Category Archives: Association of Talent Acquisition Professionals

The Top 7 Sources of Hire for 2017!

Posted on by
5

Silkroad released their annual Sources of Hire 2017 report and I always love looking at big sets of data around the source of hire because I think the vast majority of organizations are misallocating their talent acquisition resources in a big way, and this data just gives me more evidence to point to!

Check out this chart:

So, it looks like Employee Referrals remain king! That doesn’t surprise anyone, what should be surprising are two items from this list:

1. Organizations are wasting more time on Indeed than any other place. 2nd place of a waste of time is LinkedIn. What? If the vast majority of your interviews are coming from Indeed, but a much smaller percentage of your hires are coming from Indeed, you have a misallocation of resources. LinkedIn has the same thing happening but from a much smaller overall number.

2. CareerBuilder is exponentially a better overall value than LinkedIn, but when I ask most companies to give me their #1 spend LinkedIn is almost always their largest single purchase when it comes to the source of hire, even though it’s #7 overall.

So, what does this data tell us?

First, if you are not investing in automating and increasing your employee referral program, you should probably not hold a TA leadership position at any company in the world. I find most organizations spend the least amount of money ‘marketing’ and ‘automating’ their referral program than any other single source they have. Yet, it’s their number one source and their number one quality of hire source.

Second, Indeed does drive a ton of traffic, and for many companies that’s organic (free) traffic, so you can’t beat that. It’ll be nice to see if Google Jobs changes all of this when it’s fully live. You should see a traffic shift from Indeed to Google as a source of hire. But, this doesn’t mean Indeed will go away. Just like the job boards, people will find value and talent at Indeed.

Third, if you’re single biggest spend is on LinkedIn, yet, it’s not your single biggest source of hire, you’re being taken. By whom? Most likely your recruiting team who claims LinkedIn is awesome when it’s really not that awesome, for you. If your hires per source and cost per hire per source work out that LinkedIn is number one for you, great! Spend more! This data shows it probably won’t.

Lastly, you should be striving to make your sources and interviews be fairly equal if possible. If you’re interviewing a ton from a source because you get great traffic, but you don’t make many hires, it’s a greater waste of time than those sources where you get a high interview to hire ratio.

One final cool stat:

3:1  

14 Million applicants, 655,000 interviews. This data tells us what the magic number is that we already all know, it takes three interviews to make one hire.

Feels right, doesn’t it?

Scared Straight – OFCCP Style!

Posted on by
6

Being a parent of three boys I’ve always been a fan of the theory behind “Scared Straight”! Your kids don’t listen to you, they’re getting in trouble, just send them down to the local prison and have them meet with some inmates! I mean what could go wrong?

In adult life, we don’t have many ‘scared straight’ opportunities. Maybe you painted the front door of your house the wrong color and the subdivision council sent you a strongly worded letter of compliance. Maybe your dog dug up your neighbor’s flowers and she left a handwritten note in your mail box looking for reimbursement, and to be taken off your holiday cookie list. Or, maybe it’s a cease and desist letter from a big HR Tech company’s lawyer telling you to stop saying ‘they suck’ on your blog.

For the most part, it’s hard to get scared straight as adults!

The OFCCP is probably the biggest scared straight organization for HR. Worse then employment attornies for sure! I get threatened to get sued by employees daily, that’s no longer a fear, but DO NOT tell me the OFCCP is on the phone!

It used to be the OFCCP only followed up on complaints and such. You have an extremely low chance of a ‘random’ OFCCP audit. That’s all been changing because of big data. Turns out, someone at OFCCP shows them how to run a basic statistical analysis of the data you send them on your applicants and who you hired.

Check out this chart from ERE and Nicole Greenberg, Esq. (go read the article Nicole does a fantastic job and is the first person in history to make an OFCCP  article that is interesting!) 

So, this data is from a company that had to pay $1.7 Million because they discriminated in not hiring Asian candidates. No one complained that they were discriminated against. OFCCP just looked at the data and said, “Hey, if 77% of applicants are Asian and you only hire 14% of those, you’re being discriminatory in your hiring practices!”

