Author Archives: Tim Sackett

Recruiting Idea! This Might Actually Work!

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Why don’t potential candidates pick up your phone calls? Well, yes, no one picks up phone calls anymore, but, no, people still pick up phone calls for certain reasons. We don’t pick up phone calls when we don’t know who it is or we don’t want to talk to the person who’s calling.

Why do we pick up phone calls? 

  1. We actually like the person who is calling and we want to talk to them.
  2. We actually believe the incoming call is super important.
  3. It’s a return call we have been waiting for.

Under number 2, let’s put things like, it’s your boss calling, the kid’s school, your spouse, the police or fire department, hospital, etc. You see who it is on your cell phone screen and you instantly believe you need to pick up that call!

My family hates me! 

There’s this fun game I like to play with my family. You see, my monthly cell phone bill is equal to the GDP of a small country. So, I will, from time to time, get onto my cell phone account online and change the names of my family to something I think is funny. So, now when they call someone, instead of the receiver seeing “Tim Sackett” they might see something like “DJ TImmy T”, as an example!

Did you know you could do that!? You can, and it’s super fun! At least, it’s super fun if you have the power to be the person who can change those names to anything you desire!

My wife’s phone still says, “Kimmy” and I chuckle every time she calls me. I’m sure my son, Cameron, would love it if I changed it to “Queen”.

What does this have to do with Recruiting!? 

Oh, be patient little baby birds! I’m going to feed you!

Let’s say you’re trying to track down a potential candidate. You’ve sent the emails, the In-Mails, and even tried texting, but you are being shut out. You even *69 direct-dialed, and still, no pickup or response! The average recruiter/sourcer would have given up, but are not average! You’re slightly above average and you want to keep trying!

You see it now, right?

You go into your cell phone account and you start testing different names to see who will this potential candidate pick up for! Let’s say this person works for General Motors, here is what I might try:

  • “Ford” , “Chryseler”, “Toyota”, “Tesla”, etc.
  • “City” Police or fire – of whatever town they might live
  • “College” where they graduated
  • “Your Dream Job” they probably won’t pick up, but they’ll laugh!
  • “General Motors” who isn’t going to pick up a call coming from their own employer!

Just like Sex Panther, 60% of the time, this works every time!

Want to know why recruiting can sometimes get a bad reputation? Because I have the ability to come up with ideas like this!

If it works. It works. Don’t hate the players, friends, hate the game!

Zoom-free Fridays and if You Want to Work for Biden, Stop Smoking Pot! #HRFamous

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On episode 56 of The HR Famous Podcast, longtime HR leaders (and friends) Tim Sackett, Kris Dunn, and Jessica Lee come together again to discuss Gen-X references, Zoom-free Fridays, and White House staffers getting fired for marijuana use.

Listen (click this link if you don’t see the player) and be sure to subscribe, rate, and review (Apple Podcasts) and follow (Spotify)!

Show Highlights:

3:30 – Do you get upset when your Millennial and Gen-Z references don’t get your Gen-X references?

7:00 – First topic of the pod: Citigroup CEO has called for Zoom-free Fridays and a new bank holiday due to pandemic fatigue. JLee says she’d rather have Zoom calls instead of regular conference calls.

10:00 – KD says that Friday is not the best day to do Zoom free because Friday is already light on meetings. KD wants Zoom-free Thursday. What day do you think is best?

13:40 – When Tim thinks no-meeting Fridays, he thinks “I’m going on vacation early” Fridays.

16:30 – A team in JLee’s office has a policy where if they do a traditional conference call, everyone on the team has to be doing something active during that call in order to promote wellness.

17:45 – Citi is doing a new holiday called “Citi Reset Day.” KD thinks that the new CEO is trying to win the approval of the bank’s employees.

19:30 – Next topic: A few White House staffers were fired due to their usage of marijuana. Tim thinks it’s a little ridiculous for the White House to have a never-done-drugs policy for employees.

