Category Archives: Blah

How to Kill a Hiring Manager and Get Away With It!

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My wife and I just finished watching the entire series of Breaking Bad!  All five seasons, sometimes we went three episodes deep in a night. It was tough, but we persevered. You’re welcome!

This really isn’t a Breaking Bad series post, I promise. If you haven’t seen the series, I thought it was worth it. Something funny happens to you when you watch so much darkness in such a short time.  I will warn you about that.  You begin to feel like it’s somewhat normal. Like somehow I could actually get away with the stuff Walt is doing on TV!

That leads me to how you can kill a hiring manager and get away with it!

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard recruiters say, “Ugh! I hate my hiring managers! I wish I could shoot them!” Or, something to that effect.

Next to candidates who bomb or don’t show up for interviews, Hiring Managers have to be in every recruiters Top 3 worst things they have to deal with.  “Of course, it isn’t every hiring manager”, we say out loud, so the ones that are listening think they’re still awesome, when they really suck.  “There’s only a few hiring managers that can be difficult to deal with”, we say out loud again, like it really is going to matter.

I’m guessing there must be some law about posting something on a blog about instructions on how to kill a hiring manager and get away with it.  I don’t remember reading anything from WordPress when they allowed me to sign up this blog.  You would think that would be bolded in the instruction: “HEY! Don’t write sh*t about killing hiring managers! Or you could be put in jail!” 

I better be strategic about how I word this.

Well, after watching 62 straight episodes of Breaking Bad, apparently it’s fairly easy to dissolve a body in a big 50 gallon drum with some acid.  In the show, they always wore protective gear, like rubber suits and gloves.  They also had the equipment to pick up and transport said 50 gallon drums of disgusting liquid. As you can imagine this takes care of the not getting caught part.

Here are a few ideas, for entertainment purposes only, on how you might kill a hiring manager, but of course ‘we’ never would:

1. Disgruntled Crazy Candidate.  We actually protect our hiring managers so many times they don’t even know it!  We know the crazies, but we filter them out.  Not this time! This time not only do we pass them along, but we let the Crazy Candidate in on a little feedback, “Yeah, the hiring manager hated you, and thinks you’re crazy, and here is her address…”

2. Strange White Powder on the Resume. You hear about this stuff all the time with crazies sending stuff to politicians.  I’m sure it works the same for hiring managers! But you put yourself in jeopardy as well. But, if you’ve read this far, my guess is you’re on the edge already, once one more step!

3. Nut Allergies. Hiring managers love conference room cookies!  This time all you need to do is make a special batch of your Chocolate Chip “Surprise” cookies, but don’t call them “surprise”, they’ll feel the surprise!

My guess is I’ll get at least 3 ‘unsubscribe’ emails after this goes live.  That’s always a good measurement of success as a blogger.  How many people did you alienate today?

Happy hiring folks!

P.S. – if this is the FBI or any other law enforcement agency reading this, I’m joking, this is a joke, I love my hiring managers. Well, most of them.

My Name is Tim, and I’m a Helicopter Parent

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I’m not here to apologize and tell you all how wrong I am.  I like being a ‘Helicopter Parent’.  I had kids for a reason, to spend time with them, to watch them grow, to help them grow, to show them right from wrong.

Let’s face it, I was raised in an age where being a helicopter parent wasn’t a ‘thing’.  My parents loved me, but having kids in their time was different.  It was almost like it was part of a job description for marriage.  Get married. Buy House. Have kids. Start your addictions. Die with more money than everyone else.  Hello, Baby Boomers!

I didn’t want to be the same parent that my parents were to me.  Not that I disliked my upbringing.  I had great freedoms.  It taught me to be very independent.  I don’t fault my parents at all, I turned out just fine.  They parented like most parents parented during that time.  Kids were meant to be seen, not heard.  The parents were the priority, not the kids.  Different time, I survived. I’m a happy and productive citizen to the world.

