Monthly Archives: August 2018

Is employee experience really all about your manager? #Maslow #Drink!

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So, I’m sharing a post I wrote over at EXJournal.org (EX = Employee Experience). It’s site started by some brilliant people from all over the world and they invited me to write to bring down the overall quality of the site! I wrote this post and immediately thought, “Hey, I just leveled-up from my normal poorly written stuff!”.

I thought this because it’s an idea I’m passionate about and truly believe. I think we get lied to a bunch by HR vendors who are just trying to sell their shit. We’ve been lied to for a long time on the concept – “People leave managers, not companies” – that’s actually not true…enjoy the post and check out the new EXJournal site!

“Employees don’t leave companies. Employees leave managers.” 

How often have you heard this over the past decade? A hundred times? A thousand times?

We love saying this in the HR, management consulting, leadership training world. We use it for employee engagement and employee experience, to almost anything where we want to blame bad managers and take the focus off all the other crap we get wrong in our companies.

The fact is, the quote above is mostly bullshit.

Employees actually care about other things more

The truth is, employees actually leave organizations more often over money than anything else. We don’t want to believe it because that means as leaders we have to dig into our budgets, make less profit, and pay our employees true market value if we want them to stay.

Managers might be the issue if you’re getting everything else right. So, if you pay your employees at the market rate. Ifyou offer market-level benefits. If you give them a normal work environment, then yes, maybe employees don’t leave your company, they leave their managers.

But you forgot all that other stuff? Maybe the ‘real’ reason an employee left your company wasn’t the fact their manager wasn’t a rock star. Maybe it was the fact you paid them below market, gave them a crappy benefits package, and made them work in the basement?!

The dirty little truth about Employee Experience is that managers are just one component of the overall experience, and we give them way too much weight when looking at EX in totality. We do this because we feel we don’t have control over all of the other stuff, but it’s easy to push managers around and ‘train’ them up to be better than they actually are.

Rethinking Maslow for EX

There is a new Maslow‘s Hierarchy of Employee Needs when it comes to Employee Experience and it goes like this:

Hierarchy of needsLevel I – Money – cash!

Level II – Benefits – health, fringes, etc.

Level III – Flexibility of Schedule – work/life balance

Level IV – Work Environment – short commute, great design, supportive co-workers

Level V – The Actual Job/Position – am I doing something that utilizes my best skills?

Level VI – Your Manager – do I have a manager who supports my career & life goals?

We all immediately jump to Level VI when it comes to EX because that’s what we’ve been told is the real reason people leave organizations. Which actually might be the case if all of the other five levels above are being met. What I find is that rarely are the first five levels met, and then it becomes really easy to blame managers for why their people leave.

Managers aren’t the difference maker

When I take a look at organizations with super low turnover, what I find are that they do a great job at the first five levels, and they do what everyone else does at level six. The managers at low turnover organizations are virtually the same as all other organizations. There is no ‘real’ difference in skill sets and attitudes; those managers are just managing employees who are pretty satisfied because most of their basic needs are met pretty well.

I think the new quote should be this:

“Good employees leave companies that give them average pay, benefits, and work environment, that don’t utilize the employee’s skill set, and that make them work for a crappy boss.” 

(Tim note – Why the #Drink? It’s a game that my fellow HR/TA speakers and I play. We hate when someone uses the Maslow pyramid in a slide, so we make fun of it by claiming every time a speaker mentions “Maslow” or shows the pyramid the entire audience should have to take a drink – like a drinking game for bad speakers! The more you know…) 

Want to make more money? Be an extrovert!

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New research out of the University of Copenhagen finally puts to rest the age-old argument around what’s better: being an extrovert or being an introvert? I have friends who are on both sides and super successful in their careers, but it’s still one of those things where if you are one or the other, you usually believe what you are is the best.

