Author Archives: Tim Sackett

7 Things Startups Teach Us That We All Need to Learn!

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My buddy John Hill works for Techstars as the VP of Network, go connect with him, he’s completely an awesome guy who will sit down and have a beer with you and talk about how to change the world for hours!  Last week he got to meet the latest crop of Techstar startups and came away motivated with some great learnings.

Here are John’s takeaways from the newest Techstar startups:

1. Nothing beats hustle. Nothing.

2. The world is full of good ideas, but only a few will execute on them.

3. Relational capital is vital.

4. Networks matter. Surround yourself with those who can help you.

5. There are some wicked smart people in the world.

6. To build a great company you need help with funding, talent, and connections to business/industry to scale and the understanding of how to navigate each.

7. Suspend disbelief!

I’m drawn to each of the seven for different reasons but #2 jumps out because I witness this on a daily basis. There are two kinds of people in the world: those who execute and those who talk about executing. Hire those who execute. Understand that they are rare and you should overpay for this ‘skill’.

Do you notice nowhere on his list does he talk about failure. John is a motherfucking doer! He gets shit done. Techstars will only take a chance on startups led by people who will execute. John talks about ways to succeed not about just throwing caution to the wind and failing. The reality is most will fail, setting yourself up for success is key.

I love that he ends his list with “Suspend disbelief”. The world is a critic. Those who make it big have that special combination of John’s list. Great idea, ability to execute, the right network to make it happen, super smart, etc. What they also have is true belief! At the end of the day, you have to believe 1000% your idea is going to work. No part of you even questions that it won’t.

If it didn’t work you would be destroyed because your belief was so strong that you never saw it coming when it fails. That’s how most great ideas actually make it. You find a combination of all of these things and you put money and resources behind it.

These 7 learnings aren’t about how to make a startup successful. These are how you make anything successful that you’re working on.

Your Weekly Dose of HR Tech: @Jobvite goes all in on texting candidates & @UltimateHCM upgrades HR Service Delivery!

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Today on The Weekly Dose I take a break from the normal tech reviews and give you some insight on some happenings in the world of HR Tech.

For those who don’t know Jobvite, they are a popular Applicant Tracking System (ATS) that actually started out as an employee referral technology before the market was truly ready to buy into that concept. So, they pivoted from employee referral tech to full-blown ATS with employee referral tech.

This past week Jobvite announced they will be one of the first corporate ATSs on the market to integrate the ability to mass text candidates and have an AI embedded tech interact with those candidates. All of this will be powered by Canvas, an SMS-enabled screening technology that I’ve reviewed on my site a while back, and called “Jobvite Text”.

This is a great move for Jobvite! Most corporate ATSs have been dragging their feet on this type of technology over worries corporate TA teams really didn’t want it. Over the past year, though, more and more organizations have been embracing texting candidates in a big way and the results have blown away reply rates of email, phone, and LinkedIn Inmails.

I suspect we’ll see many more ATS vendors build this core functionality into their systems within the next year, as many already have this on their roadmap, but have been pushing it off for other functionality they felt their clients wanted more over the ability to mass message and screen via text messaging.

Ultimate Software who has had a really strong track record of buying HR and TA technology that wasn’t core to their system and integrating it into Ultipro is at it again with the purchase of HR Service Delivery technology PeopleDoc.

PeopleDoc is a best of breed HR Service Delivery software that allows organizations to deliver world-class service delivery to employees through document management, employee knowledge centers, and employee case management. While this doesn’t sound sexy, it will give UltiPro something no other enterprise HR provider has in the market.

Ultimate is looking to move up-market in a big way and the purchase of PeopleDoc will help position themselves as a product that will deliver to large, enterprise-sized organizations. Their payroll is already top-notch, their core HR product is really good, and PeopleDoc will make best in class.

Ultimate doesn’t buy outside technology often, but when it does, it has shown to buy smart products that make their overall offering better, and they actually listen and integrate the talent from the new company into their organization.

We will see many more partnerships and acquisitions in the coming months. Some will make sense, some we’ll wonder why. I look at each of them from both sides. Does it benefit both companies, and does it make the overall product offering of the major player better, faster, than what they could do on their own?