24:00 –  JLee thinks it’s impractical from a hiring perspective to expect all of your employees to not have a history with marijuana, especially when it’s legal in many places in the U.S. now.

26:00 – KD thinks it’s OK for people serving in the White House not to have backgrounds or positive tests with pot, but that it was sloppy on the Biden administration for not being completely transparent and upfront with their employees.

29:00 – KD’s son wants to work for a defense contractor and he’s been told not to go abroad to get that security clearance. So he won’t go!

Thank you! This will be my last post, forever. #ProjectEnd

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It comes with great pride and a bit of sorrow that I tell you that today will be the last time I’ll be posting on my blog. For the past decade, I’ve been posting each workday my thoughts and ideas about work, technology, and life.

As I looked back on over three thousand posts, well over a million words written, I came to realize something – you a$$holes don’t pay me anything!

I mean, the dude with a sign on off-ramp makes more than I do, and he wrote like 5 words on that damn sign! Not once, have you sent me a note and said, “Hey, Tim, what’s your Venmo, I want to send you $5!”

To be honest, I do have a super sweet collection of HR and TA Tech vendor t-shirts. But, the ROI of this little “Project” I started a decade ago, a labor of love and sometimes hate, just doesn’t fill my closet with limited-edition Nikes.

So, I’ve decided to say Goodbye…until I wake up tomorrow in a panic that I don’t have any content up and think wait, what about Joe, that poor TA leader in East Omaha who has no idea how he’s going to find twenty call center reps this month! Poor Joe. I got you, buddy!

#InternalsFirst

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In the past 30 days, I’ve spoken to a dozen Talent Acquisition leaders across a bunch of industries and markets. There was one common theme, “Holy crap, our req load just doubled or tripled almost overnight!”

The conversation always went to how and what can we do to get more candidates faster!

One, out of twelve, actually had the insight to comment, “we have to make sure our internal employees, first have the option to move into some of these roles, if they desire”.

She mentioned they branded this movement within their organizations – #InternalsFirst! 

The reality is, and she knows this as well, it’s not one or the other, it’s both, but I love the focus on internals as we come out of the pandemic and start increasing our hiring. Yes, we need to fill these openings, but also, yes, we need to engage our internal talent, or we’ll have a much larger problem in the second half of 2021.

We give our internal talent a discount on value. “Oh, yeah, Jenny, she’s good, but we know her and her capabilities, what about Mary, the new shiny, candidate we know nothing about!? She might be 8% better than Jenny!”

Stop it. You’re embarrassing yourself! Mary isn’t better, she’s just new and shiny. Mary has that new employee smell! Jenny lost her new employee smell and now she just smells like everyone else.

As we come out of the pandemic, our internal talent is starving to be engaged. To be noticed. The worse thing you can do, when hiring picks up is to forget about them. To make them feel like an afterthought.

#InternalsFirst 

3 Things You Can Start Today and Be Instantly Better at Recruiting!

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You’re not as effective as you could be right now! Do you know why? If you’re like me, you might start blaming some things: your tech, your boss, your company, your co-workers, etc. It’s easy to blame others for our inefficiencies. It’s incredibly difficult to own it and fix it!

I’ve got some fixes! Heck, I wrote an entire book called “The Talent Fix!” What I’ve found as I work with talent acquisition departments and TA leaders from all over is that most of us fall into some traps around inefficiencies. So, today, I want to give you three things you can start doing that will increase your capacity immediately:

1. Give Your Candidates a Gift! 

We as TA pros waste more time dealing with candidates we’ll never hire and try and tell ourselves we are doing this for ‘candidate experience’. You know what sucks as a candidate? Being led on by a company that will never hire you! Stop doing this! If you know you won’t hire a candidate, let them down fast, but professionally.

“Look, Charlie, I’m going to level with you. I don’t see you as a fit for our culture/position/organization. This doesn’t say anything about you, it says a lot about us and how we are looking for something very specific. Thank you for your time and professionalism. We will not be moving forward with you.”