But that’s not me.  I wanted to go to my kids first preschool holiday party and watch him try to figure out Christmas, even though you couldn’t use that word at the party and he was Jewish.  I wanted to coach his little kickers soccer team, where we didn’t keep score and everyone got a medal and a snack.  I wanted to spend my free time, with my kids.  Unapologetically so!  If my kids were outside playing, I didn’t want to miss their joys and falls.  I also didn’t want the pedophile on the next block running off with them. Since I know there is a pedophile one block over from the pedophile site online.  My parents didn’t know this, ignorance was bliss.

I’m proud to be a Helicopter Parent.  I’ve seen most of the great moments in my kids life. I won’t regret this when I’m lying on my death bed.  I don’t think my kids will like me any more than I liked my parents at their age, that’s just life.  They’ll hate me as a teen, they’ll love me again once they find out it sucks to be an adult.  I’m sure they’ll respect me more as they get older, the way I respect my parents the older I get.  I’m doing it differently than my parents, not better.

Okay, gotta go, I need to ‘help’ put some details into my kids science project.

Dream Jobs Are A Lie

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I hate that we are meant to feel that we should have our dream job.  It’s drilled into our society at nausea from mass media, our celebrities, our teachers and spiritual leaders. It’s all basically complete bullshit, but we eat it up like it came directly from G*d.

It didn’t.  Whichever G*d you believe in, she/he never said ‘Thou shalt have your dream job’, never.

Celebrities stand on award stages and tell our children to never give up their dreams, you can do whatever you want.  No.  No, they can’t.  Let’s face it, Mr. Celebrity, you were given a gift, most people don’t have that same gift, so stop telling my kid they can be you.

I know this upsets some people.  They love to live in a fantasy world that someday they stop working their 9 to 5 and start being a fairy princess.  I hate to tell you this, but you won’t.  Sorry, Billy, you’re an overweight short kid with bad eye sight and irrational fear of clouds.  You won’t be the next NFL Hall of Fame quarterback.  But you might be a really awesome Accountant, and that’s not a bad gig.

I don’t have my dream job.

I have a job I like a lot.

My dream job would be to make a ton of money managing and/or coaching a professional sports team. I would take basketball or baseball.  I really think I would be happy with either.

I know that won’t ever work out for me, so I don’t spend much time really thinking about it.  It would be stupid for me to do so.  But that’s my ‘dream’.

If it’s my dream, shouldn’t I give up everything I have and chase it?  Give up my well-paying, really good job.  Give up my house.  My kids college education.  My retirement account.  I mean this is MY dream!

Mr. Celebrity said I can reach my dreams.  We all can.  We just have to want it more.  We just have to not give up striving for it.

I met a person last week who said he had his ‘dream job’.  It was a good job, but he also told me he missed his kids, because his dream job made him travel a lot.  He also said his dream job had him working harder than he ever had prior.  The longer he talked, the longer it didn’t sounded like a dream job, and the more it sounded just like every other job.

The concept of dream jobs is bullshit.  That’s okay.  The sun will still come up tomorrow, even if you tell yourself I’ll never have my dream job.  You’ll be alright.  You can still have a really good, awesome life.

Be wary of someone telling you to chase your dream job.

Is Your Personal Strength Your Biggest Weakness?

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I’ve always been a huge fan of adult learners ignoring their weaknesses and focusing on bettering their strengths.  This goes against almost every single OD department in the corporate world where employee weaknesses have to be improved at all costs!  Adult learning studies have proven time and again that after a certain point in a person’s life, usually once reaching adulthood, focus on improving a weak skill will still only slightly improve even with focused training. But, you can see better increases when focusing on bettering an adults strengths.

Let me give you a personal example, I’m terrible a grammar, always have been.  I see grammar rules as something that are only important to high school English teachers. But, I love to write! Now, I could spend hours on improving my grammar, or I could spend those hours on writing better creative content, then hiring an editor to fix the crap I write.   Seems simple enough.  Hire an editor.  Bam, people will think I’m a better writer.