For both Jobvite and Ultimate this happened last week.

 

Why do we hang on to bad hires for so long?

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I’ve been very public about my philosophy on hiring. I do not hire to fire. In no way do I hire someone thinking “I can’t wait until the day I fire them!”, I don’t think any of us really think that!

I hire someone believing that with the right training, development, and support, they will be wildly successful! I own at least half of that equation, the person I hire owns the other half. Many times it works, sometimes it doesn’t.

The problem with my philosophy is “Sunk Cost”.

Sunk cost is an accounting philosophy that means a cost that has already been incurred and cannot be recovered. So, you’ve already sourced, recruited, and trained an employee. You’ve gone beyond training working to develop them. All those costs are now spent.

BUT – because you’ve ‘invested’ those costs into an employee, you are less likely to let them go believing you are more likely to get a return on those costs. In reality, there is absolutely zero evidence that shows you’ll get any return for future investment into that employee, but we really struggle to give up on them based on what we’ve already spent.

This is super common in the management of people resources!

Well, I’ve already dropped $50K into Tim, I guess another $10K isn’t that bad. When in reality that $10K is actually way better spent on another employee, and you fire Timmy!

I’ve known about Sunk Cost for a long time, but now there is actually scientific evidence to back up the fact we should be firing failing employees sooner:

“Sunk costs are irrecoverable investments that should not influence decisions, because decisions should be made on the basis of expected future consequences. Both human and nonhuman animals can show sensitivity to sunk costs, but reports from across species are inconsistent. In a temporal context, a sensitivity to sunk costs arises when an individual resists ending an activity, even if it seems unproductive, because of the time already invested. In two parallel foraging tasks that we designed, we found that mice, rats, and humans show similar sensitivities to sunk costs in their decision-making. Unexpectedly, sensitivity to time invested accrued only after an initial decision had been made. These findings suggest that sensitivity to temporal sunk costs lies in a vulnerability distinct from deliberation processes and that this distinction is present across species.”

This scientific study showed both humans and rats basically do the exact same thing. If we feel we have already invested a ton of resources to a task, we are more likely to continue pursuing this task even when all the evidence to that point has only shown failure!

This is Poor Performing Employee Management 101!

-You hire an employee.

-The employee gets trained and should have the skills to perform the job.

-The employee doesn’t perform the job, so you give more resources to help get them up to speed.

-The employee still doesn’t perform.

-The manager decides not to terminate the employee, but to continue to give more resources and chances.

Why do we do this?

You hired 3 employees before the failing employee and all three completed training and did the job successfully. We know the process works. So why do we not fire the employee?

Sensitivity to Sunk Cost. We are as dumb as rats when it comes to investing our own resources into failing employees. We act the exact same way!

It has nothing to do with the employee and our desire to give everyone a fair shot (I don’t hire to fire). It has everything to do with our own internal drive of not wanting to lose, what we fell we’ve already invested, even when all the data tells us future investment is akin to burning a pile of cash.

So, don’t hire to fire, but also don’t be as a dumb as a rat and not fire someone who shows you they can’t and won’t do the job you hired them to do!

 

 

Career Confessions from Gen Z: Bathrooms matter to a great Employee Experience!

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In my opinion, there are few places that are worse than a public restroom. There have been very few times in my life where I’ve been happy to use a restroom in a public area. I strongly dislike any bathroom that is not a private restroom or one that is in my home.

I have 2 main reasons for my strong distaste for public bathrooms: cleanliness and privacy. I can thank my Mom for my concerns about germs, and 9 times out of 10 a public restroom will be dirtier than my nice and tidy bathroom at home. My main problem with using public bathrooms is privacy. Even if I just went in to fix my hair, I don’t want anyone looking and judging me for doing it!

Although I really would prefer if I could just use my bathroom at home 24/7, that is not realistic especially when I’m working every day. I’m going to at least have to pee a few times. So, if I have to use a different bathroom than my own, I want it to be as nice as possible.

The bathrooms at Quicken Loans(where I’m doing my summer internship! Hey, guys!) check almost all of my boxes. They are extremely cleanly and I see cleaning staff work on the bathrooms a few times a day. But, the best part is the almost completely private stalls that they have! The walls in between the stalls and the doors go all the way from the ceiling to the floor. It’s my dream honestly.

