Author Archives: Tim Sackett

The One Piece of Technology Recruiting Leaders Say They Can’t Live Without! #HRTechConf

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I led a panel yesterday at the HR Technology Conference around the evolving talent acquisition stack. My panelists were a great group of TA Leaders, Jennifer Shappley from LinkedIn, Jim Livingston from Quicken Loans, and Sola Osinoiki from Prosus Group, who all shared selflessly about their stack, their wins, and their struggles.

One the question I asked all there was what piece of technology outside of your core ATS could you not do without. When I asked the question I assumed I would hear about recruitment marketing technology, or sourcing technology, or some sort of assessment they were using, but that wasn’t the case.

In fact, all three, without being previously prompted said the one piece of technology they could not do without was their Business Intelligence software. Respectively, Linkedin and Prosus used Tableau, and Quicken Loans uses Microsoft’s Power BI. I have a feeling, eventually, LinkedIn will probably make the move to Microsoft as well, because, well, Microsoft owns LinkedIn!

It makes sense that this would be the most irreplaceable tool. At no point in history has data been more important or more powerful to leaders and HR and TA leaders are no different than any other function. In fact, we could argue HR and TA have combined more data than any other function.

My push back was doesn’t your core ATS deliver the data you need. Every single ATS on the market is building or has built powerful internal BI and reporting tools. Why are they going through this effort if you’re going to just extract your data and pull it into a business intelligence tool?

The response from the panel was basically, enterprise-level organizations, that are using multiple pieces of technology within their recruiting stack need to have the story and pictures around all of this data to truly understand what is happening, and what decisions need to be made moving forward. SMB organizations that are primarily only using the ATS for most of their recruiting can get away with using the internal reporting from an ATS, but the larger your stack becomes, the more of a necessity it is to have BI tools.

Great insight from the group on how modern HR and TA leaders are really invested in their data like never before. These leaders are having to push themselves and their teams to really educate themselves around data so they keep their organizations on a successful path. It’s definitely a leadership skill set that is underrated and probably not looked at enough when it comes to promotion and hiring, but that is quickly going to change!

The difficult piece of BI tools is developing and showing the ROI. You buy a sourcing tool and you can show a drop in third party spend. You purchase a LinkedIn membership and you can show how it helped you hire so many more of a certain role, etc. You buy a business intelligence tool and it will show you what you should be doing that you’re not, but it isn’t as clear on giving you a straight line ROI.

The difference is, though, your executives, especially the c-suite, gets the value of great data. So, in reality, it becomes less of an ROI conversation, and more of a strategy conversation, which for the most part, they are already bought into. So, two great BI tools to go demo, and there are others out their as well. Modern-day TA leaders must-have business intelligence in their stack!

Mothers, Sons, and Daughters! #HRTechConf

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I’m out at “The” HR Technology Conference this week in Las Vegas and a few years ago HR Tech started a Women in HR Technology event that happens the morning of the opening of the conference with specific content built around the unique role of women in our industry.

I’m a big fan, and I think LRP (the company that runs the HR Technology Conference, and Jeanne Achille who chairs this part of the conference) have done an exceptional job building content that you really find nowhere else in our industry. Which leads me to the panel I was on, “Mothers, Sons, and Daughters” with my co-panelist, Jess Von Bank and Kyle Lagunas.

The idea Jeanne gave us and we ran with was around this idea that women in technology play these multiple roles, that are very different than their male counterparts. Jess is a single Mom of three young girls and a successful professional in our industry. Kyle is a son and aspiring father, and I’m a son to a woman who started the business I currently run. We all have very strong beliefs around the impact and influence women make on our lives.

I can’t stress enough how this type of content does not happen at conferences. Not technology conferences. Not HR conferences. Not any conferences I’ve been to! It was real and raw, and we were able to have this awesome conversation with a bunch of attendees that was unfiltered.

You see my quote from the tweet above. One of the questions we wanted to tackle is, “Do women make better leaders?”

This part of the conversation really centered around how we were raised and what were the things our mothers gave us to be successful in life. Where those things the same things that possibly give women an advantage in leadership roles in the modern workplace?