But what happens when you overuse a personal strength?

I know quite a few people who have been told and given performance feedback that you have “great attention to detail” (by the way I love these folks – I hire them on my team – because they help catch my grammar mistakes!).  You get told this, you take pride in it, and you now “really” focus on it, because that is what you’re known for.

Your company has a big important project and everyone needs to deliver. Major time crunch.  You get the deal.  You become involved because you want every detail perfect and you want to ensure nothing leaves with an error. Seems good, right?  Except for the fact that you can’t deliver on time because nothing is good enough.  You keep sending stuff back to get better, to get perfect and you miss deadlines.  One small example in our normal corporate lives, but it shows how a person’s strength, something they are applauded for, can become a weakness.

Do you know what your personal strength’s are?  I bet you probably do, but do you know if you are relying on these strengths so much, they are becoming your enemy?

I’ve been told a strength of mine is that I “will tell it like it is”.  Not a bad strength to have on a leadership team – until it is.  There are times and places where “telling like it is” is very valuable, and their are times “when telling it like is is” is very dangerous.  Remember, not all of your strengths will always be strengths!

Fall In Love With Ideas

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I use to have this issue.  I would come up with an idea.  I really, really good idea!  I would then work to make this idea a reality.  I would spend a lot of time, energy and resources making this idea come to life.  The work became more important than the idea.

Someone really smart would come along and want to change my work.  It would frustrate me. It would anger me.  I didn’t like them messing with my work.

I fell in love with the work.  With the process.

The work and my processes became more important to me than the original idea.  I was blind to see that those who were coming to me, to try and get me to change my work, were in love with my idea, but not in love with my work.

It took me along time to understand the value wasn’t in the work, it was in the idea.  Anyone can do the work.  The work can be done a number of different ways to get the same result. But the idea was the creation, the start.  Without it, there wouldn’t be any work.

So many of the HR Pros I know have this same issue.  We take great pride in our work, so much so, that we don’t allow others to come in and help make our ideas better.  We don’t allow them to get on board and be a part of something special.  Our pride, blinds us to see just maybe there might be even a better way to make our ideas become reality.

Fall in love with the idea. Don’t fall in love with the work.

Expecting Expectations

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Down at ERE’s Fall conference this week and was a little surprised at how many session speakers talked about ‘expectations’ in talent acquisitions.  It seems like talent acquisition 101, but by the amount of conversations being had on this one topic it was pretty clear that as a function talent acquisition is still doing a pretty crappy job with expectations.

What do I mean by ‘expectations’?  Here are a few ways we fail to deliver on expectations in talent acquisition:

Not setting expectations with a candidate. We constantly fail as recruiters to set proper expectations with our candidates.  When they will be communicated to and how.  What they should expect from the process.  What they should expect from an offer.  What the job will truly be once they start. What the real culture is, not the culture we wished it was.

Not setting expectations with our hiring managers. Mrs. hiring manager I’m going to work my butt off for you in getting the talent you need but I need… I might need you to respond back to each resume within 24 hours so we ensure we most fast enough to capture great talent.  I might need you to provide feedback on the quality of the talent your seeing. How the process is working or not working for you.  To let me know if something changes with the position I’m working on for you.

Not setting expectations with our peers. I expect as peers, as an internal team, as a department, that we’ll support each other and our function above all.  That means if one of us is failing, we are all failing.  We use positive words when describing our peers and our function.  That I will always make decisions based on making each of us successful in our professional positions.

It seems really, really simple.  But it’s something we fail at so much.

Why?

We fail at setting expectations because establishing expectations isn’t a one way street.  If you are going to set expectations on someone else, you have to be prepared for having expectations set on you.  This becomes a big roadblock.  We love putting accountability on others, but we hate it when accountability is put on us!

