Monthly Archives: February 2020

3 Immediate #Coronavirus Rules for Every Workplace!

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I’m not an alarmist, but this Coronavirus thing is getting serious!

While this isn’t a big deal in the U.S. I respect the fact that the CDC and WHO are telling us all we need to get prepared. That Covid-19 is going to have an impact on our daily lives. In HR, we tend to be the ones who are responsible for the preparation of stuff like this in our organizations.

So, what should you be doing at your company to ensure your employees are safe and you stay Covid-19 free!?! (Editor’s Note: Tim is not a doctor or a medical professional, his advice might actually kill you. Continue reading at your own risk.) 

#1 – The Fist Bump! 

The what, what!?! Shaking hands in the U.S. is still a thing. You know I like hugging, but holy crap, a really good hug could kill a person nowadays! That being said, I’ll still be hugging, even if it kills me. I’ll die happy. There’s actually research, from the American Journal of Infection Control, showing that a better greeting to limit virus exposure is a Fist Bump! By the way, a wet handshake or sloppy cheek kiss is definitely going to give you the virus!

That’s right, just a quick fist bump if you must have physical contact with the person you are coming into contact with. Also, stop wearing the masks, there are also studies that have shown those don’t actually work at all and you just creep everyone out!

#2 – If you are sick, don’t be a hero! 

Cue Enrique Iglesias Hero song…Tim whispering “Let me be your hero…” Was there anyone sexier when that song came out and he’s in that stocking cap!? And that accent! Stop it. I’m straight and I’m fairly sure I thew my boxers on stage.

Look if you’re sick, DO NOT come to work. But my boss thinks I’m faking!?! Look, if your boss thinks that, you’ve probably given them a reason and you should be worried. Still don’t come to work and kill our entire company, you moron!

#3 – Cancel your travel to the hot zones! 

No, that’s not the Cayman Islands! Yes, it’s quite temperate there, but we’re talking about traveling to places where they have known outbreaks. Next week isn’t the time to “get back into” China! “Hey Billy, buy a ticket! We’re heading to Wuhan!” Traveling on an airplane is one step away from patient-zero on your best days. I’m fairly certain I’ve had patient-zero sitting behind on three flights already this year!

If you do have to fly to the non-hot zone, be smart. Dudes! Yes, I’m talking specifically to you. I see you in the airport bathrooms taking a leak and then walking out without washing your hands! That is beyond gross! It could kill you! Two words – Antibacterial Gel! Use it. Wear it. Gargle with it! (Editor’s note: Do not gargle antibacterial gel, Tim is an idiot!). 

I’m going on record right now that this entire Covid-19 thing got started by dumb dudes who don’t wash their hands after using the restroom.

So, what have we learned today?

– Fisting good.

– Enrique sexy.

– Dudes are gross.

Stay safe out there my friends and get prepared! This is not a warning! 

 

The HR Famous Podcast E3 – SHRM Influencer Program & Bad Reviews on Glassdoor!

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In episode 3 of The HR Famous Podcast, long-time HR leaders (and friends) Jessica Lee, Kris Dunn, and I discuss recent legal proceedings designed to force Glassdoor to disclose reviewer identities, take a look at the company involved by reviewing their Glassdoor page and activity, and talk about dramatic changes to the SHRM Annual Conference Influencer Program.

Listen below and be sure to subscribe, rate and review (iTunes) and follow (Spotify)!!! Listen on iTunes, Spotify and Google Play.

Show Highlights:

2:45 – Tim walks through recent changes to the Influencer Program at the SHRM Annual Conference.

12:06 – Tim and JLee discuss the challenges of Glassdoor as employers and discuss Tim’s CEO rating on Glassdoor.

13:42 – KD lays out a recent court proceeding where a company (Kraken) is asking for the identities of Glassdoor commenters due to violation of confidentiality clauses in signed severance agreements.

16:15 – JLee labels Kraken as a JV squad. Tim reviews the timing of the layoffs, the targeting of former employees with a cease and desist letter about Glassdoor comments, smart Glassdoor management and more.

21:18 – The gang breaks down the Kraken Glassdoor page and activity. JLee comes in with breaking news of a warning at the top of the Kraken page. Heavy discussion of the relationship between paid customers and Glassdoor ensues.