This is short and sweet and 99% of candidates will get the “gift” of being able to move on and find the job and the company that does want their unique gifts they have to offer. This isn’t being mean to a candidate or providing poor candidate experience, this is helping them, and saving you time by not having to deal with this candidate continuing to contact you thinking they have a shot. They don’t.

2. Don’t Get Stuck in the Middle!

I don’t set up interviews with hiring managers for candidates. What I’ve found is the majority of hiring managers and candidates, find it annoying that I’m stuck in the middle when two adults just need a quick thirty-second conversation to figure out how to align their schedule! Or, maybe even use technology to do this!

We like to think setting up interviews provides great ‘service’ for hiring managers, but it doesn’t. It’s a really inefficient process to drag in multiple parties to something very simple. Any hiring manager, who is marginally effective at their job, will be able to see this if you have a simple conversation to explain the process inefficiencies.

3. Stop Starting from Scratch! 

Here’s how we go about filling most new job openings. The hiring manager informs us they need to hire. We get the job description and information. We post the job everywhere. We wait for candidates to apply. We screen applicants. We pass these onto the hiring manager and await further instructions.

Every. time. we. do. this.

Add one additional step to this process before you post the job. Go into your ATS database and send a quick mass email to each candidate in the database that meets the requirements of the job (if you have the tech, also send a quick text message!). We spend an enormous amount of resources building our ATS database, then we ignore it when it’s filled with candidates who have applied and said “I love you! I want to come work for you!”

Our first step to finding talent starts in our own database, not out in the wild to see what ‘fresh’ meat is looking like today. If your ATS sucks at search, there are many new technologies on the market labeled as “talent rediscovery” that will reach into your database and do this for you.

So, there are three. The reality is, if you really dig into how you’re doing what you do, you can probably come up with a hundred improvements to make your recruiting more efficient! The key is to look at your processes, not as the one who built it and owns it, but always through the lens of constant improvement.

I don’t have a set recruiting process in my shop. I have a process I’m constantly testing to make better. We try stuff. If it works, we keep it. If it doesn’t, we end that test and try something else. The most effective recruiting shops in the world are effective not because they have the best process, but because they continually improve their process!

How to Help Your Company to Stop Sucking at Hiring!

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Hiring people to work for you directly is probably the single hardest thing you’ll ever have to do as a manager of people. To be fair, most people are average at hiring, some are flat out killing it, and probably 20% are awful at hiring.

The first sign you suck at hiring is your new hire turnover is an outlier in your organization, your market, or your industry.

So, what constitutes new-hire turnover?

I find most organizations actually don’t measure their hiring managers on new hire turnover but use this to judge effectiveness on their talent acquisition team. That’s a complete joke! That is unless you’re allowing your TA team to make hiring decisions! New hire turn is a direct reflection of hiring decisions. Period.

When should you measure new-hire turnover?  Organizations are going to vary on this based on your normal turn cycles and level of the position. Most use 90 days as the cap for new hire turnover. That is safe for most organizations, but you might want to dig into your own numbers to find out what’s best for your own organization. I know organizations that use one year to measure new-hire turnover and organizations that use 30 days.

How do you help yourself if you suck at hiring?

1. Take yourself out of the process altogether.  Most hiring managers won’t do this because their pride won’t allow them. If you consistently have high new hire turn comparable to others, you might consider this, you just have bad internal filters that predispose you to select people who don’t fit your org or management style. Don’t take it personally. I suck at technical stuff. I shop that part of my job off to someone who’s better. You might be an exceptional manager of your business, but you suck at hiring. Shop that out to someone who’s better!

2. Add non-subjective components into your hiring process and follow that 100% of the time. Assessments are scientifically proven to tell you what they’re designed to tell you. If you follow what they’ll tell you, you’ll be much more likely to make consistent hires. If that assessment gives you better hires, then keep following it, or find an assessment that does give you that consistency.

3. Analyze your reasons for each misfire hire. Were there any commonalities in those? What I find is most poor hires stem from a hiring manager who gets stuck on one reason to hire, which has nothing to do with being successful in your environment. Example: “I want high-energy people!” But then they work in an environment where they are stuck in a 6X8 foot cube all day. It’s like caging a wild animal! 

