Monthly Archives: May 2023

Can America still lead the world in HR?

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I got the chance to travel to Singapore recently to be the closing keynote speaker at the largest HR Technology conference in Asia, HRM Asia Tech Festival. It was an amazing event, and I got to meet so many amazing global HR professionals. But this one question stuck with me long after I got back on the plane to return to the States!

Can America still lead the world in HR?

Now, some of my global HR friends might already be questioning, “Does America really lead the world in HR?” I’m not here to say if we do or not, but when I travel globally to speak at HR and Talent conferences, I’m constantly told, “Tim, we are excited to have you speak here, but you have to understand “X Region” is five years behind America in HR and Recruiting.”

It happens every single time!

What I actually find is the top 10% of HR shops around the world are fairly equal. If your organization has a major focus on HR and Talent, you are probably closer to best in class to your peers than you think. Where the truth lies in their statement is the bottom tends to be lower or there are just so many fewer organizations working to get to world-class HR practices overall as compared to America.

When it comes to America continuing to lead, it’s a legitimate question.

Now, I know a bunch of thought leaders in HR, mostly who are American, who love to rip on how awful American companies are at HR. It must be some weird American influencer power thing to believe that foreign audiences want to hear you make fun of America. What I find is this is true in Europe. Europeans love when you make fun of America, especially when you are American! But most of the other parts of the world, especially in Asia, don’t really react well to those making fun of the West. Much of Asia actually likes the West, so they are confused to hear a speaker rip on America.

The crazy part of my Singapore trip is the only time I heard anyone say negative things about America. It was coming from American Expats who now live abroad. So, my guess is these folks just didn’t really like America to begin with.

The question of whether America can lead in HR came from a local Singapore HR leader asking an American Expat speaker after his talk, where he spent the majority of it talking down America.

To his credit, he answered it rather well:

  1. The rest of the world has all the opportunity to now lead in HR. There is nothing holding them back from a technology or knowledge perspective. The world has gotten smaller.
  2. The rest of the world, through mass media, gets to see the worst of HR in America with examples like Uber, Twitter, etc. You see all the bad stories in the media and none of the great ones.
  3. The US has some unique cultural advantages that have kept it in the lead so far, including not having traditions, a willingness to move quickly and break stuff, and a willingness to be progressive.

Most of the world, especially in Asia, is steeped in tradition and saving face. HR Leaders in America can make a big mistake, and their career can survive it. That is not the same case in all places in the world. Thus, innovation and change do not happen quickly. What is the old adage, “You never get fired for buying IBM.”

So you have HR and Talent leaders who are not rewarded for making big changes and improvements. They are rewarded for not making mistakes. This makes it very hard to become a leader in that kind of environment. To lead, you must innovate and make change. If you innovate and make change, you will make some wrong turns. Wrong turns are career killers in other parts of the world.

America will lead in HR.

America will lead in HR for these simple facts. Much of the most innovative HR technology is still developed in America. Innovation in any function, including in HR, happens on the fringes. America has an amazing startup culture that pushes the boundaries and norms of what we should expect organizations to do. This is more conducive to developing leading HR practices and innovations.

It doesn’t mean that other regions around the world can’t create this, they are just pushing uphill on many fronts, and many of those are cultural, which are very hard to change. What I do think we’ll see are global HR and Talent teams who will work across regions to try and test things on a much more global front to see global HR change. It doesn’t have to be us vs. them. It can be all by working together.

One of my big takeaways from traveling around the world and speaking is every employer, and most countries face the exact same issues. How we go about solving them has been very different to this point, but that doesn’t mean it has to be as we move forward in the future.

Skills matter. Experience matters. Performance matters.

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Skills, skills, skills, skills…

If you’ve been around HR tech for two minutes in the last five years, “skills” is basically all you’ve heard. Well, okay, “skills” and “AI.” The HR Tech community is jamming skills down your throat like a new pharmaceutical drug that cures narcissism.

Why do we feel “skills” are so important?