22:55 – More Kraken analysis as the gang looks deeper into their glassdoor page and starts sorting by low and high ratings and see what’s most popular and reads titles of negative reviews and analyzes traffic to positive vs negative posts. Spoiler – people read the negative reviews more.

26:34 – The gang discusses the right way to respond to Glassdoor reviews to be credible and authentic. Code words in employer responses are also discussed.

Your Weekly Dose of HR Tech: @CornerstoneInc Acquires @SabaSoftware

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This week on the Weekly Dose I’ll give you some reaction to yesterday’s announcement of Cornerstone acquiring Saba Software.

The acquisition actually makes sense at a major level. You have two competitors beating the crap out of each other for customers, both doing basically the same thing. Cornerstone has been considered the best software in the learning space, and Saba, also in learning, was right on their tails, but also had a better offering when it comes to talent management and performance, because of Saba’s acquisition of Halogen a few years back.

On the analyst call, Cornerstone’s CEO Adam Miller talked about the combined company of over 7,000 clients, 75 million users, and over $800M in combined revenue, making the new combined company, staying with the Cornerstone brand, the largest “specialty” HR technology platform on the market.

Why does this matter to you? 

– In a world where big ERP systems are taking over HR technology (Oracle, SAP, Workday) there is a need for technology for organizations that actually need some higher-level ability when it comes to learning, reskilling, performance, and talent management. The enterprise ERP HCM systems are actually fairly good at core HR and payroll, but fairly vanilla when it comes to things like learning, performance, and recruiting.

– What happens to the 3 major pieces of Saba Software (Original Saba, Halogen, and Lumesse/ SabaTalentLink)? My take from Adam’s comments yesterday was that he saw a major advantage by combining what Cornerstone and Saba had on the learning side to make it the world’s largest and leading skills engine on the planet. Also, the performance side of Saba (Halogen) was most likely a bit better than what Cornerstone has already. Lumesse is most likely dead in the water, as when Adam was asked the question, the comment was basically, we already have a strong recruiting product in North America and Lumesse is basically a UK recruiting product we’ll maintain, but we won’t be selling.

– To be fair, I haven’t seen Cornerstone’s recruiting product, but I have seen Lumesse/Saba TalentLink, and from the analysts I speak with that have seen both, Lumesse/Saba TalentLink is the superior product (best of breed talent acquisition platform), and no one would call Cornerstone’s recruiting product best of breed in any fashion, so I’m a bit perplexed at why Adam would throw it away so easily. One analyst I spoke with actually thought one of the major reasons Cornerstone bought Saba was for Lumesse! Lumesse is a proven global recruiting platform and Saba was looking to push it heavily into the US in 2020 and 2021, but those plans looked to be shelved at this point based on Miller’s comments. If I was to rank SabaTalentLink as a stand-alone, best of breed ATS right now, it would be in my top five with the likes of Greenhouse, SmartRecruiters, etc.

– One of the major pieces of the acquisition is the acquisition of Saba’s R&D engineering teams. In an environment where it’s near impossible to recruit great engineering talent already, we’ve seen this move in the playbook many times over the past decade where one company acquires another and a major reason has to do with your ability to grow your engineering team quickly through acquisition. Although, at $1.4B, that’s a hefty price to pay for R&D talent.

– Saba’s CEO, Phil Saunders, will come on as Cornerstone’s new COO. Phil has shown his ability to run a lean ship and produces great margin and profits, and Adam and the Cornerstone team will be looking for those insights from him in his new role.

Strategically, this acquisition makes sense for both sides. Moving forward both would continue to feel the pressure of the ERP’s coming after their clients, and the main tactic to combat that is flat out becoming ten times better than anything they can offer. In a world where organizations are being forced to reskill, develop, and drive performance, the organizations that have this as their main people priority will choose Cornerstone to help them reach these goals.

 

The Cancer of Speaking Up!

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There was a post on TLNT by Tim Kuppler titled Society is Holding Organizations and Leaders Accountable for Their Culture. Go read it, it’s really good. I agree with so much of what Tim wrote in the piece.

There is one concept though that I’m beginning to question. Kuppler wants to believe that we have a problem in our society and that problem is people are afraid to speak up to their leadership.

