Category Archives: Business

HR TV Shows I Really Want to See

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I sure not too many folks have seen the Top Recruiter Internet based TV show.  It’s going after an extremely narrow audience to be sure.  But it looks and feels like a real live, reality TV based show, except you watch it on your computer and not on a specific TV channel. Chris Lavoie, the producer and originator of the show, does a great job. He gets what sells, which is mainly sexy people in conflict with each other.  It’s the basic formula for every successful reality based show.

Top Recruiter is in it’s third season, I’ve watched 5 minutes of one episode in the first season.  I personally know some of the folks who have been on it, they seem to have fun with it. That’s what life is about.  And Chris has found a market of HR technology companies that want to pay for content, and he’s paying his bills! That’s what also counts.  Here’s a marketing shot:

Top Recruiter

 

See what I mean? Sexy. Chris is up front, he’s a nice dude, regardless of how it looks all douchey. That’s marketing, you have to sell it.

I have a few more HR related TV show ideas for Chris (even though he hasn’t asked me) that I think the HR community would eat up!  Check these out and let me know what you think:

Frumpy HR Manager

 

Or, if that one doesn’t seem ‘sexy’ enough. How about this one:

Top Personnel Dept

 

I just really think these shows would connect with the HR world!  What do you think, hit me in the comments.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Will ‘Facebook at Work’ be a LinkedIn Killer?

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At this point you’ve seen the announcement, Facebook has decided to go after some of that ‘professional’ networking money, with a product called Facebook at Work. A space currently owned by the LinkedIn empire.  Who does social networking better than anyone?  Most would argue Facebook. The kids might say Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, etc.  But the numbers don’t lie.

LinkedIn owns the ‘professional’ networking space, as they’ve decided to title it.  The job board crowd now sees LinkedIn as Job Board 2.0, and have been working to see how they can get some of the billions flowing LinkedIn’s way.

Facebook is like that big giant kid in high school who was super friendly, and everyone called him a “big teddy bear’, until one day the wrong kid pushed the ‘teddy bear’ too much and everyone got to find out how strong the ‘teddy bear’ actually was.  LinkedIn is about to get ‘bear’ hugged!

The reality is Facebook had the capability all along to put LinkedIn out of business if they wanted, but they were raking in their own piles of cash, and didn’t see the LinkedIn money as a priority.  It was just a matter of time.  LinkedIn’s core weakness is two-fold:

1. They don’t go deep enough with the position you actually need to hire for.  Great you have technology candidates (who are running away from LinkedIn in droves), you have sales candidates and you have recruiters. That’s really about it. Have you searched on LinkedIn lately?

2. Users of LinkedIn rarely go to their LinkedIn profile and rarely respond to LinkedIn messages.

The two weaknesses of LinkedIn are actually strengths of Facebook.  Facebook has everyone, from skilled trades folks, to truck drivers, to teachers, to doctors, and lawyers, and bakers, and candlestick makers, mall Santas, you name it, they’re on Facebook.  Secondly, people use Facebook a lot, all day, every day.  Exponentially, more than they ever use LinkedIn.

Facebook has made it very clear they’ll keep professional and personal profiles separated, but make it easy to go between and share stuff in between. This takes away the one major fear many have at integrating their Facebook life and their LinkedIn life (although I argue this fear is also going away quickly).

For those of us who have found ways to recruit talent off Facebook, we understand the potential of the sleeping giant, err, teddy bear. I like LinkedIn and use it daily.  I wish LinkedIn met my needs for a greater number of positions.  I believe Facebook has the user base, and data, to be all things professional if it’s done in the right way.

It’s going to be interesting to see these two fight it out.