No one wants to poop at work, and if they have to, it might as well be in almost complete privacy.

In addition to the cleanliness and the private stalls, the restrooms on my floor have baskets of toiletries; toothbrushes, stain sticks, lotion, hairspray, basically anything you could need to make you comfortable and fix any problems you may have. It’s so comforting to know that if I ever spill something on my clothes or have bad breath, I have a quick fix just a few steps away.

If you want to make sure your employees are comfortable and doing their best work, the bathroom is a good place to put some luxury into. Most people don’t enjoy using the restroom but we all have to do it. So why not make it a more enjoyable experience for your employees!

 

This post was written by Cameron Sackett (not Tim) – you can probably tell because it lacks grammatical errors!

HR and TA Pros – have a question you would like to ask directly to a Gen Z? Ask us in the comments and I’ll respond in an upcoming blog post right here on the project. Have some feedback for me? Again, please share in the comments and/or connect with me on LinkedIn.

@SocialTalent’s Talent Talks with Tim Sackett and Johnny Campbell

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Hey gang!

When I was over in London a few weeks ago speaking at the Sourcing Summit UK, Social Talent’s CEO Johnny Campbell and I sat down to talk shop on how can organizations fix their recruiting.

We probably shot 45 minutes to an hour of footage, the team then broke it down to a really great 20 minutes!

For those who don’t know Johnny or SocialTalent you should really check them out. I’m a huge fan of their platform, so much so, my own team has been using it for 2 years!

Here’s the promo video for it – click the link below to watch the full 20 minutes!

Watch the full video! (just click the link)

The 4 Things Great Recruiters Do Every Day!

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I’ve hired over one hundred recruiters in my career.  Not a ton, but a pretty good sample size.  I’ve had some of those hires go on to become great Talent Acquisition pros, as well as some who have completely bombed in the profession.  It’s not an easy profession to be successful at, but I’ve seen some basic things that the most successful recruiters, I know, do every single thing day:

  1. Daily motivation. Great recruiters are self-motivated by nature, but the best ones still find ways to give themselves that extra little kick every day. It might be one client or job order they decide they will close on that day. It might be an activity number they challenge themselves with for the day.  It might just be re-centering on a larger overall goal they are chasing and what they’re doing in that day will mean to reach that goal.
  1. Critical of their own work. The best recruiters I’ve worked with own the positions they’re trying to fill, their candidates, and their interviews. There is no blame to pass around when something goes wrong. They own it.  An interview is a no-show, they own it.  They can look inward and go, next time I won’t have this happen because I’m going to do that one more thing to ensure it’s successful.
  1. They step up. Hey, guys we have a really critical position that just came open from a hiring manager, who wants it? The best recruiters always step up and want to work those high profile openings.  They want the challenge, and they are comfortable with the pressure.  They also step up with their ideas on how the organization can get better, and share freely.
  1. Daily focus. Successful recruiters can focus in and finish, every day. It’s so easy in recruiting to get pulled in a hundred different directions.  The most successful people stay focused on the job at hand and don’t allow the ‘noise’ to take them off their plan.  They find ways to lock themselves in and keep going until they reach their outcome.

HR and Recruiting both have the same main daily issue we face, we turn ourselves into firefighters.  We run from made up emergency to made up emergency.  It feeds our need to feel like we accomplished something today and became a savior.

The most successful recruiters are no different.  They get the opportunity to be firefighters, just like we all do, but they make a conscious decision not to allow themselves to slide down the pole and jump on the fire truck.

How can you make yourself more successful today?

Your Weekly Dose of HR Tech: Kashable – Low Cost Loans for Employees (@GetKashable)

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Today on The Weekly Dose I take a look at the HR Tech, voluntary employee benefit and financing solution for your employees called Kashable. Kashable is basically a simple way for your employees to borrow money, where you as a company are not involved, but can still ensure they get the assistance they need!

Here’s the scenario – Timmy walks into your office. He’s got a problem. His car broke down over the weekend. He needs new brakes. He has no savings and no way to get the money. Without his car, Timmy stops coming to work.