Gen Z and Millennials are looking for workplaces and leadership that are empathetic, compassionate, developmental, and understand that they want to bring their whole self to work. Traditional leadership kind of frowned on all this. You come to work, to work! Don’t bring your personal life to work!

Any leader can have the traits to be successful as a modern leader, but we find that females tend to have more of these traits than males, and it much easier for them to develop these traits deeper, primarily because of how they were nurtured and nurture as mothers.

I left the session inspired by the women in our industry and the great things they are doing to move the workforce and our workplaces forward. Great organizations need great talent. That won’t happen in a traditional workplace that our parents grew up in. My mom ran a successful company partly because the employees of her company were her family. She used those words constantly and meant it. She took it very personal to make sure they could and would succeed.

I want to send a huge thank you to LRP and Jeanne for allowing us to indulge in a very personal topic that is ever-present, but rarely talked about!

Is Being a Founder a Career Death Sentence? #HRTechConf

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I’m out at The HR Technology Conference in Las Vegas this week and it struck me at the number of ‘Founders’ I meet when I’m here. The founders I meet seem like the perfect person you would want to hire. Super motivated. Smart. Creative. They believe in an idea and they are willing to do what it takes to make that idea a reality.

Sounds perfect, right?

Turns out, we actually hate hiring Founders! In fact, in a strange twist of fate, we actually hate hiring successful Founders more than failed Founders! Why? Well, if you’re successful we feel you will just leave us and go be successful again. If you fail at being a Founder, we feel you’re beaten down enough to come be your employee and you’ll probably be super happy to be an employee!

That’s why most all of us suck at hiring! We have no idea what really matters or makes a difference!

We know that like 99% of startups fail. So, we have these great people who are willing to go try and hit a grand slam, but they strikeout. Because they actually took that big swing and did all those things we think are great, we actually then don’t want to hire them. Um, what!?

Not only that, if these same folks are actually successful, but then decide to exit, then we really don’t want to hire them because we somehow don’t think they’ll hang around long enough!?! We are all insane and have no idea how to judge talent! “But we only hire the ‘best’ talent!” No, you don’t! You hire people who don’t intimidate you in any way.

Part of it is the concept around entrepreneurship. We all say we want to hire employees who are ‘entrepreneurs’, but not ‘real’ entrepreneurs. More like entrepreneurs who went to school to be entrepreneurs but they were smart enough to know they would actually fail at being entrepreneurs so they’ll come work for us and be entrepreneurs, non-entrepreneurs!

I find that most of the “Founders” out here at HR Tech are not the type of folks who went to school to be an Entrepreneur. I find most folks who go to college and get a degree in “Entrepreneurship” actually want to start a bar or a t-shirt clothing brand or have one nerdy friend who can code, so they go after starting some sort of delivery-service app.

I find most of the HR Tech founders have come from all walks of life, but mostly technologist, where they ran into an issue and said to themselves, “there should be a solution for this”. Very few were from HR or TA. Many did work in corporate environments which is where the idea came from. So, the reality is, they have already shown to want to work in the corporate world.

So, what does this all mean? We need to look at someone being a former Founder of a company as a great thing, not a bad thing. Those former founders can be complete rock stars in your company!

The 7 Words That Turn Candidates Off!

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Communication is a tricky thing. It’s so easy to turn off another party by simply using just one wrong word, especially when you’re trying to build a relationship with a candidate you potentially want to hire.

I think there are some words and phrases that have a high probability of turning off a candidate to want to come work for your organization. I speak to students a few times a year about interviewing and I tell them something similar, which is what you say can automatically make a hiring manager not want to hire you!

Think about being an interview and the candidate starts to tell you why they’re no longer working for ACME Inc. “Oh, you know it was just a ‘misunderstanding’, I can explain…”

“Misunderstanding” is a killer word to use while interviewing! It wasn’t a misunderstanding! You got fired! The ‘misunderstanding’ is you not understanding the crap you were doing was wrong! 