Well, in terms of lifelong earnings the data is pretty clear you want to be an extrovert! From the study:

One striking result is how much the trait of conscientiousness matters. Men who measure as one standard deviation higher on conscientiousness earn on average an extra $567,000 over their lifetimes, or 16.7 percent of average lifetime earnings. Measuring as extroverted, again by one standard deviation higher than average, is worth almost as much, $490,100. These returns tend to rise the most for the most highly educated of the men.

For women, the magnitude of these effects is smaller (for one thing, women earned less because of restricted opportunities). Furthermore, extroversion is more strongly correlated with higher earnings than is conscientiousness, unlike for the men.

Yeah, that’s a half of million dollars! That’s life changing money for most people!

Here is something else that came out of the study that I thought was fascinating, people who are ‘agreeable’ by nature, actually make less money!

It may surprise you to learn that more “agreeable” men earn significantly less. Being one standard deviation higher on agreeableness reduces lifetime earnings by about 8 percent, or $267,600. In this context, you can think of agreeableness as meaning a person is less antagonistic and more likely to consider the interests of others. You might have thought agreeableness would be correlated with higher earnings but alas not.

So, here we are as HR pros telling all of our employees who want to be leaders they should be more ‘agreeable’, put the interests of others above your own, etc. What we are really telling them is “hey, here’s how to ensure you’ll make less money in your career!”

I think we see this in our world today. We tend to want to believe we all want ‘servant leaders’ when it comes to someone leading us individually, or leading our companies. But, for the most part, most of our great leaders we can point to, male and female, are still overwhelmingly extroverted and mostly directive in their style of leadership.

One last thing that came out of the study is that being smart and being extroverted is not correlated. Why does this matter? Well, being smart does correlate to higher income as well. So, when we go try and select great employees we tend to just look at intelligence. Which is necessarily bad. If you are going to try to increase your talent, starting with smart people is never a bad idea, but in the long run, it’s more than just IQ:

Another interesting result from the data is that IQ and conscientiousness are not very well correlated. That implies that finding ideal workers isn’t so easy. The quality of openness, however, is moderately positively correlated with IQ, so you might expect that the smarter workers are more willing to experiment and try new things.

So, do you have to be extroverted to make more money? No, but it’s easier and more likely if you are. If you’re introverted, by nature, it wouldn’t hurt to work on your outwardly extroverted self. We all have the ability to be extroverted and introverted in certain situations. The key for earning more income is being extroverted in a professional setting.

Okay, my introverted friends! Tell me why this research is complete B.S.!

Career Confessions from Gen Z: Is Work-Life Balance a Right?

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One of the scariest things that I had to go through recently was deciding to give up competitive swimming. I have been racing in the pool for the majority of my life, but I knew in March 2017 that it was time to step away from the sport that I love so much. For a while after, I felt lost; what am I supposed to fill my time and put my energy into now that I am done swimming?

This is something that many high school graduates, soon to be college students and full-time employees have to go through. Many of us have been involved in activities like sports, art, or music for most of our lives, and we’re now expected to willingly step away from the things that we love to do and work our lives away. It doesn’t seem fair and often leads to a loss of identity for a lot of people. I know I had no idea what to do without swimming.

It’s a sick thing that our society expects adults to dedicate their lives to their jobs. Growing up, I remember hearing adults making fun of their peers that did things like slow-pitch softball or an organized basketball league. They would say that they’re not dedicated enough to their careers or that they needed to spend more time with their kids.

This has bothered me for a long time. I don’t want to have to give up what I love to do just because I have a job and a family! I hope that I can find a job that allows me to do something that I love, but I don’t think that my job will ever involve racing in a pool. We shouldn’t expect young people to completely give up things that they love to do once they have to provide for themselves. I want to help foster an environment where it’s not only okay to take an hour of each day to go do something for yourself, but it’s encouraged.

This is something that is so important to me in a future employer. I want to work for a company that encourages me to have a work-life balance and doesn’t pressure me to spend my life in the office.

If you had more time to have fun and do something that you love, what would you do?

This post was written by Cameron Sackett (not Tim) – you can probably tell because it lacks grammatical errors!

