Monthly Archives: March 2016

Reruns – Beautiful Things Don’t Ask For Attention

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It’s Spring Break in Michigan, so I’m going to step away from the daily grind and throw some Reruns at you! You guys remember Rerun, from What’s Happening? (look it up, kids!) So, enjoy the Reruns, they’re some of my favorites!

Originally ran January 2013 – 

Over the holidays, I got a chance to see the movie The Secret Life of Walter Mitty.

Sean Penn plays freelance professional photographer Sean O’Connell.  Walter Mitty is played by Ben Stiller.  At one point Walter is searching for Sean to get an important negative and he finds Sean in some distant mountains, overseas, trying to capture a photo of a wild snow leopard.  Sean says this line when explaining to Walter why he goes to such lengths to get a photo:

“Beautiful things don’t ask for attention.”

In context or out, it’s a hugely profound line.  Sean isn’t necessarily speaking to the snow leopards outward beauty but saying something truly beautiful, inside and out, doesn’t ask for attention, nor necessarily want attention.  Each of us defines beauty differently, so this statement takes on a different meaning for all of us.

I love this, I’ll leave it at that.

Reruns – Top Candidate Lies!

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It’s Spring Break in Michigan, so I’m going to step away from the daily grind and throw some Reruns at you! You guys remember Rerun, from What’s Happening? (look it up, kids!) So, enjoy the Reruns, they’re some of my favorites!

Originally ran July 2013 – 

Every Monday morning I have a meeting with my recruiting team – it’s a great way to kick off the week – we share what we are working on, we talk about problems we are having on specific searches so the team can share ideas and tips, maybe even a possible candidate they know of, etc.  We also share stories!  Monday mornings are great for sharing recruiter stories – horrible interviews, funny excuses candidates have, negotiating nightmares – you name it, we talk about it!

I was reminded this week how bad of liars candidates can be – we get a lot of candidate lying stories in Monday morning meetings!  So, as a shout out to my Recruiters – and all recruiters – I wanted to put together a list of the Top Candidate Lies.  When I started thinking about all the lies, I found I could break it down by category – so here goes – hit me in the comments if you have a favorite that you get – or think of one I missed:

The Education Lies

– “I have all the credits, I just didn’t graduate.”

– “I did all the classes, I just need to pay the fees to graduate.” (so you spent 4+ years going to school, got done, but that last couple of hundred dollars stopped you from graduating…)

– “I graduated from ‘State U’, but it was a long time ago, I’m not sure why they can’t verify my degree.”

– “I had a 3.0 GPA in my ‘core’ classes, but a 1.9 GPA overall…”

– “Well, it was an Engineering/Business degree.”

The Background Check Lies

– “No, I’m not on drugs.” Then fails drug screen. “Oh, you meant Marijuana as a drug…” 

– “She told me she was 18.”

– “They told me in court that never would be on my file, so I didn’t think I needed to tell you.”

–  “No, I don’t have a felony.” (Oh, that felony! But that was in Indiana…)

The Experience Lies

– “When you said Java, I thought you meant experience making coffee.”

– “I was a part of the ‘leadership’ team that was responsible for that implementation.” (So, basically you knew of a project that happened while you were working there…)

The No-Show Interview Lies

– “My car broke down.” (Either through some fantastic wrinkle in space, or gigantic amount of lying, candidates have more car trouble per capita than anyone else ever in the world who has driven a car)

– “I couldn’t find the location.” (So, your answer to this dilemma was to turn around and go home and not call and let us know you got lost?)

– “My son/daughter got sick, so I can’t make it.” (Again – crazy coincidences that happen with candidates and sick kids…)

The Termination Lies

– “It was a mutual decision that I left.” (“So, you’ll ‘mutually’ decided that you would no longer have a job?”, is the question I always ask after this statement! Candidates – this statement sounds as stupid as it reads.)

– “I (or any family member) was in a bad accident and in the hospital, so they fired me for not showing up to work.” (No they didn’t – there are some bad companies out there, but no company does this.)