About a decade ago I would have 100% agreed with him. In fact, I probably spent more time in training sessions working with leaders on how to get employees to open up, than any other single thing in my HR career a decade ago!

In 2018, we do not have a problem with employees speaking up. In fact, it’s a full-blown Cancer! Yes, I want employees to speak up when they have something of value to add to the conversation, or if they or another employee are being wronged. No, I don’t want to hear your idiot opinions that have nothing to do with anything we have going on to make us better!

I get it. Everyone should have a voice! We are in a time when people have the right to speak up.

Just because you have the right, doesn’t mean you should open your dumb mouth! You have employees in non-leadership positions who should open their mouth and add to the conversation. And, you have employees who make you dumber when they open their mouths.

Your company isn’t a democracy. Turns out businesses don’t run well as democracies. When everyone has a say, we tend to get very cautious and very vanilla, and no innovation happens, as we try to take into account every single opinion. The business gets pulled to the middle. “Middle” is not a good position for businesses.

The challenge we have as leaders and HR pros is not giving everyone a voice. It’s finding the best and brightest in our organizations, regardless of race, gender, etc., and making sure ‘those’ people have a voice.

The fastest way to failure is to listen to everyone and take into account every opinion. That isn’t helpful. Having the foresight to understand there are really great voices beyond your leadership team could be your greatest insight of all, but understand it’s not everyone.

In a representative government, you want all voices to come through. In business, you want the voices to come through that can actually make a positive difference. Unfortunately, that isn’t everyone who works for you.

In business and leadership right now we have a cancer that is growing out of control and that cancer is a belief that every voice matters. That’s wrong. Every voice does not matter, at every time. Do you think Steve Jobs listened to every person at Apple? No, he barely listened to anyone! What about Elon Musk? Again, no. What about Marissa Mayer? Heck, no!

Great business and great innovation don’t happen by listening to everyone. They happen by listening to the right ones. That might not be popular right now in society, but that doesn’t mean it’s not right!

What I’ve Learned in a Half Century of Living on this Planet

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2-20-2020

Seems like the number people feel like this is some special birthday for me. It’s my 50th. Ugh, that’s hard to type. 50 seems so fucking old! When I was in college, 50 seemed like a lifetime away and now that I’m here, I don’t feel 50.

I actually wasn’t going to write this. I’m in a world where being old is a career death sentence, especially in today’s world! “Wait, you’re a fifty-year-old, white dude!? Yeah, next…” I get it, most middle-aged white dudes are beyond lame. Also, fifty really isn’t middle-aged, unless I plan on living to 100!

…And with my high level of income, there’s no reason I can’t live to be 245, maybe 300! – Ricky Bobby

Mentally, I feel like I’m a young 30-ish. Humor-wise, maybe young 20’s. Physically, maybe 67, which also makes no sense because I work harder now at being physically fit than I have in twenty years! So, this entire birthday makes absolutely no sense to me.

What have I learned in my fifty years on this rock? 

– Don’t love or give expecting to be loved or given something in return. If you love to love, then love. If you love to give, then give. If you expect something in return, you’re going to be let down frequently.

– The best seats are almost always worth it.

– Find someone who makes you better and never let them go. Too often we find people who want to make us the best version of ourselves and we push them away, “why can’t you just accept me for me!” Because “you” suck, but you can be so much better! Let’s try!

– Once you drink four of anything, the quality and cost no longer matter. The person who says it does is most likely someone you don’t want to hang with, just from an annoyance standpoint. Yeah, I’m sure you can really tell the level of gin you’re drinking after the fifth one…

– It doesn’t matter how smart you are. If you bore the crap out of people they won’t hear what you have to say. If you try to impress the smartest person in the room, you’ll usually fail. Try to impress the rest.

– Never underestimate how great new shoes can make you feel.

– People in high-level jobs (CEOs, etc.), making millions of dollars are much more similar to you than you think. They just had better timing and networks.

– When someone tells you they have tried their hardest, most haven’t even given you 50%. That’s really hard for someone to hear, but it’s true. What they are really saying is “I’ve tried the hardest I’m going to for what I’m going to get out of this”. There’s a study that shows most people’s bodies will tell them they are done when they’ve only really used up 15% of their ability to keep going.

– Your value has little to do with your actual value and everything to do with how much someone is willing to pay you.