HR and TA Pros – have a question you would like to ask directly to a Gen Z? Ask us in the comments and I’ll respond in an upcoming blog post right here on the project. Have some feedback for me? Again, please share in the comments and/or connect with me on LinkedIn.

Your Weekly Dose of HR Tech: @Talentegy – it’s Google Analytics for your Talent data!

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Today on The Weekly Dose I take a look at the talent experience management (TXM) technology Talentegy. Did you catch the new marketing phrase they created!? TXM? I love it. It’s just like the made-up marketing phrase Candidate Experience (CX) and Employee Experience (EX) that have swept the world!

So, what the heck is Talentegy?

In simple terms, Talentegy is a technology that is constantly tracking and measuring the experience of those candidates, and employees, who are applying to your jobs, working within your talent and HR systems, etc. This is important because we tend to always have little things going on and we want to know about them as soon as possible.

Maybe it’s a broken link in a job description, or some part of your application process or pre-hire assessment is causing candidates to not finish, etc. Talentegy can show you where this is happening and instantly alert your team of what’s going on. It can also show you how to improve the entire experience so you get more people through the process.

The best piece is, like Google Analytics, there isn’t any integration needed and it can work with all of the major ATSs, CRMs, and talent management systems. It’s a pretty simple process of placing some tags in the pages being visited and you instantly start collecting data of what’s going on in your process in real-time (FYI – the dumbest person on your IT team can handle this, or your ATS/CRM provider can walk you through this!).

What I like about Talentegy: 

– The system will record video of the actual problem so you can see exactly what a candidate or an employee is experiencing. This is important because so often the explanation we get is difficult to decipher what is really happening. With Talentegy you get to see exactly what is happening.

– Talentegy built a ‘Slack’ like communication platform with the dashboard so you can instantly communicate both internally and externally with those who need to know. IT, HRIS, your vendors, are all on the same message flow so you can quickly diagnose the issue, decide who’s responsible, and follow up, all on one platform so nothing falls through the cracks.

– Talentegy also gives you the power to survey through popups at any point in your process. Find a friction point? Drop in a survey and find out how candidates or employees would make it better.

– Simplicity. While almost any technology you would use takes weeks, months to get up and running, Talentegy can be done almost immediately, and they’ll get you up and running for free so you can check it out! They do that because they know once you see what it can do, you’ll buy it!

Most of the technology I review is what I would call ‘Big Decision’ technology. It’s not something you’re going to demo and then just go “yeah, let’s do this!” You have to bring in other people, departments, etc. If you’re an HR or Talent Leader, Talentegy is one of those technologies that you demo and just make the immediate decision to start using, without consulting anyone!

Like most data driven technologies there is one thing you really need to make this valuable and that’s data! That means you probably have an organization of 1,000 ee’s or more, or you could be smaller but hiring a ton. Basically, you just need enough data to gain better insights. The cost isn’t really the issue, because I found Talentegy to be very cost effective for what you get.

The Weekly Dose – 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 The Weekly Dose – just send me a note – timsackett@comcast.net

Want help with your HR & TA Tech company – send me a message about my HR Tech Advisory Board experience.

How Can You Become a Great HR/Talent Professional?

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I met an aspiring HR college student recently. The question was asked, “Tim, how can I be great at HR?” I told them to buy my book and read my blog and that’s really all there is to it! Just kidding, I said something after that as well! 😉

It’s a great question that ultimately has very little to do with HR or Talent Acquisition. To be great at HR, or anything, rarely do you have to be great at that certain skill set. For some things, it’s important: doctor, lawyer, accountant, etc. But most professions you can learn the skills, so it’s about these other things that I told this young Padawan:

– Go deep on a few things. The world needs experts, not a generalist. Don’t kid yourself to think being a generalist is really what your organization wants. People say this when they are an expert in nothing. Be an expert in something and a generalist in a bunch of stuff.

