The HR Famous Podcast is back with another episode this week with my special guest and friend, Madeline Laurano, from Aptitude Research! We are talking about the big AI announcements coming out from Workday, Oracle, SmartRecruiters, and more. Agentic AI (the agents) is going to have a significant impact on HR tech, and Workday’s creation of an AI agent of record is huge news!

Check it out:

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I posted a video on LinkedIn last week and it kind of blew up! The video is actually an audio recording of Jp Morgan Chase’s CEO Jamie Dimon sharing some of his feelings about the current state of work and, more specifically, Remote Work!

Check it out:

Is he wrong? Let’s break it down:

• Video meetings vs. in-person – has opened up this behind-the-meeting conversation path – where during the meeting, many people are having conversations with others at the same meeting – not paying attention, making comments, etc., that wouldn’t happen in an in-person meeting. So, he’s not lying.

• Let’s say the meeting is important – being on your laptop and/or phone, isn’t helpful. BUT TIM, WE’RE JUST TAKING NOTES! No, you’re not. You’re multi-tasking, and it can be rude and distractful. If the meeting isn’t valuable, don’t have it! But we’ve made a determination that no meeting is valuable, so I’m going to do what “I” think is valuable at this meeting.

• Work from home Friday. This was what a lot of people on LinkedIn focused on. Work from Home (WFH) is a problem for most people. There is a small percentage of the population that actually works better at home. HR pros and leaders who want to work at home keep telling executives that it’s more productive when the business measures show it’s not for most people, especially younger, inexperienced workers. So, now HR is losing credibility.

• Younger workers are being damaged by this and being left behind. This is 100% accurate and true! We are doing a disservice to the careers and social constructs of younger workers. We are creating a generation of people who believe responding to email is actually working.

• Every area should be trying to be more efficient. Most “leaders” in today’s world don’t think this way. They actually think the opposite. If you had 100 people under you, you don’t want less, you want more! That makes you more important. It’s better to have 100 direct reports than 90. In a world of AI, this mentality is broken.

• You have a choice; you don’t have to work at his company. This is actually brilliant recruiting. Amazon does something similar. They want you to self-select out. We are going to be very successful, but we are going to have expectations. If you don’t like our expectations, please don’t work here!

• We didn’t build a great company by doing the “same semi-diseased shit” as everyone else! That phrase is amazing and accurate. If you’re following the crowd, you’re not going to be successful.

For the most part, people hated this video/audio of Dimon. I get it. It’s abrasive. It sounds like an old guy executive complaining that back in his day…but when you break down each part, he’s not wrong.

HR has a problem on its hands, and for the most part, it is of their creation.

We have to change the narrative very quickly for our executives and our culture. No longer is it about WFH. It’s now about WFWYAMMP (Work from where you are measurably most productive)! HR is going to help you be the most successful professional you can be, by helping you find where you are measurably most productive. Not where you “feel” most productive, but where we actually see the data shows us where you work best!

There’s a lot of bad career advice out there coming from basically poor performers who mostly got fired and decided to open up a TikTok and start giving out free career advice. It’s easy to tell these folks; just quickly pull up their LinkedIn, and you’ll notice a common thread; they haven’t really worked that long to begin with, so slow your roll on your career advice. Also, most of them struggled to work at any one company for more than a year or two. They’ll say this is just modern work, but in reality, it takes that long for most companies to weed out poor performers.

I’m not saying all of their advice is terrible. A lot of it is fine. If you want “fine,” cool, enjoy fine.

You might be thinking, but Tim, you learn so much by failing!

No, you don’t. You learn how to fail more. And that doesn’t make you successful. Don’t buy into the hustle hype about failure. The best performers in every aspect of life didn’t fail more; they succeeded more. They found ways, even super small ways, to succeed. Which led to higher confidence, skill, etc., and allowed them to keep succeeding.

I found this the other day, and I think it’s amazing advice:

The most successful workers of the future will be more like the above.

More creative. More empathetic. More execution. More f*cking everything.

Tim Sackett’s Good Career Advice

• Spend part of every week doing professional networking while you’re working. 90% of people only network when they are looking for a job, and it feels like it.

• Tell as many people as you can that you want the job. Too many people hide the fact that they’re looking for or needing a job. “I don’t want people to know I’m out of work; it’s embarrassing.” Yeah, you need to get over that sh*t. That’s feelings. That’s not reality.

• Show up earlier than most and stay later than most. If you have to pick one, stay later than most. Executives notice who’s working “extra.” Meaning, who’s working later.

• Don’t hang with employees who complain. They aren’t smarter or better than other employees; they’re just complaining. Even if you also want to complain, don’t. Complainers don’t have great promotion records in their careers.

• Be as positive as you can, as much as you can. Everyone likes to be around positive people. People who like their life. Like their work. Be positive to others. Challenge yourself to send a note professionally within your company saying something positive to a co-worker, peer, even an executive, at least once per week.

