Category Archives: Business

Do you know what you really want in your career?

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About ten years ago I came home one day and said to my wife, “I can’t do this anymore”. It doesn’t matter what I was doing, I just couldn’t do that anymore. I knew it. Something had to change.

Steve Jobs is famously quoted as saying, “people don’t know what they want until you show them”, I think Henry Ford said something similar about one hundred years before Jobs. Both were talking about consumers, but in reality, it fits people in almost every aspect of life.

I find it really rings true for people in their careers. We think we know what we want. “I want to be a vice president by the time I’m 35”, I told my wife when I was 25 years old. I thought I knew what I wanted in my career. In reality, I was just title chasing.

I became a vice president and I found out I felt no difference in my career, and I definitely didn’t feel satisfied. So, a title was not what I truly wanted. What I discovered was I wanted to be in control. Success or failure, I wanted that on my shoulders. It didn’t matter what I was actually doing in my career, I needed control.

As a leader, I find probably only about ten percent of those who you support will truly have an idea about what they want out of a career. The other ninety percent, are just like me, they think they know, but they really don’t until they’ve reached whatever goal they’ve set for themselves, then they’ll find out if they actually had any clue, or they were just guessing.

If we start with most employees have no idea what they want in their career, or at best they have an idea, but it’ll be wrong, it’s now up to leaders to help shape this path. It might be the only real thing we can do for those we supervise as leaders are to help guide them on their career path.

Employees don’t know what they want in a career until you show them. 

If you believe this is your job as a leader to show those you work with what their career can be, this really helps to crystallize what you do each day.

What I know from my experience is the best people I ever worked for had a vision and path they wanted for their career. That path was usually developed and born from a mentor or boss that took the time to care about this person enough to show them what their career could be.

I can point to four different leaders and mentors in my life who helped shape my path, and by the way, all said I was an idiot for my obsession with a title. I was too young to listen, and thankfully they were too smart to give up on me.

It’s your job as a leader to show your people what they want. Don’t ever assume that your people already know what they want, most don’t. They won’t admit this because admitting it makes you sound like a moron, but it shouldn’t stop you as a leader from showing them the possibilities.

What I find is the more you show them the path, the more they’ll gravitate towards it and raise their performance to meet it.

Generational Profiling – The Newest Trend in Recruiting!

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We all have heard and know what Racial Profiling is, right?

Well, we get to add something new to our toolbox in recruiting, Generational Profiling!

Targeting someone because of their race is awful and illegal. Targeting someone based on their age is no different. It’s called it Generational Profiling and we are in the middle of an epidemic.

Take a look at the average age of these super popular tech brands:

You don’t have to be a genius to understand what’s going on in hiring in these companies. Remember a couple of years ago when we all got hot and bothered because Facebook and the like weren’t hiring women? Please educate me on how this is any different.

If the world, especially our work world, is moving to more and more of a technology focus, what are organizations doing to ensure they hiring for diversity across generations? I’ll tell you! Nothing! It’s not on the radar of 99.99% of organizations. We don’t give a crap if we hire older workers or not.

But, TIM, you don’t understand, older workers don’t get tech and they don’t want to work in tech!

Really?

Here are some fairly significant tech companies, compare them to the ones above:

27 years old average age of employees to 38 years old average age employees is statistically significant in a giant way!

IBM, Oracle and HP value the diversity of generations in the workplace, and are probably more likely to not be generationally profiling when hiring.

You hear “Generational Profiling” when CEOs of Fortune companies speak at shareholder meetings. They will say things like: “We need to ‘modernize’ our workforce”. They aren’t talking about re-skilling, they’re talking about getting younger, believing that’s their real problem. These old farts can’t do what we need to be done.

So, what do you do about it?

We, talent acquisition, need to start calling this crap out! If your hiring managers weren’t hiring women or minorities because of poor ‘cultural’ fit, you would call them out.

In Generational Profiling, ‘poor cultural fit’ equals ‘overqualified’. “Yeah, I don’t want to hire Tim because he’ll be bored in this role.” Bullshit. You don’t want to hire Tim because you might be challenged by having someone on your team that knows something you don’t!

We have the data to show generational profiling. You can put a report together that shows each hiring manager by age and years of experience, then show the exact same thing for their team, then show the candidates presented in the same manner. A really interesting thing will happen! You’ll instantly see which managers are profiling hires by age!

-Tim is 27 and has 6 years of experience post-college.

-Tim’s team’s average age is 24 and has 3 years post-college.