– “I play on a softball team and after games we go out and have a couple drinks. The next morning my boss smelled alcohol and fired me for drinking on the job.” (This was a true lie I got from an employee – it started out as me just giving him a written warning – until I went lunch, not joking – 10 minutes later at the Chili’s down the street from the office, and there he was belly up to the bar drinking a beer…upon cleaning out his desk we found a half a fifth of vodka.)

Here’s my take on candidate lies – candidates continue to lie, because Talent/HR Pros don’t call them out on it.  We (HR) also perpetuate this problem by hiring the folks who give you the crappy lie, but don’t hire the folks who come clean and tell you the truth.

Check out my follow up to this post: Top Recruiter Lies!

T3 – @RecruiteeHR

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This week on T3 I take a look at the recruiting platform, Recruitee.  Recruitee is an all in one ATS, recruitment automation, career site builder, and employment branding platform for the SMB market, with a very intuitive interface that follows about 99% of every recruitment pipeline out there.

Recruitee allows you to build your own career site, easily, and it doesn’t look like something your twelve-year-old put together from a template at a free website builder company.  Everyone tells you doing this is easy, then you pull your hair out and call Todd from IT to bail you out. This really is easy to do and you won’t need Todd.

Recruitee also allows you to build your applicant process by just dragging and dropping the steps in your process to match the needs of your organization. Plus, you’ll move candidates through the process with the same drag and drop ease. It’s one of the only platforms for the SMB market that I’ve seen that allows you to manage so much, all in one place. There are a ton of ATS options for the SMB market, but very few that allow you to build and manage your employment brand by yourself!

5 Things I really liked about Recruitee:

  1. Sourcing Plug-in Extension makes it super easy to import candidates into the system while you’re sourcing, plus the extension will also give you the email address (if it can be found) for those candidates you are sourcing.
  2. Job Promotion to both free and premium sites through the system. Easy job push with one click. Plus, you have the option to push it to paid sites for a discounted fee from what you could probably get on your own, for most SMBs.
  3. Career Site Editor. Most SMBs have to get in line behind everyone else to ever make a change on their career site. Recruitee puts this power directly in your hands, and you can now make changes on a daily, hourly basis if you wanted. For fast moving SMBs this is huge!
  4. CRM functionality that allows you to build talent pools and keep connected with them. Great functionality for a product that caters to this size market.
  5. It’s really about as idiot-proof of a recruiting platform as you’ll find on the market for SMB. This is important because you’re usually talking about a 1 or 2 person shop in small companies and these people have to wear all the hats! That means they need a platform that can do a lot, but doesn’t break easily.

Very impressive small market recruiting platform. I continue to be amazed at what the SMB market has access to in talent acquisition technology. Recruitee gives you so much for a rather small price. Well worth a demo if you’re in that space and looking to add or expand your recruiting technology.

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.

The Employment Branding Arms Race!

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Here’s why HR and Talent Acquisition is NOT like Marketing.

This is marketing –

Nike, Addidas, Under Armour, etc. all fight for market share.  Nike signs Lebron, KD and Kobi. Under Armour signs Steph Curry. Addidas gets D Rose and Wiggins. All of the shoe companies are trying to sign the top sports talent to shoe deals, so you’ll go out and drop $200 a pair for your kid to run around and act like they’re the next Steph Curry.

The ‘brand’ of the shoe you kid is wearing, that you are wearing, matters. It matters to them, it matters to you.  I know it matters because the shoe game is a $63 billion industry. Billion!  You care about what you put on your feet. Your kids really care! Accept my 12-year old who didn’t know who Kevin Durant was when I bought him a pair of KD’s earlier this year. See if he get’s another pair!

The shoe companies spend billions of dollars to create a brand that you want to be a part of, so, you’ll spend even more billions to buy their shoes made by 12-year-olds in China.

This is HR and Talent Acquisition –

We are spending more and more of our organization’s resources to create employment brands.  We are doing this because we need to let ‘talent’ know we are the best option for them to come and work. If we don’t play the game, other employers will beat us to the best talent.  Employment branding then becomes a strategic imperative to our organizations.

The one major difference is, we are only selling an idea.  The shoe companies are selling a product (and an idea that you’re cool if you wear our product!). We, HR and TA, are not selling a product that makes our organizations money. You have an actual marketing department that is doing that. So, in effect, you are creating something, that really has no value in the broader picture of your organization.