Numbers don’t lie. If you consistently bomb your new hire turnover metrics, it’s not the hires, it’s you! In the organizations where I’ve seen the best improvement in reducing new hire turnover, it was in organizations where new hire turnover metric results were solely the responsibility of each hiring manager, and nothing to do with talent acquisition.

It’s the 80/20 rule. 80% of most new hire turn is usually coming from around 20% of your hiring managers. Fix those issues and ‘magically’ your new hire turn improves.

9 Types of Employee Recognition That Suck!

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I run a small business.  When I need to know something, I usually reach out to my employees and find out what they think.  It’s not some big fancy ‘research’ survey with thousands of responses, but it’s real.

Recently, I wanted to know what people might want in terms of a recognition award.  Ironically, what I found goes against some big fancy research done by recognition companies who are in the business of selling the crap on the list below, crazy how that works in the research game! Anywho, what I found wasn’t surprising to me.

Here’s the list of the Top 8 things my employees don’t want when it comes to Recognition Awards:

1. Anniversary Pins! If you give me one of these I will stick it back in your eye! “Hey, Tim, Thanks for 10 years! Buddy, here’s a pin!” A What!?!? I’ve given you ten great years and you’re giving me a pin. Is this 1955?

2. A Plaque. Or any other kind of trophy thing. If I wanted a trophy to show me that I’m a salesperson of the year, you hired the wrong person. JayZ said it best “we can talk, but money talks, so talk more bucks”.

3. Corporate logo wear. Giving out corporate logo wear as a form of recognition screams you have executives that haven’t actually spoken to an employee in the last twenty years!

4. A watch. Wait, if it’s a Rolex, I’ll take a watch. If it’s a Timex you better ‘watch’ out, I’m throwing it at someone! Nothing says we don’t really care about you like a $50 watch with it engraved on the back ‘You Matter! 2019!’

5. Luggage. The ‘experts’ would like you to believe that your employees would really ‘appreciate’ luggage because it’s an item they don’t normally like to spend their money on. The reason why people don’t like to spend their money on luggage is that it gets destroyed after one trip through O’Hare! That’s just what you want to see coming around the luggage carousel – “Hey, look, honey, it’s your employee of the year award all ripped up and stained”. Sign and symbols.

6. Fruit Baskets. First, most people don’t want to be healthy or we wouldn’t have the obesity problem we have in our society. Second, people like chocolate, candy, salty snacks, and diet soda. If you want to send food, send food they’ll actually eat!

7. A Parking Spot with Their Name On It. This goes bad two ways: 1. I drive a $100K Mercedes and you don’t, now you know I drive a better car than you and it’s awkward; 2. I drive a beater and I’m embarrassed to let everyone know I make so little I can even afford a 2014 Chevy Cobalt.

8. A Hug! Wait! I totally want a hug! Just not a creepy hug. You know what a creepy hug feels like when you’re about 13 seconds into it and the other person won’t let go! But nothing says “we recognize you” in the totally wrong way, like inappropriate hugs at work!

9. Anything Virtual! Get the hell out of here with your stupid virtual card and virtual balloons! Or a virtual Zoom high five. No one wants virtual recognition, they want some tangible and real.

What do employees want?

Well, that’s an entire post by itself, but my 20 years of HR ‘research’/experience shows people want their peers and leaders to appreciate their efforts. Nothing says ‘we truly care about you’ like having one of your peers tell you in some sort of way. When teams can do that, they become special! It might be a quick handwritten note, a face-to-face meeting in the hall, etc. It really doesn’t matter the avenue of how it comes, it just matters that you have the culture that it does come and it’s encouraged to keep coming.

Can Being Vulnerable at Work Hurt Your Career? #HRFamous

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In episode 55 of The HR Famous Podcast, longtime HR leaders (and friends) Tim Sackett, Kris Dunn, and Jessica Lee come together again to discuss big sisters, vulnerability in the workplace, and what the best question is to ask someone if you’re looking for negative information on a candidate.

