Monthly Archives: September 2022

Is More Efficient Recruiting Always Better? #TruthBomb

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If you’re in HR or TA and read this blog on a regular basis, you know I’m all for making our recruiting process as efficient as possible! Primarily because so many of us are woefully inefficient in using our technology and the belief that a more involved process must be a better process.

I’m a little nervous about the future and recruiting efficiency.

I think in our rush to become ever more efficient. We might miss out on some great talent. At this point in the recruiting tech stack, I can actually automate every single piece. Anything you have a person do in recruiting, I can automate. I can even ensure that candidates “don’t” get dispositioned if that’s how you like to play it! I mean, about 50% of you don’t do that now, so it seems like that is probably the way you like it.

If recruiting was only about taking a requirement, matching that requirement to available talent, screening that talent, interviewing that talent, assessing that talent, and onboarding that talent, well then, technology can do that better and more efficiently than humans at this point. But, I think recruiting has always been about getting the best talent for your organization.

Available vs. best is where the technology starts to fall down if talent truly makes a difference in your organization. Honestly, for many, “best available” will work just fine, and it has for decades. The vast majority of organizations are hiring the best available at this point.

Technology is exceptional at hiring the best available. Technology hasn’t figured out how to hire the best talent that isn’t openly available at this point. If you don’t have that talent in your database, and that talent isn’t active on LinkedIn or other job boards, technology has a really hard time getting your message in front of them.

The future of recruiting isn’t about efficiency. That is already here. The future of recruiting is about your organization’s ability to actually go out and discover who is the best talent for your organization. That person might not actually be on the “jobs internet,” or they were, but that was five years ago, so you’ll never see them as someone you want because the five years ago person isn’t the person you need today.

Efficient recruiting is great until it isn’t. If you suck at recruiting, then becoming more efficient at best practice recruiting (which recruiting technology can definitely make happen) will elevate your function for sure. But efficient recruiting isn’t world-class recruiting. It’s just efficient.

The best talent acquisition in the future will be able to go out and discover the talent that hasn’t been discovered by everyone else. We like to believe that everyone who is anyone is on LinkedIn, Indeed, or you name the site. But they are not, or they haven’t been active for a long time, so this is a hidden talent.

Too many TA shops are currently working too hard at becoming efficient and not hard enough at becoming experts of the talent for their industry and their marketplaces. You know I love technology. So, be great at technology, but don’t forget to be great at recruiting.

Does Your Average Employee Tenure Matter? (New Data!)

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I keep getting told by folks who tend to know way more than me that employees ‘today’ don’t care about staying at a company long-term. “Tim, you just don’t get it. The younger workforce just wants to spend one to three years at a job than leave for something new and different.” You’re right! I don’t get it.

BLS recently released survey data showing that the average employee tenure is sitting around 4.1 years.  This speaks to my smart friends who love to keep replacing talent. I still don’t buy this fact as meaning people don’t want long-term employment with one organization.

Here’s what I know about high-tenured individuals:

1. People who stay long-term with a company tend to make more money over their careers.

2. People who stay long-term with a company tend to reach the highest level of promotion.

3. People who tend to stay long-term with a company tend to have higher career satisfaction.

I don’t have a survey on this. I have twenty years of working in the trenches of HR and witnessing this firsthand. The new CEO hire from outside the company gets all the press, but it actually rarely happens. Most companies promote from within because they have trust in the performance of a long-term, dedicated employee over an unknown from the outside. Most organizations pick the known over the unknown.

I still believe tenure matters a great deal to the leadership of most organizations.  I believe that a younger workforce still wants to find a great company where they can build a career, but we keep telling them that is unrealistic in today’s world.

Career ADHD is something we’ve made up to help us explain to our executives why we can no longer retain our employees. Retention is hard work. It has a real, lasting impact on the health and well-being of a company. There are real academic studies that show the organizations with the highest tenure outperform those organizations with lower tenure.  (here, here, and here)

Employee tenure is important, and it matters a great deal to the success of your organization. If you’re telling yourself and your leadership that it doesn’t, that it’s just ‘kids’ today, we can’t do anything about it, you’re doing your organization a disservice. You can do something about it. Employee retention, at all levels, should be the number 1, 2, and 3 top priorities of your HR shop.