That probably doesn’t feel good, right there, for those who are spending most of their life working on and worrying about their organization’s “employment brand”.  You want to argue with me on this. I get it.

The reality is, there are only a handful of true employment brands that anyone really cares about or understands. You can name them off the top of your head: Apple. Facebook. Microsoft. GE (and only because they’re dropping millions right now on this). Enterprise Rent-A-Car (I would argue is the first and best at actually doing this organically, by hiring former NCAA athletes that didn’t go pro). Give me other national employment brands?

The reality is people have no idea what it’s like to work at GM. Or Oracle. Or Walmart. Or IBM. Or FedEx. Or PepsiCo.

We know of them because of their ‘brand’, not their employment brand. Pepsi could spend zero dollars on employment branding, and people would still have a positive connotation of their employment brand because they love their product brand. Conversely, WalMart could spend a billion dollars on employment branding, be a thousand times better to work for than Pepsi, and people wouldn’t buy it. Actually, they probably would, we’re all suckers for believing what the TV tells us.

So, this arms race of employment branding all seems a bit silly.

If every organization is out their ‘building’ their employment brand, the noise gets raised up all at the same time. The only ones who truly have an advantage are the ones who were out first, before the noise got so loud or the ones with the most money who can buy bigger speakers!

The noise is already deafening, and candidates have already stopped listening.

So, what can you do, if you’re one of those employers who is a good company, but people really have no idea who you are and what you do, and what kind of work environment you have? How do you break through the noise?

I believe you need to define what audience you really need to attract and you need to go after them with a sniper rifle. Not louder. Not with a shotgun. Not bigger. Not more money. Get very narrow, and pick off individuals you truly want.

You don’t need to make your message bigger and louder, you need to sneak around the crowd and pull people out of the fray. Put a hood over their head. Throw them into the van and take them back to headquarters. Well, so to speak.

In an arms race where you can’t afford nukes, you need to take the opposite approach and lay down your weapons. Many times the silent protest will get you what you’re looking for.

The Key to Handling High Maintenance Employees Like a Pro

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Do you know the one piece of HR technology that hasn’t been created, yet? The Diva Detector!*

Wouldn’t that be nice? “Hey, Mr. or Ms. Candidate, please look into the DD 2.0 and don’t blink….Yeah, looks like you’re a straight-up diva, and sorry, but we’re fully loaded up on those at the moment. Please feel free to test again in 30 days. If your diva levels come down to just a know-it-all, you’ll be reconsidered!”

We tend to hire high maintenance employees because they’re very good at hiding their diva-ness during the interview process. Sometimes they even hide it through the probationary period of their employment. Those are the really hard-to-handle ones because they know they’re divas and hide it long enough to make your life difficult.

The question is, what do you do once you have a high maintenance employee?

I’ve had to deal with this in every single HR stop of my entire career, usually with a line out the door waiting to one-up each other on who has the biggest diva flag.

The thing about high maintenance employees is they usually want more attention than a normal employee. It’s this need for attention that drives you nuts, their manager nuts and all the other employees around them.  The key is getting them to focus on what the organization needs from them, not what they need from the organization. So, how do you do that?

Well, usually, high maintenance employees become a problem because their direct supervisor doesn’t stop this issue immediately when it comes to light. But, this is common, especially with new hiring managers, so it’s critical to work with them and help them become better managers.

High maintenance employees are at their best when they can divide you and the hiring manager. You can’t allow this to happen. You have to make a plan with the hiring manager and stick to it. The best way to box in a high maintenance employee is to never allow them to play two parties against each other. “Well,” they might say, “my boss said I could lead, then Jenny just took over, and I’m the one…”

You see where this is going!

As soon as this starts, you just need to say one thing, ” I’m going to call in your boss and Jenny so we can all talk.” To which they’ll probably say: “You don’t need to do that. You’re in HR! I thought this was confidential!”  (I love that one, by the way. I’m not a lawyer, I’m an HR leader, there’s a big difference.)

My reply to this, delivered in very calm, even-keeled manner is, “I can see this is very important to you, so I don’t want anything to get misinterpreted, it’s best that we get all of us together and get on the same page.”

