Category Archives: Blah

There Are Only 5 Real Jobs

Posted on by
4

For those who didn’t see this last week the former NBA great and round mound of rebound Sir Charles Barkley made this comment:

“We got great lives. Why would we be miserable? Like, I’ll tell you, there’s five real jobs in the world: teacher, fireman, policeman, doctor, and somebody who’s in the armed services. Those are five real jobs.” 

For those who don’t know Charles he makes outlandish statements all the time, that’s why he gets paid more now to be a commentator on TV than he probably ever got paid to play basketball. But his statement got me to thinking, how many ‘real’ jobs are there really!?

First, you have to define ‘real’ job.  Charles believes talking about basketball on TV is probably not a ‘real’ job.  It doesn’t really add value to peoples lives further than to those who enjoy watching basketball and listening to other people talk about it.  So, it would seem that for a job to be real, it must have some value further than entertainment purposes.

Doctor’s add value beyond entertainment, but so do nurses and dentist and physical therapists.  So, are not those other health professionals ‘real’ jobs?  If we had no nurses, could doctors, theoretically, do what nurses do? Yes. Okay, so a we add another element to determine ‘real’ job. It’s a job no one else can do, but that profession could do the other jobs if they had to.

Teacher. You don’t have doctors without educators. Someone has to teach the kids to be doctors.  So, teachers are for sure a real job.  Could a teacher be a doctor?  Now, we are starting to run in circles.  Not all teachers could be doctors, some just wouldn’t be smart enough.  So, beyond, doctors and teachers, it would seem like there needs to be someone who just is simply brilliantly smart.  We don’t really have a job title for just smart guy or smart girl.

I will say fireman, policeman and armed services all seem to have a very similar skill set.  I would lump them into all one job – people savers.  That gives us really 4 jobs: Teacher, Doctor, Really Super Smart Person and People Savers.

Is there any others?

I’ve got one I think most people won’t even consider.  Sales Person.  Think of all those ‘jobs’ we have that are really just sales: Politicians, Clergy, most business professionals, educators, etc.  Our reality is that we need to people to sell us on stuff.  If no one sells, we all just sit around and wait for stuff to happen. Politicians sell us on the importance of change. Our religious leaders sell us the need to be good and get better.  Educators sell us on the importance of learning.  We are constantly being sold something.

So, for my money, there are 5 Real Jobs in the world:

1. Teacher

2. Doctor

3. Really Super Smart Person

4. People Savers

5. Sales People.

What would you consider a ‘real’ job? Hit me in the comments.

This Isn’t Rocket Science

Posted on by
1

I hear one thing over and over from people who read my stuff or see my presentations:

“It’s not rocket science.”

I take that as a compliment.  I’m not trying to ‘wow’ anyone with my big brain.  I’ve never been known for being the big brain type.  I’m the common sense, straight forward type.  HR and Recruiting, to me, shouldn’t be hard and complex.  It should be simple and easy to understand.

That’s the problem.

Too many HR and Talent Pros want to make it seem like ‘our’ jobs are very complex and difficult.  This is very natural, every profession does this.  If HR is easy, you won’t be valued highly by leadership.  So, let’s make it hard.  The last thing anyone wants to do is come out and say, “Hey! A monkey to do my job, but keep paying $80K!”   It’s very difficult culturally to come clean and say, “You know what?  This stuff isn’t hard.  It’s work.  We have a lot to do.  But, if we do what we know we have to do, we’ll solve this!”

But that’s HR and Talent Acquisition. It’s work.  Many times it’s a lot of work!  But we aren’t trying to solve the human genome!  We are trying to administer some processes, get our employees better, find ways to keep them engaged and happy, and find more folks who want to become a part of what we are doing.  Not overly hard.  It’s not rocket science.

I think the complexity in HR and Recruiting comes into play with ‘us’ not being aligned with what our leadership truly wants.  Many times we flat out guess what we think they want out of HR. Sometimes we assume what they want, and try and do that. Very rarely do we actually find out exactly what they expect, and just deliver that.