So, instead of doing a very simple thing like ensuring we are both on the same page with clear expectations, we do a lot of assuming and just plain poor communicating.

It really might be the one thing you could start doing tomorrow that would have the biggest impact to your functions performance.  We are going to certain expectations for candidates, for hiring managers and for peers, and I’m going to work on what they can expect from me.  We are going to live by these, and we’re going to move the needle in a positive direction on our functions performance.

We waste so much time and resources because we just aren’t being clear on what is expected.

Recruiters! Conferences Don’t Care About You!

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I’m down at ERE’s Fall Conference in Chicago this week.  It’s a conference designed for Talent Acquistion leaders (FYI – they don’t like to be called ‘Recruiters’).  It’s really cool the folks at ERE do a great job putting together great content and work to push the role of Talent Acquisition forward in organizations around the world.

HR Tech also does a great job for HR folks looking for HR Tech.  So does Sourcecon, for people wanting to be better sourcers.  So does TLNT’s Transform for HR leaders. Heck, even SHRM National has some great content.

Besides ERE, though, where does a TA leader or Recruiter go to keep up on their industry. To get better. To challenge and measure themselves and their organizations to get better?  No where, that’s where.

ERE does a fall and spring national conference.  If you don’t have the budget for a national conference, usually $1-2,000 to attend, plus travel which usually doubles the cost, you’re screwed when it comes to getting really good recruiting content.

SHRM has both local and state opportunities for HR Pros to get further development and expand their knowledge base.  Do you have a local recruiting organization or a state recruiting organization that will offer this to you?  Most likely No, unless you live in D.C. (RecruitDC) or Minnesota (Hello Paul!).

It’s crazy when you really stop and think about it.  Almost no where are we really leveraging the minds and the dollars to bring these people together at a state or local level.

I’m in Michigan.  I know right now I could put two days of content together, leverage some awesome Recruiting talent from around the world to come in and speak, and get 250-500 Recruiting/Talent Acquisition Pros from Michigan to attend at $400-500 each.  That’s anywhere from $100-250K just in conference fees, not including probably another $100-200K in sponsors. So, some company isn’t interested in $400-500K!?

Southeast Michigan is begging for technical talent. Organizations would spend the money to spend their TA teams to something like this.  All across the country many areas are hurting for talent and willing to invest (a little) to get their recruiting teams better.  But, most are not willing to have those same teams travel across the country at the price tag of $3,000 each for the same content.

Build it and they will come…just don’t build it too far away!

I see this work on the HR front.  Monthly local SHRM meetings will get 50-100 participants at $50 per meeting for lunch and one hour of content! State conferences give you a day and half of content for $500-750, and most of that is vendors trying to sell you crap.

It just seems insane to me that someone who actually does conference planning for living can’t figure out how to leverage the largest 25 metro areas and put together a calendar of ‘local’ level recruiting conferences.

Like I said, ERE does a good job nationally, their just leaving about 90% of the money that is available out there locally on the table.

The Corruptible Effect of Praise

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This is a quote from Albert Einstein:

“The only way to escape the corruptible effect of praise is to go on working.”

 

That’s pretty powerful.  When I first read the quote I thought to myself, Albert believes praising someone for their work is a bad thing.  He was a really smart dude, so I tend to read his quotes with a sense of he probably knew more than I do, there must be some truth.

Praising someone for their work is bad.  It just doesn’t seem right, does it!?  Could Albert have been wrong?

I didn’t write this post as soon as I read the quote, I gave myself a day or so to let it sink in.  The longer I was able to digest it, I think Albert was saying something different.  I now believe he was speaking to our ego, not to the praise.

Praise itself is not corruptible.  The effect is has on the participant is corruptible. If you allow yourself to buy-in and believe your praise, you tend to stop doing what got you the praise to begin with.

How do you combat this corruption.  Go on working.