High-maintenance employees hate to be on the same page because they get their power from the lack of communication within organizations. So the best way to limit their impact is to get everyone in the same room and nip the issue in the bud before it gets way out of hand.

(*Remember how I mentioned how great a Diva Detector would be? This isn’t exactly that…but Jellyvision’s unique recruiting process is a pretty close second. Check out how they weed out divas and slackers right here. It’s good stuff.)

2 Minutes with Tim! SHRM-SCP or HRCI-SPHR?

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Hey! guys, I’m trying a new platform out this week called Anchor.FM which allows me to post audio right on my blog, and if you have the Anchor App which you can download for free from the App Store for iPhone, you can easily respond back.

Here’s how it works – I have 2 minutes to tell you anything I want. You have one minute to tell me I’m full of hot air! It’s really that easy. Check it out! Either way, you can listen by just pushing the play button below.

This week, I decided to discuss if you should get your SHRM-SCP or HRCI-SPHR. I was asked this question this week via private message and thought others would love to join the conversation.

Let me know what you think about the audio post in the comments!  Anchor is made for people like me – a face made for radio!

I love the idea and think it could be a great way to post every once in a while, or a regular Thursday edition, who knows!

The Big Reference Check Scam!

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I remember when I started my first job in Talent Acquisition and HR, I totally believed checking references was going to lead me to better, higher quality hires. My HR university program practically drilled into me the belief that “past performance predicts future performance.”

For all I knew those words were delivered on tablets from Moses himself!

After all, what better way is there to predict a candidate’s future success than to speak with individuals who knew this person the best?

And it’s not just anybody: It’s former managers or colleagues who have previously worked with this person – directly or indirectly – and have a deep understanding of how they have performed, and now telling me how they will perform in the future.

Grand design at its finest.

About 13 seconds into my HR career I started questioning this wisdom. Call me an HR atheist if you must, but something wasn’t adding up to me.

It was probably around the hundredth reference check when I started wondering either I was the best recruiter of all time and only find rock stars (which was mostly true) or this reference check thing is one giant scam!

Everyone knows the set up: The candidate wants the job, so they want to make sure they provide good references. The candidate provides three references that will tell HR the candidate walks on water. HR accepts them and actually goes through the process of calling these three perfect references.

When I find out that an organization still does reference checks, I love to ask this one question: When was the last time you didn’t hire someone based on their reference check?

Most organizations can’t come up with one example of this happening. We hire based on references 100% of the time.

Does that sound like a good system? Now, I’m asking you, when was the last time your organization didn’t hire a candidate based on their references?

If you can’t find an answer, or the answer is ‘never’, you need to stop checking references because it’s a big fat waste of time and resources! There’s no “HR law” that says you have to check references. Just stop it. It won’t change any of your hiring decisions.

New ways of checking references that checkout

So, how should you do reference checks? Here are three ideas:

1. Source your own references

Stop accepting references candidates give you. Instead, during the interview ask for names of their direct supervisors at every position they’ve had. Then call into those companies and talk to those people. Even with HR telling everyone “we don’t give out references,” I’ve found you can engage in some meaningful conversations off the record.

2. Automate the process

New reference checking technology asks questions in a way that doesn’t lead the reference to believe they are giving the person a ‘bad’ reference, but just honestly telling what the person’s work preferences are. The information gathered will then tell you if the candidate is a good fit for your organization or a bad fit — but the reference has no idea.

3. Use fact checking software

Google, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc. have made it so candidates who lie can get caught. There is technology being developed that allows organizations to fact-check a person’s background and verify if they are actually who they tell you they are. Estimates show that 53% of people lie on their resume. Technology makes it easy to find out who is.

Great Talent Acquisition and HR pros need to start questioning a process that is designed to push through 99.9% of hires. Catching less than .1% of hires isn’t better quality. It’s just flat out lazy.

Start thinking about what you can do to source better quality hires and your organization might just think you can walk on water.

Your turn: What are your tips for checking references?

T3 – Employment Branding Activation tool @Universum_eb

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A couple times a year I get to demo a product that totally blows me away.  This week on T3 that product is Universum! Okay, let’s first get out of the way they Universum uses an underscore in the Twitter name which is a kiss of death in marketing! I have to let this go, because what they have is so industry changing, this might be the only mistake they’ve made along the way!

