Monthly Archives: January 2019

10 Things That Scare Me

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I listen to NPR in the mornings on my way to work. It helps me keep up on how my ultra-liberal friends are thinking, plus it’s my only access to news outside the U.S. on a regular basis. It’s important we make ourselves aware of all sides of the conversations taking place.

On a recent ride in I was introduced to an NPR produced podcast called “10 Things That Scare Me” which is a podcast about our biggest fears. The interview struck me with the idea that I’m not sure what my biggest fears are because my brain subconsciously helps me not think of them! 

I thought a good experiment would be to try and list ten things that scare me, with how I rationalize these fears. Here’s what I came up with in random order:

  1. Bees – My wife laughs at me about this. There’s an actual video of me she took of me freaking out about a bee chasing me. There’s no logical reason that I don’t like bees. Oh, wait, yeah there is, bee stings hurt!
  2. Heights – Let me preface this by saying I’ve jumped off the Stratosphere in Vegas and I’ve done many Zipline adventures. I love roller coasters. But have me climb a ladder and walk on the roof of my house and my legs are shaking like crazy! I think the difference is all about safety harnesses. I don’t mind heights if I’m safe, I mind heights when I could fall and die.
  3. Horror Movies – I don’t go to them, I don’t watch them, you can’t make me. Again, completely stupid I know, but yeah, I’m out!
  4. Something Bad Happening to my Wife, kids, or dog. I think I spend too much time thinking about this, but not half as much as my wife, but it’s still a fear. Probably will always be a fear.
  5. Not being able to pay my bills. This might seem irrational to many people. I’m a successful person. It comes from childhood and being raised by a single mom, who was trying to launch a business, and many times being at stores where they wouldn’t allow her to write a check because she had ‘bounced’ so many. And we definitely didn’t have any cash! Taking food back to the shelves of a store because you can’t afford it doesn’t leave you. That walk, with the employees staring at you feels pretty bad.
  6. Not knowing the right answer. For most of my life, in almost any situation, I’ve felt like I’ve had ‘the’ answer. School, work, life, love, okay, way less in love, but most things! So, I’m fearful of not having the right answer that will solve the problem. Turns out, some problems don’t have answers, or at least not a ‘right’ answer.
  7. Dying unexpectedly. I have this notion that I’ll die with some warning. I’m planning on it. There’s really only one time in life when you can truly tell people what you think, and I do not want to miss out on that time! We see random death every day, and it’s hard for me to understand it.
  8. Embarrassing people who are important to me. To know me is to know anything might come out of my mouth. Mostly that’s been a great trait over my life. Every once in a while, not so much. I truly care about my family and friends, and if I say or do something that embarrasses them, it truly impacts me deeply. Just not enough, apparently, to change my personality!
  9. Access to guns. Guns don’t scare me. I grew up around guns. I’ve shot guns. Hunted. Shot skeet. Etc. The access that mentally unstable people have to guns scares me because of fear #4 above. Guns are too readily available in our society and I can only pray and hope for the safety of those I care for.
  10. Failing my Mom’s company. For those who don’t know, I run the company my mother started and ran quite successfully for decades. 2nd generation family businesses have an extreme failure rate. I work and stress every day to not be a statistic. So, call me and do work with me! Help me conquer this fear!

So, what do you think? It feels pretty good to get your fears out there in the open. To look them in the eye. To introduce them to the world. They are definitely more scary when they are locked in my head!

What fears do you have that you have admitted? Hit me in the comments and let’s do this cleanse together!

The Human CRM

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We didn’t always have sales automation and recruiting automation. There was this time when you just had to keep a ‘date book‘ or a calendar of some sort, or just simply to remember to call Mary over at Acme Inc. to see how everything was.

Old school sales was following up. Letting you know I’m still here. I still want your business. Give it to me and not someone else.

Like a CRM the goal is to eventually wear you down, and it works. It’s worked since the beginning of time.

CRMs can do it, and do it very effectively, but in some cases not as well. I can ignore the CRM. I know the CRM game, so when you see those messages they are easily ignored.

I can’t ignore the lady who has made nine calls to my voicemail. I can’t. You might be able to, but I can’t. I respect the craft too much. The effort. I know how hard it is to pick up the phone the first time, let alone 2 – 9. That doesn’t get easier, it gets harder.