This should scare you straight, like immediately! Especially if you work in a company that has government contracts!

Of course, how the OFCCP is doing this is fraught with bad data interpretation. Just because 77% of my applicant pool is Asian doesn’t mean I’m being discriminatory in hiring. What if, for 77% of those Asian applicants who applied for Front End QA Engineer actually had a degree in accounting and no IT background!?

Doesn’t matter, you are now in an audit that is going to uncover some stuff! Most likely with numbers that far apart, you’re going to have a hard time arguing you’re not at least a little discriminatory in your hiring!

Nicole smartly points out that the government’s own contracting language forces many companies to be discriminatory in hiring in some aspects. Most government contracts require those working on the contract to be U.S. citizens. So, you could have the numbers above in the chart, being following the requirements on the contract and not hiring foreign nationals, and the OFCCP would still find you discriminatory in hiring! Welcome to the American Dream!

So, consider this a heads up. Go run your numbers. Find your hot spots in your organization and address them.

Why Am I Being Ghosted After I Interviewed?

Posted on by
3

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 gotten 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

************************************************************

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 in 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 is 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 hand written letter to the CEO of the company briefly explaining your experience and what outcome you would like.

2. Go on Twitter and in 140 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 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 treats candidates like this, imagine how you’ll be treated as an employee?

 

T3 – @Ascendify – Intelligent People Management

Posted on by
Reply

This week on T3 I review the end to end talent acquisition platform Ascendify. Ascedify currently is a cloud-based platform that is completely mobile and social enabled, combining all of your talent acquisition technology needs in one platform. Ascendify is also adding talent management to its platform as well and you’ll soon get performance management and employee development as well.

Ascendify can run your complete TA tech stack – ATS, CRM, recruitment marketing, onboarding, etc. If you already have an ATS you love, or you’re stuck with, Ascendify can run all the parts of your TA tech stack that are missing on your ATS, with current integrations with Taleo, Workday, Kenexa, etc.

So, what does Ascendify do? All the stuff you read about, but can’t make happen with your ATS alone! Ascendify allows you to run your own talent communities, helps you run your employment branding and recruitment marketing, engages and nurtures prospective candidates, gives you one-click apply, source tracking, multiple forms of messaging candidates, create multiple landing pages for hiring events you have, and built in employee referral, to just name some of the functionality!

What I liked about Ascendify:

– It’s built for Global enterprise talent acquisition. High security, scalable to multiple locations, divisions, different employment brands, etc.

– Easily build out talent communities based on gender, veteran status, diversity, locations, etc.

– Ascendify will help you build and re-design your career site to better use this level of technology. You’ll be driving a Ferrari, you can’t just park it out on the street!

– You can have and build separate employment brands within your organization, but still, share candidates between the brands and divisions. Super flexible and supportive of each employment brand, which letting you all work together within one system.

– Ascedify is designed so that your TA team will spend their entire day within one system to post, communicate, source, pipeline, market, etc.

– Tag candidates under ‘champion’ status giving one who interviewed a silver or bronze medal status based on finishing as a runner up in the process, knowing those who finished second and third are many times still really great candidates who barely missed out, and then we forget about them!

What I liked most about Ascendify is they know they have a big, giant sophisticated platform they are offering you. You’ll go from horse and buggy to a rocketship! That’s pretty scary, and difficult! So, they also work hand-in-hand to help you build it all out, and show you how to use it and how to kick your competition’s butt using it!

When you purchase a piece of TA technology like this, it’s a big investment in resources and time, and it’s critical you pick a vendor that isn’t just selling you the technology, but is also selling you the talent acquisition expertise to help you build out your ‘new’ TA strategy, because that is what will happen if it’s done right!

They are an enterprise level Talent Acquisition technology to be sure. If you’re a TA leader looking to modernize your processes Ascendify is definitely a technology you need to demo.

T3 – Talent Tech Tuesday – 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 T3 – just send me a note – timsackett@comcast.net

Cybersecurity is Teaching Organizations How To Fix Their Talent Shortages

Posted on by
3

Cybersecurity jobs are the hottest thing on the planet. Hackers out to do bad are growing as fast as the need to combat them and at this moment the bad guys are winning!