The Container Store Doesn’t Want to Hire Harvard Grads

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You probably saw this on the web this past week, but in case you didn’t a former Harvard University graduate and Emmy award winning writer got rejected for a job at The Container Store for the holidays.  She was very surprised by this, in a pompous I’m-really-to-good-for-you kind of way, but I’m desperate, so you would be lucky to have me. Here it is in her words:

“The email from The Container Store asking for holiday help arrived a week before my rescheduled MRI. Of course I applied! You would have, too, if you had one kid paying his own way through college, another applying, no health coverage, a bum boob, a broken marriage and an empty bank account. There is no time for shame in a recession. You do what you have to do. There are worse ways to spend your day than greeting visitors at the front of a store run by a company whose products you actually use. A week later, I got an email from the Manhattan Loss Prevention department at The Container Store. Here’s what it said:

Hello Deborah —

Thank you for your interest in employment opportunities at The Container Store.

We carefully review all applications and consider each person for current or future opportunities. At this time, we are moving forward with other candidates for this position.

Again, we thank you for your interest in The Container Store. We wish you much success in your job search.

Sincerely,

The Container Store
Manhattan Loss Prevention

Reader, first I laughed when I read this. Then I cried. Oh, Reader, I cried and I cried, long and deep and mournfully. I cried for me and my kids, then I cried for everyone else in my same boat, then I cried for everyone in far worse boats. Because seriously, if an Emmy Award-winning, New York Times bestselling author and Harvard grad cannot land a job as a greeter at The Container Store — or anywhere else for that matter, hard as I tried — we are all doomed.“

Really?  We are all doomed because someone who has a Harvard degree and can write can’t get a service level holiday job?

Let’s take a look at why she probably didn’t get hired. I’ll give you some possible reasons on why The Container Store decided to go another route:

1. It’s a temporary job for the holidays, where they need someone to greet stressed out holiday shoppers.  Many people work these jobs each year to get extra holiday money, they have experience doing this, they can be counted on, not to quit after the first rude person yells at them. Experience counts. Even in ‘crappy’ jobs.

2.  These jobs are boring and monotonous. Service level companies know that most Harvard educated folks would be bored and not engaged in these positions.

3. Looking at the application of someone with a Harvard education and being a writer, they might have decided the person would work only until they got a better job, and they wanted to ensure the person stayed on through the completion of the assignment.

4. Maybe they had someone who has worked ‘temporarily’ for them in the past apply to come back, that had previously performed well.

5. Maybe they got internal referrals of friends and family from their employees, and decided those hires might ‘fit’ better.

No doubt Deborah is smart and a good writer. That doesn’t mean she would be good for the container store, and it is pompous of her to believe she would be.  She didn’t see this ‘job’ as good, she saw it as a step down, and something she was ‘forced’ to do.  Sounds just like someone you really want working for you, right?  “Well, I don’t have anything else Container Store, I guess I’ll take your crappy job.”

The Container Store rejected a Harvard graduate because a Harvard graduate isn’t the best hire, the best talent, for the position they were hiring for.  I might not be a Harvard graduate, but that seems pretty simple to figure out.

Surge Pay

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My friend Laurie Ruettiman wrote about Uber’s Surge pricing recently.  You know, when Uber basically is super busy, so to advantage of this time, they up their prices to meet demand. Do you really want a ride?  Okay, that will be twice the amount as normal!  It’s basic economics of supply and demand.  No one really seems to mind all that much, people get it.  There are more people who need rides than their are rides available.  I’ve got more money than you, I really want a ride! Welcome to America.

Someone commented on her post about companies doing this with wages.  It was tongue in cheek, but I wonder…

Think of those times when ‘Surge Pay’ would really be welcomed!  Like the last time you were at the DMV and had to wait 3 hours to get your license renewed and you watched the state employees seem get slower and slower as the line grew longer and longer.

Surge Pay to the rescue!  Hey, Joe, step it up, bust through this line, and we’ll double your pay!  Do you think that would work?  I bet it would.  There are so many jobs that are like this.

When I was in college I worked at a movie theater. For about 45 minutes before a show started you worked your butt off! Then, you got a nice one hour and forty-five minute ‘break’ where you prepped for the next rush.  Do you know how many people skip the popcorn line at the movies because they don’t want to wait in that long line!?  A lot.  And it’s basically all margin! If you doubled the kids salary shoveling popcorn for those 45 minutes, you would probably get a lot of extra effort.