You guys know I love technology. I’ve done it both ways and having the automation helps immeasurably. There’s a bit of art to the old way of following up, over and over. Some poetry to it.

You might get sick of “Steve” calling you every single month, but eventually you find yourself in a jam and “Steve” comes to mind. Steve was the one that was there when you didn’t have anything. Any “Johnny” come lately can call on you when you just landed a $50 million dollar contract, but where were they when you had nothing?

Companies fail when they take the human out of the CRM. It’s not one or the other, it’s both in combination. The plow helps the farmer do more quickly, but not without the horse.

So, the next time you see your phone ring and recognize the number, or delete that email that you know was personally sent without reading it, know a real person put in time for that recognition. The Human CRM was at work and didn’t stop!

Guerilla Recruiting Marketing

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All I know about marketing I’ve learned from friends. Brilliant people like William Tincup, Michael Carden, Laurie Ruettimann, Jamie Gilpin, Bret Starr, Leela Srinivasan, etc.

 

I remember sitting in front of William Tincup and Bret Starr when they were partnered up and running Starr-Tincup (which is now the top marketing firm in the HR Tech space – Starr Conspiracy). I was overwhelmed by how smart and creative they were. You got this feeling like they could solve any marketing challenge within seconds.

 

Michael Carden came to the HR Tech Conference to market, at the time, his new startup (Sonar6) with a giant cardboard box and markers where people could come into the booth and start drawing on the box which was basically their booth.

All of the people I’ve listed have had the courage in their career to do and try stuff others weren’t willing to. Maybe it wasn’t always Guerilla Marketing, but it was definitely out of the box (pun intended!).

When you think about where we are at with Recruitment Marketing right now, we are still, mostly, in this mode of trying to figure out the automation of the martec stack as it relates to recruiting. 

Once we get the technology figured out, we can begin to start being more creative in marketing our jobs and our organizations to the marketplace. We can start having fun!

Imagine partnering with a food truck or two and having them show up across the street from your competitor on a Friday lunch, and you just sit and wait for your competitors employees to walk across the street to check it out and get lunch.

You don’t even have to pay for lunch. People love food trucks and will come buy their own lunch. Just give a few bucks to the food truck to put your branding on their vehicles and show up and eat lunch, network, be different. Put out your big cardboard box!

I love the concept of being the one employer in your marketplace that is willing to be different. If you are just trying to be similar to everyone else, you have little chance of truly standing out as an employer people want to come work at.

Your Weekly Dose of HR Tech: @Content_App – Job Branding

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This week on the Weekly Dose I review the job branding and messaging technology Content. Content is a mobile-based SMS text-based technology (app) AI social media assistant that scales across your recruitment teams to help your business get the most from LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter.

Content will send you a text message when she/he/it discovers something relevant for you to share. Every share Content creates will have relevant hashtags and an image to ensure you get the best engagement.

Content will also decide the best time to share the article so your recruiters don’t need to worry about the details. Just reply yes to share it, or no to decline.

Content will also automatically grab your jobs from your career site and brand them to look like a professionally digital marketed piece of content for your team to share out to your networks and talent communities.

One of the biggest issues we face as Recruiters in sharing great content with candidates is usually we don’t know what good content is out there, and we don’t have time to go out and find good content. The Content app does this automatically for you, while still keeping the power of customization in your hands.

What I like about Content:

  • Content is built on machine learning algorithms that will learn what content you like and dislike, and work to deliver more of the content you want to share with your talent networks.
  • Solves your share issues – want to share a piece of content to your internal team so they’ll share it outwardly, Content uses SMS-text based communication to do this with a simple “yes” or “no” via a text reply.
  • Tracking ROI via clicks is pretty cool showing you which person is responsible, plugs into your Google Analytics on your career site, and will give you ROI verse pay per click advertising.

One of the most difficult things in talent acquisition right now is being able to measure the ROI on social media recruiting and Content gives you a tool to actually show these results, but also makes it super easy for your team to share more and better content out to the networks they are trying to engage with.

Ultimately Content does the one thing we all need more of which is to get more traffic to our career site, and with the right CRM and retargeting, this really puts our recruiting on a different level. Well worth a quick demo, as this simple to use tool will help move many TA shops to the next level.

The team behind Content is the former team behind Broadbean, so you know these guys understand recruitment and how to drive traffic to your jobs.