Every single organization I speak with have needs for Cybersecurity talent, or they are in denial of their needs for Cybersecurity talent!

Here’s the main problem, there are basically very few formal programs teaching cybersecurity. You can’t go to your local state college and get a degree in Cybersecurity. Even if you’re lucky enough to have a program like that close, this is such a ‘new collar’ field that the supply can not even come close to keeping up with demand.

So, what are organizations to do?

Build your own! Old school is the new black! Remember when if you needed an Electrician, no you wouldn’t because it’s been decades, you wouldn’t go hire one, you would hire an ‘apprentice’ and basically teach someone how to be an Electrician, and for this training they would give you 35-40 years of great service and you would give them a Timex gold watch and a bad back!

Remember when if you needed an Electrician, no you wouldn’t because it’s been decades, you wouldn’t go hire one, you would hire an ‘apprentice’ and basically teach someone how to be an Electrician, and for this training they would give you 35-40 years of great service and you would give them a Timex gold watch and a bad back!

Cybersecurity is bringing back the modern day equivalent of solving a talent shortage by having organizations actually solve their own problem, and not wait for higher education to catch up and fix the problem.

The new modern day fix to labor shortages involve a number of things the personnel departments from the 1960s and 70s didn’t have, but in some ways are still trying to catch up with a modern equivalent of the old apprentice programs.

IBM is on the forefront of building their own Cybersecurity workforce and they’re basically giving you the blueprint to do this on your own.

Steps you should be taking to build your own talent:

Step 1 – Reexamine your workforce strategy. You better know what skills you need three to five years down the road, you’re too late for the skills you need right now. The only way to solve that current problem is through a big checkbook because you will have to pay your way out of that problem!

Step 2 – Get really close with your community. You’re going to need training help, so start investing in programs at the high school and community college level. Your money goes further in these places than at State U., and you’ll have more direct control. You need to build a recruiting base.

Step 3 – Own the local talent pool you need most. If there are local groups, you support them in every way they need. Bring in national level development opportunities for those skill sets and give it away for free. Build a complete talent ecosystem with you at the center. This isn’t to say you won’t let others in on your market, let’s face it, it’s simple supply/demand economics. If you’re all building this talent, the overall price will come down!

Step 4 – Build Apprentice 2.0 for your Company. This is heavy lifting and hard work, but it’s the only way you can fully build the talent you need. This means great training, mentoring, hiring manager and peer ownership, continual development and upskilling, etc. The difference between old school apprenticeships and new school is you can’t just grow them and forget about them, or they’ll just leave you and waste your investment.

Step 5 (but should probably be #1 but you wouldn’t have paid attention to it!) – Forget about 4-year degrees! Your unfounded need to have college graduates in every role is silly and now hurting your company. IBM has shown you don’t need to be this ‘traditional’ peg to fit in the round hole. You can actually redrill the hole in any shape you want if you find the right attitude and willingness to learn.

But, Tim, we don’t have the money for this!

You will either pay for this, or you’ll pay at least 40% more to lead the market in wages and steal talent. I tend to believe this is the cheaper and more effective outcome because if you grow your own talent from puppies, they tend to be really, really good at your business and your problems. Hired guns might have talent, but you still have the issue of getting them up to speed at a much higher cost.

Hyperlocal Hiring

Posted on by
3

The BLS reports that 80% of hourly workers live within 5 miles of where they work. Snagajob’s 2017 State of the Hourly Workforce survey found that 70% of our hourly workers refuse to commute more than 30 minutes to work. When you take a look at your own total workforce, my guess is you’ll find the vast majority live very close to your place of employment.

Blue collar, white collar, it doesn’t matter. People would prefer, for the most part, to live fairly close to work so they don’t waste a ton of time commuting. Commuting hours are for the most part one of the biggest drags on balance. Sure you can be productive on your commute, but it’s not really what you would prefer to be doing!

