Category Archives: Brilliant Mind

The Venmo of Recruiting

Posted on by
3

I talked about this a few years ago, and I think it’s bound to catch on eventually.

So, Gen-X and older folks reading this, I probably need to explain what Venmo is. Venmo is an app that makes it super easy to send money to friends. It’s like PayPal but more social. When my three GenZ sons go out to eat, they don’t bother with cash. They just Venmo each other to split the bill. Got it?

In HR and recruiting, we often see tech companies calling themselves the “Tinder” or “Uber” of recruitment. But no one has claimed to be the “Venmo” of recruiting yet. So, I’m jumping on this idea before anyone else does!

Picture this: a mobile app that lets you see where your friends are interviewing, share information, contacts, questions, and reactions about your interview experiences.

Candidates can help each other find jobs, ask for connections at companies, and share insights about hiring managers.

To start, we’ll focus only on candidates, no employers. It will be free (backed by angel investors for the first three years duh!) aiming to hit 50 million users. Once we have a strong user base, we’ll add an employer section. Think of it like Glassdoor but better. Employers can see what people are saying about them and their jobs, but they can’t respond.

Employers will get a behind-the-scenes look at what candidates really think about their company, hiring managers, and the interview process. This info will be super useful for making improvements and highlighting what’s working well. Trust me! TA leaders will pay a lot for this kind of insider info and to see how things change over time.

For candidates, having a trusted network to share real information about interviews, jobs, and companies on a mobile app would be awesome. They can make better decisions and use their connections more effectively.

So, I’m excited to introduce the Venmo of Recruiting. We’re looking for angel investors! Immediately!

Zoo-Zapped Dreams

Posted on by
Reply

Once upon a time, I had my heart set on being a teacher. All through my early twenties, that was the future I saw for myself. But then reality kicked in when I dove into teaching and realized it wasn’t the act of teaching that didn’t fit; it was the political chaos within the public education setup. One incident made it obvious.

There was this amazing exhibit at the local museum, perfectly syncing with my lesson plan by chance. I thought, “What luck! The kids would love this.” So, I proposed ditching our routine zoo visit for this exhibit.

“Can’t do that,” my principal said. “It had to be approved a year in advance, but you can do it next year.” “It won’t be here next year; it’s a traveling exhibit, only available this year,” I explained. “Sorry, won’t happen,” she replied. “What if I got parents to do this after school or on a weekend, and it wouldn’t cost anything?” I pleaded. “Nope, can’t let you do it. Don’t waste your energy on this,” she could see my rising frustration with something that made no sense. Guess where we ended up? The zoo. Same old tour, the same old caged animals, and the same lack of engagement.

Right then, it hit me hard—this system cared more about following rigid rules than genuinely educating kids. My dream of being an educator got a reality check.

But hold on, my dream didn’t vanish; it shifted. See, many think an unrealized dream equals failure. Nope. It’s about adapting when life throws a curveball.

The real grind isn’t just the pursuit; it’s in reimagining when things hit a dead-end. Time for a pivot!

We glamorize chasing a dream endlessly, but the truth is, sometimes dreams need an adjustment. And that’s okay. It’s not defeat; it’s evolution.

Let’s embrace the idea that dreams are adjustable. It’s about celebrating the courage to pivot, not just the pursuit. Chase your dreams fiercely, but know it’s equally admirable to adjust them when life asks you to. Adjustments don’t belittle dreams; they shape them, making the journey all the more vibrant.

I identify as Age-fluid!

Posted on by
5

I would love to take credit for coming up with “Age-fluid,” but I’m stealing it from Chip Conley, who I saw speak at Transform a few weeks back. Chip was talking about age diversity and how only 14% of the F500 actually measure age diversity and how this is becoming a major issue in corporate America.

Now, if you would talk to my wife, she would tell you I’ve identified as “age-fluid” most of my life. I’m 53, but my humor is mostly that of a 12-year-old boy! Also, I refuse to believe that I still can’t do most of the stuff I could 20 years ago. While my body feels like it’s 80 some days, I still think I hang on the court with folks half my age.