– A pizza and a six-pack in a hotel lobby with great friends always beats a 5-star restaurant when dining with idiots.

– Most people need a hug. A real, genuine hug. Linger a bit. Tell them you missed them. Tell them everything is going to be alright. Tell them you are there for them. Don’t linger too long, that’s creepy. Hug for real.

– People who tell you they aren’t the “Ritz Carlton” type, most likely haven’t stayed at a Ritz Carlton. Because that sh*t is dope! “It’s so choice…If you have the means…” – Ferris

– A great massage will leave you drooling like you had a stroke. Tip that person well.

– If you see someone who does something awesome, find a way to tell them, privately. A quick call, text, email, written note, pull them aside. That one-on-one interaction is the most valuable thing you can ever give them.

– “Call them again” is the most powerful recruiting strategy of all time. “I already called them and they weren’t interested.” So, call them again! That next call really makes you work. What are you going to say? What are you going to ask for? How will you get some kind of value out of this call? “Call them again!” 99.9% of people won’t make that second call.

–  It’s way better to know what you suck at than what you’re good at.

– No one on the planet works harder than a single mom. No one. Give these women a break. Help them. Admire them. Build environments that help them thrive.

– I’m simultaneously more woke and less woke as I hit the half-century. Part of me is so much more knowledgeable and understanding now as this age by a mile compared to younger me, and also older me just wants to know whey we all can’t just get along.

– Deadpool should have won an Oscar for Best Picture. Don’t @ me, Trolls! You can’t come up with a funnier movie, don’t even try. Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby is close.

– Don’t take financial advice from someone who’s car cost more than their house. They fail to understand the simple depreciation and appreciation of assets.

– Have an opinion. Hang with folks who don’t share your opinion, and value that fact you don’t share their opinion. It won’t get you promoted, but it will let you sleep at night, and lead to the best conversations you’ll ever have in your life.

– The only thing you’ll ever get everyone to agree on is puppies. 100% of everyone on the planet is in on puppies. Buy all the puppy stock you can.

– Don’t ever feel guilty about not spending ‘enough’ time with those you love, if the time you are spending away from them is for their benefit. But, when you do spend the time, really spend the time.

– Seeing other cultures and spending time around the world with people from other cultures is the best D&I training you’ll ever receive. Just go. The world continues to shrink. People will help you. I’ve made friends all over the world and it’s enriched my life beyond anything I could ever imagine.

– Hater’s gonna hate.

Thanks for letting me indulge myself today. I started blogging because I found it to be therapy. I write what I’m thinking. Sometimes you like it, sometimes you hate it, sometimes you forget about it the moment it’s read. Me too.

The HR Famous podcast – E2 is Live! Workplace Dating & Hookups!

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NOTE FROM Tim: Here’s a new podcast from me, Kris Dunn, and Jessica Lee called “The HR Famous Podcast”. Take a listen and we’ll be back on a weekly basis. See the player below (email subscribers click through if you don’t see it), and please hit iTunes, Spotify and Google Play to subscribe so you get notified whenever there’s a new show on your phone. Click here for Episode 1, where we talk about the title of the show and share a bunch of stories about being less than famous.

In Episode 2 of The HR Famous Podcast, long-time HR leaders (and friends) Jessica Lee, Tim Sackett and Kris Dunn get together to discuss Workplace McLovin – relationships, dating and hookups that occur inside your company between employees. The HR Famous team tells stories and talks about the role of HR and whether there is a need for deep policies to protect your company when people fall in love, as well as when Outlook Exchange and a digital copier are involved. Email subscribers click through if you don’t see the player below or click here for a direct link or hit iTunes, Spotify and Google Play.


Show Highlights:

3:00 – The gang discuses KD’s choice of hotels, whether you can say “white” these days and if white is a primary color.

4:00 – JLee lays down the science behind how long you can say “Happy New Year” and Tim and KD turn it into a manager access issue and a discussion of the Chinese New Year.

5:50 – KD kicks off the topic of C-level McLovin and dating in the workplace with a review of the McDonalds CEO and the Alphabet/Google Legal Counsel going down for relationships at work.

8:40 – Tim and JLee discuss whether companies and the HR leaders need to be the relationship police, including risk management, positional power and more.