  1. Hiring by skill is thought to eliminate bias. It’s not about relationships, or what school you went to, or that you went to school at all, or what color your skin is. If you have the skill to do the job, you should be hired to do the job.
  2. As a concept in organizations, skills seem to connect a lot of dots. We can measure skills and make a giant inventory of all the skills we have, and our all-knowing executive team can tell what skills we need in the future, and we can build those skills to be ready.

In theory, hiring and promoting people based on skill makes a lot of sense. In reality, it’s super hard to pull off. It’s difficult to truly assess someone’s skill in most areas. We just don’t have enough black-and-white skills measures that truly differentiate nor do we have the ability to build all the skills we believe we need.

Does “experience” matter?

The folks on the skills side of the fence want you to believe experience is an outdated concept being sold to you by “the man.” Or, more specifically, by men who have traditionally controlled the world in so many ways. Some of that is also true. But that doesn’t mean that experience doesn’t matter. It does.

You are about to go to prison for a crime you didn’t commit. You can choose between two lawyers. Both passed the bar to demonstrate their “skill” as an attorney. For one, this will be their first case. For the other, it will be their 2,000th case. Who will you choose? You are about to go into a life-saving brain surgery. You have two surgeons to choose from. Both of whom passed their boards at the highest level. One has performed over 1,000 of this specific operation. One has done 50. Which one will you choose?

There is a piece of this skills revolution that also is veiled in ageism. One of the reasons “skills” has risen is that young people are sick of old people getting hired and promoted over them. Old people who might not have the same skill level, but definitely have more experience. We can’t just say stop hiring them because they’re old, but we can say stop hiring them because I have higher “skill.” So, if it’s only about skill, we eliminate the ageism bias.

Your experience actually does matter.

Wait, what about performance?

Here’s where I get a bad feeling in my stomach around “skills.” It’s not just that a person has a certain skill, but how they perform in that skill. The reason we say “experience” doesn’t matter because there are dozens of academic studies that have shown that when we measure new hires and we take a look at their resumes and their previous job experience, there is very little correlation between where they worked previously and the job they had, to success in the new job and company.

That isn’t because experience doesn’t matter. It’s because high-performing experience matters!

Therein lies our problem. We can’t measure the performance of someone’s past job.

Let’s get back to our lawyer and doctor examples. What if I now told you that our lawyer, who has tried over 2,000 cases, actually lost every case? You would obviously try the inexperienced lawyer! Same with our doctor. The doctor who had 1,000 brain surgeries under their belt has a success rate of 10%. But our 50 case doctor has a success rate of 90%!

But wait, what if I tell you the “experienced” doctor only takes on the most difficult last-chance cases? And the less experienced doctor is given the “easy” cases where the vast majority of patients are thought to recover. Does that make a difference? You see how complicated “experience” as a factor can be.

Performance matters a great deal!

If you are looking to hire the best talent, it’s not only about skill. It’s about choosing individuals who have the skill to do that job at a baseline, then looking at their experience and their performance, and probably their intrinsic motivation. This is why a job sample is the number one predictor of a new hire performing well on the job. If they can actually do the job, successfully, then it stands to show they will probably be successful when we hire them. Although, even that isn’t guaranteed. We then add in factors like culture, leadership, peer support, etc.

It turns out hiring is really hard.

So, why is everyone saying the future of talent is skills?

I believe it’s because this is something we can control. It’s tangible and feels like something that can work. I can try and measure for skill. I can assess and build for skill. It seems obtainable, and it seems like something better than our past hiring based on experience.

In reality, hiring and promoting should have always been about skill. And experience. And performance. I want to hire highly skilled people that have amazing experiences and have performed in their previous jobs at a very high level.

What I don’t want to do is blindly hire and promote based on someone’s ability to demonstrate they can do a bunch of random skills. A job and performing in that job is not just about doing a bunch of random skills. That simplifies what employees do down too far. People and work are much more complex than just skills.

Skills. Experience. Performance. I want to hire the complete package. Be careful selling “skills” as a strategy to your executives. Most executives have great experience and high performance, and they actually believe that matters. Because it does.

An easy way to know if a candidate is batsh*t crazy!

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Have you ever hired a batshit crazy person? Yep, we all have. Wouldn’t it have been nice to know if that person was batshit crazy before you hired them? Again, 100% yes! But it’s hard, right? Candidates lie to us. They don’t give us their true selves.