Listen (click this link if you don’t see the player) and be sure to subscribe, rate, and review (Apple Podcasts) and follow (Spotify)!

Show Highlights:

4:00 – JLee has two kids: an older daughter and a younger son. JLee’s daughter has got to set a good example for her brother!

5:00 – KD asks Tim what’s the worst injury his big sister inflicted on him. He tells a story about how she almost burned the house down!

7:30 – Next topic: vulnerability in the workplace! An article about Brene Brown’s stance on vulnerability came out in Inc.

11:00 – Tim thinks you have to draw the line when an employee comes to a manager and says they don’t think a person can fulfill their duties.

14:40 – KD thinks some people will use certain talk points and be more vulnerable than they actually should be.

16:30 – JLee likes Brene Brown’s points on vulnerability guard rails and how there is a need for boundaries in this regard.

18:00 – What are some things that cross the boundaries of workplace vulnerability? JLee thinks it’s best, to be honest about what’s going on especially while working from home.

21:55 – “In hard times you can’t ignore hard times.” — Tim

24:00 – Tim mentions that his wife knows he’s off before he knows he’s off. He asks the crew if it’s the same with their spouses.

27:00 – How do we best extract negative information from candidates? KD asks JLee what the best question to net negative info when interviewing candidates.

How long should it take a candidate to decide on a job offer?

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When you make a candidate an offer, how long do you give them to tell you they want the job or not? 24 hours? 3 days? 1 week? Immediately?

For two decades I’ve been in the camp of a candidate should be able to tell you ‘yes’ or ‘no’ immediately, or you (the recruiter and hiring manager) did something wrong in closing! But, I think I’ve changed my stance on this, if “fit” is really important for the position, your culture, etc.

Here’s the deal, if the job and/or company fit is really important to your organization. The candidate should take as long as they need to, to make sure that your organization is the one for them. That might mean they need to finish up other interviews, do more research, go through counter-offers, etc.

So, if that takes two or three weeks, so be it. The fit is critical for you and you actually want the candidate to take their time with this decision.

I feel so strongly about this, I think you should actually make candidates wait 72 hours after you offer them the job, to give you an answer! Yes! You won’t accept an acceptance from them until they’ve taken 72 hours to really think about the job, the new boss, the organization, everything!

Why wait 72 hours if they already know!? 

A “cooling down” period will give them some time to get through the infatuation period of getting the offer! It will give them some time to really think about your job, their current job, other jobs they might be considering. This time is important because too often, too many people get that offer and at that moment everything feels so awesome!

After a couple of days, they come down from the high of being desired by you and start to think clearly, and all of sudden you’re not as pretty as you looked two days ago, or you’re even more pretty by playing hard to get.

But what if a candidate gets cold feet by this technique? 

That’s a real concern especially with historic unemployment in many markets and fields. If you force a candidate to wait 72 hours there is a good chance someone else might come in and offer them a job!

Yep! That actually would be awesome if that happened, because then you would really know! Do they love you, or did they just fall in love with someone else!? Remember, this isn’t for every organization. This is only for organizations where fit is critical to your organizational culture.

If a candidate gets cold feet by another offer or by waiting 3 days, they don’t really believe your organization is the one for them. They don’t believe what you have is their dream job or organization. Also, if you get cold feet by having them wait, you don’t really believe fit is important!

So, how long should it take a candidate to decide if your job offer is right for them? 

There is no one right answer. Each of us has our own internal clock to make those decisions. If you force a candidate to decide immediately upon an offer, that speaks to your culture. If you let candidates decide on their timeline, that also speaks to your culture.

In a perfect world, I still believe if the process works as designed, and everyone pre-closed as they should, both you and a candidate should be able to make a decision when the offer is placed on the table. But, honestly, how often does our process work perfectly?

Hit me in the comments with what you believe is the proper amount of time you should give a candidate to decide whether or not they’ll accept your job offer?