13:20 – The gang gathers around the campfire and listens to the gripping story of young KD’s first exposure to C-Level McLovin(s) and KD advocates for relationship policies being like a DUI Checkpoint. Tim and JLee weigh in with policy impact, including level considerations, reporting relationships, asking for waivers and potentially asking people to leave the company or change jobs as a result of falling in love.

31:00 – Tim tells his story from Applebees, which is epic and should not be missed, including perceived benefits that don’t have a Summary Plan Description or an Explanation of Benefits.

34:00 – KD breaks down another McLovin C-Level story that felt like the Matrix and tells the gang why all McLovin sightings seem to happen around elevators.

Subscribe today at iTunes, Spotify and Google Play.

Transform Recruitment Marketing Conference – June in Boston!

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June 2-4, 2020 the Transform Recruitment Marketing conference will be back in Boston, and I will again be the Emcee for this event! You can use the code “TIMROCKS” for a 10% discount to the conference!

I’ve been a part of Transform from the beginning, I believe this is the fifth Transform. All I know is we started on the Recruitment Marketing bandwagon super early! In those early days, it was all about branding and CRM technology. Since then, we’ve seen the growth of an entire Talent Attraction industry, that includes programmatic job advertising, hyper-personalization for candidates, the rise of video, the evolution of content marketing in candidate attraction and nurturing, and so many other marketing concepts that have found their way into recruiting!

The reality is we went from Employment Branding to Recruitment Marketing in a blink of an eye, and it just keeps growing. Most Fortune 500 organizations now either have a team of Recruitment Marketing pros on staff or use an outside vendor to help them support their recruitment marketing efforts.

Why I love Transform Recruitment Marketing Conference? 

  • It’s not just high-level strategy, but in the weeds, tactics being taught by other corporate recruitment marketing pros who are doing what you’re trying to do!
  • Keynotes that are different. We’re used to a certain type of keynote at HR and Recruiting conferences. Transform always brings in folks I have never heard of that blow me away. In fact, we had Mel Robbins before Mel Robbins was Mel Robbins! Hell, I take credit for Mel Robbins becoming Mel Robbins! (not really, but a little!)
  • We’ve developed a community of corporate Recruitment Marketing Pros and Leaders. This alone, the ability to build your network of like-minded folks, is worth the price of admission!
  • No pitches, just ideas. The conference was built around this idea of how do we raise the game of recruitment marketing, regardless of your tech stack. If we all get smarter, the decision of tech to use will play itself out in the appropriate way.

So, put it on your calendar now and sign up to send your recruitment marketing pro and/or team to Transform!

Click Here to Register and See More Information! 

Navarro Cheer Coach, @MonicaAldama, is the Greatest Leader of our Time!

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If you haven’t watched the series, Cheer, on Netflix yet, you must! It’s great.

Honestly, I wasn’t thrilled to watch a series about cheerleading. Just not something I thought I would be interested in, but it’s so much more than a show about cheerleading. It’s about getting to great performance, about inclusion, about leadership, and about how a great leader with a vision and no-how can take any organization to the next level.

For those who haven’t seen Cheer, I’ll give you the quick rundown. Navarro College is a two-year community college in the middle of nowhere Texas, that has a multi-time national championship cheer team. It’s led by hometown coach, Monica Aldama, who just happens to have a degree in Finance from the Univ. of Texas, Austin, and her MBA, but decided to come back to sleepy Corsicana, TX to get married and raise her family.

She was a cheerleader in high school and decided to take a job as cheer coach at the local college, and her type-A personality, world-class attention to detail, superior drive, business knowledge, lead her to become the greatest cheer coach in the country at any level, where kids from all over the US are looking to come to Navarro College if you want to reach the highest level of cheer.

Why is Monica Aldama the Greatest Leader of our Time? 

– She’s performance-driven at a world-class level. She seeks perfection and understands to get there she has to rely on 20-ish 18 to 21-year-olds who have to be pushed to levels they can’t even imagine.

– She’s a relationship-based leader. To get the highest performance out of someone as a leader, that person must believe and trust 100% that you have their best interest in mind. Their future. That you are helping them become the best version of themselves and nothing else.

– She is a data-driven leader. Early on Monica found out her background in finance and numbers would serve her well in how these competitions were scored and understood beyond her peers what it would really take to win at the highest level.