You’ve had this conversation before, haven’t you? In fact, you probably will have it this week!

Here’s the problem. Your company and you in HR don’t want to become a bank. Loaning out money to employees, through your company, always becomes a nightmare. This is why I was so intrigued with a technology like Kashable.

Kashable gives your employees access to low-cost loans based on a percentage of their take-home pay. You as the employer, only facilitate the repayment through payroll deduction, but ultimately you are not responsible for repayment.

Having this option for employees is important! 

Here’s what way too many of our employees do in a cash crisis situation. They choose bad money options! 401K loans, high-interest credit cards, cash advance shops, or they go without something that is critical, like health insurance or a medication, etc. All of which puts them in a worse situation long term than where they started. The problem is, most of our employers have a bad or low credit and don’t have access to cheaper capital alternatives.

What I like about Kashable: 

– Gets the employer out of the loan business and puts it back where it belongs, in the hands of a financial institution that I have validated will do right by employees.

– Kashable reports directly to the credit bureaus, allowing your employees to build positive credit on these smaller amount loans that are paid back through payroll deduction.

– Kashable doesn’t allow employees to take a loan that can’t afford, so they are also teaching them responsible financing. The average amount of a weekly repayment is 5-10% of their takehome, so they don’t put themselves in a worse situation. They also only allow an employee to have one loan at a time.

– Many of your employees have a bad credit and could never get a low-cost loan, but with Kashable because they are employed by you, they will have access to this financing mechanism.

– Gives a credit option to your employees have no credit as well (high school grads, college grads, H1B workers, etc.).

Kashable has data to show that 35-40% of employees who use the service use it to pay down higher interest debt they have. So, already you’re helping to teach them to get away from the nightmare too many of our employee get caught in with high-interest credit.

I’m in love with any kind of technology that helps my employees and helps me and my organization. I’ve been in the bad situation of having to loan my employees money and how that usually ends up bad. I’ve begged my banking partners to give me an option like this, but they never would because they had to follow traditional banking rules. Kashable takes on the loan risk, and they do it because they know your employees are an actual fairly low risk.

Go check them out and do a demo – www.kashable.com

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.

DisruptHR Detroit Speaker Applications Now Being Accepted!!! But, you probably can’t handle it! #8Mile

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Look, I just like being honest. This isn’t DisruptHR Brentwood or DisruptHR Nantucket! This is Detroit! We do real HR in the D!

Come on, just be real with yourself for a moment, you can’t handle Detroit. It’s okay, you’ll do fine at DisruptHR Sun City. Just slow down and do some tour stops before you come to Detroit!

You see, we actually make stuff that sells for money in Detroit. We have employees who get their hands dirty. We have to live in snow and cold for six months out of the year, which tends to leave us a little less likely to be willing to consume your weak B.S. When you come to DisruptHR Detroit, you better bring it!

Alright, I hear you feeling yourself. You just might be ready to hit 8 Mile and the rap battle that is HR in Detroit. DisruptHR Detroit will take place on September 20th onsite at Quicken Loans awesome event space in the heart of downtown Detroit.

Want to speak at DisruptHR Detroit? (what you need to know) 

– It’s 5 Minutes, 20 slides, the slides automatically move every 15 seconds (this is not something you can change!)

– If you’re a vendor you try selling your product in the 5 minutes, we’ll Gong Show your ass right off the stage!

– DisruptHR is about emotion – make us laugh, make us cry, make us angry, make us motivated. Just make us feel something!

– There will be over 250 HR and Talent Pros in the audience cheering you on. (FYI – many in the audience will be drinking!)

– You will get a video recorded, professionally produced copy of your presentation!

Apply to Speak at DisruptHR Detroit! 

Upgrade Your Employee Experience with a “Nap Experience”!

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Okay, I already know that there are some “ultra-cool” employers our their with sleep pods, but let’s face it, ‘real’ employers don’t have sleep pods in their work environment!

Yes, I just said it. If you have sleep pods in your work environment you’re not real. You are a Unicorn. That’s fine a lot of people love unicorns! The reality is, though, most of us in HR and Talent don’t work for unicorns. We just work on regular old employee farms.