I love to the phrase, “Dance with the one that brung ya.” I use it often.  To me it means, you have to keep doing what you did to get you to where you are, assuming you want more of what you got.  If you don’t, stop doing what you’re doing and do something else.   If I’m doing well, I’m going to keep dancing with the one that got me to the dance in the first place, I’m not changing to another more sexy dance partner.  That’s corruption.

We like to blame praise.  Tell someone they’re great enough times and they will begin to believe they’re great.  If they believe they’re great, they’ll stop working to be great. Praise must be to blame.  But it’s not praise that is to blame, it’s ego.

Now get your ass back to work, you’re not as good as your praise has you believe you are.

 

Dad’s Don’t Get Work-Life Balance Empathy

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Max Shireson, the CEO of mongoDB, turned in his resignation this past week.  That announcement in itself isn’t really that big of a deal, CEOs turn in resignations every day.  The reason he turned in his resignation is huge.  I’ll let him tell it in his own words from a letter he sent to mongoDB’s workforce:

“Earlier this summer, Matt Lauer asked Mary Barra, the CEO of GM, whether she could balance the demands of being a mom and being a CEO. The Atlantic asked similar questions of PepsiCo’s female CEO Indra Nooyi. As a male CEO, I have been asked what kind of car I drive and what type of music I like, but never how I balance the demands of being both a dad and a CEO.

While the press haven’t asked me, it is a question that I often ask myself. Here is my situation:

* I have 3 wonderful kids at home, aged 14, 12 and 9, and I love spending time with them: skiing, cooking, playing backgammon, swimming, watching movies or Warriors or Giants games, talking, whatever.

* I am on pace to fly 300,000 miles this year, all the normal CEO travel plus commuting between Palo Alto and New York every 2-3 weeks. During that travel, I have missed a lot of family fun, perhaps more importantly, I was not with my kids when our puppy was hit by a car or when my son had (minor and successful, and  of course unexpected) emergency surgery.

* I have an amazing wife who also has an important career; she is a doctor and professor at Stanford where, in addition to her clinical duties, she runs their training  program for high risk obstetricians and conducts research on on prematurity, surgical techniques, and other topics. She is a fantastic mom, brilliant, beautiful, and  infinitely patient with me. I love her, I am forever in her debt for finding a way to keep the family working despite my crazy travel. I should not continue abusing    that patience.

Friends and colleagues often ask my wife how she balances her job and motherhood. Somehow, the same people don’t ask me.”

When we talk about ‘inclusion’ we aren’t really talking about everyone.  That’s the problem.  We wonder how possibly a woman could handle the pressures of being a CEO and being a Mom, but we never wonder, or even care, how a man handles the pressure of being a CEO and a Dad.   It’s expected a man can do both, we question if a woman can do both.  

There is a cultural expectation, wrongly, that as a man I can be CEO and a Dad and perform just fine. As a woman, I’ll have trouble doing both jobs, because the Mom does more than the Dad.  The mom cooks and cleans and nurtures and schedules and kisses booboos and, well, does everything for the family.  The lazy asshole Dad comes home and waits for the Mom to fix him dinner and his drink.  Really!?! Is that where we are in 2014?

I’m a Dad and a President of a company.  I feel for Max.  My wife does a ton, it can’t even be measured.  I don’t expect her to do everything and help out a ton with parenting when and where I can.  I assume if the roles were changed and my wife was a CEO, I would have to pick up more of her home and parenting duties.

This goes beyond just duties, though, this is about emotional connection.  As a Dad, like Max, why should I have less of a connection as a parent than my wife.  Why do we throw that cultural expectation onto our employees, on to our executives?  As a father I frequently feel failure.  Maybe it’s because I missed being able to have lunch with my son at school.  Maybe it’s because my wife has a stronger relationship with my kids than I do.  Maybe it’s because I trying to live up to a cultural expectation that I should be less of a parent.

No one ever wants to talk about how hard a man has it, trying to be a father and work.  It’s not ‘politically’ correct.  Men have it easier. End of story.  That sucks sometimes.