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.

Questions I’m asking myself in 2019!

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I’m constantly being asked about what are the “trends of 2019”.

Honestly, year to year trends are usually fairly unnoticeable to most people working a real job in HR and TA.

Google for Jobs was a giant trend in 2018 and yet most TA leaders still have no idea what it is and haven’t felt a real impact of it. Yet, it was a huge trend.

I can give you some great guesses about what the trends will be in 2019, but it’s fairly worthless. Me telling you that machine learning assisted automation will change how you find talent in 2019 isn’t going to really change a single thing you do.

Instead, I have all of these questions I would love to get answers to in 2019. Some of those answers will come from the industry, some will come through testing, and some will be left unanswered.

Here are some of these questions:

  • What are the common talent acquisition metrics we all should be using to measure the success and failure of our efforts? How do we get all TA shops to use these, or better, how do we get ATSs and TA suites to build these ‘common’ measures into their technology? (If you tell me Days to Fill/Hire I will punch you in the face!)
  • Can we automate most of the sourcing function across the talent acquisition supply chain? (I know it can’t all be automated, but it would seem with the current technology in the market 90% of sourcing could be automated. The last 10% are those Super Sourcers, like the folks that attend SourceCon.)
  • Can selection and assessment science make better hiring decisions than hiring managers? If so, how do we gain buy-in from hiring managers to move this science forward?
  • Is “Job Brand” more important than “Employment Brand”? Do candidates care more about your job or your company? (This is clearly predicated on the idea that the majority of candidates aren’t searching for companies, they are searching for jobs, yet we spend just a fraction of time on our jobs versus our employment brands.)
  • How can I tell if a person (either experienced in recruiting or entry level) from outside my environment will be a great recruiter inside my environment?

Let’s not kid ourselves, a softening of the economy in 2019 and 2020 won’t make our jobs significantly easier. A 4.0% unemployment versus a 5.5% unemployment isn’t really going to change most of our jobs. Talent will still be difficult to find.

While the TA industry has grown so much over the past decade, we still lag many other functions when it comes to some basic building blocks that will really move us forward. The idea we don’t have common measures of success across industries in recruiting is shameful for a function that wants to call itself a profession.

I’m super interested in what questions you are trying to answer in 2019! Hit me in the comments.

What’s the most luxurious benefit you can offer an employee in 2019?

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I read a bunch of article about what’s the next greatest benefit to offer employees. I read one the other day that tried to make it seem like now offering food at work is normal, like everyone is giving away breakfast and lunches, like you give away health insurance.

It’s the one thing I hate about reading mainstream media HR articles. Apparently, the only employers in America are located in the 50 square miles around Silicon Valley. Do you really think I believe that the majority of companies in America are giving away free food to their employees?

Come on, that’s not happening!

If you are lucky enough to work for a place that feeds you, great you won the job lottery, enjoy it! If they offer you Kombucha as well, then I’m just sorry for you, because that means they hate you.

What’s the #1 luxury benefit to offer in 2019?

It’s Time.

Time is the one thing every single one of us needs more of. For many it doesn’t even have to be paid time off! Just allow me some time to do some of the stuff that impacting my life, so I can better focus on work when I’m at work.

But of course Paid Time is always appreciated.

I know some employers have gone to unlimited paid time off and studies have shown that when organizations go to this their overall use of paid time off actually goes down. This is a sad commentary on our society.

I know a lot of HR friends of mine argue this can’t be the case because it seems so contrarian to what you would think would happen. “If I had unlimited time off I would never come in and just be on vacation every day!” Okay, Betty, and you would be fired!

The reality is unlimited time off is the answer, because psychology it doesn’t work. Some have the self control enough to use it appropriately, but most people fear that taking time off will somehow impact their performance, so even when they do take their unlimited time off, they still are connected, working in some way.

I know of a few organizations that completely shutdown for a week or two completely. Notice out to clients – “hey, it’s our annual refresh the batteries, 100% of us will be off and not connected, we can’t wait to come back fully recharged to rock your world”. I like the idea but get it probably impractical for so many organizations.

I think the best thing we can do as leaders is to ensure our people are actually taking their paid time off and when they do they know that it’s okay to completely disconnect. That we’ll have their back and to enjoy themselves.

I wonder how many of your leaders pull quarterly or annual reports of PTO to see if their team is taking time for themselves?