-Tim’s interviews selected average age is “X” with “X” experience.

-Tim’s interviews declined average age is “X+” with “X+” experience.

Stuff just got real!

No one, and I mean no one, likes to be called a racist or a sexist. Our hiring managers should feel the same way if they were called and ageist, but they’re not. We need that to change.

By the way, you will see this in promotions as well…

What Happens When ‘Dad’ Doesn’t Like How His Daughter’s Boss is Managing Her?

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If you follow sports recently you can’t get away from Lavar Ball, the overbearing Dad of three really talented basketball-playing sons. His oldest, Lonzo, is a really talented rookie in the NBA with the Lakers, his middle son was at UCLA as a freshman, got suspended from the team for shoplifting, and his youngest was a top recruit in high school.

Lavar took the two youngest kids out of school and took them to Lithuania to play professional basketball.

Lavar was back in the news this week when he told ESPN that Luke Walton, the Lakers Head Coach, wasn’t doing his job and should be fired.  Luke Walton is considered by many to be one of the top young coaches in the NBA and is highly regarded by both players and other NBA coaches. The NBA coaches came to his defense in a big way.

One, in particular, was Steve Kerr, considered the top coach in the NBA, and Luke Walton’s mentor. Here’s what Kerr had to say:

“This is the world we live in now. I was thinking about ESPN and they laid off, I don’t know 100 people…many of whom were really talented journalists covering the NBA. So this is not an ESPN judgment, it’s a societal thing more than anything…I’ve talked to people in the media and said ‘Why do you guys have to cover that guy.’ They say ‘We don’t want to. Nobody wants to. But our bosses tell us we have to because of the ratings and the readership.’

So somewhere, I guess in Lithuania, LaVar Ball is laughing. People are eating out his hands for no apparent reason. Other than he’s become like the Kardashian of the NBA or something and that sells. That’s true in politics and entertainment and now sports. It doesn’t matter if there’s any substance involved with an issue. It’s just ‘Can we make it really interesting.’ For no apparent reason. There’s nothing interesting about that story. You know how many parents of my players have probably been at home thinking ‘Why isn’t he playing my kid.’ Yet we’re sticking a microphone in front of his face because apparently, it gets ratings. I don’t know who cares, but people must care or ESPN wouldn’t be spending whatever they’re spending to send reporters to Lithuania when they laid off people who were writing really substantial pieces…”

Don’t think this ends here.

We can already find examples and stories from corporate America of parents getting involved in their kids work-life. In the past, a couple of decades ago, you would have never heard of a parent saying anything about how their kids were getting managed.

Now we live in a world where everyone has a platform and the ‘threat’ of this happening to you, your organization, to one of your managers, is very real.

It’s easy to say that you wouldn’t engage. That you would only work through the ’employee’ in this manner. That’s what the majority will say. But, what do you do when that parent has a larger platform than your brand? When ‘that’ parent finds others willing to listen. How are you prepared to react?

I can foresee a time in the near future where HR leaders will be meeting with parents to discuss issues. It happens in what part of society, politics, entertainment, sports, etc. before it filters into other parts of normal, everyday society. You can ignore it, but those who do will probably be the least prepared to handle this when it hits them over the head.

I’m ready. Bring Big Momma into the office, let’s talk this out!

The fact of the matter is if I’m transparent about performance there will be nothing I haven’t said to your child that I won’t be willing to say to you. I’ll first ask the kid if they want Big Momma to come in, which I’m guessing they’ll say “no”, but if they do, let’s do this!

There’s one part of our society that is ready for this and it’s teachers!

Teachers have been dealing with overbearing parents who think little Jimmy walks on water for years. You know what teachers do? They do the exact same thing you and your managers do. You sit them down, all together, you give very specific examples of behavior and performance, and you shut up and wait for a reaction.

When I taught, I found most overbearing parents, when presented with facts, would actually support me and help me get better performance. In teaching, and in the real work world, I’ll take any help I can get to get better performance!

In Lavar Ball’s case, he’s just an idiot with a stage.

GenZ Doesn’t Want Your Stupid Millennial Office Happy Hour!

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Guess what 2018 will be the year GenZ’s get us to stop talking about Millennials and this just in, all those ‘after hour’ work happy hours you think your employees love so much, well, GenZ hates them and they’ll hate you for expecting them to go to them!