There are a number of reasons for this.  First, we might not agree with what our leadership wants or expects from HR.  So, we give them what we want and expect from HR.  This never works well, but is tried often!  Second, our leadership changes what the want and expect, as they see better ways to HR and Recruiting.  Change is a bitch.  It’s more of a bitch when it’s happening to you.  Third, we might not have the experience to deliver what is wanted or needed.  So, you get what we can give you.

This seems to be why delivering great HR and Talent Acquisition becomes rocket science.  Simply, we can’t have basic communication with our leadership and some self-insight on our capabilities of what we can actually deliver.   Couple this with most people’s unwillingness to ask for help, because they fear others will look down on them for not knowing, and you’ve hit the HR rocket science grand slam!

HR isn’t hard. Recruiting isn’t hard.  Dealing with expectations, and our own insecurities, that’s hard!

I Hate Hotwire

Posted on by
5

I’m a Hotwire user.  My buddies, Kris Dunn and Matt Stollak, got me to use it.  The first time I was really nervous.  I didn’t like I couldn’t see what hotel and location I was getting exactly.  I loved the price I was going to pay, it was always like 40%+ off the hotel’s own reservation site.  I started using it all the time.  My kids travel for sports so I was constantly having to look up hotels and wanting someplace nice and clean, but not having to pay a ton.

I even recommended it to the parents of other kids we were traveling with. Soon entire teams were using Hotwire to book their travel.  100% of the time I was satisfied with what I got on Hotwire.  Until I wasn’t.

This past baseball tournament I got booked on Hotwire.  The deal said I was getting $119 room for $71 for a 3 star hotel.  The examples they gave me were Holiday Inn Express, Hampton Inn, etc. What I got was a Best Western that was last updated in 1973.  For $71, and the actual price on Best Western’s site was $72.37.  I save $1.37.  A little less than the $48 per night they lied to me about.

I did what any customer would do who loves working with a company.  I called customer service. That was probably my first mistake.  You see, Hotwire didn’t care if I was satisfied.  How it works is you book and pay up front, then they tell you what hotel you get.  They’ve already got your money, they don’t care if you are satisfied or not.  Their customer service rep read me the script, “in small print at the bottom of our website it specifically says…”.  It ‘specifically’ says we don’t care if you’re satisfied, suck it! (my words, not there words, but that’s basically how their customer service guy made me feel)

I then tired the email customer service route.  Same deal.  Small print.  Too bad.  Anything else we can help you with?

Nope.  Nothing else. I’ll never book with you guys again. I actually said that to both the live person and the email person.  They didn’t care.  They didn’t care they were losing a customer because I felt like I was ‘taken’ and ‘duped’ by their small print.  They easily could have have solved this be cancelling the reservation.  They would have saved me as a customer.  As someone who would have shared a positive story about Hotwire.

But the $213 sale was just too big to give up.

It’s funny how companies so easily throw away customers, for something so easily fixable.  In the end my original fear came to light.  Not knowing the place and location was a problem for me.  I own that.  Hotwire had exceeded my initial expectation with good rates at good locations.  Then I got a lemon, and I was pissed.  They seemingly didn’t care, that made me more pissed.  So, I’ll break up with them.

The moral of this story wasn’t that I got a crappy hotel and I wanted the nice one.  It is I felt lied to.  I felt like the site made it clear I was getting a $119 room for $71, when in actuality I was getting a questionable 3 star room for $71 that really costs $72.  To me, that’s shady.

 

The 1 Problem with Posting on LinkedIn

Posted on by
2

LinkedIn made me internet famous for a day with my 11 Rules for Hugging at Work.  That one post got me a gig on Huffington Post, has gotten me speaking gigs and has gotten me clients at HRU.  My immediate reaction on the back channel to my close friends was “Holy Sh*t! This LinkedIn publishing thing is a game changer!”

Of course, my friends are smarter than me, and they said, slow down.  It’s great if you an “LI Influencer”, because they promote your posts out to millions of potential readers.  But, as they open the publishing ability out to everyone, let’s see what will happen.

I was in the first roll-out of 20,000.  Now everyone and anyone can’t publish on LinkedIn.  You know what?  My friends are smart.

