Monthly Archives: June 2016

5 No-Cost Retention Fixes!

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I love SMB HR shops (SMB – small/medium sized businesses) for a number of reasons, but none more than for the simple fact, smaller sized HR shops are forced to be more creative because of

Creativity and SMB HR shops, remind me of my Grandma. Grandma grew up in the depression.  People who grew up in the depression have creativity skills to burn!  They had so little but found ways to fill their life with so many things.  Lack of resources didn’t stop them, it unleashed their creativity!  Creativity is the most underrated HR skill out there for high performing HR shops.

Having worked in big HR shops the one thing that frustrated me most was sitting around in large meetings, trying to figure out how to “fix” retention – and listening to all the ways and how much money it was going to cost.  In the end, I always came back to, if we just take all this money we are going to spend on the “fix” and just go out and hand to the employees, we probably won’t have a retention problem.

Large HR shop folks don’t like to hear that!  So, for you SMB HR shop folks out there, with little or no money to spend on increasing your retention, I came up with a few ideas you might want to try before you go spend all that budget money on programs with little return.

Large HR shop folks don’t like to hear that!  So, for you SMB HR shop folks out there, with little or no money to spend on increasing your retention, I came up with a few ideas you might want to try before you go spend all that budget money on programs with little return.

No Money Retention Fixes:

Fire the manager with the lowest retention.  You have the data, you know who is turning people over. Your organization needs to send a message that managers, not HR and not the CEO, are responsible for retaining talent.  This has to be the first step!  Your leaders have to have a clear understanding it is their job to retain their employees, and it’s your job to hold them accountable for it.

Measure it by Department, and post it publicly for all to see.  No, don’t just share it in meetings.  Post it up in the lobby, down the halls, everywhere!  Then just wait.  It will almost change overnight.  No one likes to be at the bottom of any list and have everyone know it.

Fire your worst performers – then use that money to compensate your best employees more.  It’s a wash.  Your worst employees aren’t helping your productivity anyway, and your best will appreciate the increase, appreciate you noticing the bad people were taking away from the team, and they’ll give you more discretionary effort.  The result – same cost (actually less if you factor in benefits, taxes, etc.) more productivity, a little less headcount.

Have your senior leadership talk about retention publicly, constantly.   That which gets measured will get changed, that which gets measured and has the eye of senior leadership will get changed much quicker!

Institute a “Save Strategy” for employees who want to leave.  Save Strategy? If an employee puts in their notice, have them go meet with your CEO and explain to her why they are leaving. You’ll be amazed at the results and how many people will change their minds.  Some people just want to know you care, and sitting down for some one-on-one with the CEO, shows that a whole bunch. Plus, it’s much cheaper than finding their replacement!

Seems like most of these retention fixes are just good old fashion performance management. Crazy how that works. Do performance management really well and people want to hang around for a while!

Sourcers Are The New Recruiters?

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Come listen to my story about a man named Tim.

Poor Recruiting Pro, barely kept his family fed. 

And then one day he the internet came along, 

and up on his screen came a bunch of profiles. 

Candidates those are. Money, in people form. 

For those of you that are under 40, you might want to go Google Beverly Hillbillies theme song…

What the hell is going on in this world?

No, really!?

I started my career out as a ‘Researcher’. Little did I know, that was really just sourcing (or at least what we call sourcing today). My job was to find candidates for jobs we had open. I find a candidate. Do a basic screen. Pass them onto a recruiter who sold them to the client/hiring manager.

I then got my own clients/hiring managers and did the full boat. Find the jobs. Find the candidates. Make the offers. Etc.

When I went to corporate Talent Acquisition almost every shop was doing it the same way. Recruiters were assigned departments, business units, hiring managers, etc. They would work with those individuals when they had openings. Post jobs. Screen incoming candidates. Attend campus job fairs. Maybe, just maybe, a little bit of outbound calling – those were the rock stars. And complain how crappy their ATS was, and how awful the hiring managers were.

That was corporate Talent Acquisition, as I know it, from 7 years ago.

During this time, Sourcing became a thing. Everyone needed to now, break up “Talent Acquisition” into Sourcing and Recruiting.  Sourcers found candidates. The premise being we need ‘outbound’ activity happening. Actual candidate hunting. Recruiters then did screening, setting up interviews, offers, etc.

Somewhere over the past five years. Sourcers have become what Recruiters used to be.  They find candidates. They screen candidates. They set up interviews. I know some are even closing the deal with offers.

So, my question is, today, what the hell do Corporate Recruiters do in those shops that have Sourcers?

It seems like corporate recruiters are now advanced admin professionals. They really don’t have any skills to speak of.  I’m honestly asking TA Leaders! If you have Sourcing doing all of the skill-based activities of recruiting, what are you paying recruiters for? It would seem like you could get some really good Admin Pros do all of the work you have Recruiters doing.

Am I off base on this?

This came up because I met with a TA Leader who was paying their corporate Recruiters $85-100K in salary. She was also paying Sourcers a bit less, $65-80K in salary. When I dug into what they were actually doing, it seemed to me the most valuable of the two was easily the Sourcing Pros! The Recruiters did almost nothing of value for what they were being paid.

