Category Archives: Career Advice

Talent Pros! You are not alone! #SHRMTalent

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I’m in Nashville, TN this week attending and speaking at the SHRM Talent Conference. SHRM Talent has quickly become one of my favorite conferences to attend and speak at because I love being surrounded by TA Pros and Leaders who are in the weeds! Actual real folks, making real placements, with real stories and pain of running corporate TA operations every day! My Peeps!!!!

I was speaking to attendees this week as I was getting ready for my presentation and guess what!?! Every single one had the exact same issue! We all need more people! And, AND, “we” – every freaking one of us – is struggling to find those people to fill our jobs. From San Fran to Dallas to Tampa to Kansas City to Detroit to New York and every small, medium, and large city in between, we are struggling.

So, you are not alone. I am here with you. And though you are far away. I am here to stay. (it’s lyrics to a song I couldn’t get out of my head as I started writing this post!) But it fits!

The cool part of knowing you are in the same boat as everyone else is since we are all in this together, we can help each other. We almost now are in a position where we have to help each other. It’s not okay to what our brothers and sisters in the grind fail.

So, how can we do this? I’ve got a couple of ideas:

1. Local Partnership Candidate Sharing – You have applicants and candidates you are not using. They are unused inventory that for whatever reason you don’t need and won’t hire. You have a peer in your city that is also sitting on an unused inventory of candidates. Go meet for lunch and take those unused, new candidates, and swap. They might be able to use some of yours and you might be able to use some of there candidates. The reality is, this is costing you nothing, and helping both of you! Ramp it up by inviting four or five other leaders from other organizations, and now you’re changing the game!

2. Stop Traditional Employee Referral Programs – Well, Tim, we pay $250 after 90 days of employment. Great, that’s like telling someone you’re giving them $1 Million in Monopoly money! It’s not real to them. They don’t truly believe they’ll ever get that. Start rewarding the behaviors and activities that lead to hires. Hey, here’s a $20 bill for giving us the name and phone number of a candidate, Thank You! Here’s a $50 bill for when the person actually shows up for the interview! Here is a $100 bill when they show up day 1! THANK YOU! Here’s another $50 bill when they are still here on Day 90, or whatever. This will lead to more referrals and cash money in the hand will make this real to your employees and you’ll get more referrals!

3. Stop Making Candidates Jump Through Your Hoops – Well, Tim, if the candidate really wants the job they will come into our office and fill out the application. No, no they won’t. Because your competition isn’t making them, and you’re an idiot! I’ve got 3 Gen Z sons who would all be great hires for any company. Work hard, care about their job, look your customer in the eye and treat them with kindness and respect, but they won’t walk in an fill out your stupid app. But, if you allow them to text you their interest, they will be all in. There is absolutely zero correlation that a candidate who jumps through your hoops will be a good hire, and there is absolutely zero correlation that a candidate who won’t jump through your hoops will be a bad hire. Stop it!

Stop doing this alone. Go invite one peer from another company to meet for lunch or coffee. Start building your local talent network of peers who you can work with to rise all of our boats. There is a time for competition and there is a time for cooperation. Today we need to be working together to solve this talent crisis.

Career Confessions of Gen Z: 3 Tips for Starting a New Job — The Intern Addition

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STOP, COLLABORATE, AND LISTEN.

While these may be the words to an iconic and catchy song — you’re welcome if it’s now stuck in your head — they are also words of wisdom for a college student or new grad about to start an internship or entry-level job. So, let’s take a piece out of Vanilla Ice’s lyrical genius and apply it to some real life advice.

Stop:

If you’re anything like me, starting anything new can be extremely overwhelming. Be sure to stop, take a breath, and know that it will take time to adjust. Don’t try to rush yourself. Allow yourself some grace and your transition will be much smoother than if you put ten tons of unneeded pressure on yourself.

Collaborate:

You’re in your new job and you want to impress the big cheeses. What’s a great way to do this?

By demonstrating all you learned from those college group projects.

Show that you know how to be a productive team player, that you’re willing to share your ideas, and that you’ll make the effort to work well with your new co-workers. Your ability to collaborate successfully will stand out more than a 4.0 GPA, I promise.