– Don’t be super concerned with what you’re going deep on, just make sure it interests you. While it might not seem valuable now, at some point it probably will be. I’m not in love with employee benefits, but someone is and when I need help with that I’m searching for that person.

– Consume content inside and outside of your industry. Those with a never-ending appetite to learn are always more successful.

– Connect with people in your field outside of your company. We are in a time in the world where your network can be Pitbull Worldwide! Use that to your advantage. There is someone smarter than you a thousand miles away just waiting to help you.

– Just because someone older and more experienced than you might think something is unimportant, don’t give up on it. We all get used to what we are used to. Older people think Snapchat is stupid and it might be, but it also might unlock something awesome in our employment brand. Experience and age are super valuable until they aren’t.

– Constantly make stuff and test it. Some it will fail, most of it will be average, some of it will be awesome. Give yourself more chances for awesome! Don’t let someone tell you, “we tried that three years ago and it didn’t work”. Cool, let’s do it again, but this time change the name!

– Take a big chance early in your career. Find a company that you absolutely love and just find a way to work there in any position, then be awesome for a couple of years and see what happens. Working for a brand you love is beyond the best career feeling you’ll have.

– Don’t expect to be “HR famous” overnight, but the work you do right now will make you HR famous ten years from now. Do the work, fall in love with it, the fame will come down the road. “I want to blog and speak just like you, Tim!” Awesome, I started doing this a decade ago. Let’s get started right now!

– Don’t discount social skills in the real world. You can be the smartest most skilled person in the room, but the one with a personality is the one people will pay attention to. This is a skill that can be learned and constantly improved upon if you work at it.

– Spend time with Great HR and Talen pros. No one is really hiding their secret sauce, you just aren’t asking them questions. The key in spending time with others is not asking them to invest more in helping you than you’re willing to invest in making it happen. I get asked weekly for time from people who rarely are willing to help me in return.

Okay, as internships are concluding for the summer let’s help these aspiring professionals out! Give me your best advice in the comments!

A Tribute to Elle Taylor Seiden #ATributeToElle

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Today I get the privilege of introducing you to a brilliant young lady who unfortunately left this world too soon. I was introduced to Elle by her father and my friend Jason Seiden. Today, our community is celebrating Elle by doing a day of giving to her favorite charities.

Here’s how I remember Elle back then in 2010, Elle was around 7 or 8 years old:

One thing you have to know about Elle, she is beyond her years when it comes to most things in life and her writing was off the charts. Jason would share things with me and it was impossible for me to believe a child could write with such deep passion and meaning. I would joke that I felt inferior as a parent as my boys could barely speak let alone write so beautifully.

Here is one of her poems – remember – this is from an 8-year-old!

Nipula

By Elle Seiden

It cannot be life

Of the vibrations, they come

Over a force, they leap and twirl

Many rise, many pray

No, no God, we’re okay.

Leave the creatures of Earth at their own level

They will rise to only the vibrations of love

When time ends.

Jason would do videos on his blog with Elle on his lap, asking her normal life questions to get a ‘normal’ child response to life. Elle never gave a normal ‘child’ response. She shared a wisdom that would sometimes take your breath away. I loved those videos. Every time I would see Jason I would ask about Elle because she was so remarkable and I was just fascinated.

I think G*d knew Elle needed Jason on her journey. Jason is an amazing person himself. Like his daughter, he always sees the world a bit differently than the rest of us. I try to steal time from him because I’m always smarter when I leave him.  It’s not often when you have a child that is smarter than you from almost birth. I know all kids think they’re smarter than their parents, but almost none really are. Most parents couldn’t handle that situation. Jason loved it.

I’m going to miss Elle, she was an awesome person. The world was better with her in it.

I hurt for Jason as a friend and a father and can’t imagine this kind of loss. What I know, though, is Jason will live on and thrive because that’s how Elle will live on and thrive. He was the exact Dad that Elle deserved and needed. He was supportive and loving and helped her reach out to the world in every way she chose.