Hello, Employee Experience! Turns out all of us don’t like the same things, and GenZ is much more cautious and career-focused than their much older Millennial peers. A recent article in Wired had this to say:

The college student survey allows a more precise look at in-person social interaction, as it asks students how many hours a week they spend on those activities. College students in 2016 (These are GenZ, not Millennials)  (vs. the late 1980s) spent four fewer hours a week socializing with their friends and three fewer hours a week partying—so seven hours a week less on in-person social interaction. That means iGen’ers (or GenZ) were seeing their friends in person an hour less a day than GenX’ers and early Millennials did. An hour a day less spent with friends is an hour a day less spent building social skills, negotiating relationships, and navigating emotions. Some parents might see it as an hour a day saved for more productive activities, but the time has not been replaced with homework; it’s been replaced with screen time.

Basically, GenZs don’t want your forced socialization. They would rather be at home gaming, watching Netflix or hanging out in much smaller more intimate settings. So, your weekly office happy hour is like torture to GenZers.

Another factor playing into this is alcohol is more unpopular with GenZ than any generation before them. So, if you are having a group office interaction, your youngest employees would more likely prefer it be a non-alcohol affair, especially if it’s a work event.

GenZ has grown up with Snap and IG and they know better than anyone what happens when you get in drunk in front of people – it lives on forever and is embarrassing!  Combine this with being more career-focused as a generation and GenZers would just prefer to have other types of fun than drinking.

It’s not that they’re completely different than their older peers, but from a career standpoint, they’re probably more like they’re GenX parents in terms of thinking work is about work and not a party. They go to work to focus on their career, not socialize.

So, what should you do for GenZ when replacing the office happy hour? Here are few ideas:

– Weekly Netflix Series “Meet”-Up – Everyone in their own comfortable place all watching the same show at the same time and interacting on Twitter or Snap or IG or whatever messaging app fits your culture. But without actually physically meeting up!

– Encourage smaller one-on-one employee interactions – It doesn’t mean these younger employees won’t create many relationships across your company. They would just prefer one or two people at a time versus larger social interactions.

– Plan fun events that are dry, or that aren’t centered around alcohol. GenZers are not prude, and they are fine with people making the decision to drink, but they won’t want to choose to hang out at a work event where the sole purpose is getting drunk.

Ahh! Something and someone new to talk about! Isn’t this refreshing!?

The Most Valuable Skill Set of the Future Will be…

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Common sense.

We’ve lost most of it already.

We can no longer see both sides of a situation. There is only right and wrong, as interpreted by each individual, not actual right or wrong. That’s not reality, but that’s how we are reacting to most things that happen in our life.

The world is coming unglued because we lack common sense. We only see the extreme edges of everything. We no longer work to see both sides, or any sides other than our own, of a situation. I am right. You are wrong. Go kill yourself.

The big problem is we no this is wrong. How do we know this? We tell every person who doesn’t agree with us! The hardest thing to do in your life is being able to see the side of others. It’s super easy to only believe in the stupid stuff you already believe in.

This won’t go away because 2017 is over. What we are feeling had nothing to do with which year it is. It has everything to do with our lack of basic common sense to understand there is no right or wrong at the edges, just extremes. The answer is in the middle when you come together to find that common ground.

I not really looking to hire a certain educational skill set any longer. I’m looking to hire people that still have a shred of common sense left in them. It’s getting harder and harder to find that skill.

Reference Checking for Employment is Dead!

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I remember when I started my first job in Talent Acquisition and HR, I totally believed checking references was going to lead me to better, higher quality hires. My HR university program practically drilled into me the belief that “past performance predicts future performance.”

For all, I knew those words were delivered on tablets from Moses himself!

After all, what better way is there to predict a candidate’s future success than to speak with individuals who knew this person the best?

And it’s not just anybody: It’s former managers or colleagues who have previously worked with this person – directly or indirectly – and have a deep understanding of how they have performed, and now telling me how they will perform in the future.

Grand design at its finest.

About 13 seconds into my HR career I started questioning this wisdom. Call me an HR atheist if you must, but something wasn’t adding up to me.

It was probably around the hundredth reference check when I started wondering either I was the best recruiter of all time and only find rock stars (which was mostly true) or this reference check thing is one giant scam!

Everyone knows the set up: The candidate wants the job, so they want to make sure they provide good references. The candidate provides three references that will tell HR the candidate walks on water. HR accepts them and actually goes through the process of calling these three perfect references.

When I find out that an organization still does reference checks, I love to ask this one question: When was the last time you didn’t hire someone based on their reference check?