But, just because you’re not a Unicorn doesn’t mean you can’t offer your employees that unicorn-level Nap Experience! Casper Mattress (you know the mattress company that for $1,000 will send you a mattress to your house in a box and you get to pop the plastic wrapper and watch it grow like a sponge animal in water) opened a “Nap Store” in New York City:

“Right next to its New York City store, Casper has launched a branded nap destination called the Dreamery. For $25, customers can catch a 45-minute nap inside little sleeping pods, furnished with Casper mattresses (obviously) as well as Casper sheets, pillows, blankets, socks, and an eye mask. Staff will provide fresh linen for every nap, and also on loan are pajamas by Sleepy Jones, a toothbrushing set from Hello, face wash from Sunday Riley, and audio tracks from Headspace — you know, all the necessary sleep accouterments any Instagram-fluent millennial could desire.”

Yep, for the low cost of $25 you can give your employees a little ‘nap’ bonus and it doesn’t even have to be taxed!

Let’s face it. No one really wants to sleep at work in some gross sleep pod that Ted from IT just spend the last two hours in hiding while playing Fortnite! What we want is our own private, clean area to sleep during work, before we go home to watch Netflix until 3 am, so we can then go back to work and get another one of those great Nap Experiences!

I want a Nap Experience right now!

I once spent a $125 to jump off the Stratosphere in Las Vegas. It took 12 seconds to fall to the ground. For $125 I could have a 225 minute Nap Experience!!! Let me tell you, right now, I’m always choosing the 225 minute Nap Experience over jumping off a building!

You in 2018 we really haven’t had anything come out yet that has had real impact on increasing the Employee Experience. That was until this week!!! I’m going to go out a limb here and say that the “Nap Experience” might become the biggest thing to ever happen to sustain a positive workplace culture!

The other idea that hasn’t been tried yet, but would also totally work is “Rent-A-Puppy”. If you combine Nap Experience with Rent-A-Puppy experience you might be able to take over the entire world!

So, hit me in the comments below – are you Pro Nap Experience or Con Nap Experience?

 

The Talent Fix Now Approved for @SHRM CP & SCP Recertification Credit!

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By now I hope you know I wrote a book! If not, guess what I wrote a book! The Talent Fix: A Leader’s Guide to Recruiting Great Talent is a top-rated Talent Acquisition book on Amazon and the best selling book at SHRM’s Talent Conference (Top 8 at SHRM National, which was really cool!).

Also, it was recently approved for SHRM CP and SCP recertification credit!

So, you buy the book. You read the book. And SHRM and I will approve you for recertification credit of your SHRM CP or SCP! Okay, I have really have nothing to do with approving your SHRM CP and SCP! 😉

One Big Takeaway

I had a reader reach out to me last week. They just got done reading the book and they shared one of the big takeaways they got from the book, and it wasn’t one I would have expected!

When you think of Employment Branding and Recruitment Marketing (Chapter 7) we tend to think that it’s first Employment Branding (EB) and then it’s Recruitment Marketing (RM). In fact, these two functions within Talent Acquisition are really completely separate!

This reader, like most us, believed these two were attached at the hip. You first created your EB, you then used RM to get your EB shared to the audience you were going after.

After reading my book she realized these two functions really have nothing to do with each other. Both can live without the other. You can use a great RM strategy to promote your jobs and organization and get very good results.

You can create an awesome EB and share that with candidates without any type of RM strategy or technology and it can be great. There is no need to have both, but both working together create a synergy that one does not have without the other!

Create a great EB and create a great RM machine and you will see results that are far better than anything else you’ve done. Far too often I see organizations that focus most of their effort and resources on one side and not the other.

I naturally put these two together within the chapter because I would never do one without the other. It doesn’t make sense to me, but you can. In reality, we all have an employment brand within the market, whether you actually created it or not.

Many times we internally think way higher of our EB than the actual market in which we are hiring gives us credit. Most of us will have an EB that the majority of our hiring audience has no idea about. Which is why a great RM strategy is critical to finishing off great EB work.

You can do one without the other, but rarely will it ever make sense.

Okay – that’s like 1/16th of a SHRM CP or SCP credit – go buy the book and get the rest!