For hundreds of years, we’ve known of this phenomenon where you have a mental age and a physical age. I’ve already said my “mental” age is way lower than my physical age, but it’s important to truly understand the impact this has on the diversity of our organizations. Because we also see the opposite. I’ve met many young people who were wise beyond their years and seemed to have an “old soul.”

Most organizations and hiring managers are biased toward those of a higher age. I don’t think that is shocking to anyone. Old people are still the ones we can be biased against, and no one thinks it’s wrong. We make jokes in meetings about someone’s advanced age all the time, and no one thinks anything of it. But in reality, this is no difference from someone making an old person’s joke than if they were making a similar joke against someone’s gender or ethnicity.

I actually love the concept of being Age-fluid.

If someone in our society can be gender-fluid and decide from day to day which gender they believe they are, then I can decide what age I believe I am. I mean there are advantages to every age. Being young is cool, but it also sucks because you don’t know what you don’t know. Being old can suck physically, but usually you’re also more confident in where you’re at in life. You know who you are and you’ve come to grips with it. Being a child is magical, but you don’t understand that.

Today I feel like I’m 36.

Why 36?

Hmmm…well, at 36, you can still feel great physically, but you also have enough time on this rock to have a bit of learning. I won’t call it wisdom, but you’ve made enough mistakes to mostly know how not to make them again. Doesn’t mean you won’t, but you know the path you’re going down and how it will most likely end.

At 36, you aren’t looking at the end yet. You also aren’t looking back at the “good old days.” You feel like you still have more life ahead of you, than behind you, and you’re still young enough to truly feel like you haven’t written the script for your life yet. You still have promise, and you’ve made a bunch of progress on where you want to go.

Yeah, today, I’m 36. I’m also about 12 for a few seconds at at time, depending on what memes my other 12-year-old friends are sending me!

What age do you want to identify as today and why? Hit me in the comments.

How do you “practice” HR?

Posted on by
Reply

We are constantly told that if we want to be good at anything in life, we must practice. It starts when we are kids, and we want to be our heroes. If you want to be good at sports, or dance, or computer games, you must practice. Not just “play” but specific steps that lead to success in the endeavor we’ve chosen.

Tyler Cowen released his book “Talent” in 2022 and I really like this quote from it:

“What is it you do to practice that is analogous to how a pianist practice scales?”

What do you do each day to practice your profession?

What I find when I ask HR and TA professionals this question, and we really dig in, is there “practice” is showing up and doing the job. That is akin to an NBA player just showing up and playing games but never putting in time and effort outside of the game to increase or maintain their basketball skill level. They wouldn’t be successful for long.

Just showing up and doing the job isn’t practice. That’s the job.

Are we talking about practice…

YES!

Let me tell you how I practice my skill in HR and TA:

  • I write on this blog that has nothing to do with my paying job.
  • I design and present content for roughly 20+ webinars every year.
  • I design and present content to present live on stage for around 20 different talks every year.
  • I consciously reach out and schedule calls with experts in our industry to “talk shop” each month that has nothing to do with my paying job.
  • I network on sites like LinkedIn to expand my professional network and ask and answer as many questions as I can.
  • I will do upwards of 100 tech demos per year in the technology that impacts my industry.
  • I will attend upwards of 12 HR and TA professional conferences.

Okay, I’m a complete freak around personal development, primarily because I actually really like this stuff. That makes it easier to do, for sure.

But, I rarely get into a professional dilemma where I don’t feel prepared to handle the situation. I believe that is because I’ve “practiced” a whole bunch!

I get asked frequently, “How did you learn this stuff?”

Practice.

Honestly, my hope is one day, I’ll take this love of practice in my professional life and turn it into some other sort of practice in my personal life. Like, someday, I’ll roll out of bed and be like, “okay, today is the day I stop being an out-of-shape dough ball and get back into shape like I was in college!

I mean, if I can put this level of practice into my professional life, it stands to believe I could put that same level of practice into any part of my life.

Do you want to be “Great” at your Career?

I find almost 100% of people I would ask this question to will say, “Yes, of course!”

But like my lazy butt sitting on the couch at night watching Netflix, they are willing to put in the practice of being great. They are just showing up to work and doing the job. That usually doesn’t lead to greatness.