The Only Interview Questions You’ll Ever Need!

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A while back, Forbes had an article Top Executive Recruiters Agree There Are Only 3 True Job Interview Questions, that shared the “wisdom” of a handful of Executive Dinosaurs Recruiters on the only things that you should really have to ask a candidate. 

These 3 questions were:

1. Can you do the job?

2. Will you love the job?

3. Can we tolerate working with you?

Simple enough and straight to the point, and you can assume for the $75,000 you’re paying, this is probably the extent of their screening as well!

In my Recruiting/HR career, it’s probably the single most often asked question I get from other Talent Pros, Hiring Managers, and random people who know I’m in HR. “What are your best interview questions?”  Then you get to hear their questions and how Google has some really great ones, and I even heard once about a company that asked people if they were an animal which animal would they be, and if you only pick one vegetable to eat for the rest of your life, would it be carrots?  It goes on and on until you want to vomit!

The actual interview questions have very little impact on the success of the interview.  If you are interviewing anyone with some decent smarts, they are going to be able to ace your questions with little effort. What is important in interviewing is what you allow the candidate to get away with.  I find that most recruiters and hiring managers are way (I mean WAY!) too easy when it comes to questioning candidates.  See if this example sounds familiar:

Interviewer: “John, it looks like you left your last next to last company in May but didn’t start your current position until July. Can you explain that gap?”

John: “Sure, you know I was doing a great job, and I didn’t see myself moving up in that company, so I wanted to go find somewhere I could move up the ladder.”

Bam! At this point, most interviewers move on to the next questions. When clearly, John deflected, and someone needs to rip into some Gestapo interrogation tactics and find out what’s really going on. But they don’t. It would be conflict, and he might think we are rude. We’ll move on…

Follow-up questions to original answers during an interview is a skill in itself. 

The only interview questions you really ever need are the questions a Jealous Girlfriend asks when you come home on a Saturday morning around 3 am. Shoot, just hire Jealous Girlfriends as your interviewers they’ll get to the bottom of a candidate’s background! 

The hardest interview I ever had was with a woman that was eventually my boss, who was a former U.S. Army interrogator, and it was exhausting, it was painful, and it was Awesome. I actually lost my voice (after the 7th hour – True Story!).  She was the ultimate Jealous Girlfriend. In fact, I think she trains Jealous Girlfriends in her spare time. There wasn’t an answer I could give her that she was satisfied with, she just kept at it until I would slip and say something I really didn’t mean to, and once she smelled the blood, it was over. The result? She hired the best talent (excluding me) in the entire organization by far! Bad hires did not make it past her interviewing technique.

So, don’t worry about having the “best” interview questions, really. Any will do just don’t accept the first answer you get!

The BIG HR Tech Conference What I Learned Post! #hrtechconf

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The largest HR Technology Conference in the world took place a couple of weeks ago in Las Vegas, and I attended it for my 10th year in a row! At this conference, I did 26 briefings with various HR Technology companies and judged two rounds of the Pitchfest HR Tech Startup competition! I also hit 13 cocktail parties and had my shared BFF cocktail party with Madeline Laurano and Kyle Lagunas get shutdown do to overcrowding! Welcome back to Vegas, HR Tech!!!

The big question is always: What did I learn and see?

– First, it was giant! Over 600+ vendors at the expo make it the largest ever, and I can’t even describe how incredible it is!

– The vibe? High energy! Folks were excited to be back in person, and it seemed like everyone was happy with the show and the content. Josh Bersin, once again, killed his keynote to a packed audience. I’m not sure who can fill his shoes in our space! There is really no one who pulls such a crowd like Josh. I’m positioning myself as his opening act at HR Tech Fest Asia next spring! He’s that HR Famous that he needs an opening act!

– The Pitchfest winner this year was Spotlyfe, an employee engagement platform that makes sense coming out of the pandemic, with so many more employees working remotely and hybrid and more awareness around our employee’s mental health!