The hiring managers in this environment even went to the Sourcing Pros to get information on candidates! Basically, the Recruiters set up interviews, made offers, and onboarding.  To be fair, they were also in charge of ’employment branding’ for which they had an outside firm doing all of that work. Sourcing Pros had candidate experience, recruitment marketing, ATS/CRM, job postings, etc.

It seems like this is coming full circle.  We split the function and now the Sourcers are just becoming what Recruiters used to be. A one-stop shop for filling positions.

What I’m quickly seeing is that the value of these two positions is quickly becoming uneven.  When “Sourcing” as a concept was introduced, it was to have better efficiency in recruiting. Take a difficult function. Split into two parts, and let folks specialize. Through this specialization and synergy, you’ll get more work then everyone running their own desk.  Great theoretical concept!

What I’m finding in most organizations is that the theory isn’t meeting the actual result.

Are you seeing or feeling the same thing? Hit me in the comments, I’m truly interested.

Building HR Service Delivery on a Global Scale – AMEX Edition!

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Hey, gang – I have American Express’s VP of HRIS, Adam Krahling, for a cool one-on-one SHRM exclusive where he shares how AMEX built their entire global HR Shared Service delivery model from design through production! This is a free SHRM Webcast with HRCI credits. It’s coming up next week June 8th, Wednesday, at noon EST.

Adam is an awesome speaker, and I’ll be doing my best Oprah impression to interview him and dig out all those hidden secrets!

Every major HR project has its challenges but, when you add in the global perspective, those HR projects just got exponentially more challenging! For large organizations in the banking and insurance industries, these projects also have the added complexity of major regulations and laws that change from country to country. This webinar will assist you in understanding where most organizations fail from a global perspective, how to launch and get a project like this off the ground, and how to ensure your organization is successful in the long run.

The global transformation of HR is upon us, and American Express is leading the charge. Come learn how AMEX’s HRIS team helped lead the company into this new frontier and what strategies and design it incorporated from country to country.

Adam Krahling, vice president of Global HRIS for American Express, and I will dig into the American Express case study on how the company expanded HR service delivery globally. Learn how a large organization like AMEX moved its HR operations forward on a global scale, the impact it had and the step-by-step process they used to ensure success.

You’ll be able to post your questions and thoughts on bringing your HR service delivery project into the modern era. –

CLICK HERE TO REGISTER! 

The Right To Disconnect From Work

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Did you hear that France is trying to pass a law that would allow workers to disconnect from the office without fear of disciplinary action? Here’s some more on the proposed bill:

The “right to disconnect” legislation, which would go into effect in 2018 if passed, would require companies to encourage employees to turn off phones and other devices after they leave work…

The law reflects the sense in France that white-collar workers in the digital age are vulnerable to burnout.

Technologia, a risk analysis firm, found that 3.2 million French workers were emotionally exhausted from work and at risk of developing burnout symptoms like exhaustion and chronic stress.

“It is a real problem,” said Yves Lasfargue, a sociologist who specializes in teleworking. “Twenty years ago, before emails had been invented and we could not reach colleagues, we would have to go and knock on their doors. Traditional courtesy teaches you to abstain from disturbing people. With these new tools, this form of courtesy has totally disappeared. This is why we need to legislate.”

“Traditional courtesy”.

Two things at play here. First, there’s no doubt that our new hyper-connected world is causing people to work in ways we could never have imagined twenty years ago.  Most white collar jobs currently have no ‘unplugged’ off the clock hours any longer. People are connected from the moment they wake until the moment they go to sleep, many even getting up during the night when they hear notifications coming in on their devices.

That’s a problem. That’s an organizational problem because we will see burnout at a faster rate than ever before. I am starting to hear about organizations that are shutting down email servers at 6pm and not turning them back on until 5am, trying to force their employees to shut it down and refresh, even shutting down during the weekends. It’s a drastic step, but one some organizations feel is the right one.

Secondly, is this concept of traditional courtesy.  This 1950’s idea of not disturbing someone who is at home for the evening. Most everyone in the workplace has no understanding of this concept.  We don’t come home at 5pm to a wife and kids sitting down for a hot meal the ‘Mrs’ cooked all afternoon. Our society has completely changed from this “Leave It To Beaver” idea of how our lives should look.

Still, I hear this courtesy issue come up many times when speaking with corporate talent acquisition pros. Well, we don’t want to make calls to people after 6pm because ‘they’ don’t like it.  I still call bullshit on this! People don’t like getting calls after 9pm, otherwise, we’ve been conditioned by telemarketers to expect calls up until 9pm.

People don’t like being bothered at home with stuff that doesn’t have value to them! If you call them about a great opportunity, they would rather take that call from home, than from work. This has nothing to do with courtesy.  If someone has decided to ‘unplug’ for the evening, they simply won’t pick up your call. You believing this is a courtesy issue, is an excuse not to be an effective recruiter!

So, what say you? Should there be laws on the books encouraging people to shut it down at night?  I think our new world has given us more flexibility to work in our own way. I personally like that I can work when I need to. Do I need to ‘unplug’ more, especially around my family? There is no doubt. But don’t take my flexibility away from me!