Most organizations can’t come up with one example of this happening. We hire based on references 100% of the time.

Does that sound like a good system? Now, I’m asking you, when was the last time your organization didn’t hire a candidate based on their references?

If you can’t find an answer, or the answer is ‘never’, you need to stop checking references because it’s a big fat waste of time and resources! There’s no “HR law” that says you have to check references. Just stop it. It won’t change any of your hiring decisions.

NEW WAYS OF CHECKING REFERENCES THAT CHECKOUT

So, how should you do reference checks? Here are three ideas:

1. SOURCE YOUR OWN REFERENCES

Stop accepting references candidates give you. Instead, during the interview ask for names of their direct supervisors at every position they’ve had. Then call those companies and talk to those people. Even with HR telling everyone “we don’t give out references,” I’ve found you can engage in some meaningful conversations off the record.

2. AUTOMATE THE PROCESS

New reference checking technology asks questions in a way that doesn’t lead the reference to believe they are giving the person a ‘bad’ reference but just honestly telling what the person’s work preferences are. The information gathered will then tell you if the candidate is a good fit for your organization or a bad fit — but the reference has no idea.

3. USE FACT CHECKING SOFTWARE

Google, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc. have made it so candidates who lie can get caught. There is technology being developed that allows organizations to fact-check a person’s background and verify if they are actually who they tell you they are. Estimates show that 53% of people lie on their resume. Technology makes it easy to find out who is.

Great Talent Acquisition and HR pros need to start questioning a process that is designed to push through 99.9% of hires. Catching less than .1% of hires isn’t better quality. It’s just flat out lazy.

Start thinking about what you can do to source better quality hires and your organization might just think you can walk on water.

Your turn: What are your tips for checking references?

7 Sure Ways to Fail as a HR Leader

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It’s tough being a Leader these days!  You have all these boomers retiring and taking their typewriters and knowledge with them, you have all theses X’ers who think they are now the second coming, the GenY’s and the Millennial’s who have been told they are the second coming, and now we have these Generation Zs who think they can work from where ever since they grew up with a smartphone and an iPad in their crib.

On top of all this, somehow in the last 10 years executives decided HR is no longer HR, but now we are these business partners, so on top of having to take care of all these people issues, we now have to be concerned with business issues, teach our leaders how to be leaders, continue to train our workforce to stay current, fight off talent sharks from our competition, make sure the corporate picnic still runs smoothly and oh by the way can you put a nice internal blog post together for the CEO and make it real “peopleish”.

I get it, it’s hard being a leader in HR, that’s why I’m going to help you out and give you some tips on things to stay away from:

1. Think of yourself or your company as “the” industry leader. As soon as you do, someone will knock you off.

2. Identify so strongly with the company that you no longer have a clear boundary between your personal interests and the corporation’s interests. Yes, you should be committed, but don’t be “committed” Too often leaders doing this fail to differentiate their personal agenda and the corporate agenda and start empire building.

3. Have all the answers.  This is tough because it’s common leadership training that we all know: use your people, surround yourself with people better than you, make group decisions, etc.  But until you put your butt in that seat you never realize how many things will come your way, where people want a decision and they are unwilling to make it. So they look to you for the answer. Don’t get sucked into this trap. Pushback and make them bring you solutions.

4. Hunt down and Kill those who don’t support you. Don’t think this happens?! Look at turnover numbers of departments when a new leader takes over. They are almost always higher than those of the organization as a whole.

5. Become obsessed with the company image.  Your company image is hugely important, but it is not the most important thing you have going on. Make sure your operations match the image you want to create, not the other way around.

6. Underestimate or take obstacles for granted.  As a leader you want to be confident during hard and challenging times, but don’t let yourself get fooled into believing your own confidence will get you through.  Having a clear understanding of the reality you are facing, and being able to communicate that without fear to your team, with a plan of action, is key.

7. Stubbornly rely on what you’ve always done.  “Well, when I was the leader at GE we did it this way…” Look, this isn’t the 80’s and this isn’t GE. Might it work? Sure. But be open to new ways of doing things, while being confident of what you know will work. Don’t put yourself or your organization in jeopardy, but be willing to try new things when time and circumstance allow.

Adapted from The Seven Habits of Spectacularly Unsuccessful Executives in Forbes by Mike Myatt

Quality of Hire is NOT a Talent Acquisition Measure of Success!