Universum is an employer branding digital research company. What the hell is that? Basically, they measure both sides of employment branding. What candidates want and expect from employers, and what you and your competition is actually doing. All of this information runs on a platform they call “Iris”.  It was originally built in conjunction with 12 of the largest employer brands in the world, and they leverage data from 3,000 universities worldwide, over 2000 individual employer brands and 55 countries.

This is a product that is used by large companies who have an employment branding function within HR or a dedicated social media role in HR or as part of a larger social team. After going through the demo, I can’t imagine any large organization not utilizing this tool. In fact, I would question the capabilities of the leadership and CMO that didn’t use this tool. The data insight and direction Iris gives you is simply a competitive advantage over those not using it!

5 Things I really like about Universum:

1. Universum has figured out the science behind social. Right now most organizations still hire under-experienced marketing pros, or HR grads who think they know social, to run their employment branding and have them basically test crap out and see what sticks. Iris will show you exactly what works and what doesn’t work in your branding.

2. Universum will show you what your competition is doing that is working really well. Competitive data is the holy grail of what HR can provide strategically to an organization. This one product will elevate your practice, strategically, like no other technology I’ve seen in HR or Talent.

3. Iris can give you exact insight to what content and language you should be using to attract specific talent to your organization.  Most employment branding is one message, way too broad. Iris lets you build specific branding tailored to the exact talent your organization is struggling to find.

4. Iris helps you create great content by showing you what is working, with what audiences, and in which countries. Truly a global company, that will give you global views about how branding needs to change based on which locations you’re trying to get talent. They have over 1.3 million pieces of content curated in their platform and growing. No inspiration needed.

5. Universum is an Employer Branding Spy Tool! Probably the coolest feature of Universum is its ability to show you exactly what and how your competition is leveraging their employment brand, and exactly how you can beat them for the same talent!

Universum is an employment branding activation technology.  Most of us either have a nonexistent employment brand or a brand that is basically on life support. Universum does more that just give you knowledge, they show you step-by-step how to activate and win your industry with your employment brand.

As I mentioned at the beginning this is a product for large companies. Probably Fortune 2000 types, or organizations that have dedicated employment branding folks on staff in their HR shop. The cost is fairly reasonable. When they told me the price point, I was surprised, I would have paid way more for what I was getting.

Check them out, I guarantee a demo Universum/Iris won’t disappoint!

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.

Employees don’t leave organizations, they leave…

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BOSSES! Right?! Right? Right…

For at least the past two decades, the foundation of employee engagement has been built on this one simple principle. Employees don’t leave organizations, they leave Bad Bosses.

So, if you want highly engaged employees just don’t have assholes for bosses. Super easy! Just hire and train great leaders and your employees will be engaged and productive and all will be right in the world.

Then along comes Harvard and their stupid studies:

“Good leadership doesn’t reduce employee turnover precisely because of good leadership. Supportive managers empower employees to take on challenging assignments with greater responsibilities, which sets employees up to be strong external job candidates. So employees quit for better opportunities elsewhere — better pay, more responsibility, and so on.”

Wait, what!? This is exactly what your CEO said she feared when you wanted to dump all of that money into leadership development. But you said, “If we don’t develop our leaders the people will leave as well!” So, what happened? We did so well at developing and empowering our leaders they pushed our best employees right out the door to other opportunities!

Ugh! This HR thing is hard. We think we’re doing the right thing for twenty years, then we find out we did it all wrong! Don’t fret, there’s some good news:

“There is a silver lining, though. Former employees with good bosses are what we call “happy quitters.” When the consultant company asked them about their feelings toward their former employer, their responses were overwhelmingly positive. Questions included Do you hold positive opinions about your former company? Would you refer employees to work for the company? and Do you see yourself as a potential boomerang employee? Good leadership, then, is an important tool for building goodwill with employees, which they are likely to retain as alumni, in turn becoming sources of valuable information, recommendations, and business opportunities later on.