– Other Pitchfest startups that I really liked also: Dalia (recruiting automation), JobSync (recruiting orchestration), and SmartRank (candidate screening). That’s the hard part of Pitchfest. 33 startups, and think about ten could have won!

– The rise of Talent Orchestration! HiredScore is the originator of this new marketing speak, to give credit where credit is due, and an amazing technology to check out! What is “talent orchestration”? Basically, it’s an invisible AI-driven technology that connects all of your recruiting technology and makes it work as it should! I spoke to some enterprise-level TA leaders who had great things to say about their experience using HiredScore.

– I was a bit surprised that I didn’t really see anyone who has figured out how to leverage technology to figure out the cultural dilemma we currently have with remote, hybrid, and on-premise workers. How do you bring all three of these segments together, effectively and efficiently, under one culture? It just shows how complex of an issue this is for HR!

– The Future of HR Technology is technology you don’t see. That is amazing and what is needed, but also a problem for marketers! “Invisible Tech” is the technology you don’t see, but it does exactly what you want it to do. Most tech is sold through a demo, and you see what you’re buying. The future tech you won’t see, but it will actually work! Hard to sell six and seven-figure deals of something you don’t see! But this is exactly how our tech should work. I want to fill job “X” and all of a sudden, candidates who are interested and match the job show up in my email or on my calendar to interview for job”X.” I don’t need to see any of that. I just need it to work!

– Apparently, vendors think the future of HR Technology is “Skills”! I’m not 100% sold we are in a skills economy. We are in a definite lack of skills economy, which puts us in need to build and develop skills. The problem is, it’s really hard to do! We have historically been really bad at building talent for our organizations. Just because you can now measure and deliver skills doesn’t necessarily make us better at building talent. But, it won’t be for lack of trying from the vendor community around HR Technology!

– My friend and HR Famous fellow podcaster, Madeline Laurano, did a session on the future of talent acquisition technology and the current landscape. She did an absolute mic drop when it came to DEI recruiting technology when she put up the slide of the vendors you should look at, and it was EMPTY! Her point is most of the DEI tech on the market is vapor. You either have great recruiting technology, or you don’t. Calling yourself DEI recruiting tech, but no one uses it for recruiting tech, is very telling! By the way, she’s right. You can either help a company recruit better, or you can’t. There’s nothing special about DEI recruiting tech that shouldn’t be built into your core recruiting technology.

– The overlap of technologies is becoming a problem. Basically, we have techs building out more and more and encroaching on each other’s turf. Great, but it’s confusing the buyer in a major way. Normally, when a technology space gets like this, you would see massive consolidation. The problem is the values of tech in our space over the past few years are extremely overvalued, so we aren’t seeing this consolidation happen yet. If a recession does impact HR tech values, it’s going to get crazy with folks buying each other!

Recruiting is going to continue to be very difficult over the next few years, even with a business slowdown. There just aren’t enough humans for the jobs we have open. Automation and robotics will catch up and help, but we still have some major demographic issues we will face. This means the technology and investment will continue as well. We are being forced into a path of choosing your pain – steal talent from others, build your own talent, do a combination, or die waiting for applicants to apply to your jobs.

The ones with the best technology stacks, best measures, and best insights into their data will win. Today is not the time to sit by and watch the world pass you in HR. The technology that runs our people business is changing fast, and the top leaders in HR stay on top of this curve.

Shoutout to the LRP Team and Devon Team for all the work that goes into pulling off this event. I’m just not quite sure how they do it!

Set your calendar for 2023 – The HR Technology Conference will be back at the Mandalay Bay on October 10-13th, and god willing, I’ll be back for my 11th time!

What is your measure of success? #HRTechConf

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I’m out at the world’s largest HR Technology Conference this week, learning a ton and having some amazing conversations with peers and practitioners. One, in particular, is sticking with me about how we measure success in HR and Talent Acquisition.

With the increase in the capture of data across our technology stacks, we have more information than ever to give us insights and really give us better robust measures of success. But we tend to hang on to old measures that have little correlation to actual success.