I’m wondering what it would be like if an organization started “Hyperlocal Hiring”? What if you only hired people who were willing to live within 1 mile of your place of employment? Maybe 2 or 3 miles, but not more, the idea is you could walk or bike to work in a reasonable time.

I know of some local government services that already require this in certain positions. I knew a Fire Chief who worked for a city and one requirement of the job was he had to live within the city limits. This was a rather small town, so he was within that 3-mile distance for sure!

Play along with me for a second!

We already know that the millennial and GenZ workforce like to work for companies that have community involvement. If your employees work in the communities they live in, it makes it pretty easy for organizations to truly support their local community. High engagement equals longer tenure, increased productivity, etc.

The Advantages of Hyperlocal Hiring:

– Hyper-short commutes give employees better work-life balance

– Living close to co-workers build more natural, deeper relationships (if you have a best friend at work…)

– Working and living in the same community gives you a stronger tie to both, increasing tenure.

– It would seem the living/working in close proximity would drive a stronger culture as well.

Okay, I know you’re already poking holes in this theory, but just imagine this for a few minutes on the positive side. It could be extremely cool!

I’m sure an organization with 10,000 employees couldn’t pull this off as it would be super difficult and expensive to have housing for 10,000 employees in a mile or two radius of your place of employment. SMB organizations, on the other hand, could use this as a huge advantage in hiring and attracting that younger workforce. Of course, this also works better in urban settings, but I could imagine a billionaire building their own city!

Dan Gilbert, Quicken Loans founder, basically went up and bought much of downtown Detroit and then moved this headquarters there. 5,000+ employees, modern company, downtown Detroit! If you don’t know the area, you either live a mile or two from the headquarters, or you drive out 30 miles to the suburbs.

There’s nothing that stops you from making a proximity of where someone lives a condition of employment. As long as it’s contractually agreed to up front, you would be fine. You can’t go tell someone they’ll be fired unless they move closer to your office, but new hires coming in can have this condition.

I know most of us would say, well, you’ll limit your candidate pool, so you just can’t do this. That’s my point! I want to limit my candidate pool to others who share this vision with me. To work and build a community in a micro-community with all of us involved! Yeah, Hippies! Come join the commune, but in a very modern, free-will, capitalist sense of being!

What do you think? Would you ever want to be Hyperlocal employee?

‘Divided America’ is a myth – @Jobvite 2017 Job Seeker Nation

Posted on by
1

Jobvite does an annual study called Job Seeker Nation where they go out and survey over 2,000 Americans. The data is fascinating from an employee and candidate perspective. This year’s study found that 80% of Americans believe the country is divided, but when you dig into the detail of their responses, you find that’s not really true!

Sure, at a high level you have Dems and Repubs. Rich and Non-rich. Big city and country. Anything from far enough away can be divided into two sets. But, when you really dig into individual beliefs, you find that Americans are that different in their beliefs.

You can access the free, 35-page report from Jobvite!

Here are some of the highlights I pulled out of the data:

– Women negotiate less than Men for salary increases. We’ve known this for a while, but the data also showed that 87% of men who negotiate get a higher pay, and 80% of women who negotiate get higher pay. So, what does this tell us!? HR pros and Hiring Managers are awful negotiators! Also, it’s a candidate market! So, negotiate!

– 68% of job seekers do not believe Diversity is very important when selecting an employer. Only 36% of Women believe it’s very important, 60% of African Americans believe it’s very important. This isn’t to say that the majority don’t find diversity important, it’s saying that most candidates actually find other things more important!

– The lower you get paid, the less loyal you are to your employer. I think we all can understand the psychology behind this. If you have a great paying job, you’re probably more likely to be loyal to help keep that job. If you’re paid like crap, you probably don’t care as much about keeping that job.

– 46% of job seekers find it harder in 2017 to find a job, than in 2016. I found this unbelievable! I can walk outside of my office, right this moment, and within a quarter mile find at least ten business begging for employees. There are more jobs than job seekers, so why is it more difficult for almost 50%!?