Don’t Kill The Dog!

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I was listening to the Bill Simmons podcast yesterday and he was interviewing Adam McKay, the director of Anchorman, and the new movie Vice (editor’s note – Vice is wickedly funny, and very disturbing all at the same time).

Adam was talking about how they knew that the movie was super funny and when they did their first test, it came back a 50 out of 100, when a good movie should be 60’s to 70’s out of 100, on the rating system they used.

Adam and the star of the movie Will Ferrell, didn’t understand, the test audience of industry insiders immediate told them they loved the movie and it was the funniest thing they ever saw. That’s when one of the studio executives came up to them and said, “you killed the dog! you can’t kill the dog!”

In the movie, Will throws a burrito out his window while driving and it hits a guy on a motorcycle, played by Jack Black. Will stops to make sure he’s okay, and he is, the motorcycle is ruined and an angry Jack Black kicks Will dog off the bridge. It leads to a very funny scene with Will screaming in a telephone booth, “I’m trapped in a glass case of emotion…”

In the original cut, the dog is dead and never comes back. Rating is 50/100. In the movie that gets released, Baxter, the dog comes back at the end to save Will. That cut of the movie got 75/100. It was the only change made and the movie went from 50 to 75. A 75 movie is super successful. 50 is dud.

Why does this matter?

We constantly “kill the dog” in leadership and don’t even realize it!

We do things that people don’t outwardly think are a problem, and in fact, they might even say they really think you are a strong leader, but then you get rated a 6 or 7 out of 10, versus an 8, or 9, or 10 out of 10!

It’s hard for someone rating you to say specifically why they didn’t rate you higher, there’s just something about you that doesn’t make you a 9.

You kill the dog.

Maybe it’s the way to treat someone publicly that others are seeing. Or something you are doing that others see and don’t approve of, even though it wouldn’t be something that you would catch yourself doing. Think of coming into work late, when at the same time you hammer your team for being late.

You get upset when someone doesn’t follow up with you, but you’re awful at returning the same effort in kind. You expect perfection, but constantly make errors. You want complete transparency of your team, but don’t return that transparency.

Stop killing the dog.

Want to make more money? Do what your spouse does!

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I rarely find a person who believes they don’t want to make more money. “No, I’m fine Tim, no more money for me! I make $75,000 per year and you know what that one study says, it’s all I need to be happy!”

Good for you pal. I prescribe to different study that says if you make $175,000 per year, you’ll be happier than at $75,000, and if you make $1,750,000 you’ll be so much more happier than at $75,000 per year you’ll actually hire two people making $75,000 per year to tell you how much happier you are!

A recent study out of Princeton shows that if you want to make more money all you really need to do is be in the same profession as your spouse!

“Individuals who work in the same occupation as their spouse have significantly higher earnings on average than similar people whose spouses work in different occupations. For instance, a lawyer married to a lawyer makes more than an otherwise identical lawyer married to a physician or a teacher. The earnings effect associated with such “same-occupation marriages” is negative for less-educated men but positive for other groups and stronger for women than men.” 

So, let’s unpack this concept a bit:

  • I can understand that if I worked in the same job as my wife, let’s say we are both teachers. We would be a bit competitive (editors note: my wife and I, and our kids, are super competitors!) in our careers. We would both strive to be the best teacher with the most awards and education, continuing to push each other to reach the highest levels.

So, the concept makes sense so far.

  • I could also assume that two people in the same profession, let’s say doctors, would also be more willing and able to start their own business in that profession. It’s hard to hang your own shingle, but two of you and now you have a practice!

I really struggle to find how this doesn’t work in most cases. When I worked at Applebee’s we constantly had partner teams and it was rare that either partner failed. If your partner worked in your same profession, you constantly have this close person to share your pain, frustrations, celebrations, etc., with someone who truly understands!

All of this is predicated on finding a spouse that loves to do what you love to do, professionally.

Did this study just uncover a hidden secret to successful relationships? I’m not sure, but it makes sense that if you love what you do and find a partner who also loves that same thing, and you are both pushing each other to be successful, and because of that you both earn more money, well then, that relationship at least has a chance!

What do you think? Could you do what your significant other does? Would you like if they did what you did?