The upside to losing well-led employees, however, comes with an important caveat. Our research finds that good leadership generates alumni goodwill only for those employees who experience good faith retention efforts when they quit. So managers should go to bat for their employees and counteroffer if they can. Our findings indicate that such retention efforts are critical for preserving the goodwill created by good leaders with employees, which can then be translated into a continuing relationship with them as alumni.”

What does this all mean?

You better get a heck of a lot better at Off-boarding! Off-what?  You know Onboarding but in reverse. Make employees feel really good about leaving you! Make them feel like they are valued and you don’t want to lose them and you’ll do anything to keep them. When they leave, they’ll be more likely to return or recommend others go work for you.

Most companies off-board like this:

Leaving employee: “I’m putting in my two weeks notice, I have this great opportunity to challenge myself and I have to give it a shot.”

HR and/or Hiring Manager: (while ripping their shirt) – “You are dead to us! Leave immediately. Don’t return to your desk, we already have security guards boxing up your crap!”

You laugh, but it’s mostly true. We suck at off-boarding, which is why most of us suck at alumni hiring. Fix that!

When Take Your Kid To Work Goes Too Far!

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If you haven’t heard by now, Chicago White Sox player Adam LaRoche decided to retire and walk away from a guaranteed $13 million dollars because the White Sox asked him to bring his kid to work a little less.  Yes, you read that correctly.

Apparently, LaRoche, who signed with the White Sox last year and made $12.5 million liked to bring his 13-year-old son to spring training with him. He asked the White Sox if it was alright if he brought his kid to spring training, and they said yes, believing the kid would come for some batting practice once in a while and hang out in the clubhouse. Little did they know, LaRoche actually had his kid with him 100% of the time he was at the facility!

A statement from Ken Williams, the President of the White Sox:

“There has been no policy change with regards to allowance of kids in the clubhouse, on the field, the back fields during spring training. This young man that we’re talking about, Drake, everyone loves this young man. In no way do I want this to be about him.

“I asked Adam, said, ‘Listen, our focus, our interest, our desire this year is to make sure we give ourselves every opportunity to focus on a daily basis on getting better. All I’m asking you to do with regard to bringing your kid to the ballpark is dial it back.’

“I don’t think he should be here 100 percent of the time – and he has been here 100 percent, every day, in the clubhouse. I said that I don’t even think he should be here 50 percent of the time. Figure it out, somewhere in between.”

So, the internet went crazy supporting Adam LaRoche on this with the #FamilyFirst hashtag and set the White Sox up as “evil” because they wouldn’t allow a player, that they are paying $13 million to, to have his kid at the workplace full time!

I get it, the internet is mostly stupid.

This is a family issue. Bob the electrician down at the GM plant. Guess what, he never gets to bring his kid to work, and Bob doesn’t think GM should allow him to bring his kid to work. Bob makes $50,000 a year. If Adam wanted to  spend more time with his kids, maybe he should choose a career that doesn’t put him on a the road 200 days a year.

I do have another idea, that no one is talking about.

Adam LaRoche made $12.5 Million dollars last year in his 12th MLB season. He hit .200, his worst year ever. This year the White Sox were going to have to pay him $13 million, and he’s not getting better.

Maybe Ken Williams was just doing some good old performance management! Hey, Adam, you’re sucking, maybe it’s time to leave the kid at home and start focusing on hitting the curve a little better. We are paying you way more than you’re worth at this point!  Knowing that telling him he can’t bring his kid to work, will potentially do one of two things – 1. he’ll retire and we don’t have to overpay for talent; or 2. he’ll actually get a wake-up call and start hitting. Either way, the White Sox win.

How do I know this is potentially true? Take the same scenario and use a different player, like Miguel Cabrera of the Detroit Tigers, arguably the top player in baseball. If Miggy wanted to bring his son to spring training, or he would retire, what do you think the Tigers would do? If you’re performing, you get perks. Miggy’s kid would be shagging balls in the outfield, I can tell you that!

Adam LaRoche isn’t a hero from walking away from $13 million dollars to spend time with his son. He’s already made $78.5 million in the last 12 years. He and his son can both retire. Adam wasn’t performing.  He is set financially. Leaving to spend time with his son was just a good excuse to end it because he couldn’t hit his weight any longer.