– Get used to Hyper Job Hopping. 46% of Millennials will change jobs every 1 to 3 years. So, those hiring managers who have job hopper-itis when it comes to looking at resumes better get over it! That being said, I still don’t buy into the candidates who’s jumping a new job every year.

– Cover letters are dead. 58% of younger workers did not submit a cover letter on their most recent job application, but 26% of recruiters still view cover letters as critical to their decision to hire. That means 1 out of 4 of your recruiters have no clue at what they’re doing!

– You have a 13 times better chance of getting a job through a referral than applying on a job board. 13 times! That’s no joke. If you really want a job, find a referral, work your network, stop applying!

– 28% of younger workers analyze your company culture using Instagram. Candidates believe IG gives them better insight into your true culture over your career site.

I could go on all day with this stuff, I barely scratched the surface of what’s in this report. Go download it for yourself. We’ll basically be seeing screenshots of this study in every conference PowerPoint for the next twelve months!

Three overall key takeaways I took from the study:

  • We are more alike than different when it comes to being job seekers
  • Companies have shaped the behaviors of job seekers more than job seekers are changing company behaviors related to job seekers
  • If you hang onto your old ways of treating job seekers, you’re only hurting your own organization, not the job seeker

 

I Can’t Make You Recruit!

Posted on by
1

My mind is still racing after coming back from SHRM Talent this week! So many great conversations I had with TA leaders and pros. I actually think the level of conversation at functional specific conferences is higher because everyone is feeling the same pain!

It’s not to say a conference like SHRM National can’t be great, but you’re surrounded by HR and Talent pros with dozens of specialties and focus. At SHRM Talent you basically had the majority of the attendees focused on how do we attract and hire better talent for our organizations! That leads to great open dialogue and connection. I came back to the office super energized!

I have to share one specific conversation I had. Great, passionate TA leader approached me with a problem she was having. She was feeling a little beat up, not as successful as she wanted her function and team to be, probably didn’t have the respect and influence she deserved for the challenges they’re facing. Her question was this:

“How do I get my recruiters to recruit?” 

It was simple and honest.  The easy answer is a performance management discussion but I knew what she was really asking. It’s a dilemma most TA leaders face right now. Our organizations are pushing us for more talent, and yet I don’t really have team and technology to provide what they want!

My answer to her was also simple and honest.

“You can’t.” 

Okay, I expanded my answer because you know I love to give advice! I explained that most likely I’m guessing you have some really lovely, caring, company people working on your team that love working for you and love what they do. She said, “that’s right!” I’m  also assuming these people are administering a recruiting process, but they’re not actually recruiting. “Right again! That’s my problem!”, she said.

Here’s what I know after twenty years in talent acquisition. If someone doesn’t want to change, nothing I do will get them to change. Making someone recruit who doesn’t want to recruit, won’t work. Never has, never will. You have to want to recruit, really recruit, to recruit. No, not what you think recruiting is, what actual recruiting is!

So, I said, here’s what I would do and laid out a plan of how I would change process and activities and hold them accountable. I also said more than likely most won’t do this and they’ll quit or fight you until you fire them. If you’re lucky you might get one or two of your “Farmers” to turn into a “Hunters”. But, my experience has been most will refuse to change, while telling you they’re desire to change!

I don’t have the time or capacity to get someone to change. Either they truly care enough to change, or they don’t. There’s no middle ground because I need to change what we’re doing, and I only need people on the team that can now do the new requirements of what I’m asking.

What I find is most TA leaders die trying to change their non-recruiters into recruiters. And by die trying, I mean they eventually quit or get fired, all the while their team keeps doing what they want to do. You can change the people, or you can ‘change’ the people.

I can’t make ‘you’ recruit, but I can find people who want to recruit.

7 Ways to Increase Your Hourly Hiring!

Posted on by
Reply

In 2017 there will be over a thousand webinars on how to hire more IT talent, 15,285 blog posts on how to hire more IT talent, 100s of new technologies will be released on how to hire more IT talent. You won’t see a fraction of that help when it comes to hiring Hourly Workers!

Why?