So, what are the 7 Deadly Words you should never use as a recruiter? Don’t use these:

-“Layoff” – It doesn’t matter how you use it. Even, ‘we’ve never had a layoff!’ “Layoff” isn’t a positive word to someone looking to come to work for you, so why would you even add it to the conversation!

-“Might” – Great candidates want black and white, not gray. “Might” is gray. Well, we might be adding that tech but I don’t know. Instead, use “I’m not sure, let me check for you because I want to get you the truth.  Add

-“Maybe” – See above.

-“Unstable” – You know what’s unstable? Nothing good, that’s what! If something isn’t good, don’t hide behind a word that makes people guess how bad it might be, because they’ll usually assume it’s worse than it really is!

-“Legally” – “Legally” is never followed by something positive! “Legally, we would love to give you a $25K sign-on bonus, but…” It’s always followed by something that makes you uncomfortable. When trying to get someone interested in your organization and job, don’t add “Legally” to the conversation!

-“Temporarily” – This is another unsettling word for candidates. “Temporarily” we’ll have to have you work out of the Nashville office, but no worries, you’ll be Austin soon enough! Um, no.

-“Fluid” – Well, that’s a great question, right now it’s a fluid situation, we’re hoping that hiring you will help clarify it! Well, isn’t that comforting… Add: “Up in the air” to this category!

We use many of these words because we don’t want to tell the candidate the truth. We think telling them exactly what’s wrong with our organization, the position, our culture, will drive them away. So, we wordsmith them to death!

The reality is most candidates will actually love the honesty and tend to believe they can be the one to come in and make it better. We all want to be the knight on the white horse. Candidates are no different. Tell them the truth and you’ll end up with better hires and higher retention!

Breaking Down @LinkedIn’s Entire Database! #TalentConnect

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I have a confession to make. I use LinkedIn every day! Not just Monday through Friday, I’m on the app on Saturday and Sunday as well! So, don’t think this is a LinkedIn hater post! I’m a LinkedIn 1%’er! I’m a bit addicted to LinkedIn, to be honest, I might have to go see someone!

Being on LinkedIn every day like I am, you begin to notice a few things. Some are great, like content that I find my network sharing that I probably find on LI before I find anywhere else. I love to read about the celebrations of people doing great things at work. I love to read about the funny stories and the heartwarming stories of people in their workplaces. All great stuff!

The more time I spend on LI I begin to feel like the database is basically populated with about 6-7 main types of profiles. It’s like the world is broken down, not in male or female, or black or white, but in these mini-subsets of lives. Here’s what I see when I look at LinkedIn Profiles (these are not official LinkedIn database numbers!):

– Sales Pros: I want to say that it’s at least 40% of the LI database, but I know it’s less. But, the reality is, if you’re in sales of any kind, you probably are on LinkedIn at least multiple times a week, and you’re probably sending me an InMail trying to see if I want to blindly give you access to my investment portfolio, sell me leads to executives, sell me offshore recruiting solutions, etc. It’s endless! Even the LinkedIn Sales Pros get into the game and I probably get a message through LinkedIn Sales Navigator from LI themselves at least once per month.

– Recruiters: I think about 30% of the LI database are recruiters, but again, it’s probably less, but feels like more, because we (recruiters are my people) are so freaking active on LI! There are very few occupations you can’t find on LI. Of course, you’re probably less likely to find a great pool of truck drives on LI, but for sure any white-collar talent you can find. Recruiters and Sales Pros have to make up at least 90% of all InMails sent on LI, right?

– Keynote Speakers: It feels like 1 out of 5 profiles claim to be “Keynote Speakers” which would mean there are approximately 100 million Keynote Speakers on LinkedIn! So, I know that number isn’t correct, but come on, you all can’t be Keynote Speakers! Maybe we need a “Keynote Speaker” definition. To put “Keynote Speaker” on your LI Profile you must be on the main stage speaking either in the opening session, the lunch session, or the closing session, and you must be paid. That probably knocks about 80% of the “Keynotes” out with just those factors.