Well, this is why you read this blog, my friends. I give you all the inside, pro recruiting tips and tricks you want but never knew you needed!

Okay, here’s how this will go down.

At some point, every organization will have this in a different part of the process, you will ask some form of this question. I recommend you do it early, but some organizations actually wait to do this in the background check.

The question is this: “Have you ever gone by a different first name, and/or do people in your life call you by a different first name?” Now, I’m not looking for something like my Mom calls me “Richard,” but my friends call me “Dick.” Those are the same thing. Mike and Michael, check those are the same. Also, I’m not asking for your median name and married name. We expect that to happen. Also, I’m talking about gender changes like I grew up Bruce, but now I’m Caitlin.

I’m talking about something like I grew up “Tim,” and I was “Tim” until I turned 16, and then I decided I wanted to be called “Trevor.”

Um, what?!

No sane person, not in witness protection, randomly decides to be called a different name unless there is some batshit crazy in the mix.

God bless my sister. I love her, and her name is Michelle. One day in high school, she came home and said, “Call me Chelsea now. All my friends call me “Chelsea.” And we immediately said nope. That’s not happening. Your momma named you Michelle, and everyone is going to call you Michelle. That’s what those who love you do. They put an immediate stop to anything that looks batshit crazy. By the way, to this day, she’s Michelle.

So, it’s an easy question to ask during an interview. “So, Tim, have you ever gone by a name other than Tim? Maybe something like Mark or Ted?” That response and answer you’re looking for is someone staring back at you, perplexed. Almost now, like they think you’re batshit crazy for even asking. That is the correct response! The correct answer is not, “Oh, yeah, for like a decade, my co-workers called me “Billy”!” If that happens, you immediately end the interview.

Look, I’m just out here spitting recruiting wisdom for free.

Some of it is going to hit home, some of it you’ll pass on. Pass on this gem at your own peril!

2023 @LinkedIn Research Proves Compensation is Number 1 Priority for Employees! #GlobalTalentTrends

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LinkedIn Talent Solutions flat-out gets me! They recently released their 2023 Global Talent Trends report, and you all know I’m a nerd for talent data, and this report is always impressive. I encourage you to download and check out this report (2023 LinkedIn Global Talent Trends report).

Here are my takeaways:

  • Hiring is slowing down from its historic pace over the past few years.

While slowing, it doesn’t necessarily mean it’s equal across all industries and segments. Tech hiring has taken a huge hit, but hospitality, healthcare, and education remain challenging.

  • Internal mobility is taking a foothold in the consciousness of workers. We’ve always known that changing companies and jobs is very stressful. One of the most stressful things you’ll go through in your lifetime. So, finding ways to keep your workers by allowing them to move within the company is an excellent way to increase retention and job satisfaction. Interestingly enough, LinkedIn Talent Solutions found in this most recent report that older generations are actually finding more success with internal mobility than their younger counterparts, generationally. GenX experiencing the highest internal mobility rate of all the generations. Most likely, this is because the more experience you have and the deeper your professional network, the more desired you’ll be by other functions and departments within your own company.
  • We can finally erase the decades-old quote, “People don’t leave jobs. They leave managers”! I’ve always thought that quote was B.S., but people would show “academic” research to prove it. Well, now I can prove it’s wrong with this research!

SHOW. ME. THE. MONEY!

LinkedIn actually measured 15 priorities that employees value. Where did “Management” and “Leadership” fall in those 15? 9 and 11, respectively!

Also, another huge takeaway we’ve been trying to sell as thought leadership for the last two decades is great talent wants to work with other great talent. Actually, “Talent” as a priority, meaning, it’s important to you and your career that you work with other highly talented people, actually came in at 15 out of 15! We don’t care about that at all, in comparison.

“Security” will continue to raise up the chart as the economy slows and finding and keeping a job gets harder. It’s currently seventh on the list, but it was much higher in industries like Tech, which has been hit hard by job losses.

The report is jammed packed with amazing data and insights. Go check out the full 2023 LinkedIn Global Talent Trends report.