We get stuck in our ways.  We don’t do something like Surge Pay because we feel ‘it all works out in the end’.  We’ll just take the amount they should be paid and spread it out over 40 hours.  It all works out, Tim, relax!  But it doesn’t.  People in these types of jobs get use to working one speed, and it’s not on ‘high’, so productivity during rushes gets hurt.

It’s really an easy concept.  Find the hard, crappy part of jobs.  The ones you have a hard time feeling with productive workers, and do surge pay for those times you most need it.  Can’t find anyone to cover the Saturday evening shift, it’s now on surge pay! Who wants to make twice or triple what they normally do to work Saturday night!? You’ll find some folks for sure!

I know, I know, you call this ‘shift premium’, but guess what your 10% shift premium isn’t working! You want your second and third shift to be as good as first.  Surge pay is your answer!  You want to Timmy to sell more popcorn. Hello, Surge Pay!

Who knew Uber could solve your compensation issues!

 

It’s Not a Talent Contest

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I think most of us have gotten away from using the phrase “a war on talent’ throughout the industry.  It’s not really a war, and if it was most of you would lose.  Most talent acquisition shops are unwilling to do what it would take to win a war, that’s just a fact, not a shot at your shop.

There’s a better phrase that I think should encompass the plight of talent in our organizations that is used frequently in sports:

“It’s not a ‘talent’ contest. It’s a ‘winning’ contest!”

This means it doesn’t matter how talented the other team is, it all comes down to winning the game.  Great, you have the best talent, but if you’re losing the game/contest/event your high level of talent means nothing!

HR, Talent Acquisition and most executives have a hard time with this. They want to get the ‘best’ talent.  When, in reality, the best talent might not help your organization ‘win’.  Yes, you win or lose in most organizations.  You either make the sale or don’t make the sale. You either launch on time or don’t.  You either design award winning products, or you design products that never make it market.  Those are winning and losing in a business sense.

Business isn’t a talent game. It’s a winning and losing game.

What does this mean to HR and Talent Acquisition?  You don’t always need the most talented individuals to win.  What you need is people who are willing to give that little bit of extra effort, over those who won’t.  This discretionary effort gets you the win, over talented individuals who aren’t willing to give such effort.

You need individuals that put the goal, the vision, first.  Again, nothing to do with talent.  They believe in what you are doing as an organization, and do what it takes to make those goals reality.

You need individuals who want to see those around them succeed and are willing to sacrifice themselves, from time to time, to see their peers and coworkers succeed.  This sacrifice has nothing to do with talent.

I love talent, don’t get me wrong.  All of us need a certain level of talent to do what we do, but almost all of us don’t need to be the ‘most’ talented to be successful.  When we go out and build our talent strategies we have to be aware of this.  It’s not about hiring top talent.  It’s about hiring the talent that will make our organizations successful.

I don’t want my organization to be in a talent game.  I want my organization to be in a winning game.

3 Real Reasons HR Does Exit Interviews

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The exit interview process is much like most organizations employee referral process. You believe you should have a process.  You design the process.  It’s going to be great! It starts out great.  At some point, soon after starting the process, it dies a slow horrible death!

Exit interviews are something every HR pro believes are important, but very few actually do a great job at.  The problem with most exit interview processes is that their very HR dependent and take a ton of follow through.   Another major problem is that while our executives say they want the data from the interviews, rarely do they believe what they are given.  Most chaulk bad interviews up to disgruntled employees and discount the entire process.

So, why do we give Exit Interviews?  I’ll give you three ‘real’ reasons HR wants to do exit interviews:

1. We want to know where you’re going!  Yep, HR folks love to gossip and we want to be the first ones to know where you’re going and why.

2. We trying to get your current manager fired!  You know what’s really frustrating in HR? Having to hire over and over again for the same bad managers!

3. We need data to look strategic. But we’ll never really make any changes based on what we find.  What? Everyone is leaving us because our competition across the street is providing more flexibility.  Yeah, well, they suck and you suck if you go to work for them!