There are a bunch of things getting in the way of us successfully determining what should be the measures of success in our functions:

  • We need to measure things that are challenging but not too challenging.
  • We tie our success metrics to annual bonus potential.
  • We don’t really know what success should look like from a benchmarking standpoint.
  • We have legacy measures that everyone is just kind of used to, and the majority of the industry still uses them. So, we should follow the pack.
  • We need measures that we can quickly manipulate of having excuses if things go sideways.

We will never admit the truth above.

From the HR Technology standpoint, your technology vendors assume you are much more sophisticated than we really are. I don’t mean that in a way that is meant to slight our expertise and knowledge. If I had HR and TA leaders rate their own skill competencies, almost always, technology would come in dead last. Most of us have this as an area of massive improvement.

Why does this matter?

Our technology will drive our success measures. Our technology vendors believe we know what success looks like. So, they build our measures, even when they know there are actually better measures of success that they can pull and put together. True, black and white measures that are not subjective and can’t be manipulated.

The first thing that would help with creating real HR measures of success would be to decouple our bonus compensation and measures. Having a person design their own measures of success and tying it to a compensation outcome is a recipe for failure and underperformance. If anything, HR and TA should have their bonus tied to business success outcomes and measure functional success separately. In the long run, a highly successful function should help the business achieve better outcomes.

This one practice frees us up to really dig into our data and our technology and redefine what success looks like around the HR umbrella of functions. To really use our data and our insights to reach new levels and better understand how we can make an impact and improve. We should feel like we can build measures of success and fail at those measures without killing our livelihood. That’s the only way we can hope for true change and worthwhile long-term measures that help us succeed.

What I’m finding is the HR technology community is ready to help us do this. We just have to ask them! We have to ask them to define our success using a data analytics approach and understand the outcomes and insights we can gain from these new measures. This also takes a big of courage because we’ll be leading not following and that’s always a vulnerable spot. But, one I think separates great leaders from average leaders.

The 5 Steps to Buying HR Technology #HRTechConf

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Hey kids! I’m out at the HR Technology Conference this week, and I have 26 meetings set up with HR Technology companies to do briefings. My buddy, KD, says I do a hundred crappy HR tech demos a year, so you don’t have to. That means this week, I’ll knock about 25% of those! It was 27, but I had one cancel because they felt like I didn’t do enough “HR” tech, and I only know “Talent Acquisition” Tech. That made me laugh! Thankfully, I’ll survive. They most likely won’t.

If you are an HR or TA Leader, the biggest budget purchase you’ll most likely ever make in your position is technology. What I find is that even though this will be one of the most important leadership decisions you’ll ever make, most leaders really have no idea how to buy the technology that runs their business. By the way, as leaders, almost know functional leader knows how to buy technology, so we aren’t alone!

Because we lack this knowledge, most of us will either let our IT department make this purchase for us (a super bad idea!) or pay a giant consulting firm a giant fee to help us make this decision (not as bad of an idea, but not great). Your IT department doesn’t know HR/TA. You do. That should be enough said about IT choosing your functional technology. The giant consulting firms are paid millions of dollars by certain vendors for “research.” So, guess who they will recommend you buy?

Since I get to do a lot of demos and briefings, I like to think I most likely have some good insight into how to do this. Wait, what the heck is a “Briefing” with an HR Technology company? Basically, “briefing” is analyst-speak for speed dating with a tech vendor. In 30 minutes, they’ll tell you why they’re awesome, what they have built recently, and what they plan on building in the future. Then I get to ask them what their favorite movie is, where they’ve traveled, etc. You know, all the normal dating questions. If they really know what they’re doing, they’ll bring diet Dew to butter me up!

How Should You Buy HR Technology?

Step 1 – You actually use your current software fully and truly figure out what it can’t do that you desperately need to do your job better. I find almost no one does this first step. They just want something better, even though when asked, they struggle to verbalize what better is.

Step 2 – Once you know what you need, you figure out who the best players are in the market who do that thing. That takes some research and a hell of a lot of demos. For anything you need, figure out at least twenty vendors selling that solution. Based on your size, that will limit your selections, but at least 5-6 will always be in play. Think about Enterprise-level HCM alone; you have: Workday, Oracle, SAP, Infor, Ceridian, ADP, UKG, and I’m sure others that I’ve missed. This is why I got to the HR Technology Conference every year, to keep up with the market. Every HR and TA leader should be doing the same.