Your Weekly Dose of HR Tech: @TheVIPCrowd

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Today on the Weekly Dose I take a look at the engagement technology, VIP Crowd. VIP Crowd is a technology that organizations can use to get their employees, and their customers, to engage in a number of things.

Want to get more feedback from employees on what the like or dislike about your benefits package? Want to see what hiring manager is most admired in your organization? Want your employees to share a really important, hard to fill job with their network? VIP Crowd’s platform allows you to do this with ease.

VIP Crowd solves that aged old issue we all have in HR and TA when we can’t get our own employees and hiring managers to give us feedback or engage in our programs by making them a VIP! “Why doesn’t anyone respond to the email I send!?”

VIPs are people in your network who you’d like to keep updated and whose feedback, input and ideas can help your business. These might be co-workers, top customers, or peers. VIP Crowd is invite-only, and you decide who gets invited.

It works by you basically posting a challenge to your VIP network, and you can add ‘points’ for completely that have real money value that can be turned in for prizes, given to charity, etc. So, the gamification aspect really raises the engagement to finish these challenges.

Challenges can be something like “share this blog post”, or “give us feedback on Glassdoor”, or refer a friend, etc. The challenges are only limited to your imagination, and they don’t always have to be for points. Send a challenge out to your workgroup to see who can come up with the best place to go eat lunch!

What I like about VIP Crowd:

  • You can easily segment out departments, locations, workgroups, etc. So, you can truly personalize the challenges for more targeted groups.
  • You can post a challenge anonymously and interact with those people who respond, the entire time maintaining the anonymity of those responding!
  • The VIP platform runs the loneliest number game each week to keep your VIPs engaged, even if you don’t challenge anyone this week, for free.
  • Runs on both mobile and desktop, with about 65% of those engaging in the platform using the mobile version.

VIP Crowd is definitely worth a demo. Super simple to use and a great way to increase and measure engagement. While I see a number of uses on how HR and TA would use this, the reality is this is technology that will be used across your organization, so you might want to bring some cross-functional peers along to the demo!

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.

It’s 2019, Money still motivates more than anything else!

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NO IT DOESN’T, TIM! YOU ARE AN IDIOT!

Well, you’re half right! I’m an idiot most of the time, but finally we are beginning to see what I’ve been saying for a decade, money is still the best motivator when it comes to getting extra effort.

For almost a decade the media and influencers perpetuated this belief that it was other things, rather than money, that motivated individuals to do more. They sited weak studies, if at all, but mostly it was antedotal evidence from people saying it wasn’t money, it was time off, it was feedback, it was…

A recent study puts this to rest, and it clearly shows that if you want ‘extra’ effort out of an employee, money is the single biggest motivating factor, overall, to get the effort your organization is looking for.

What I love about this study is they went out to over 200 experts in the field and first asked them what they thought. They were comprehensive in their analysis of the results and the most recent literature on the subject and the findings were straightforward:

We find that (i) monetary incentives work largely as expected, including a very low piece rate treatment which does not crowd out incentives; (ii) the evidence is partly consistent with standard behavioral models, including warm glow, though we do not find evidence of probability weighting; (iii) the psychological motivators are effective, but less so than incentives. 

Psychological motivators are effective, but less so than monetary incentives!

It’s not that things like working for a great leader or having time off aren’t also effective motivators to getting extra effort out of your employees. They are. But we have to stop telling ourselves that they are more important, because they aren’t!

Again, this is overall. You might have some individuals working for you that are more highly motivated by non-monetary incentives. But overall, in a large workforce, money will still get you better results.

So, why do we love saying that it’s not about the money?

If you think about how this concept became popular, it really tells the story. A decade ago we were coming out of the Great Recession. We didn’t have a ton of money to throw around, so it became popular to espouse the idea that people were really motivated by other things, rather than money.

And, it wasn’t really a lie. We are motivated by many things, money just being one.

The lie was that the other things motivated us to a higher level than money. Those don’t. I’m completely motivated by a great leader, if I’m getting paid what I think I should be. I’m super motivated by extra time off, if I think I’m getting paid what I should be. I’m not motivated by any of that, if I have a monetary issue I’m facing in my life, which most people do.

If my partner is a successful doctor and she makes way more than we need to live very well, money isn’t my primary motivation for effort, it might be a lot of other things. But, if I’m struggling to pay my mortgage, and my kid is about to go to college, I could care less that my boss is nice to me. Just pay me!