Don’t get me wrong. Some folks can show up and be great, just like freak athletes. That is about .001% of our society. So slow your roll. That isn’t you.

I want to be great at my job, but I don’t really do anything other than the job to ensure I’ll be great at it. Doesn’t that sound funny? It goes against everything we know about greatness in our lives.

Don’t get me wrong. I don’t believe I’m great at HR and TA. I think I’m pretty good at certain parts of it, but I know people who are so much better than me at so many parts. When you compare yourself against the top 1% in your profession, you feel small. You feel like you need more practice.

When you compare yourself against Kevin in payroll, that constantly loses his way back to his cube, you feel like you’re a giant. Practice isn’t needed to be greater than Kevin. That’s our problem. Most of us are surrounded by average players, and your slightly above-average performance makes you feel like you no longer need practice.

Pick higher performance targets. Chose to emulate someone who amazes you in your profession. Chase greatness through practice.

We Didn’t Train These Kids, Now We’re Going to Pay the Price!

Posted on by
Reply

Which kids? The GenZ’s? Nope, we didn’t train the Millennials! And now we’ll deal with the aftermath of a decade of undertraining and almost no development of an entire generation.

You see, for the past decade, money was basically free. Zero interest rates, and we all went around spending and hiring like the party was never going to end. Because of all this free money, no one really took the time to ensure anyone knew what they were doing. Lose $100M?! Oh well, here’s some more. Lose it faster next time!

You would think with all that free money, we could have over-trained the kids, but instead, we just paid them more and bought them dairy-free ice cream and cool hoodies. “Their training will be this startup experience, and it’s better than any formal training they’ll ever get.” In some ways, that is very true. In other ways, that’s the biggest lie we sold in the past decade.

While real-world experience is part of a great training program, free money is not. We’ve grown an entire generation of “leaders” who lack financial discipline. Most have no idea how to run a company that actually makes more revenue than it spends. This isn’t how the world runs long-term. You see, there’s this little thing successful companies call Net Income, which basically is the positive money you make from your revenue after you pay all your bills and taxes. I know. I know. All these old-school terms are boring and confusing! Profit. Revenue. Net Income. Taxes. Interest Rates.

Have you wondered why all these companies are bringing people back to the office?

No, it’s not because these bosses are old and hate you. Well, they might be old and hate you, but that’s not the reason!

It’s because the vast majority of you aren’t actually working hard enough. “Hard enough” is another old-school phrase meaning you’re work level and your pay level aren’t matching up. The old folks who sign the checks and all their financial data are telling them they need fewer of you working at home if you keep sucking.

By the way, you are right. The old folks failed you. They didn’t train you to be a productive worker. They didn’t train you to lead high-producing, effective teams. They didn’t train you to be fiscally responsible with corporate resources. Blame them if you want. They should own that.

Now they are leaving the workforce right at the beginning of the second recession you’ll see in your lifetime. The first one was when you were in college or just entering the workforce, and honestly, you acted all dramatic about how that impacted you, but it turned out pretty well for you. You entered the workforce and had a magical ten-year run where your salary and benefits seemed like monopoly money as compared to your parent’s first ten years in the workforce. Congratulations! It was an awesome time to be alive!

Now, you’ll be in charge. The GenXers are too few to take over. We have to rely on the Millennials to run the show, for the most part. It’s going to be a really hard lesson. It’s going to be painful for a lot of people. Recessions suck when you’re in the middle. That’s where the cuts hurt the worse. The folks on the upper side will weather the storm. The folks in the lower half will scrap by like they always do. They are used to life being hard. They were born into the hard, you are just visiting.

The best organizations and c-suites will double down quickly on training and educating their new leaders. Hard skills and soft skills, but mostly hard skills. We will mourn the layoff losses as unfair, but within a few years, we’ll come to realize that it was just the payoff of not understanding how to run our business. Call it a bad leader tax. Businesses weren’t meant to run on free money. Money has value, and those investing in your business expect a return in profit and net income, eventually, not user growth.

I’m not punching down on Millennials. They are a product of a decade of free money, and now we’ll deal with the aftermath. They just are going to be the ones responsible for cleaning up the mess.

