually hurt workplace culture

 

What else will you get? 

Kris Dunn is coming on to talk about how he and his team are building a more human workplace at his company Kinetix.  Get some great insight and tips from Kris on how you can begin building this in your own workplace as well! The Kinetix team has one of the best cultures around, and you’ll want to hear how they’ve built from the ground up.

This isn’t your normal webinar. This is real advice, brought to you by real practitioners, letting you know what works and what doesn’t!

Register Today! 

 

T3 – Microsoft Excel

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Wait a minute, this isn’t April Fool’s Day is it?

On a daily basis I’m reminded at how much of HR and TA (Talent Acquisition – but I’m now just going with TA for the rest of time) Technology is really just Excel spreadsheets and Word docs.  That isn’t a knock on HR and TA pros. That is just a reality of resource limited universe most HR and TA shops live in every single day!

The awesome thing about HR and TA is that you really don’t need that much technology to be great.  This proven out by Men and mostly Women that run HR and TA in SMB shops everyday around the world, who use mostly email, Microsoft Office, a copy machine and a phone. I don’t have exact numbers, but if you take away a payroll system, over 50% of HR shops run on the technology listed above.

Microsoft Excel can be used to provide your organization with front-line HR and TA metrics, like turnover, sourcing information, days to fill, benefit enrollment information, employee relations log, etc. You can track time and attendance. Performance management records. Total compensation statements. Succession planning. Interview guides. And on and on.

What Microsoft did with the launch of office in 1988 is tell HR and TA that you no longer have an excuse in not providing great service to your organization, because we just gave you the backbone of every process, procedure and product you’ll ever want or need to do great work.  We look at Microsoft Excel now like we look at the internet.  We can’t imagine not having access to it to get our jobs done, and if you took it away we would lose our minds in a short period of time!

5 Things I really like about Microsoft Excel: 

1. It makes you look way smarter than you really are.

2. It makes your data look official even when it’s kind of made up to present a case to get you something you want.

3. It gives you something to blame when executives don’t buy your bullshit numbers. (Must be an Excel error, I’ll go back and check that!)

4. The learning barrier to begin using is very low, but ceiling to what you can potentially do with it is very high.

5. Almost everyone running HR or TA has access to use it, and learn how to use it for free.

In a few weeks I’ll be at the annual HR Technology Conference and I’ll be on the front-line of the best and newest HR and TA technology the world has to offer.  Every single product is designed to solve specific pain points we have in HR and TA. None of these products will have the ability to match the scope and breadth of what Excel can do, and almost all will be more expensive. I’m still super geeked to see the new stuff, and can’t wait to share what I find with you!

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.

The Most Powerful Employee Motivator of All

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I was once fired from a job.  I won’t go into the story because we all have a story and we all frame it to sound like a victim. In hindsight, many years removed, I would have fired me to!

After being fired I could only think about one thing. It consumed me. I wanted to show whomever I went to work for how great I really was.  I didn’t want the ‘fired’ label to follow me, even for a minute.  I wasn’t ‘that’ person. I was better. I wanted…

Redemption!

Redemption is the most powerful employee motivator of all time. None others are even close.

It’s why always laugh when a hiring manager tells me they will never hire someone who has been fired from a job. Really!?  I actually only want people who have been fired from jobs! I want people who have failed, and have a giant chip on their shoulder to show the world they are better than that.

I don’t want to hire crappy people who were fired because they actually have no skill and no personality.  That’s the problem, right? We believe everyone who has been fired to be crappy. “Well, Tim, people don’t get fired if they’re good!” Really? You believe that?

Good people get fired every day. They get fired for making bad decisions. They get fired for pissing off the wrong person. They get fired because they didn’t fit your culture. They get fired because of bad job fit. Good people get fired, maybe as much as bad people get fired. Unfortunately, we lump all of them into the same pool.

Redemption sets the good fires apart from the bad fires.

You can hear redemption speak when interviewing a good fire.  Bad fires don’t speak of redemption, they speak of justification.  Good fires want a second chance to show the world they are right. Bad fires want a second chance to show the world they were wronged. Those are two very different things!

I like redemption motivation.  It sticks around for a long while. Those scars don’t go away easily.