– Life Coaches: You know what happens when you get fired from your job, or can’t hold a job? You become a Life Coach and tell other people how to get a job or hold a job… Is it just me or does seem like 50% of LinkedIn profiles claim to be Life Coaches? “Life Coach” might be the single easiest job in the world to obtain. Life Coach criteria: 1. Are you alive? 2. Have you lived any amount of life? 3. Do you like to tell people to do things that you yourself probably wouldn’t do? If you can say “yes” to all three of those things, congratulations! You’re a life coach!

– Executives: Turns out the great thing about LinkedIn is you can call yourself anything you want! It seems like about 30% of LinkedIn Profiles list their occupation as “Executive”. You really bend the matrix when you list yourself as “Executive Life Coach!” So, you are the sole person at your company? Awesome, you’re now the Chief Strategy Officer at Timmy Sackett, Inc.! In fact, I’m a Fortune 1 Million Executive in one of the fastest-growing industries in the world! It’s kind of like the banking industry where everyone is a Vice President, no matter what you really do.

– Actual People Doing Real Work that are not in Sales or Recruiting, or playing make-believe as Keynote Speakers, Life Coaches or Executives: Like 3%? Okay, to be fair, I know it’s way higher than that because every week we hire real people off LinkedIn for all kinds of jobs in Supply Chain, Engineering, IT, Accounting/Finance/ and HR. But holy cow do they all seem like the minority. I’m guessing this is the case because these folks are not like me, they don’t live on LI every day. For the most part, folks with jobs are also not looking for attention, so they don’t stick out as much.

So, before someone goes postal in the comments about the value of their life coach or how my math on the profiles equals 347%, I understand that I built my LinkedIn network, so my view reflects a world I built around myself! I built my own nightmare! I put on my headline “Not a Life Coach” and stupid life coaches from around the world reached out to connect with me saying things like “I see we are in the same industry” in their invites.

My dream is that LinkedIn eventually gives me the ability to go in and easily curate my network. You know, do some searches and see that I’ve got “X” number of people in my network that I no longer want in my network and with one click, shrink it down. That would be so cool! Or maybe you’ve changed professions and while you used to want a network of HR pros, now you want a network of Business Intelligence pros.

As our networks get large, it becomes more difficult to curate, that would be super valuable to me. I would pay for that ability! As our careers grow and change over the years we’ve been on LinkedIn for a long time, we really need this ability. I hope as all of you are out at Talent Connect this week you enjoy the great content and networking. LinkedIn puts on one of the top Recruiting conferences in the world and I’m really upset I couldn’t make it this year!

Amazon just got 200,000+ Applications and That is a Giant Problem!

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You probably saw the headline from Amazon: “Hiring 30,000!” Let’s face it, Amazon is a rocketship. Have you seen the Amazon vans coming down your street? I’m 100% sure the “Amazon Guy” who drives the van in our neighborhood stops by our house about 250% more times then the mailperson stops by our house!

I’m not actually surprised they have 30,000 openings, but I am surprised that they only got 200,000 applications!

The headline is from Business Insider and they’re mostly professional journalist thinking that when they write the headline everyone will be wowed by the big number, but in reality, that number is scary low! Do the quick math 200,000/30,000 = 6.6 applications per position.

Also, we (Talent Pros) know the reality. For positions that Amazon has no trouble filling, they probably got 600 applications per positions and for the ones they are having trouble filling they got zero or one, and that one wasn’t even close to being qualified!

I’m not sure exactly what Amazon’s applicant funnel looks like but if the top of the funnel only has 6 applicants, that’s a problem! A giant problem! The big question is how many applicants does Amazon need to fill 30,000 currently open, or anticipated open positions. If Amazon has 30,000 positions to fill, right now, how many applicants would they have to plow through to fill those jobs?

This is where the rubber hits the road with your Talent Strategy. There are a number of factors:

  • What’s the average pay per position?
  • Can we group these positions into various categories to better understand how long the process will take?
  • How many are skilled vs. unskilled vs. semi-skilled vs. white-collar?
  • What are the locations?
  • How fast do these need to be filled?
  • How picky are your hiring managers?
  • What’s our comp strategy? Trailing, leading, etc.?