Chalk this up to data that our executives say they want, but they really don’t!   What they want to hear is the problem our people are leaving us are easy fixes.  When they find out they’re leaving because of their bad leadership, every person who fills out an exit interview immediately becomes a piece of garbage in their eyes.

How do you fix this?

Do ever deliver specific exit interview data immediately after one person leaves, that seems to similar to why that person leaves.  Basically, you never get credit for that being real data.  Exit interview data only becomes ‘real’ when it’s based on a many data points put together.  The problem with that, is it takes most organizations a while to get that much data.  Usually, at that point, it starts to become vanilla.

Individual exit interview feedback can be powerful, but only if it is coming from a top player and you can get everyone involved to agree this is a top performer before the data comes in.  At least, at that point, you have a fighting chance to get them to listen and not discount the feedback.

Let’s face it, we all know most of our issues.  We just hate it when our past employees throw those in our face, when we think we’ve been working hard to correct them.   That kind of feedback is hard to accept, and we tend to discredit it way too fast.  Don’t allow yourself to believe data isn’t statistically significant unless you have a lot of it.  One great employee leaving is significant, and you need to listen to it.  Just know, the up hill battle you’ll face in actually creating the leadership change necessary to address it.

 

Unlimited Vacation Policies Suck!

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Well, it had to happen, unlimited vacation policies have jumped the shark!  Billionaire Richard Branson announced this week his company, Virgin Group, would begin offering unlimited vacation to all corporate employees. Here’s a statement from Richard:

“Take a holiday whenever you want. Take as much holiday as you want. We’re not going to keep a check on how much holiday you take,” he said in a CNN interview…”Treat people as human beings, give them that flexibility and I don’t think they’ll abuse it. And they’ll get the job done,”

Here’s what Richard knows, it’s been proven time and again, study after study, that companies that implement unlimited vacation policies actually show a decrease in vacation time used, not an increase!  He’s not making a decision based on people, he’s making a decision based on business.  That’s how you become a billionaire, and not a thousandaire!

One other issue I have with the announcement, is him saying ‘we’re not going to be checking”.  Really!?  You aren’t going to have anyone checking who and how much vacation is being used. What if you have some employees not using any vacation at all?  Isn’t that a problem?  Shouldn’t someone be ‘checking’ on this?

Let’s face it, unlimited vacation day policies were garbage the moment companies discovered that the psychology of these policies was causing their employees to actually take less time off, not more time.

We all write and design policies we think will have benefit to our employees and the organization.  It’s a balancing act.  As soon as you come out publicly with a policy and state it’s a ‘benefit’ to your employees, when you know it isn’t a ‘benefit’ to your employees, you lose credibility.

The design of unlimited vacation policies were broken to begin with, but we got sucked into the dream of taking every Friday off, and taking a 3 week holiday in the summer to some island.  Then reality kick us in the teeth and we realized what would actually happen if we tried doing something like that.  It’s hard enough to use the time you had given to you previously, and your leadership team made your employees feel like crap when they did have to use it.

Unlimited time off was designed to be trap.  Let’s see which poor sucker will actually try and use it, and then we know which person is least engaged and not fully on the bus!  No one will say this, because the companies using these policies think they’re saving the world one stupid app at a time.

The reality of most work environment is you are hired to do a specific job.  When you are not there that job doesn’t get done, or at the very least gets put on hold for the period of time you’re gone.  So, you, taking off all this wonderful vacation time, only means your job really doesn’t get done.  This becomes a performance issue, and/or a resource issue, since now we have to hire someone else to pick up your slack while you’re out on ‘holiday’.

How long do you think you’ll keep your wonderful job, with unlimited vacation, when your organization is having to bring in other people to do the job you are supposed to be doing?

Yep. Not long.

What’s a better alternative?

