Author Archives: Tim Sackett

You’re Banned From Changing My Mind…at Work!

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Did you see Facebook’s internal announcement to their employees about banning an employee’s ability to change the mind of a co-worker about Politics and Religion? I think I need to use these for my family get togethers!

An internal memo was leaked (God Bless internal memo links) from Facebook’s Chief Technology Officer on some new workplace rules that Facebook is putting into effect immediately on all communication channels, and they are:

  1. Don’t insult, bully, or antagonize others
  2. Don’t try to change someone’s politics or religion
  3. Don’t break our rules about harassing speech and expression

Sorry workplace trolls at Facebook, your Employee Experience just took a major blow! (BTW “Workplace Trolls” is a great podcast name)

As you can imagine I have a few thoughts on this!

My actual first reaction to this had nothing to do with “the rules”, but had everything to do with who was communicating this message! Why is this coming from the CTO and not the CEO or CHRO? Definitely different than most organizations.

This tells me one of two things: 1. The CTO made these up on his own; and/or 2. Facebook’s leadership team wanted to make this seem like it wasn’t that big of a deal, so let’s not have it come from the CEO or CHRO, which normally would handle formal employee communications like this.

This is a bit of an employee experience course correction that I think we’ll start seeing in many organizations over the next couple of years with a softer economy. In an ultra-low unemployment economy the inmates run the asylum.

As we back to a bit of normal unemployment environment, employers will focus less on becoming a playground you get paid to attend, and more of a ‘back to work’ mentality. You shouldn’t have time to berate Billy all day because he worships Pokemon. Get your a$$ back to work!

Over the past couple of years with #MeToo and Trump, our workplaces have become littered with landmines of employee strife. We want and value inclusion, and at the same time this increases the communication issues and the need for rules like Facebook are instituting.

So, what do you think? Does your workplace need to adopt rules like this?

No pay! Do you come to work?

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I’ve seen some messages on social media by folks being negative about the TSA workers they’ve run into during the government shutdown. I’m always perplexed by this because here are people who are forced to come to work, and not getting paid.

I would bet that these folks who have negative comments would almost all not even show up to their job if their boss told them, “Hey, yeah, well guess what? I need you to come to work tomorrow, but I can’t pay you.” Yeah, thanks, but no thanks, buddy!

I think there are some folks who would for a while. Healthcare workers I could see many of those folks working for free for a bit and understanding the importance. Most first responders would do this based on their oaths. But, that’s probably about it.

I traveled this past week and I went out of my way to thank every TSA employee I ran into. It completely sucks to be forced to work and not get paid, and while I can’t pay them, I can let them know that I appreciate what they are doing to help keep my life safe.

By the way, I also saw many, many people who were complete jerks to the TSA agents because the wait was too long, or they had to take their hat off, or all kinds of stupid stuff. Turns out, some people are just jerks. Look, jerks, these people are working for free, have some compassion!

Our government, all of them, fail these people in such a colossal way it makes me sick to my stomach. Employees, government, public, private, etc. are not pawns in a game. These are real people and our elected officials could care less.

What I think is most people wouldn’t come to work if they weren’t getting paid. Many of these federal government employees have been told you come to work or you get fired and you won’t be hired back. These are good jobs, hard to come by jobs, so most come to work without pay.

The question is for how long? Like, yeah, I want this job because it has good pay and benefits, but once that stops happening, I no longer want this job!

So, what do you think? How long would you come to work knowing you will not be paid?

Your Weekly Dose of HR Tech: @Xref automated reference checking

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This week on the Weekly Dose I review the automated reference checking platform Xref. Xref is a fully automated solution that turns a slow and inconsistent task into an efficient and valuable stage of the recruitment journey.

Answer the following question: Does your organization check references?

SHRM’s recent survey showed that 89% of organizations still check references of candidates before offer of employment. The majority of those are still manually doing reference checks.

Xref is a technology platform that gets 98% of your candidate’s references with just a fraction of the current work you’re doing in your hire process. The Xref process is a simple message sent directly to your candidates and it puts the candidate in control of obtaining those references by inputting the references and having a message come directly from the candidate to their professional references.

Answer me one more question: When was the last time you didn’t hire a candidate based on a bad reference?

What I find is most organizations struggle to answer that question because it happens so infrequently. What I love about automated references is the normal rate of false offers is 8-14%. This happens because when a reference gets the chance to answer questions on the platform they are more open to give information than during a live conversation.