Let’s just throw out some numbers assuming the average pay is around $15/hr. Probably low for many of the openings they are filling, but I’m also assuming the vast majority are warehouse, drivers, service level type roles. Scattered all over the country, but most white-collar positions will be in highly competitive markets.

Let’s say you need at least 20 applicants on average per position. That would mean at a minimum they will need around 600,000. But, there is a massive turnover of those lower-level positions, plus Amazon is known to have a demanding work culture that tends to push folks out even quicker, so you would probably need at least double that to around 1.2 million applications to fill 30,000 openings.

That means, in the real world, Amazon’s TA team is probably right now having a panic attack! A panic attack of being around 1 million applications short to fill 30,000 positions, and that’s not even considering current turn and churn of their giant employee base already, plus who knows what Bezos and the team have cooked up for future growth.

The numbers are staggering, but at scale this the job. It’s just a funnel whether you’re filling 30,000 or 30. You better know how many applications you need on the topside to ensure you get the hires at the end!

Why am I being ‘ghosted’ after I interview?

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Dear Timmy,

I recently applied for a position that I’m perfect for! A recruiter from the company contacted me and scheduled me for an interview with the manager. I went, the interview was a little over an hour and it went great! I immediately followed up with an email to the recruiter and the manager thanking them, but since then I’ve heard nothing and it’s been weeks. I’ve sent follow-up emails to both the recruiter and the manager and I’ve got no reply.

What should I do? Why do companies do this to candidates? I would rather they just tell me they aren’t interested than have them say nothing at all!

The Ghost Candidate

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Dear Ghost,

There are a number of reasons that recruiters and hiring managers ghost candidates and none of them are good! Here’s a short-list of some of these reasons:

– They hated you and hope you go away when they ghost you because conflict is uncomfortable.

– They like you, but not as much as another candidate they’re trying to talk into the job, but want to leave you on the back burner, but they’re idiots and don’t know how to do this properly.

– They decided to promote someone internally and they don’t care about candidate experience enough to tell you they went another direction.

– They have a completely broken recruitment process and might still be going through it believing you’re just as happy as a pig in shi…

– They think they communicated to you electronically to bug off through their ATS, but they haven’t audited the process to know this isn’t working.

– The recruiter got fired and no one picked up the process.

I would love to tell you that ghosting candidates are a rare thing, but it’s not! It happens all the time! There is never a reason to ghost a candidate, ever! Sometimes I believe candidates get ghosted by recruiters because hiring managers don’t give feedback, but that still isn’t an excuse I would accept, at least tell the candidate that!

Look, I’ve ghosted people. At conference cocktail parties, I’ve been known to ghost my way right back up to my room and go to sleep! When it comes to candidates, I don’t ghost! I would rather tell them the truth so they don’t keep coming back around unless I want them to come back around.

I think most recruiters ghost candidates because they’re over their head in the amount of work they have, and they mean to get back to people, but just don’t have the time. When you’re in the firefighting mode you tend to only communicate with the candidates you want, not the ones you don’t. Is this good practice? Heck, no! But when you’re fighting fires, you do what you have to do to stay alive.

What would I do, if I was you? 

Here are a few ideas to try if you really want to know the truth:

1. Send a handwritten letter to the CEO of the company briefly explaining your experience and what outcome you would like.

2. Go on Twitter and in 280 characters send a shot across the bow! “XYZ Co. I interviewed 2 weeks ago and still haven’t heard anything! Can you help me!?” (Will work on Facebook & IG as well!)

3. Write a post about your experience on LinkedIn and tag the recruiter and the recruiter’s boss.

4. Take the hint and go find a company who truly values you and your talent! If the organization and this manager will treat candidates like this, imagine how you’ll be treated as an employee?

The Rules for Office Romances

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We spend a ton of time at the office and it only seems to be increasing. On top of that, new research says we need to spend more time with co-workers if we want a great employee experience! As HR pros we know what this means, which is usually a lot of unwanted advances by horny dudes who think they have a shot at the hot co-worker, who has absolutely no interest in them at all.