I don’t know if you noticed, but the content stream on LI has turned into Twitter.  There is so much content, you can’t even begin to start to digest it, let alone find really good stuff.  That was my initial hope.  Oh boy, this is going to be great!  I will find all kinds of new and interesting voices! In reality, what has happened is I can’t find anyone, because there is so much crap that people write, I find myself unwilling and unable to put in the time to get through it.  So, I’ve given up.

I even have given up writing on LI’s platform, because I figure the same thing is happening to everyone else, that is happening to me.

The 1 Problem with posting on LinkedIn is that they’ve allowed too many people to post, to often.  It’s become spam.  It’s become to much to digest.  While their original concept of “Influencers” was great, the new concept of open access, I believe has blown up on them. More content does equal more clicks, I’m sure.  But, too much content just equals more garbage for their members to sift through.

There’s a great lesson here for leaders.  If you have something that works great and is getting great results, sometimes more of that one thing doesn’t equal better.  It equals worse.  As with most things in life, less is more.

Resume Objectives Sent from G*d

Posted on by
8

This is an actual resume objective from an actual candidate’s resume that was submitted for a position at my company (HRU Technical Resources) this past week:

Objective:
1. Move out of my apartment after 4 years of living there.
2. Buy house
3. Buy ring, find girlfriend, marry her.
4. Continue investing for retirement
5. Go to florida on vacation
6. Make documentaries
7. Do what I do best. Intovate.

Because this might possibly the best resume objective ever written, I wanted to break all seven of the objectives down:

1. Shows great forward thinking and longevity all in one simple sentence.  I want more, but I’m willing to work to get there.

2. Big goal #1 – set the foundation. Smart!

3. I’m heterosexual, just in case you were wondering.  Plus, I do things a little different.  I want to get the ring before the girl. That way I’ll know for sure the girl will like the ring that I can afford, since it will already be bought. I might even show it to her on the first date, just so we don’t run into problems later down the road.

4. Long term planning. Conservative. Can’t rely on Obama to plan for my retirement.

5. But, I like to party and have fun in the short term.

6. I also have a serious side and a creative side.  I’m the full package.

7. Do what I do best! Intovate! Not spelling. He was so proud of it, I had to look it up and make sure I wasn’t missing something! You know I’m grammatically challenged! Nope Intovate is not a word, but it sure sounds like it should be!

There is a reason that resumes are dying, and this might it.  For certain positions you need a resume, but for most you just need to fill out the application, no resume needed.  Some how, at some point in our history, everyone began to feel like they need a resume. That’s when this happens.

Happy Searching my recruiting friends! Go forth today and Intovate!

 

Dad Ball!

Posted on by
1

Yo! I’m on vacation this week, don’t try and come rob my house, it’s a ‘staycation’!  I’m going to run some oldies but goodies so I can let my creative juices focus on Gin and Tonics. Here you go:

This one goes out to a special friend who is going through this right now!

Let me do this with full disclosure – my name is Tim Sackett, and I’m a Parent Coach…I feel like I have to give the AA introduction, because I’m definitely going to need therapy once my kids are all through the parent-coaching stage!   Coaching your own kids is probably the closest thing to child-parent-abuse without physical contact that I can imagine.  Dads completely lose their freaking minds when coaching their own kids – but not all in the same way – so I’ll give you run down of types of Dad Ball Coaches:

– Coach Moses: This is the Dad who thinks his kid walks on water!  You know the type, this is the Dad who has a kid who is probably a decent player, but there are other kids who are better, but he continues to put his kid in prime positions in the field and batting lineup – even when they don’t produce.  Coach Moses will tear apart a team faster than any other type of coach.  The only time a Coach Moses can be successful, is when their kid is truly the best kid on the team – and it’s very apparent.

– Coach Dalai Lama: This is a Dad who tries to make it all about the “experience”.  This Dad is all about fairness, and equality – winning isn’t the goal, learning is the goal.  After all these are just children, and we’ve been given this gift and opportunity to mold them, and we need to protect this opportunity like the fragile butterfly out of the cocoon.  This is also the team that get’s beat by hundred runs every game!