“You like that!” – Kirk Cousins

The best career advice anyone can give you sounds like something your Dad/Mom will say to you (assuming your Dad/Mom was a good, hard-working Dad/Mom kind of person). Show up, all the time, work hard, be nice, be helpful, make yourself as valuable as you can in any position you work.

This isn’t rocket science. Just do your f*cking job.

This past weekend, I was scrolling when I ran into a video of Counting Crows lead singer, Adam Duritz, talking about how Counting Crows got its name. Look them up, kids; their album August and Everything After is fantastic. I’ve been lucky enough to see them live twice.

Here’s the story.

Duritz had put this band together, and he was trying to figure out a band name. Coming up with a name for anything sucks. It seems like every single name you come up with is worse than the last name idea. So, he’s sitting in his living room, watching a movie, and brainstorming names.

In the movie, he’s watching two characters standing outside on a hill, and they are watching these birds fly around, and one character mentions something about “Counting Crows”. He’s like, that’s the name and throws away the paper with all the other names.

Here’s the thing, though.

He knows this name sucks. All the names suck until you make them not suck by being a great band!

He gives the example of the Beatles. It’s cheesy! Using “Beat” as a play on the word beetles (the bug). It’s awful! Until it’s amazing.

I talk with at least 100 new HR Tech startups on an annual basis. I talk with current HR tech companies who have been in business for years. Probably half the time, someone in marketing wants to change the name. “Tim, Google, as a name sucks!”

Yeah, no one knows what the hell that is. Also, no one knows what the hell you do! So, does it really matter what the name is? You being great has very little to do with your name. It has everything to do with you being great or your product or service being great. Almost every name you’ll pick will suck.

Until it doesn’t.

Okay, I’m bringing back the HR Famous podcast, but instead of having the OG crew of Kris Dunn, Jessica Lee, and Madeline Laurano, you’ll have me and all-star guest appearances by my friends, and the King of GenZ, Cameron, the Producer Sackett!

Life happens. The OG crew got too busy, but I wanted to return to it! Here’s how I’m thinking about Round 2. I might do some episodes where it’s just me ranting about sh*t (I really want to see if anyone wants to listen to just me for 30 straight minutes!). There will be some episodes where it’s just Cam and me because I don’t think GenZ is heard from enough in HR specifically. Let’s be honest. They are overheard everywhere else! LOL And, I want to introduce you to my friends.

Don’t ask to be a guest – I’m not interested in randoms. I want to talk to my friends.

That’s what I did in this first episode. Jon Stross, the CEO and co-founder of Greenhouse, has known each other for the better part of a decade, and I find Jon to be one of the most thoughtful people in talent acquisition. He listens and tries to understand the plight of the recruiter and the candidate, and I think you’ll hear that in this episode.

Enjoy!

Oh! Like and Subscribe!

The kids told me I have to say this…

It’s that time of year when most of us in talent acquisition just got that fresh new budget for the year. While most of it will be earmarked for stuff we already have, it’s always exciting to think about some new things we can bring on board — and there might even be some things you use it for that you haven’t even thought about yet. 

So how do we make sure we’re spending that money in the right way? Well, this caught my eye: some fascinating research from Aptitude Research looking specifically at corporate talent acquisition budgets.

The findings were both somewhat shocking and somewhat expected to me. One of the first things that hit me when looking at this research report was the reality that most TA leaders don’t have long-range visibility into our budgets. Almost all of us have a one-year view or less. It’s very rare for a TA leader to have visibility beyond a year (as corporate budgets tend to go), yet we are constantly told to think long-term about our talent strategies.

The problem here is that if you have workforce plans and strategies that your executives are building that are a few years down the road, but no budget, how exactly do you accurately prepare for that? Well, you better be sitting down with your CFO and their team to develop, at least, cursory budgets that are beyond a year in length, especially if you foresee growth or major technology changes happening (hello, AI!).

Here’s another big one from the report: “Currently 64% of TA leaders fear they will face budget cuts this year, and 1-in-3 believe their existing budget is being wasted.” 

Let’s start with our budgets getting cut each year. Get ready for an unpopular opinion! If you don’t have major change or growth happening, then some combination of these three things is happening: you’re 1.) optimizing your processes, 2.) upgrading your team. and 3.) utilizing your current technology to its fullest. In this case … your TA budget should be cut — that’s just how leadership works. In your role, you should be expected by your organization to gain efficiency, increase productivity, and reduce costs year over year.

On the other side, if 33% believe their TA budget is being wasted, this is a real problem. It’s not exactly a “you problem”, but it’s also kind of a “you problem”. Now, we all get saddled with bad contracts that we need to work our way out of as we take on new TA leader roles, or maybe it was our own doing, and we have to live with it before we can make it better. So, some waste is understood in the short term. My hope for the third of leaders who felt this way is that they’re doing everything they can to tackle that waste.

Okay, it’s been a while. We had the holidays, and then I went on my annual Caribbean get-out-of-Michigan trip – but I’m back!