How do we feel about government student loan foregiveness?

Posted on by
3

President Biden this week announced some college loan forgiveness for certain individuals holding federal student loans. There are a bunch of details, but I’m not going to get into those here. You can read about them on a thousand different sites in detail. I want to talk about whether forgiving student loans is something we agree with or don’t agree with.

There seem to be two camps. On one side, most holding current student loan debt, but not all, think this is a great thing. Those who have this burden now have less and can move on with their careers and build their lives with a little less burden.

On the other side, you have folks who went to college, incurred debt, went to work, and paid that debt off. The government didn’t help them, but that was what they signed up for, and they made it work. They might have had this debt decades ago when attending college was much less expensive, or maybe they went got only a few years ago but worked like crazy to ensure they paid it off.

The fact is, student loan debt for all those who have it can be crushing. The reason most people decide to take on that burden is that they believe getting that college education will lead them down a path to a better life. The ROI on a university education is still pretty good in the U.S.

I’m in both camps.

I went to university and had parents who couldn’t help me. I left with student loan debt, and my wife and I worked very hard to pay off that debt. We laugh about how we would come home to our first apartment and go sit in the bedroom because we had no furniture but a bed. We couldn’t afford furniture because my monthly loan payment took up our extra money.

Yeah, yeah, and I forgot to tell you I walked uphill, both ways, to work…cry me a river, right?

When I started in HR, we never spoke about the burden of student debt for those we hired. It wasn’t as big a portion of the monthly expenses of new grads, so while they had the debt, they could still handle it. Now, it’s a major topic of conversation when HR talks about talent attraction and retention. It’s a major topic of conversation when we talk about benefits and incentives. The amount of student debt has become outrageous.

This question of forgiving student debt is very difficult.

There’s a piece of this that is about individual accountability. I took as few loans as I could while I was in college because I knew I had to pay them back. I worked multiple jobs all year while going to school. I chose a school that was inexpensive because I knew I had to pay for it. I didn’t go on Spring Breaks. I had a beater of a car. I bartered meals for services I could do. I was accountable for the debt I took on.

As a person who hires people now, I frequently will ask new college grads how they paid for their education. What part did you pay for through work? What part did you have to borrow? What part did your family cover? What about scholarships? The effort you put into paying for your burden speaks a lot about how you will be as an employee. I’m not saying that if you are fortunate to have parents who were able to help you pay for school, you can’t be great. You can. I rarely meet someone who worked their way through school on their own and doesn’t have a great work ethic.

What does this have to do with student loan forgiveness?

There’s no difference in having someone pay your debt if it’s not you paying for your debt. It’s not teaching you to value the commitment you made. You committed to a loan that had to be paid back. Mom paid it off. Your company paid it off. The government paid it off. You got from under your debt through no work of your own. You will be more likely, moving forward, to take on debt believing somehow, in the future, someone else will bail you out.

The problem with the thinking above is it’s still really f*cking hard to start life out in a hole, and too many people in our society are starting out in a hole. Some were hard-working enough to make it out of one hole and get into college, only to find themselves in the next hole. And often, that hole is just too deep to escape from.

I believe every single kid in our country who puts in the work in school should have access to a great college education, and that education should not bankrupt their future. At the same time, I’m not sure just giving them a get-out-of-college debt Monopoly card is the answer. Our country has a crisis when it comes to federal, state, and local government hiring. What if students could do some kind of government job corps that gave them a fair salary and experience, and for that, each year, they had a portion of their student debt forgiven? Or come up with some other sort of plan that taught with any debt you purposely decide to take on, there is accountability to pay it back.

These are your tax dollars.

Let’s face it our government is historically bad at spending our tax dollars. If you were to go out and ask the US population, do you want your “personal” tax dollars spent on paying off someone else’s student loan, you would be lucky to get a 50/50 split. Going to college and incurring college debt is still a privilege in our world.

What about paying off the car loan a single mom has that she had to take on so she could go to work to pay her rent and put food on the table for her kid? Should we pay that off as well? It’s a slippery slope when we start paying off individual obligations people make. Great, you want to be an Artic Beetle History major, and now you can’t find a job. That’s okay. Let us pay off that awful decision you made with my hard-earned tax dollars.