– Practice, practice, practice. Another thing that most people don’t understand about the show is Navarro Collge, being a two-year college isn’t under NCAA rules for practice time, scholarships, etc. There is an NJCAA governing body, but having a kid who played two years of JUCO baseball, I can tell you there are no real rules! So, Monica being at a two-year school gives her a major advantage over traditional four-year schools bound by NCAA practic rules. Is that fair? Is that too much on these kids? If you want to be the best, and this coach and these kids do, you don’t care. They don’t care!

– Attention to detail is off the charts! The way you practice. The way you look. The way to represent the team and the community. Every single step, movement, she is watching. I find that the greatest leaders I work with have extremely high attention to detail. They see things others don’t, all the time, and then make sure those things are changed for the better.

– She embraces diversity and inclusion. Monica was raised and lives in a very conservative area. Many of her athletes, especially on the male side, are gay. Many are people of color. Many come from disadvantage homelives. She embraces it all and helps these kids grow into adults.

– She has high rational compassion. What’s that? She cares about everyone on her team as an individual, but she isn’t willing to hurt the overall team, for the sake of one individual. You are injured. You were on the performing team. If we keep you, you might not perform to the level we need to win. You are now off the performing team, and we’ve replaced you with an alternate. The team needs this, and you need to support it, as you are still a part of this team, and you having drama right now hurts our team.

Here’s what I know. You could put Monica into the CEO role of any Fortune 500 company, today, and she would succeed. She has all of the DNA needed to be great at leading people, leading an organization, reaching extremely high performance.

Set a goal. Have the vision. Do the work. Hold people accountable. Care for each other.

Don’t @ me trolls! Monica Aldama is the greatest leader of our generation and you can’t convince me otherwise!

The 3 Rules for Kissing Your Boss on Valentine’s Day!

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May 20, 2013, I published a silly little post on my blog called “The Rules About Hugging at Work”. The post might have taken me twenty minutes to write. It was just an idea I got, like thousands of others, I thought it was funny, so I wrote about it. To date, it’s been read over 1 Million times. Huff Post picked it up, it went viral on LinkedIn (I got over 1300 comments), I’ve been interviewed and called, “The World’s Foremost Expert on Workplace Hugging”.

Twenty minutes of writing, a throwaway idea.

Months later I posted the exact same post on LinkedIn’s publishing platform. This was before everyone could publish (remember that), you had to be invited. I got a call from the LinkedIn chief editor offering me access. I didn’t know if it was really anything so I just threw up old posts I had already written but added a few new pieces.

On the Hugging post, I added at the bottom my next post would be: The 3 Rules About Kissing Your Boss! as a joke. I never wrote it. Until five years later I got a message last week from someone who found the hugging post for the first time asking how they could find the kissing post! I didn’t even know what they were talking about!

So, here’s the kissing post! 

It would be easy to dismiss the notion of kissing your boss as something that would never happen. When I say ‘never’ I mean never. I mean honestly do any of us ever feel it would be appropriate to kiss your boss!?

This one is hard for me. I come from a family of huggers and kissers! My father is 73 and he still kisses me on the lips when I greet him or say goodbye. Some folks would find that super weird. Different cultures do different things.

My son went overseas visiting friends in Belgium and it was quite common for new people he met to give him that traditional kiss on the cheek, but he said those same people would not give you a hug or a handshake. This kiss on the cheek greeting is very common in many parts of the world (I wonder if this is changing with Coronavirus!?!).

In America, you would probably get punched in the face if you tried kissing someone on the cheek you were meeting for the first time! I mean, look, if I don’t know you, I certainly don’t want your germs all over my face! Most Europeans I meet for business purposes in the states who come here often have gotten used to handshakes, rarely do I see one of them do the cheek kiss greeting.

All of this is way different, though, then kissing your boss! Kissing your boss would have to be a special circumstance or special occasion. I’m guessing if you’re kissing your boss one of a few things probably hasn’t happened in that relationship. You’ve probably become very good friends, some once in a lifetime event is happening, or you’ve become romantically involved, in which case, not really your boss any longer!