–Coach Knight (as in Bob Knight):  This is the Dad who yells – yells – and yells.  He yells at the players, yells at the umpires, yells at the other parents, yells at his mother – you get the idea.  These are the guys that believe the only way you get the most out of your kids is by yelling at them to keep them motivated.  This is usually the most hated of all Dad Ball coaches – but from personal experience, I’ve had some Coach Knights that were actually the best coaches.

– Coach Bobby Boucher (pronounced Boo shea):  From the Adam Sandler movie The Waterboy – This is a Dad Ball Coach who played the sport in high school, but wasn’t any good – thus the “waterboy” reference…  You can imagine, this coach is trying to re-live their failed youth, but driving their team to win the league championship.  This coach is usually the main figure on the team – out in front of the actual team – the winning is all about their job as a coach, the losing is all about those idiot kids failing.  Nothing like a grown man re-living this life’s failures through the blood, sweat and tears of adolescent boys!

The one cool thing about my kids getting older and into high school is Dad Ball is most likely over.

Nursing Moms Seen As Less Competent

Posted on by
3

Yo! I’m on vacation this week, don’t try and come rob my house, it’s a ‘staycation’!  I’m going to run some oldies but goodies so I can let my creative juices focus on Gin and Tonics. Here you go:

Have something to admit.  I’m a bit of an expert in regards to Nursing Mothers.  “Really”, you say.  Let me explain.  I’m in a fairly small office, 20 or so employees on a daily basis – about 70% female.  The interesting part is that in the last few years, I don’t think we’ve gone a day when we haven’t had a nursing mother on our staff.  The women keep telling me it’s something in the water – I keep yelling at our water softener rep – and yet it hasn’t changed.  That being said – I was somewhat shocked when I read a report out of the Wall Street Journal titled “Nursing Moms Seen as Less Competent” in which spoke of a new study claiming people perceived nursing mothers as lower performers than their peer group. From WSJ:

In one of several experiments testing attitudes toward breastfeeding, 60 students were told they’d be forming general impressions of other people, based on a brief meeting and reading of a short profile. Each met a woman whose profile described her as a married  transfer student and psychology major. During the course of the experiment, this woman—actually a confederate of the researchers— checked her voicemail and played out loud a friendly message that varied in one way: It expressed understanding that the woman wanted to push back a social event because she had to go home to 1) breastfeed her baby; 2) give a baby a bath (emphasizing her motherhood but not breastfeeding) ; 3) change into a strapless bra (emphasizing the sexuality of the breasts); or for an unexplained reason.

The students rate the “breastfeeding” woman lowest of the four on overall competence, workplace capabilities, math ability – and also whether they’d hire her, if they were in a position to do so.

So, what does this tell us?  Clearly that those 60 students at Montana State University are idiots – but beyond that – probably someone who has no concept of breastfeeding probably shouldn’t be taking a perception survey on cognitive competence based on whether someone breastfeeds or not!   From my in-depth experience with breastfeeding here’s what I know:

  • The women who were/are nursing mothers who have worked with me – work their butts off and usually have to endure uncomfortable, at best, and embarrassing conversation with idiot male co-workers when trying to do what is best for their child, and still be productive and professional.
  • Work as hard or harder than their co-workers, because they know they are taking extra time out of their work schedule to take care of their lactation duties, and don’t want to be seen as not pulling their weight.
  • Are usually more on task with their work, because they value their personal and professional life balance more than most workers, who don’t have the same life challenges of working and raising a family.

And NO those breastfeeding Moms I work with in no way made me write this post!  (how’s that gals?)

 

Hi! I’m a Society of Human Resource Management Senior Certified Professional…

Posted on by
1

I have some HR friends who are telling me that SHRM’s recent decision to develop their own certification is a non-issue to real trench HR pros around the world.

What do you think?  Is it a non-issue?