Step 3 – Depending on your size, you’ll have to RFP. For many SMB and Mid-enterprise buys of point solutions, you’ll just be on your own trying to find a partner. In this case, step 2 becomes super important for you because I find that most HR/TA shops buy what is “Sold” to them, not what is available. Turns out, HR Tech companies are super good at marketing and advertising to potential buyers. Those companies marketing to you might be the right choice if you’re lucky, or it could be an awful choice. You need to know your options!

Step 4 – You need to talk with users of the technology you decide to buy before you buy it in three ways: 1. Users currently going through an implementation. 2. Users who are through implementation for at least one year. 3. A user who has left them within the past year. If the vendor doesn’t give you these references, walk away! You need to know how much pain you’ll be in and the realistic timing of implementation, you need to know what learnings others had during their ramp-up of the technology, and you need to know what could go very wrong as a worst-case scenario.

Step 5 – Network in the community for other users who use the same technology you want to use and find out what they are paying for that same technology. I find tech vendors charge as much as they can, and some buyers are better at negotiating than you’ll be. If you can come back with some hard numbers, the vendor will work with you. If you have no idea, you’ll pay a much higher rate than another company using the exact same solution. Also, if the big giant consulting firm that you’re paying six figures for can’t give you these introductions, you’re paying them too much!

There are obviously a bunch of steps within these steps, but this framework will give you a good start and make sure you don’t make a bad purchase. Also, remember the old technology buying saying, “no one ever got fired for buying IBM.” That was said because, at the time, IBM was the gold standard and the most expensive. So, while you might be able to find a good technology cheaper, you also have more risk of it failing.

The same goes for HR/TA buying decisions. There are over 10,000 HR Tech solutions on the market. You can find some amazing technology where the vendor will almost give it away to gain you as a client and get more users, but that comes with some big-time, unproven risk. For some, that risk will be worth it because you’ll be able to get and use the technology you could never afford without taking that risk.

The Recruiter Texting Rules!

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Here we go! Your boy is back with some more rules! You know I love me some rules! I’m high rules, and low details, which drives most people crazy!

I was having a conversation recently with some recruiters about texting candidates. For the most part, in recruiting, we’ve gotten to this point where we believe every candidate prefers texting over every other kind of communication. And, if they don’t want a text message, then they want email.

This isn’t exactly true! I did some research and surveyed over 1600 candidates we screened to find out the facts and published it – 6 Things Candidates Want You to Know – you can download it here for free. But I’m not here trying to sell you a free whitepaper!

The entire reason we believe candidates prefer text over any other form of communication is some creative marketing around text vs. email response rates in overall text vs. email communications. Now, this is where all of this falls apart. I get over 500 emails per day. I get maybe 25-50 messages. Of course, I’m going to respond more to text messages vs. email. But that doesn’t mean, as a candidate, I want text vs. email, necessarily!

This all lead me down a path where I believe we need some rules around texting as recruiters!

The Recruiter Texting Rules:

Rule No. 1 – As the first outreach to a candidate you don’t know, texting is not preferred by candidates. They don’t know you, and they certainly don’t want you jumping into their private text messages with a spammy job offer!

Rule No. 2 – No one of quality ever accepted an interview and job offer through text message without first speaking to a real human. Pick up the god damn phone. Once a candidate is all in with you, then yes, they will most likely only want texts from you.

Rule No. 3 – Give me a way to opt-out of your bad text recruiting automation hell! For one, it’s the law. But, most still make it way too difficult to stop the automated texts.

Rule No. 4 – Just because you have my number as a candidate does not give you permission to stalk me for a date. It’s super creepy!

Rule No. 5 – If we aren’t friends, don’t text me like we are friends. Avoid sarcasm. Keep it professional and short.

Rule No. 6 – If it feels like you’re sending candidates too many text messages. You are sending candidates too many text messages! Also, don’t text me a novel! Send long stuff in an email.