Welcome to the show, kids!

I’ve given out some rules in the past. Everyone on the planet has read my Rules for Hugging at the Office, but Office Romances are a little more complicated than the simple side-hug in the hallway. So, I thought I would lay out some easy to follow, simple rules for Office Romances for you to pass out to your employees as you start asking them to join each other at TopGolf for your employee outing to increase their employee experience:

Rule #1 – Don’t fall for someone you supervise. If you do fall for someone you supervise, which you probably will because this is how office romances work. In that case, get ready to quit, be fired, be moved to another department, and or get the person you’re having an office romance with fired, moved, etc.

Rule #2 – Don’t fall for anyone in Payroll. When it ends, so will your paycheck. At least temporarily, and even then it will be filled with errors from now until eternity. It’s a good rule of thumb to never mess with payroll for any reason.

Rule #3 – Don’t mess around in the office, or on office grounds. Look I get it. You’re crazy in love and just can’t wait until you get home. The problem is the security footage never dies. It will live long past your tenure with us, and we’ll laugh for a long time at you. So, please don’t.

Rule #4 – Don’t send explicit emails to each other at work. It’s not that I won’t enjoy reading them, it’s that I get embarrassed when I have to read them aloud to the unemployment judge at your hearing. Okay, I lied, I actually don’t get embarrassed, but you will.

Rule #5 – Don’t pick a married one. Look I get it, you’re the work spouse. He/She tells you everything. You get so close, you really think it’s real, but it’s not. You’ll actually see this when the real spouse shows up and keys your car in the parking lot.

Rule #6 – Don’t pick someone who has crappy performance. Oh, great, you’re in love! Now I’m firing your boyfriend and you’ll have to pick between him and us, which you’ll pick him, and now I’m out two employees. Pick the great performers, it’s easier for all of us.

Rule #7 – Inform the appropriate parties as soon as possible. Okay, you went to a movie together, not a big deal. Okay, you went to the movie together and woke up in a different bed than your own. It might be time to mention this to someone in HR if there is at anyway a conflict of some sort. If you don’t know if there’s a conflict of some sort, let someone in HR help you out with that.

Rule #8 – If it seems wrong, it probably is.  If you find yourself saying things in your head like, “I’m not sure if this is right”, you probably shouldn’t be having that relationship. If you find yourself saying things like, “If this is wrong, I don’t want to be right”, you definitely shouldn’t be having this relationship.

Rule #9 – If you find yourself hiding your relationship at work, it might be time to talk to HR. We’re all adults, we shouldn’t be hiding normal adult relationships. If you feel the need to hide it, something isn’t normal about it.

Rule #10 – Everyone already knows about your relationship. People having an office romance are the worst at hiding it. You think you’re so sneaky and clever, but we see you stopping at her desk 13,000 times a day ‘asking for help’ on your expense report. We see you. We’re adults. We know what happened when you both went into the stairwell 7 seconds apart. Stop it.

There you go. Hope that helps.

HR Pros: Do you spend more time eliminating negative or creating great experiences? #Greatness19

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While I was out at Influence Greatness this week I came across a great little nugget of genius from the O.C. Tanner Institute. They released their 2020 Global Culture Report and one of the main things they are looking into currently is employee experience. It’s been a super hot topic over the past few years and we still really no so little about it.

What we believe to be true is negative employee experiences are bad. We can all agree on that, right?! At the same time, we also tend to believe that positive employee experiences are good but really worth about the same as stopping a negative experience. So, we (HR pros and leaders) spend a great deal of our time eliminating negative experiences and trying to ensure new negative experiences don’t happen.

The O.C. Tanner study is going to change how we think about employee experiences moving forward!

From the picture above you already know the big finding! Positive experiences outlast negative experiences for a duration of four weeks to two weeks. Meaning, if you have a great employee experience happen to you, it carries over, on average for four weeks, while a negative experience we only carry for about two weeks.

This really should change our behavior where we spend way more time trying to create peak employee experiences versus eliminating valley, or negative, experiences for our employees. I’m not sure it will, though. Why?