I think it is, but we won’t see the real effects of the change for a year or more down the road.  I recertified with HRCI this past year, so basically I’ve got three years before this becomes a real issue for me.  At that point, I have a decision to make.  Here’s my three decisions:

1. Recert with HRCI.  It’s easy, I know it, I get to keep my SPHR letters that I’ve become so comfortable with and that most people in the industry view as something that means I know at least something about HR.

2. Certify with SHRM’s new certification.  Get comfortable with a new set of letters – SHRM-SCP which seems overly long, but I think people in industry will recognize the SHRM letters and say, yeah he probably also knows something about HR.

3. Just skip it all together.  I’ve reached that 20 years of experience career mark.  Do I really need some letters to tell people I know my stuff?  Probably not.  Look, any job I’m going to have moving forward in my HR career, probably could care less if I have letters behind my name.

You might say, “wait, Tim! there are other choices!” Like, I could certify with both HRCI and SHRM! No, I don’t consider that a choice.  Why would I do that.  Let’s face it, neither organization really has put the best foot forward in this whole mess, and I don’t need a business card that says:

“Tim Sackett, SPHR, SHRM-SCP”

That’s just ridiculous, no one wants to see that, or have to explain that!

I’m wondering if SHRM believes we should just go with “Tim Sackett, SCP”, at which point someone will ask “What’s SCP?” and I’ll go “It’s Senior Certified Professional”, to which they’ll go, “of what?”, to which I’ll go, “of Human Resources”, to which they’ll go, “what is the S and the M stand for than?”  You see where this is going…

All this being said, I do have to agree with my HR friends.  In the large scheme of things this will be a non-issue.  SHRM has launched their new certification program.  Most people will go down that path.  A few will hold out and keep their HRCI certification.  I don’t know if it will be enough to save that company, I’m doubting it.

Like I said above, this is a non-issue for me for the next three years.  My reality is I’ll keep developing myself like I have for the last 20 years.  I’ll go to SHRM events. I’ll go to user events. I’ll attend webinars on topics that interest me.  Regardless of the letters, I believe in development.  That’s why in the long run this becomes a non-issue to trench HR folks.  You either believe in making yourself better, or you don’t really care much about that.  That’s what really separates professionals, not letters.

Come Have Breakfast with Me at SHRM!

Posted on by
Reply

Okay, it’s not really breakfast, but it sure is breakfast time!

I’m speaking at SHRM National at 7am on Monday June 23rd in Orlando.  The title of my session is “What Your CEO Wishes HR Would Do!“.  It’s a fun session, will kick off your day at SHRM with a lot of energy and some laughs.  Plus, I’ll also give you 6 things you can start doing the next day to increase your influence in your organization, and get your CEO to fall in love with you – not marriage love, work love!

I promised SHRM I wouldn’t swear, so I’m going to try and make this a PG 13 version of what I would normally do.  They gave me a Mega-Session, which means I’ll have a big giant room, and a 7am time slot, which means I’ll have 50 people show up.  It’s a nice way to keep my Ego in check.  “Hey, you’re really popular, we’re going to give you a big giant room, but just to screw with you, we put you on during a time when normal people will be sleeping!”

Please, please, if you come out at that way too early time to see someone give a business presentation, stop by afterwards and introduce yourself.  To me, that is the real reason I love speaking at events, I get to meet other great HR Pros from around the country!  I’ll even give out hugs, even if you don’t want one! Because I’ll be all hyped up on Mt. Dew!

I promise I’ll be on my 3rd Diet Dew by the time 7am rolls around on Monday, which means I’ll be talking fast, probably saying things I shouldn’t and having fun!

See you all in Orlando!  At 7 freaking AM!  Ugh, it hurts me to even think about it!

The Honest Performance Feedback

Posted on by
3

Channeling my inner Seth Godin today…

It really is a choice.

Either you can decide to perform the job you have, or you can decide to work someplace else.

Either you believe this is the right company for you, or you can decide it’s another company.

Either you treat you coworkers as partners, or you don’t treat someone else’s employees like crap.

Either you follow our rules, or you follow someone else’s rules.

Either you make a positive contribution to the organization, or you make me make a choice about your future.

Earning the right to work here isn’t hard, it’s just a simple choice that you control. Losing that choice is up to me, though.