The majority of hiring done on a daily basis by most companies around the world is in hiring hourly workers, yet almost no one spends time on how to make this easier or do it better. This webinar is designed to help our brothers and sisters in the trenches who are out there every single day, doing all the dirty work in their organizations. Those recruiters and talent leaders who are responsible for hiring the masses!  

Tim Sackett loves the people! (and apparently talking about himself in the third person!) The real people, who go to work every single day and keep our organizations running like a well-oiled machine, not those pretty boys sitting behind a computer screen who have no idea what we really make and do on a daily basis!

Can you hear that music playing in the background? “America, America, God shed His grace on thee…” (Okay, I’m off my rocker, but you get it, I love this stuff!)  

What you’ll learn from FOT’s first webinar on better hourly hiring:  

–7 things you can start doing to increase and simplify hourly hiring in your organization

–3 ways top organizations are leveraging technology to do massive (over 1,000 hires per year) hourly hiring

–Pitfalls most organizations fall into when hiring hourly workers, and what you can do to make sure you don’t go down this path  

Smashfly, the world’s best recruitment marketing platform, is the sponsor for this FOT webinar.  So, you know we’ll be discussing the benefits of utilizing CRM technology in mass hiring, along with so many other tips, tricks, and techniques.

Joining me on the webinar will be my special guest, friend, and HR Influencer, Robin Schooling, VP of HR from Hollywood Casinos, who every day is in the weeds with her team in hiring the best hourly talent!

Register today! Thursday, April 27th at 2 pm ET! 

You need to be a part of a Professional Tribe

Posted on by
1

One of the things I speak about when presenting to HR pros is there need to become part of the ‘Tribe’.  Meaning, if you want to have your seat at the table, you want to gain influence with your leadership team, you need to become part of that tribe.  How do you do that? Well, every tribe is different, you need to figure that out. There is no magical answer, but my guess is they have or do something in common. Find out what that is, and slowly work yourself into that tribe!

HR people struggle with this concept.

“Tim, I just want to do my job and go home!”  Okay.  Then stop bitching that you’re not getting any respect from your executives.  You’re choosing not to be part of that tribe.  Tribes take care of themselves.

You see, most HR pros place themselves on a professional island.  Just Tom Hanks in Cast Away, they’re all by themselves, plus maybe there own little ‘Wilson’ comfort toy picked up at a SHRM conference, a Monster stuffed animal, a Careerbuilder ‘recruiter’ doll, you know the ones!

I have a really, really cool tribe.  In fact, I have many tribes.  First and foremost of have my family.  My HRU tribe is next.  I probably spend more time with them, then my real family on a daily basis!  I also have a number of other personal tribes around youth sports, neighborhood, etc.

My FOT tribe is professionally very cool and satisfying. It’s a group of HR and Talent bloggers who are super smart and snarky, and they make me laugh every day.  I support this tribe and they support me.  They make my professional world better.  They help make me get excited about what I do, and how I do it.  They challenge me to be better. There are many subsets of that tribe, like the 8 Man Rotation tribe, the greater HR blogger tribe, etc.

Tribes are important.

HR and Talent Acquisition pros need to take down their locked HR office doors. Take them right off the hinges.  Get out and start getting involved with professional tribes.  Start in your own organization first.  Do you support a department or client group?  Get into that tribe, now!  Go to lunch with them. Go for drinks after work on Friday.  Bake cookies and bring them to the tribes.  All tribes like to eat and drink! Never underestimate the importance of being a part of that tribe.

I hear from HR pros who tell me all the time, “Tim, ‘they’ just won’t listen to me. How do I get them to listen?”  My first question is to ask them what relationship they have with whoever isn’t listening. That answer is usually, none, or next to none.  They aren’t part of that tribe. That’s the real problem.

I’m not saying it’s easy to break into every tribe. It might not be, but that shouldn’t stop you from trying.  Also, you can create your own professional tribes.  There are so many people just like you that just want to be a part of a tribe.  Go find them! Start a tribe.  You’ll be better for it.

Some of my Tribe and I will be at SHRM Talent next week speaking and hanging out. If you’re going reach out to me and let’s connect! Maybe you’ll become a part of my tribe!