Design the amount of time off around business needs.  I’m in the Midwest, most companies are a ghost town between December 23 and January 2 or so, depending on the calendar. They are also empty Thanksgiving weekend.  Throw in a few days around July 4th, and a week for spring break, and you have almost 3 full weeks of vacation time.  Your employees now have sick time, doctors and dentists appointments, a day here or there for personal business (banking, family, etc.), there goes another week.  How about a real vacation?  You know the kind where you sit at home with a list of a thousand things to do, but spend four days watching Netflix!  Now, we’re at 5 weeks.

5 weeks of total time off, probably works for about 99% of people in the world.  Anymore and it’s hard to actually do your job.

The Problem With Executives Estimating Risk

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I harp on my peers when I speak about our role as HR Pros.  I tell HR Pros it is not our job to eliminate risk, it’s our job to advise risk, then let our executives make choices based on that perceived risk, with our influence.   It sounds really good when I say it live!  It sounds thought provoking and wise.  People take notes.

I might be wrong about all of it, though.

Daniel Crosby, Ph.D. wrote a post over on LinkedIn called You Are Not a Snowflake were he cited a study done by Cook College that explored unrealistic optimism. Here’s some of it:

Cook College performed a study in which people were asked to rate the likelihood that a number of positive events (e.g., win the lottery, marry for life) and negative events (e.g., die of cancer, get divorced) would impact their lives. What they found was hardly surprising—participants overestimated the likelihood of positive events by 15% and underestimated the probability of negative events by 20%.

What this tells us is that we tend to personalize the positive and delegate the dangerous. I might win the lottery, she might die of cancer. We might live happily ever after, they might get divorced. We understand that bad things happen, but in service of living a happy life, we tend to think about those things in the abstract.

Knowing this, it now makes me uneasy to let our executives just go off and make decisions on risk!

HR Pro: “Well, you know if we fire Ken, he’s probably going to sue us and we’ll lose.”

Executive: “Let’s go ahead with it.” (in their mind thinking “we won’t get sued, that’s only other companies who treat their employees like crap. we’re great”)

HR Pro: “Are you sure!? From my experience we are definitely going to be hanging out there on this one.”

Executive: “Yes, I’m sure. Shoot Ken!” (again thinking, “Ken will probably thank us for finally put him out of his misery”)

That is just one silly example.  We constantly mitigate risk in HR.  On a daily basis we are making decisions based on positive and negative outcomes.  If we know we are predispositioned to believe the positive is more likely going to happen, when statistically speaking it won’t more than negative, and we are predispositioned to believe negative things won’t happen, when they likely more than we believe, we are really making some bad decisions over time!

I’m a very confident person.  I’m also decisive.  This makes this concept very concerning to me!  I like to believe in positive outcomes. I don’t believe bad stuff will happen, or if it does I’ll be able to conquer it!

So, HR pros forget what I tell you.  Stop risk in all manners that you can in your organization! Don’t advise.  Mitigate! If you’re anything like me, you’ve probably already had this come back and bite you a time or two.  Also, know you won’t be very well liked taking this course of action, but that’s something else I like to advise to HR pros in which is probably wrong…

ACA Complaince – HR, You’re In Trouble!

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I wanted to title this – “The most boring post ever!” But you guys know I couldn’t write a boring post!

Going through my debrief of HR Tech and I had a meeting with ADP regarding health care reform compliance.  Yes. It was as boring as it sounds!  But there’s a catch, this is stuff that the real HR folks are really concerned about, especially small and medium sized HR shops (50 – 999 employees).  Let’s face it, we don’t have the staff or budget to really feel 100% confident we know what we really need to be doing!  It’s something that can make us look like fools to our executives.  So, I wanted to pass along some stuff I think might help.

ADP has data coming out of their ears! They surveyed our executives in the SMB space and here’s what they are saying:

  1. 69% are concerned with the cost of health coverage and other benefits
  2. 54% are concerned with health care reform legislation

I’ll bet you that 54% is really 100%, but the other 46% believe you (HR Pro) have it under control, and most of us probably don’t!