The real solution isn’t paying off student debt. It’s a political stunt!

The real solution is taxing colleges and universities that have become empire builders under their tax-exempt status. We, the U.S. population, allow higher ed to continue to build world-class structures and increase prices to the point that is ridiculous. Dorm rooms have become five-star hotels, okay, 3-star, but definitely Courtyard by Marriott level accommodations! My dorm room was more akin to a prison cell.

Why has this happened?

Universities are in the business of keeping kids in college as long as possible. The longer you stay, the more tuition and fees they will get. No longer can a normal kid make it out in four years. God forbid you to change majors and move schools. You will definitely be on the five to six-year plan. Higher education in the U.S. has become the biggest racket outside of health insurance in the entire country!

The crazy part about this is it seems like no one in politics is talking about this fact. We care that it costs too much, but we never do anything to make higher ed run like a real business.

Student loan forgiveness isn’t about helping students. It’s about votes. If we really wanted to help students, the government would go after our “non-profit” colleges and universities and create a system where all students could go and afford a proper education for a respectable cost. Like Taylor Swift wrote, paying $10K in student loan forgiveness is like putting a bandaid on a bullet hole. We aren’t solving the problem, and we are partially addressing a symptom and then acting like we cured cancer. In the long run, my fear is this behavior just will make the problem worse.

The 1 Thing You Have to Do to Fall In Love With Your Job!

Posted on by
Reply

Do you know what it felt like the last time you fell in love?

I mean, real love?

The kind of love where you talk 42 times per day, in between text and Facebook messages, and feel physical pain from being apart? Ok, maybe for some, it’s been a while, and you didn’t have the texts or Facebook!  But, you remember those times when you really didn’t think about anything else or even imagine not seeing the other person the next day, hell, the next hour. Falling “in” love is one of the best parts of love; it doesn’t last that long, and you never get it back.

I hear people all the time say, “I love my job,” and I never used to pay much attention; in fact, I’ve said it myself.  The reality is that I don’t love my job. I mean, I like it a whole lot, but I love my wife, I love my kids, and I love Diet Mt. Dew at 7 am on a Monday morning. The important things in life!  But my job?  I’m not sure about that one.  As an HR Pro, I’m supposed to work to get my employees to “love” their jobs.  Love.

Want to know the difference between like and love? The next time your significant other tells you, “I love you!” just say in return, “Yeah, I like you as well!” Then get ready for an argument!

Let me go all Dr. Phil on you for a second. Do you know why most relationships fail? No, it’s not cheating. No, it’s not the drugs and/or alcohol. No, it’s not money. No, it’s not that he stops caring. No, it’s not your parents. Ok, stop it. I’ll just tell you!

Relationships fail because expectations aren’t met.  It seems logical knowing what we know about how people fall in love and lose their minds.  Once that calms down, the real work begins.  So, if you expect love to be the love of the first 4-6 months of a relationship, you’re going to be disappointed a whole bunch over and over.

Jobs aren’t much different.

You get a new job, and it’s usually really good!  People listen to your opinion. You seem smarter. Hell, you seem better looking (primarily because people are sick of looking at their older co-workers). Everything seems better in a new job.  Then you have your one-year anniversary, and you come to find out you’re just like the other idiots you’re working with.

This is when falling in love with your job really begins. When you know about all the stuff, the company hid in the closet. The past employees they think are better and smarter than you, the good old days when they made more money, etc.  Now is when you have to put some work into making it work.

I see people all the time moving around to different employers and never seeming to be satisfied.  They’re searching. Not for a better job or a better company. They’re searching for that feeling that will last.  But it never will, not without them working for it.

The best love has to be worked for. Passion is easy and fleeting. Love is hard to sustain and has to be worked on, but it can last forever.

Don’t Offer Yourself Up to the Burden.

Posted on by
Reply

I was on TikTok the other night. TikTok for me has become my mindless tv. You know when you’ve had your normal busy day and you just want mindless interaction before you go to bed. The TikTok algorithm is amazing. I get all my golf vids, funny vids, political vids, puppy vids, and out of nowhere last night the algo snuck in Conor Crippen.