When I came back, I’m immediately hit with the “Ghost Jobs” “Fake Jobs’ thing all over the media, and you guys know I was going to lose my mind! So, KD and I jumped on a pod to discuss.

Enjoy!

BTW – Here’s some early returns on an informal survey I did on LinkedIn:

This actually aligns with the WSJ article. So, what do I have to say about this?

Nope. It’s still a fake concept. We’re just really bad at communicating with candidates, so it’s easy for candidates to believe when they don’t hear anything back, it must be fake!

Also, I did have one brave soul message me privately with a link to show me a fake job! It was a startup technology company that was going through layoffs, but they didn’t want the “street” to think they were doing poorly. But they are, and this friend of the blog said they were 100% not filling these jobs. So, for real, fake jobs do exist, but it’s rare.

I was talking with an HR Leader who recently left their position. It’s a tale as old as time; they came in to make the massive transformation of the HR function. They were surrounded by a team that had been in place for decades. A team of professional survivors, I call them. They had been through other HR leaders, and they went through my friend.

What is a Professional Survivor?

First, let me try to define it: “An employee who does slightly above the minimum based on what the current leader desires, but they are more intuned with what the organizational politics prefers.”

Traits of a Professional Survivor:

• Friendly with the current leader and can acknowledge the failures of the past leader without taking responsibility for those failures. (I was doing what I was told and tried to advise them we should be doing what you want us to do now.)

• They are usually fairly well-connected with the old guard within the organization. Professional survivors know how to stick together.

• They never rock the boat. Even when they are demanded to rock the boat by their current leader.

• They are experts at knowing when to push for promotion and pay increases and when not to.

• They are often well-liked, good, positive energy people, so they are not viewed as a problem; they are viewed as just good employees; we wish we had more of them. They know how to “go with the flow.”

I’m not here to bash professional survivors. We see them in every single organization, and they might be the glue that keeps organizations going through major leadership shifts and changes. When we hire new leaders to come in and make change, it’s very common for these executive leaders to bring in their own next-level leaders directly under them, but rarely do you see entire teams overturn. Professional survivors always remain.

Many of us grew up with parents and grandparents who were professional survivors. For those who are type-A it might have made you mad that you were raised by a professional survivor. “How did you just stay in that position your entire career!? Working for the same company for 40 years!?” We struggle to understand that mentality. For the non-type A personalities, we struggle to understand how someone can be so reckless with their career.

Professional survivors want to see the organization succeed. I mean, the majority do. There are always bad folks in every organization. What they don’t want is for something to disturb their status quo in life, which sometimes makes it feel like they don’t honestly want to see success, as much as a new leader might believe.

The key to any new leader in an organization is understanding who are the professional survivors on my team. How do I get these people to be on my side and want to help me, help the organization, and ultimately help them maintain their status? Professional survivors can be amazing advocates to have as a leaders. They know the norms. They know the right people. And they know how to survive!

I was going through my email recently, and I saw some data pulled from Greenhouse showing that the number of applications has basically doubled per job opening in the past year. At first glance, you would believe, “Oh, the economy isn’t doing great; that’s probably the reason.” But in reality, unemployment is still relatively low. So, it is a bit harder to find a job, but historically, there has been pretty low unemployment.

My next feeling is that AI and candidates’ ability to use AI to apply for jobs are more likely the culprits and the Greenhouse team confirmed that. They are seeing candidates apply to many jobs within seconds, which isn’t humanly possible. Also, candidates are using AI tools to match their resumes to the job description, so our matching technology is also struggling to differentiate candidates.

All of this leads me to one simple conclusion.

If AI writes resumes for our jobs and matches jobs to our candidates, we are going to end up with way more candidates who look amazing but are most likely not that amazing. The only way we’ll find this out is to do an amazing job interviewing!

Guess what?!

Most of us SUCK at interviewing! I mean, not you/us/I; we are recruiting professionals, and we are amazing at interviewing! Right?! Right? Right…

It’s our hiring managers who will need the most help.

This is why I believe Interview Intelligence Technology, like Pillar (FYI—I’m an advisor and investor in Pillar—I think they’re amazing technology) and BrightHire, will be the type of HR Technology that takes off in 2025 and 2026. Right now, about 10% of organizations are using AI-built interview technology, but we’ll begin to see that percentage skyrocket.

Our reality in Talent Acquisition is this:

• We don’t have the capacity to interview enough candidates now, and it’s getting worse, not better.
• We don’t have the capacity, material, and skill to train our hiring managers to be better at interviewing to the level we need them.
• We need technology to help us be better at making interviews as bias-free as possible for all of those employees we have interviewing candidates.
• We need to be able to track all the data and content created in interviews.

When I start to ask myself what the future of HR and Talent Acquisition looks like in an AI-enabled world, this is one of the things I’ve come up with. We’ll be having way more face-to-face interviews than ever before, and it’s going to be more critical for us to make fewer false-positive hires, not only from a skills standpoint but also from a fit standpoint.