Today I celebrate Elle Taylor Seiden. Please join me in supporting her favorite charities. It’s really a great way to celebrate who she is!

 

The “Real” Man Talent Crisis in America!

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I have to admit, I’m not much of a  “real man”. I don’t know many ‘man’ things. I don’t fix cars. I’m horrible fixing almost anything. I have a lot of tools, but the reality is I usually cost myself more money by trying to fix something myself than just paying to have a ‘real’ man fix it.

That’s hard to admit. I want to be a real man. I want to have something go wrong in my house and instantly know what to do and how to correct it. I usually just go to YouTube and watch a real man show me how to fix it, then I call a real man to come over and fix it.

It seems like there is a huge need for real men right now in the world. It’s a shrinking talent pool for sure!

My mother is at a point in life where she finds herself without a man, real or fake, but she needs the skills of a real man to help her keep up her house. We found her someone and all I can think is I really need this guy for myself, not her! I need her real man for me!

I have three sons and none of them are real men, and unfortunately, I don’t see them becoming real men. I’m teaching them to pay for a real man. It’s cheaper and less frustrating in the long run. I don’t really have a desire to learn to plumb, do electrical work, appliance repair, engine repair, carpentry, etc. I mean I wish I had those skills, but that’s a lot of life experience and it’s almost too late for me to pick those up and be any good at them.

I have some great qualities that most ‘real’ men probably don’t. I’m awesome at gardening. I love to shop. Go to the movies. I love to go to the theater. I can cook up a storm. I do some basic sewing. I’m awesome with children. Just don’t ask me to ‘fix’ the front door when it won’t close properly.

While you might think this is a ‘me’ problem, it’s not. This is an “us” problem. I can foresee a time when ‘real’ men are so scarce we won’t be able to find anyone to fix our stuff! We have a real man talent crisis on our hands and I don’t think people really understand how bad it is, and how bad it’s going to get.

I don’t need someone to show me how to play Fortnite! That is a skill I can live without. But I can’t have the deck falling off my house and just let it dangerously hang there! I don’t need someone to show me how to watch the entire series of The Office on Netflix, but I do need someone to help me fix my garage door when it won’t go up or down!

I’m sure there is a correlation between skilled trades leaving public education and downfall of “real” man skills in the U.S. I’m also sure that there is a correlation between white collar jobs and blue collar jobs and real man skill level. You could probably add in a number of other factors around higher education, income level, etc. But, it’s all really meaningless, I still need have a need for real man skills no matter the reason I lack them!

So, I’m wondering. Is this just me or are others feeling the real man skill pinch as well? Hit me in the comments with how you lack real man skills, or how you got your real man skills, even if you’re a lady with ‘real man’ skills!

Career Confessions from Gen Z: Celebrate Success, But Don’t Stop Moving Forward!

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At a pretty young age, I discovered I wasn’t very good at most sports. I tried the normal ones: baseball, soccer, basketball, but I didn’t really seem to find any hand-eye coordination, running ability, or a general sense of how to be good at sports. In third grade, I asked my Mom to try out for the local swim team because some of my friends were on it and she was reluctant to say yes. I hadn’t necessarily excelled at swim lessons growing up and she thought that I would be bored just doing laps over and over.

Through her reluctance, she let me try out, but I didn’t make it because my backstroke wasn’t up to par. They recommended that I take a few private lessons and then I could try out again and start on the team. My parents got me a few private lessons, and about a month later, I tried out and made the swim team.

Fast forward, 10 years later and I am finishing my swim career on an NCAA Division 1 varsity swim team, scoring for my team in guess what stroke, backstroke. Never could anyone have predicted that I would go on to improve and have the success in the sport that I did. Now, I wasn’t some swimming prodigy, and it took a lot of hard work to get to where I was, but not everyone goes on to be a collegiate athlete!