I was now all in down the Conor Crippen rabbit hole. I don’t even know why the algo surfaced this up, but damn it, I love it! it’s an inspiring story and I’m laying there watching Conor videos and I’m laughing and crying and smiling and if anyone saw me they would have thought I was probably having a breakdown of some sort!

Here’s Conor’s story:

On Conor’s site, he has this saying and it won’t get out of my brain: “Don’t offer yourself up to the burden.” He goes on:

“Every day, no matter what you are going through, you have a choice. You can either give in to the burden you’re facing or refuse to let it define you.”

I needed to hear that. Almost everyone I know needs to hear that.

Conor’s story is inspiring not just because of this perseverance and strength, but also because of his mother’s perseverance and strength! His aunt wrote their story in the book titled, “Just Give Me the Road” based on a quote his mother said just hours after his accident. It’s an amazing story.

Make sure you follow Conor on TikTok:

https://www.tiktok.com/@crippenconor/video/7081670691757575466?is_from_webapp=1&sender_device=pc&web_id=7094594753518913067
@crippenconor on the TikToks

You can also hire Conor to come to speak at your event! I hope that I get to meet Conor at an event I’m speaking at in the near future!

Also, shoutout to TIkTok for taking my mindless activity time and helping me find such an amazing person!

Sackett Tips: Advice for Grads and Dropouts!

Posted on by
1

Every year around this time the content machine delivers an endless amount of “Graduation” advice to new grads. “As you leave the manicured lawns of your youth…” I’ve actually done the “wear sunscreen” posts myself from year to year. They are easy to write because it allows the writer to just wax poetically about all the mistakes we’ve made ourselves, which in turn becomes the advice for you to do or not do (thanks, Yoda!).

I realized just yesterday the problem with the grad advice columns is we’ve completely forgotten about dropouts! In today’s world, with declining higher ed enrollments (college starts are down 5 quarters in a row) it’s even more important that we talk to the dropouts as well. Of course, we see many more dropouts when unemployment is very low as it is now. With a ton of jobs open, young people can make really great money without going to college, so it’s a natural phenomenon.

The Sackett Tips for Grads and Dropouts

  • Work for the biggest brand possible right out of the gate. You most likely won’t have a great experience, but it will help your career out way more in the long run. We are all enamored with the person who worked for Amazon and Apple over JBE Automation in central Iowa. Like somehow that Apple job where you got to focus on a sliver of a project is way more valuable than actually owning an entire project. But that’s life. Go work for a giant brand.
  • Calculate the value of leaving a job and people you really like. You will hear estimates from “experts” telling you not to change jobs unless you get a 10-20% increase. And that is really a lot of money. But, what if the new job sucks and the new people suck. Is that $5,000-10,000 worth it? Each of us has to make that call. What I find is most people will tell you it’s not worth it. 
  • Maintain relationships with peers and co-workers from other jobs you left and with those who left your company. That network will pay you back in the future like nothing else you have.
  • Say, “Yes” to jobs no one else wants. Those are the jobs that get noticed by executives. We all know the stuff no one else wants to do, so when someone steps forward and “takes one for the team” you stand out above the rest. 
  • Protect your time, but have a reason. Executives totally understand the person who says, “I can’t this weekend, I’m coaching my little girl’s soccer team and I have to be there for her” vs. someone who just says “No”. 
  • Every executive is looking for people who treat the organization and the brand like their own. I get it, they make a crap ton more than you, but they always didn’t make more. At some point, they made peanuts as well but treated the company like it was their own. Protected assets, spent budget wisely, etc. 
  • Diversity isn’t about color, gender, etc. But it also is about all that. You want to hire great people who fit your culture and who are also from diverse backgrounds. Most organizations fuck this up by just hiring color or gender and forgetting about the fit. It’s not one or the other, it’s both. 
  • Don’t wait for an employer to develop you. Find ways to develop yourself. Build a business case as to why your employer should pay for you to take a class that costs money. 
  • Make yourself as pretty as possible. Every single study you can find will show that the more attractive you are the more money you make, the more likely you are to get promoted, work for a great company, etc. Turns out, everyone loves pretty people. You, like me, might not have been blessed with “pretty” DNA, but we can all make ourselves the best version of ourselves! Don’t believe people that tell you looks don’t matter. They matter greatly, they’ve just given up.
  • Put on your own oxygen mask first. I run into so many kind souls who are trying to protect and help co-workers, peers, etc., but not helping themselves. Take care of yourself, so you can properly help others.