What I like about Xref:

  • Tailored questions based on role that are easy to change and customize, at the same time can be used right out of the box.
  • A dashboard shows you every candidate and exactly where they are in the process in great detail from where the candidate is in gaining these references, but also where the references are in responding.
  • Mobile optimized. 55-60% of references are actually completed on a mobile device. This is how all of us would probably do this in our busy lives.
  • Candidates also have a view to see where their own references are in the process, so they can nudge the folks who are dragging their feet.
  • Nurturing effect of sending polite reminders to move the process along quickly. Most references are completed within 24 hours!
  • Shows how a reference assessed based on others in the same level of position within your own environment.

I’m a giant fan of this technology as I see so much capacity being lost in organizations that are still manually checking references and getting really nothing to show for it in terms of hiring better talent. Well worth a demo, automated reference checking technology is one of the highest ROIs you’ll get in the TA technology space.

The Weekly Dose – is a weekly series here at The Project to educate and inform everyone who stops by on a daily/weekly basis on some great recruiting and sourcing technologies that are on the market.  None of the companies who I highlight are paying me for this promotion.  There are so many really cool things going on in the tech space and I wanted to educate myself and share what I find.  If you want to be on The Weekly Dose – just send me a note – timsackett@comcast.net

Want help with your HR & TA Tech company – send me a message about my HR Tech Advisory Board experience.

The Talent Fix Book Club Starts this Week!#RecruiterDevelopment

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If you are a regular reader of this blog than you clearly know I wrote a book, The Talent Fix, that was launched in April 2018. I have been overwhelmed by the awesome response and I would like to give back to the community that has given me so much. 

Beginning January 23, 2019, I’ll hold a monthly book club webinar, for free, where I’ll be going over each chapter of the book in detail, from a discussion point of view. Each webinar is scheduled for one hour, it might be a bit less or a bit more depending on discussion and questions. 

Each month, I’ll pull out some of the highlights and strategies, discuss them in more detail, open up the discussion to Q&A from the book club attendees, and probably bring on some micro-celebrity Recruiting guests as well to talk shop and continue to challenge the way we think about Talent Acquisition! 

We’ll go one chapter at a time, and while they might be too slow for some, most people don’t even read one book a year, so we’ll go slow and make sure we have truly dynamic discussions each week! 

The schedule will breakdown like so: 

  • January 23, 2019 – Introduction to the Book Club, we’ll breakdown Kris Dunn’s Foreword and I’ll tell you the “KD” story, plus a bonus topic of what recruiting tools you need to look at in 2019! 
  • February – Chapter 1 – Highlights, discussion, and live Q&A
  • March – Chapter 2 – Highlights, discussion, and live Q&A
  • April – Chapter 3 – Highlights, discussion, and live Q&A
  • May – Chapter 4 – Highlights, discussion, and live Q&A
  • June – Chapter 5 – Highlights, discussion, and live Q&A
  • July – Chapter 6 – Highlights, discussion, and live Q&A
  • August – Chapter 7 – Highlights, discussion, and live Q&A
  • September – Chapter 8 – Highlights, discussion, and live Q&A
  • October – Chapter 9 – Highlights, discussion, and live Q&A
  • November – A look forward to preparing for 2020, looking at our next book club read, and a mini-demo of the hottest recruiting tool on the market I found in 2019! 

Also, remember, I’ll bring in several surprise guests that are genius level TA leaders, sourcers, and tech experts as well! 

Register for the free Talent Fix Monthly Book Club! 

This will be the easiest Team Development you’ll do all year! I’ve already had multiple teams contact me about signing up! One TA leader went out and bought each member of his team the book so they could get started and be ready for January 23rd! 

Buy The Talent Fix on Amazon or SHRM Members can buy it directly from the SHRM bookstore at a discount with your SHRM membership! 

I can’t wait to talk to everyone on January 23rd! If you have any questions, just send me an email at sackett.tim@hru-tech.com! 

10 Things That Scare Me

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Human CRM

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Guerilla Recruiting Marketing

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

 

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What I like about Content:

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

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

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

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

The Weekly Dose – is a weekly series here at The Project to educate and inform everyone who stops by on a daily/weekly basis on some great recruiting and sourcing technologies that are on the market.  None of the companies who I highlight are paying me for this promotion.  There are so many really cool things going on in the tech space and I wanted to educate myself and share what I find.  If you want to be on The Weekly Dose – just send me a note – timsackett@comcast.net

Want help with your HR & TA Tech company – send me a message about my HR Tech Advisory Board experience.

Questions I’m asking myself in 2019!

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

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

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

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

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

Here are some of these questions:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Come on, that’s not happening!

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

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

It’s Time.

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

But of course Paid Time is always appreciated.

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

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

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

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

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

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