Almost every day (especially on Facebook), we see these stories of extraordinary people excelling under incredible circumstances. We hear and see stories like of Michael Oher (watch The Blind Side if you somehow avoided Sandra Bullock’s amazingness), where people go from nothing to the best in their field. While we all love a great underdog story, it’s hard to relate to these improbable situations. There’s a pretty big chance that not many of the people reading this blog post are undiscovered football stars or musical geniuses, and although we may love watching these stories, it’s a struggle to relate.

That’s why we need to find these success stories in our own lives. I didn’t go on to play in the NFL or win an Olympic medal, but I went from not making the swim team at 8 years old, to competing in the NCAA. If I had just given up and tried a new sport, the course of my life would have been completely altered.

With the prevalence of the media, we see these extraordinary stories all the time. The media loves to sell these almost impossible moments to us because we can’t look away! This isn’t going to change. The news isn’t all of a sudden going to start talking about my slightly above average swimming career just so we can celebrate something more normal!

My advice for my fellow Gen-Zer’s is to look for these moments of success in your life. Celebrate them. And then keep moving forward for another moment of success. The reason I had a slightly above average swimming career was that I always wanted more, but I never let myself get burnt out. I would go get pizza to celebrate after a good meet, but I’d be right back in the pool working hard on Monday.

Next time you do something pretty freaking cool, pat yourself on the back, get a treat, and then get your butt working again the next day.

This post was written by Cameron Sackett (not Tim) – you can probably tell because it lacks grammatical errors!

HR and TA Pros – have a question you would like to ask directly to a Gen Z? Ask us in the comments and I’ll respond in an upcoming blog post right here on the project. Have some feedback for me? Again, please share in the comments and/or connect with me on LinkedIn.

Your Weekly Dose of HR Tech: Microsoft’s Workplace Analytics and MyAnalytics are Pretty Awesome!

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Today on The Weekly Dose I review two of Microsoft’s newest entries into the HR tech space Workplace Analytics (WPA) and MyAnalytics. Both MS Workplace Analytics and MyAnalytics are products that can be purchased to use with Microsoft 365.

From a high level what Microsoft does is pull in your data from all the other Microsoft 365 products you use like email, your calendar, activities you do on various other products like Skype, etc. This data is then used to unlock a bunch of stuff around cultural change and transformation.

You can imagine mining this data from your entire employee population would give you insights around how to create more capacity in new ways to work, understand what your best performers are doing to be the best, how certain teams, locations, etc. are collaborating, or not collaborating, etc.

Microsoft Workplace Analytics can then help your organization show where time is being wasted, communication breakdowns, how to increase worker focus time, reduce your amount of meetings, reduce the amount of after-hours work being done, etc.

MyAnalytics can be bought by itself as a stand-alone product for 365 users, but it works great in conjunction with Workplace! It’s the natural offshoot technology for once you have your insights from Workplace you can then help individuals with how can they better manage themselves and their calendars to be more effective and efficient in their work.

What I like about Microsoft Workplace Analytics and MyAnalytics: 

– It’s 100% adoption! Your employees don’t have to do anything to gain the value of using Workplace, they just keep doing what they’re doing and the data insights automatically start coming in. Then it’s ‘just’ simple behavior changes!

– Leaders can easily see ways to increase productivity almost instantly after turning it on. Workplace gives you a dashboard that can be drilled down to the team level to show you where your team’s time is being fragmented and help get them more focus time to work better.

– It’s a dynamic tool that is fairly flexible as a BI tool allowing you to bring in other outside data like Sales metrics or employee engagement data, and give you insights on how to best work on increasing the measures that move your business.

– Workplace shows you organizational and team trends around meetings, emails, internal vs. external hours worked, meeting overviews and effectiveness, coaching opportunities, etc. It’s really unbelievable on how one tool touches every person equally in our organization and can have a real impact on moving the culture of an organization on how the leadership wants to define it.

– MyAnalytics is literally like a Fitbit tracker for your workplace. Complete privacy of the individual data. Organizations have zero access to the individual data. “Nudges” the employee to more efficient/effective behaviors based on data. Constantly gives ideas and tips to help them. Shows awesome things like what percentage of your emails were actually opened, reminds them to block time when their calendar begins to get to full with meetings in the future, etc.