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I was looking at LinkedIn’s annual Global Recruiting Trends 2017 report and it had some great information.  I have to give LI credit, this report, each year, has some really great information that always makes me think!  This year’s report was no different, and one stat struck me as really telling:

When Talent Leaders were asked: “What is the way you measure your recruiting team’s performance today?“

They said:

  1. Quality of Hire metrics (hiring manager measure not a TA measure – my opinion)
  2. Time to Hire (the single worse measure of all time – my opinion)
  3. Hiring Manager Satisfaction (has no correlation to whether or not TA is actually good or not – my opinion)

I hate all of these answers!!!  In fact, these answers are so bad it makes me question the viability of the future of Talent Acquisition!

You know what?  Quality of Hire is an Illusion for about 99% of organizations!  Most of us have no freaking idea how to actually measure the quality of hire, or that what we are actually measuring doesn’t haven’t the faintest correlation to actual quality of hire.

So, why is this interesting to me?

It shows me that TA Leaders still don’t have the guts to use real metrics and analytics to measure the performance of their teams!  Using a subjective, at best, measure, like Quality of Hire, allows them to continue to just make up what they ‘feel’ performance is, and one that doesn’t truly hold themselves or their teams accountable.

If you think this isn’t you, tell me how you actually measure quality of hire of your employees?  It’s very complex to even come up with something I could argue is an actual quality of hire metric!  Most organizations will do things like measure 90-day retention as a quality of hire. “Oh, look, they stayed 90 days! Way to go, recruiters, you’re hiring quality!” No, they’re not! They’re just hiring bodies that decided to stay around 90 days!

Quality of hire metrics only works if you are actually measuring the performance of your new hires to the performance of those employees you already have.  This measure, then, becomes one that you can’t even measure until you have a true measure of performance (which is a whole other issue!) of both the new hire and your current employees. Also, you have to give that new hire, probably a year, to truly see what kind of performer they are in your environment.

How many organizations are waiting a year to measure the quality of hire of the employees they hired a year ago?  Almost none!

The other issue here is why is Quality of Hire a recruiting measure, to begin with? Are the recruiters ultimately choosing who gets hired and who doesn’t?  No? That’s what I thought.

So, the recruiter can give the best candidate in the world to a hiring manager, but she instead hires a gal from her sorority who bombs out, and the recruiter gets killed on the quality of hire metric? That sounds fair.

Quality of hire metrics only became something because TA Leaders didn’t have the guts to tell the executives in their organizations that this isn’t really something that matters to the effectiveness of the TA function.  Quality of hire is a hiring manager metric.  You know how it’s measured? By looking at their operational measures and seeing if they actually met them.  If they didn’t it one of three things: they don’t know how to hire, or they don’t know how to manage, or both.

Regardless, check out the LinkedIn report. It has some good data points that are fun to discuss!

The Future of Sourcing is Here!

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So, yeah, the future of Sourcing, as a function, is not Artifical Intelligence (A.I.).

I know that makes a ton of folks working in Sourcing really excited to hear! For the past year, all Sourcers have heard is that the Robots are coming to take your job. That is incorrect.

The correct version is that the robots are going to take most of your job.

Wait, what?!

Yeah, I know it sucks, but horses don’t pull carts anymore and they made out just fine.

Look, the reality of sourcing is that most sourcing technology on the market today, is better at sourcing than over 90% of actual Sourcers working in the sourcing function. No, not you SourceCon geeks! The true specialist will always have jobs.

When you take the current sourcing tech on the market, add in the A.I. component, you now have a tech landscape that can automatically take your openings, go out and find candidates on the internet, job boards, your own ATS database, etc., contact them to see if they’re interested, then deliver activated candidates to recruiters. And, the tech does this 24/7/365, without bitching about not having a LinkedIn Recruiter seat.

Yes, that is current reality.

So, what’s the Future of Sourcing?

Say, hello, to my little friend! The Telephone!

The future of sourcing is connecting with those millions of candidates, who don’t have a social footprint on the web, or at the very least don’t have enough of a social footprint to ever show up in any kind of crazy search you could dream up.

It’s Larry the Engineer, sitting at his desk in Detroit, MI. Larry works at GM, 20 years experience, hates Facebook, doesn’t have a LinkedIn profile, and doesn’t attend conferences or his former college events. Larry is a candidate ghost. Larry sits in a large sized office space with 35 other engineers who all do similar stuff. You know probably 25 of those engineers. You know nothing about Larry.

You only find Larry one way.