Creating ‘wow’ experiences, peak experiences, for an employee is hard. Many times those great experiences actually happen by chance. Someone does a great job on a project, and from that work, something amazing happens with appreciation or recognition, that wasn’t planned, and “Bam!” a peak experience happens.

It’s easier for us to just keep fighting fires. “Oh, jeez! There goes Mark again hitting on the gals in payroll, we need to shut this down…” Don’t you feel better, now? We stopped this negative experience from happening! Now you can go back to enjoying your normal, daily average employee experience, minus creepy Mark hitting on you!

Stopping negative from happening isn’t great HR, it’s just HR. It’s what is expected. Making great happen isn’t expected, and it’s probably why those experiences stay with us so much longer. The cool part about working to create ‘great’ experiences for your employees is once you start going down that path it becomes easier and easier to come up with ideas and ways to create great. Like every skill, the more you do it, the better and easier it becomes!

The first step is for HR to make the behavior change. No, I’m not saying ignore negative experiences. Do what HR does and stop those, but let’s not linger there. Stop it, move on. Get back to the more valuable work of creating lasting great experiences that will do more to drive the culture we want to foster and nurture.

The data is robust, so it’s hard to ignore. This isn’t some small sample of one workplace. This is thousands of employees over hundreds of work locations and many countries. I love it because it forces me to think differently about what we do in HR and why. What I do know is working to make great experiences sounds like a way better job than putting out fires all day!

Is Your Company a Magnet for Talent? #Greatness19 @OCTanner

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I’m out at O.C. Tanner’s Influence Greatness conference this week and got a sneak peek at their 2020 Global Cultural Report by the O.C. Tanner Institute and it’s loaded with some exceptional findings! O.C. Tanner puts more money into their research than almost any other HR Tech company on the planet, so it’s well worth checking out. This report surveyed 20,000 people and over 12.8 million data points.

The research is based on O.C. Tanner’s model of “Talent Magnets” of which there are six:

  • Wellbeing
  • Leadership
  • Purpose
  • Opportunity
  • Success
  • Appreciation

While every single one of these is important in their own right, they also all work together. Lift one, and you will lift the rest. As you can imagine the highest-rated magnet is Purpose. Having a clear purpose to why you do the work you do has the highest impact on positive engagement.

So often I find people believing their job or their company has no purpose, but everyone does and every organization does. You might not believe in it, or agree with it, but the purpose is there. Part of the being a strong magnet is pulling in others who do believe in your purpose.

Wellbeing is another one that is interesting. On the outside, we see “wellbeing” and we think physical wellbeing, but in reality, in terms of being a talent magnet, it’s probably more social wellbeing that has a bigger impact. It’s something like belonging. Do I feel like I belong here, or that I’m wanted here? Do I feel valued by not only my leader but my peers and co-workers that I’m with every day?

I think we discount how important this is to the retention of all talent. We discount it because it’s really hard to help someone feel like they belong. Many times this comes out on the exit interview as “oh, yeah, Tim, he just didn’t ‘fit’ our culture”. The truth is no one ‘fits’ your culture the moment they walk in, we make them feel wanted, we make them feel like they belong, and then not so magically, they become a great ‘fit’.

One of the shocking findings in the report is the picture above. 59% of your employees would take another job with another company for basically the same job. Same title, same pay, same benefits, believing that it will magically be better. This really isn’t as surprising if you really go through your turnover. Most people leave us for basically the same job at another place, believing it’s something better, but it’s basically the same.

Another piece of data from the report I’m fascinated by is 79% of employees are feeling some level of burnout, from minor to extreme. Burnout is basically chronic workplace stress that isn’t mitigated. Do you know who never had “burnout”? Your grandparents! So, they either were way tougher than we are, or work has changed considerably! I think it’s a bit of both, actually!

It’s a giant report, I’m only scratching morsels from all the data – it’s like 180 pages – I’m not even sure my book was that long! If you’re in HR and leadership this is a must-read to help your organization nurture the culture you want to have.