So, if we can see a time in which you might kiss your boss, the great HR pro in me says we better put some pen to policy and make some rules! Here are my three rules for kissing your boss:

1. No kissing on the lips. Kissing on the lips is a slippery slope you can’t put back in the bag! Wants that happens you might as well just get undressed, stuff just got real! We’re going to assume this kiss is not romantic in nature, completely as professional as kissing your boss can be professional!

2. Do not leave moisture on your boss’s cheek. Okay, somehow we got down this rabbit hole to a point where I’m kissing my boss on his or her cheek, let’s not make this super awkward by leaving a nice big wet spot on the side of their face. If you’re so excited to be kissing your boss’s cheek that you leave it wet, you should be checked into a mental ward.

3. Do not have bad breath. First impressions are critical and even though your boss knows you, your boss doesn’t know the kissing you. Do not go in for that first boss kiss with bad breath! I love Ice Breakers Mints and I have some close by almost always. Why? I can’t stand bad breath. Coffee breath is the worst and I know a lot of you are major coffee drinkers! Guess what? Diet Mt Dew breath smells like a flower garden! Think about that next time you go for a fill-up at the coffee station at work!

See? That’s how you do it. That’s how the World’s Foremost Expert in Workplace Hugging becomes the World’s Foremost Expert on Boss Kissing. You can’t be a one-trick pony in this world folks, we all need to keep striving on reinventing ourselves. Watch out this season’s conference circuit! If you see Sackett coming, I might have just raised the game!

So, hit me in the comments. What are your rules for kissing your boss!?

Your Weekly Dose of HR Tech: @Talkpush #HRTech

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This week on The Weekly Dose I revisit a recruiting technology called Talkpush that I originally took a look 5 years ago! Guess what? Quite a few things changed in five years!

Talkpush, now, is the Recruitment Automation Platform that makes hiring conversations happen faster and more naturally. Talkpush is also a tool for high volume hiring, so if you’re not hiring at least 1,000 hires per year, this is something that probably doesn’t make sense for you to have. If you’re hiring 1,000 and over, then you have to check it out!

Five years ago, Talkpush was basically a voice screening solution and a good one. Since then, Talkpush has moved with technology to include screening over messaging apps like Facebook and WhatsApp, career sites, micro-sites for hiring events, and live chat between recruiters and candidates.

Talkpush figured out early on great candidate experience and your ability to hire at volume meant you needed to automate as much of the up-front recruitment process as necessary. Candidate applies to a job or shows interest on a messaging app, and the AI-driven chat technology takes over and engages each candidate, until a point where it’s far enough down the process that a real-live recruiter needs to jump in.

What do I like about Talkpush’s technology? 

– It gives you the ability to communicate with candidates in the way they want to communicate. We all have our preferences. You might prefer someone contacts via text message, or Facebook Messanger, or a phone call, or email, or WhatsApp. No judgment, we all have our favorites, and if you’re a global organization, it changes drastically depending on what country you’re trying to hire in!

– Truly global hiring technology. Eight+ languages and variations of those languages. The majority of their mass hiring clients are actually out of the U.S. So, if you’re hiring global, they know the ins and outs of what a global workforce is demanding in terms of candidate communication.

– It’s a hybrid technology model and brings in a real-life recruiter at just the right time. So, it’s not about automating the entire journey, but putting in as much automation as possible until it’s time for a real candidate and a real recruiter/screener/hiring manager to connect. Then they make that happen in real-time, seamlessly.

– Post jobs, capture candidate video, make a phone call all from the Talkpush dashboard. In five years, they’ve turned their technology into a full end-to-end recruitment automation that hires at volume. From the first click as a candidate to the first day of hire, your hiring team can live within Talkpush.

– Their funnel analytics and data are way ahead of the competition. And with how they measure and collect data across your hiring process, their insights are substantial. Plus, I think most leaders want a component of visual data and Talkpush’s “arts and charts” are far and away the best I’ve seen in the market.

I’m a huge advocate for text messaging in recruitment. But I’m also naive to global recruiting in so many aspects. The reality is text messaging in many parts of the world, outside the US, is expensive and unreliable, as a form of candidate communication. But technology like Facebook Messanger and WhatsApp are the go-to technology in many other countries when it comes to contacting candidates.

If you are currently, or preparing, to do mass hiring in the US or globally, Talkpush is one of those technologies you really need to demo! It’s one of the most economical mass hiring solutions I’ve seen. Check them out!