ACA is confusing, and it seems like a moving target.  Most vendors will tell you they can help, but when you really look into the folks who are giving them the information to give you, they’re really no different than you or I.  What I really liked about my meeting with ADP is they have the resources to throw some really, really smart people at this, and they have the size and influence to probably get insight directly from those writing the legislation.  With great size, comes great access!

ADP has launched a new solution called ADP Health Compliance.  ADP Health Compliance combines Software as a Service (SaaS) with rigorous managed services staffed by ACA experts who can help to enable compliance while managing all of the complex regulatory requirements: Eligibility, Affordability and Regulatory Management.  And you don’t even need to be an ADP client to sign up to use this solution!

“The ACA has transformed the practice of workforce management into a fluctuating system of checks and balances, and one missed step can be the difference between compliance and significant financial penalties,” said Saliterman.  “ADP Health Compliance’s managed service feature is truly unique and can provide large employers with the expertise that only a leader in tax and compliance can deliver.”

“In our restaurants, the vast majority of our employees are variable hour workers whose time will change shift to shift, week to week.  We need to constantly monitor employees hours—12 months a year—to determine who is required to be offered  health coverage benefits and whether or not that coverage is affordable, which can be a heavy lift,” said Bruce Clark, Chief Financial Officer of Hooters Management Corporation, an early adopter of ADP Health Compliance.  “Restaurant operators are good at running restaurants, but that doesn’t mean that they’re good at complicated compliance tasks.  Our plan is to keep doing what we do and do that great, and we’ll leave ACA administration to our expert partner…“

Yeah, ACA isn’t sexy.  It’s not employee engagement platforms, and digital interviewing and big data.  ACA compliance is where HR Pros earn their chops, it’s real-life HR, and it’s something we can’t afford to get wrong.  ADP isn’t paying me.  I think they have a product a lot of you could actually use, and it protects your organization.  Check it out. It’s probably worth your time to take a look and see where you might be at risk!

Why Your Best Performers Make Horrible Leaders

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We all make this mistake, and we’ll continue to make this mistake.  It’s the same old story.  One of your employees performs really, really well, and because of their performance you move them out of the position they are in and put them in a leadership position. Then, they fail and become a lousy performer.

The best companies in the world make this mistake, and keep making it.  The worst companies make this mistake as well, and every other company in between. We can’t stop ourselves, it might be the largest single failure of business in the history of the world, and we can’t stop ourselves.

I like sports and it’s easy to make this analogy with sports.  Larry Bird, one of the all time NBA greats, couldn’t handle being a head coach.  But he was one of the top basketball players of all time.  He couldn’t take that those players he was coaching weren’t as good as him, couldn’t do the things he could do. He couldn’t understand this.  For him, it was easy…

Great performers are great because they do or have something no one else does.  It might be superior work ethic, it might be G*d given talents.  Regardless, they have perform better than everyone else.  Therein lies why they struggle to become great, or even marginal, leaders.  They can’t understand why you can’t do the same thing. I did it. What’s your problem!?

We take our best and brightest and we ‘reward’ them with management positions.  We believe this is what they really want.  In reality most don’t actually want this.  They really love what they are doing, shown by the tremendous performance they are giving you.  And, as an organization we want to reward that great performance, but we have structure and the only way we can really reward them, to give them more money, the big money, and the big title, is to promote them.

So, we promote them.

And we hope. We hope they’ll be one of the few who can make the transition and not be a total failure when it comes to leading other people, but rarely does it really happen.  Usually, it’s just a slow death of another great performer into the mediocrity of leadership.

A few organizations are beginning to just stop this.  They leave their great individual performers in position and just pay them like they would pay a leader. They give them a leader title. But what they don’t do, is give them people to manage!  They reward them for truly great performance, and put them in a position to keep performing great.

Your best, most talented person is worth more than your average leader.  But we struggle with this because it doesn’t fit nice and neat to a compensation pay band, or any job description we have in our HRMS system. We feel this undeniable desire to force people into positions we know they won’t do well in, because it makes us feel better when we pay them more.  Justification of value.  We value leadership more than great performance. That’s 1950 talking.  Stop listening.