Step 1: You map out that group. You find someone on the inside that tells you about the 35 engineers. You then start piecing it together and find out you can only find 25.

Step 2: You start asking all 25 for referrals. Who do you work with? Who is great in your group? Who doesn’t anyone know about, but they should? Etc.

Step 3: You cold call Larry. You do your Sourcing magic in getting Larry really excited about going to work for Ford.

Welcome to the future of Sourcing.

The robots can’t do this. This is the real future value of sourcing.

Sounds super old-school doesn’t it!? That’s because it is. Turns out, we can find almost anyone online. The “almost” portion accounts for about 25% of the adult population. That’s about 40 Million adults in America alone that the robots won’t find, and neither will your searches. These are people you have to dig up manually, the old school way.

Okay, I’ll tell you the new old school way will be better because you can use texting and messaging and whatever else the kids are using to communicate. But, your real value as a sourcer will not be picking off people who are now online that any robot can find. Your real value will be networking your way to that talent that has no social footprint.

My mom, who started recruiting in the 1970’s would be today’s greatest sourcer! She could talk anyone into giving her anything. If you knew ten people, she could get you to make an additional one up, so she had eleven names and numbers. Your ability to get more referrals of people no one else knows about is the future of sourcing.

Everything that is old is new again.

Let’s face it, we love pretty people!

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So, you’ve probably heard by now that some companies in Silicon Valley decided to hire models to attend their annual holiday parties and act as friends of executives. The purpose was not to show the executives had pretty friends, but to add some ‘prettiness’ to the party:

Along with a seemingly endless string of harassment and discrimination scandals, Silicon Valley’s homogeneity has a more trivial side effect: boring holiday parties. A fete meant to retain all your talented engineers is almost certain to wind up with a rather same-y crowd, made up mostly of guys. At this year’s holiday parties, however, there’ll be a surprising influx of attractive women, and a few pretty men, mingling with the engineers. They’re being paid to.

Local modelling agencies, which work with Facebook- and Google-size companies as well as much smaller businesses and the occasional wealthy individual, say a record number of tech companies are quietly paying $50 to $200 an hour for each model hired solely to chat up attendees. For a typical party, scheduled for the weekend of Dec. 8, Cre8 Agency LLC is sending 25 women and 5 men, all good-looking, to hang out with “pretty much all men” who work for a large gaming company in San Francisco, says Cre8 President Farnaz Kermaani. The company, which she wouldn’t name, has handpicked the models based on photos, made them sign nondisclosure agreements, and given them names of employees to pretend they’re friends with, in case anyone asks why he’s never seen them around the foosball table.

So, my HR brothers and sisters lost their minds over this on the social webs!

There were many comments all going down the path of: “Gross”, “Pathetic”, “Trumps America”, etc.

I have a different take. This is Recruitment Marketing in the real world. Most of us don’t live in Disneyland, and the real world of hiring is a bit different for the majority.

Here’s the deal. Tech hires are mostly men. White men, brown men, black men, really, really pale white men, but mostly men.

If you have a holiday party at a Tech company and it’s all dudes, well, that’s not very exciting. In fact, it’s pretty sad for all the dudes standing around looking at each other. If you were part of that party, as a dude, you probably wouldn’t tell your friends to come work with you.

Now, if you go to a party and there’s a bunch of hot women, hey, this place is pretty great! I’ve got a chance. Now, if you knew all that ‘talent’ was paid for, now it becomes depressing again. But, if you thought, these are just ‘friends’ of some of the other employees who got invited and they just love to hang with techy dudes, now it feels a bit better, again.

These models aren’t hookers. They’re at your company party to make the ‘atmosphere’ better. Basically, these models, are like the free laundry service and ping pong table you provide. It makes the environment better. You like where you work more. You don’t tell your employees, “Hey, we offer dog walking services for free because it really has been shown to help retain you.” Everyone kind of gets that.

This is no different. Having good-looking people at your employee events, makes it seem like this place is cooler than it probably really is. By the way, these pretty people, are in on the game! They are making money using their god given assets. Just as the techy people are using their big brains.

We love to hate. The reality is, America is addicted to pretty. We made the Kardashians millionaires for absolutely no reason except for their looks. We want to be pretty. We want to hang with pretty. We are a nation that values pretty over almost everything else.

Is that right? No! Is that part of the game we are in right now? Yes.

Pro Tip: I get around hiring pretty models (male and female) at my holiday party by just hiring pretty employees to begin with! Stay thirsty my friends.