Oh, and wear sunscreen.

So, what’s the difference in advice between the grads and dropouts? None. Turns out, once you start working no one gives a shit whether you have a degree or not, now you have to actually perform.

It’s a great time to be a hard-working, attractive, smart person in our society. Take advantage.

The Baby Bonus Program You Never Knew You Needed!

Posted on by
4

In HR and Talent Acquisition, we tend to be in crisis mode constantly. We are some of the best firefighters are organization has! Our functions tend, by their very nature, to be short-termed focused. This month, this quarter, this year. Rarely are we able to think and plan further than twelve months ahead.

The problem is, currently and in the future, we (the U.S. and pretty much every industrialized country on the planet) are not making enough humans! In the U.S., we are early Japan. This means our birth rate has dipped below the replacement rate. Japan has been facing this crisis for decades; we are just starting down this path.

Why does this matter?

  1. If we can’t replace our humans, we have a shrinking workforce, and it’s very hard to grow.
  2. If we aren’t going to grow enough humans, we have to find another path to get more humans, and that’s immigration, and in the U.S., we have been awful at immigration.
  3. If we can’t get real humans, we have to build robots. The problem is, why robots will come faster than humans, it still takes time, and robots can’t effectively replace humans in most roles.

What is the solution?

This might sound a bit controversial, it’s definitely out of the norm, but HR needs to build a policy that encourages our employees to have babies!!

“Wait, what?! You want us to encourage our employees to have s…”

Okay, hear me out! Japan knew it had an issue decades ago and did nothing to address it, believing nature would take its course. But it didn’t! We have the opportunity to reward and compensate our employees for growing our next employees!

In the U.S., historically, we’ve also sucked at parental leave policies, and we’ve held parenthood against workers for promotion. Having kids, for the most part, has been a negative to your career. We need to change that! We need to make it a reward and benefit to your career. Like, imagine if Mark and Mary had seven kids! They both should be promoted immediately to Vice Presidents or Chief Growing Officers or something!

I’m only saying that half-joking! We are in a crisis and to get out of a crisis takes bold moves.

The hard part of encouraging our employees to procreate is that HR has spent its entire existence trying to stop our employees from doing this very thing! Now I’m asking you to become the Chief Baby Officer.

Um, are there other solutions?

Yes, but America tends to hate both of these options, traditionally.

The first option is to completely revamp our immigration policy and allow in millions of immigrants in both skilled/educated backgrounds and non-skilled/labor backgrounds. Traditionally, both political parties are against this because of the belief immigrants take jobs away from current citizens. Labor Unions hate this. Conservatives hate this. It’s usually a political non-starter.

The UK recently made a major change to their immigration policy because, like the U.S., they are facing a similar human challenge, and we should all take note because it’s an amazing policy. Basically, it allows professionals to come in with a Visa before getting a job, as long as they can prove they can pay their own way. This works because one of the biggest hurdles in U.S. immigration policy is we force an immigrant to have a job before they can enter, and for most U.S. employers, that just doesn’t work from a timing perspective.

The second option is more automation and robots. This is another one that labor unions tend to fight because it takes jobs away from humans. Unfortunately, this one is moving forward because we just don’t have enough workers, and even unions can’t produce more unions. More and more, we’ll see automation take the place of traditional roles we are used to seeing humans in. Cashiers, order takers, warehouse workers, truck drivers, etc. This is scary for many but a necessity for employers looking to run their day-to-day operations.

You might think that encouraging your employees to have babies is a very out-of-the-box idea, but in HR, we need to start thinking more long-term about how we’ll manage our workforce. If you believe your company will be around twenty years from now, a part of our job, strategically, should be thinking about this workforce concept.