When I first started to see this my first thought was “Oh no! Big brother!” but Microsoft has taken real care to ensure this is a product for a positive cultural change, not a hammer for performance management. It’s a technology to aid organizations at a high level, but also give individuals the empowerment to help control their own work lives as well.

Microsoft Workplace Analytics can work with organizations as small as a couple of hundred and still deliver great returns. MyAnalytics can work in teams as small as 3 or 4 and deliver results. It’s easy to see how you would get giant ROI at the enterprise level, but I love that this can be used for organizations of all sizes.

I’m a big advocate that HR should own culture and be the organizational performance driver at a high level. Workplace Analytics and MyAnalytics give those leaders in organizations a tool that delivers real insights into how we can begin changing work for the better! Less wasted time in meetings. Less redundant email. Less of all of those things that keep us from being successful. If you’re a Microsoft 365 shop, this is a demo you need your entire leadership team to take a look at!

The Weekly Dose – 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 The Weekly Dose – just send me a note – timsackett@comcast.net

Want help with your HR & TA Tech company – send me a message about my HR Tech Advisory Board experience.

SHRM CEO says All Employers Should “Require” HR Certification!

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Did you see this last week by new SHRM CEO Johnny Taylor?

“Require certification,” Taylor said. “SHRM certification is a validation that the professional doing the job has the competency to do it. Treat HR like a profession. Don’t just prefer—require!”  

So, there will be a reaction from the HR community on this for sure! My guess is it will be mostly negative by those who aren’t certified, and mostly positive by the small percentage, overall, of HR professionals who do have a certification.

Here’s my take – I 100% agree with Johnny!

In fact, I love Johnny even more as the selection of SHRM CEO!

We (HR) want to be put on the same level as our peers in accounting, legal, etc. They are required to complete an examination to reach their CPA or pass the bar exam. Why should HR be any different?

I think it would be awesome to begin seeing HR positions at all levels have “HR Certification Required to Apply to this Position!” on job descriptions and job postings. I think it’s a sign that organizations are saying we want to ensure that our HR professionals meet some basic understanding and competency of the profession, at a minimum.

I think the one pushback would be there is a cost of obtaining the certification. That’s a real barrier and being a professional that embraces and espouses to inclusion, we want to eliminate barriers. Thankfully, SHRM also was prepared for this and announced last week:

“We’ve adapted our recertification process to provide additional flexibility to match your learning needs.

Going forward, SHRM will no longer have a maximum limit on self-paced activities, in the ‘Advance Your Education’ category.”

What this means is an HR professional can go out and take all 60 recertification credits for free through various webcasts or other self-paced free HR learning opportunities.

There still the cost to recertifying ($100 for members, $150 for non-members) and a cost to take the initial exam ($300 or $400, respectively). The reality is we all have investments we need to make to maintain and grow ourselves in our profession. This is a rather small amount for such a great profession.

I’ve been a long time vocal critic of SHRM in many ways but I love this push from Johnny to the profession. Sure it’s a bit self-serving since SHRM is the one selling the SHRM-CP and SCP certification (along with HRCI who sells the PHR, SPHR, and GPHR separately), but I don’t care. It’s the right thing to do.

I’ve been an HR professional who has held a certification since 2001. Gaining that certification took work, study, and practice. It wasn’t easy. After completing the examination and passing it was a big deal. 17 years of pursuing continuing education puts me in a really great position as a professional that I know a great deal about HR in a number of facets.

Does this make me a ‘better’ HR professional than someone who does not have a certification? That’s the big question, right? I believe it does, on average. Sure someone can know more than me, who does not have an HR certification, but normally, I would say that is not the case.

So, kudos, to Johnny, who got beat up recently in social media for shaking President Trump’s hand and taking a pic at an event. I believe requiring HR certifications for HR positions is the right stance to take for SHRM and for the profession.