The Weekly Dose: Talent Intelligence Platform – Loxo

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Today on the Weekly Dose I review Loxo. Loxo is a Talent Intelligence Platform and a global leader in artificial intelligence recruitment automation software. What does that even mean? Well, you know me, let me break it down in layman’s terms!

First, my team actually has been a Loxo user for the past three years. When we found Loxo I was on an 18-month search to find a great Applicant Tracking System (ATS). I looked at everyone! Then, I started to hear about Loxo from my super cool recruiting friends in the industry, folks like Stacy Zapar and Lars Schmidt, and they were like “Tim, you have to take a look at this new company, Loxo”.

I did, it was exactly what I was looking for, so we purchased it and started using it, and we are still using it. So, really the big question is why did I choose Loxo over all the rest? We are a recruiting shop, and three years ago Loxo kind of was built specifically for the kind of recruiting we do. Hard to find, technical talent, but we had to move very fast. (Since then, Loxo has built out all the bells and whistles for corporate talent acquisition as well). We are not a post and pray shop, I needed next-generation recruiting software that let my recruiters be fast, efficient, and repeatable.

So, yes, Loxo does have an ATS, but that is only a small part of what they are today. Loxo is also a world-class sourcing engine, an AI-driven matching engine, a best-in-class recruitment CRM, and a data intelligence engine. Basically, with Loxo, I’m getting great recruiting tech in about four areas, all under one umbrella, intuitively linked together, that drives my recruiters to be super recruiters.

What do I like about Loxo

  • This is a recruiting platform for recruiting shops that actually recruit. Software built around the concept that we have hard-to-fill jobs and we can’t just post openings and hope someone applies.
  • I love that my recruiters aren’t jumping from across multiple technologies all day. They can source, build pipelines, set up nurture campaigns, and communicate with talent all under one roof.
  • From Loxo, my team can call, email, and text candidates from within the platform. They can actually do all three of these things at the same time in a nurture campaign. This allows them to be everywhere at once, with multiple candidates.
  • Unlike a lot of the sourcing tech on the market, Loxo gives you live, active connections to the talent you find in their sourcing engine. They are gathering data from over 95 sources and it’s constantly updating in real-time.
  • Loxo was created by a Technologist, turned Recruiter, who decided to build great recruiting tech. So, it works like a recruiter. It feels natural to use. Less steps, fewer clicks, things seem to be where you think they should be.
  • As a recruiting leader, I get real-time funnel analytics on my team. I can easily breakdown where my team, or an individual, is struggling and immediately know where we need help.
  • If you’re already using an ATS, Loxo integrates with your ATS to give your team all the AI, automation advantages to recruit fast, but still, get the data you need back into your ATS and HRM systems.

Loxo might be the best ROI in Talent Acquisition Technology

Quite honestly, we eliminated three other pieces of recruiting technology when we started using Loxo and in three years we never felt like we needed to add anything back. The three technologies we stopped using, by the way, all cost more than using Loxo, and Loxo was better! Plus, the Loxo product team continues to keep innovating faster than the market, so as I’m seeing new tech come to market, the Loxo team usually is already building those features within the platform.

Sounds like I’m a fanboy, right?

I am. I look at over a hundred different technologies a year, and this is the one I bought and use. Quite frankly, and I say this to their CEO, Matt Chambers, all the time, I can’t believe someone hasn’t backed up a Brinks truck full of money and bought them! The reason you haven’t probably heard of them is they haven’t taken a bunch of VC money. Instead, they are a heads-down technology company that is just building great sh*t. And because they don’t have investment, they don’t have to over-price it, like a bunch of the “cool” recruiting brands on the market that cost a ton because you’re paying for their sales and marketing, not better technology.

So, Yes, you should demo Loxo, even if you’re stuck in a long-term relationship with an ATS, because they’ll do everything your ATS doesn’t. Or if you’re just looking for sourcing or AI match, all of that can be used separately as well. At the very least, you’ll get to see a better way your TA team should be recruiting.