Rule No. 7 – If I ask you a question, answer the damn question! We are adults. You can tell me the truth I don’t need some run-around answer that doesn’t really answer my question.

Rule No. 8 – If you expect me to respond within minutes. I expect you’ll respond within minutes. Set the ground rules around expectations early.

Rule No. 9 – Never! And I mean, NEVER! Text with a green bubble! Just Kidding! 😉

Okay, peeps, what did I forget? Give me your favorite rule for texting candidates in the comments below.

You Have No F@cking Idea What You Want!

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Can I be real a second?
For just a millisecond?
Let down my guard and tell the people how I feel a second?

We have a core problem in HR and Talent Acquisition that might be impossible to solve. On one side, we have hiring managers who think they know what they want, but any Recruiter can tell you that changes by the minute and by the candidate you put in front of them. Can you spell conscious bias?

On the other hand, we have candidates who truly believe they know what they want, but until they actually get into the job and work with the team and get a feel for how the culture works, they also have no clue of what they really want. Can you spell clueless?

All the while, the reality is that none of us really know what we want.

Oh, Timmy, I do! I want more money! Ugh, this new job with more money sucks!

Oh, Timmy, I do! I want passion and purpose in my work! Ugh, this new job doesn’t pay enough for me to live!

Oh, Timmy, I do! I want a job that pays me more than I should be making, makes me feel like I’m helping out the world in some major way, allows me to come and go as I please, and never asks me to produce any evidence of any work that I ever did!

Well, yes, yes, you do know what you want!

Even then, some idiot would find fault with that job. The brand isn’t cool anymore…(and here comes the throat punch!).

Humans are awful at knowing what they want and combining what’s best for them. We tend to pick things that make us feel good at the moment, but a week later, we hate ourselves for it. This makes employee selection super difficult. You have two people meeting each other for an hour, if you’re lucky and then making a life-changing decision. Turns out, that rarely works out well for either side.

We try to throw psychology and technology into the mix, and honestly, this would work better, but we still throw a human in the loop (candidate) at some point who basically can’t be honest with themselves or the A.I., and we can’t figure out why this entire thing keeps failing.

So, what should we do?

I think we should just select employees based on a lottery. “Are you interested in this job? and Do you meet the requirements?” Two yes’s, and you get a shot at the job lottery! Let the odds forever be in your favor! Good luck.

I mean, would it really be worse than what you’re doing right now?

I don’t know.

I hope you liked the picture of my puppy.

Happy Global TA Day! I Love Recruiting!

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Today is Global TA Day, put on by the Association of Talent Acquisition Professionals (ATAP).

The other day I had someone ask me, who doesn’t really know me and definitely didn’t know what recruiting is, isn’t recruiting hard because people don’t like you?!

I wish I could tell you I’ve never heard this question before. When I first started in recruiting 25 years ago, it was a common theme in my life. “Oh, you’re a headhunter! That must suck…”

I thought it would be all different when I went into the corporate side of Talent Acquisition. Okay, now I’m in “real” recruiting. But I wasn’t. Corporate TA, which I love, wasn’t real recruiting. It was just another form of recruiting. Either way, I enjoyed that side of recruiting as well.

Why? Why do I love recruiting?

Basically, at any moment in my day, week, or month, I’m going to be a part of a life-changing event. I’ve been a part of someone getting the job they dreamed of, or getting a pay increase that will change the direction of their life, or maybe a position that will allow them to move to a location that will fulfill something they’ve been searching for.

It’s not every day. It’s not every week. Heck, sometimes it might not happen in a month. But every morning when I get up, today might be the day! There’s a chance. There’s a chance today is going to be a great day.

I love recruiting because in recruiting, we have the ability to change our company for the better every single day. Maybe today will be the day I find the designer who will design a next-gen product that is the future of our company. Today might be the day I hire a nurse who will care for my grandfather when he is sick and help them recover. Today might be the day I hire a Barista who takes to extra seconds to recognize a person who tomorrow will need to be seen to make it through another day.

Aspirational? Hell, yes. And today, I’m here for it!