Listen:

I have saved the best for last. This tip is the most important:

If you cannot listen actively, you will not advance nor impress. Just like your mom used to say, “There is a reason you have two ears and one mouth”. When you start your new job you will have to take in a great deal of information.

It’s important that you be an active listener. Take notes, ask for clarification, and don’t be too prideful to ask for help. Active listeners are some of the most valuable employees. While I am no expert — or famous rapper — by any means, I do work on these things each and every day that I come into work.

These tips will help you transition smoothly, impress the big cheeses, and demonstrate your value as the incredible employee you are!

*Though I don’t know if Vanilla Ice took these tips, he is worth $18 million, so he’s doing something right.

Elena Moeller is currently junior at the St. Edward’s University and Intern of all trades for Proactive Talent in Austin, Texas. Being born and raised in Minnesota I grew up playing hockey, riding snowmobiles, and fishing. One thing you should know about me is that I have never been labeled as shy — I live for getting to know new people and learning new things. This has enabled me to travel the world, become fluent in Spanish, and live in Milan, Italy where I learned a bit of Italian! I find I am happiest at work when I am able to spark my creativity and create something that is useful for our company but is also an entertaining read.

It’s Okay to Tell Your Critics to Suck It!

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In the corporate world, everyone is a critic!  Everyone!  We’ve gotten really good at a learned behavior. No longer can we send out a final product the first time. Why?  Because everyone wants to trash it and change it so it can be this really nice piece of vanilla crap!  Welcome to Corporate America. But you know what, this isn’t new, critics have been around since Jesus and critics have been wrong since before Jesus!

I wanted to share with you some famous things that critics got wrong:

Symphony No. 9 in D minor, Op. 125, by Ludwig van Beethoven (1824)

What the critics said in 1825: “We find Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony to be precisely one hour and five minutes long; a frightful period indeed, which puts the muscles and lungs of the band, and the patience of the audience to a severe trial…” –The Harmonicon, London, April 1825

Moby-Dick, by Herman Melville (1851)

And the critics’ response: When Melville died in 1891, Moby-Dickhad moved a grand total of 3,715 copies…in 40 years! The below was typical at the time of the book’s release:

“…an ill-compounded mixture of romance and matter-of-fact. The idea of a connected and collected story has obviously visited and abandoned its writer again and again in the course of composition…Our author must be henceforth numbered in the company of the incorrigibles who occasionally tantalize us with indications of genius, while they constantly summon us to endure monstrosities, carelessnesses, and other such harassing manifestations of bad taste as daring or disordered ingenuity can devise…” -Henry F. Chorley, London Athenaeum, October 25, 1851

 

Animal Farm, by George Orwell (1945)

What the critics said about the book we all had to read in high school: “It is impossible to sell animal stories in the USA.” –Publisher’s rejection

 

Here’s what I know, true creativity and innovation in what we do, does not come from running our ideas through everyone and their brother for approval.  If your organization wants your employees to be truly creative and innovative, stop pushing teams.

 

Teams don’t make masterpieces, they can do some pretty cool stuff, but pure creativity isn’t one of them.  We push “Team” so hard in HR and in most organizations it sometimes makes you think like this the only way everyone in the world must work, but it’s not.  An HR Pro that can determine the proper work structure throughout their organization is truly valuable and “team” isn’t always the answer. We should have other tools in our toolbox besides just ‘teams’.

 

You hear artist all the time say “I don’t listen to my critics”. This is valuable in that they know listening to a critic will hurt their art.  Unfortunately, in business, we don’t always have the ability/decision to not listen to our critics (since those critics could be bosses, peers, friends, etc.).

 

In business telling your critics to “Suck It” could be a big career derailer!

 

So, when do we go all “Suck It! It’s my project” in the workplace?   First, I wouldn’t suggest you approach it, beginning with “Suck It”. While you will get their attention, I think we all have the ability in our work environment to push back appropriately when you truly know you have something that will make a difference.  But, it’s about having the conviction to stand behind it and not let it get changed.  That’s your marker, “am I willing to put my career/credibility/bank of influence on the line for this idea/project/etc.?” If you are, it’s time to pull out the “Suck It” card and push forward.  For most of us, this might never happen in our work lives, maybe once, but it’s rare.

 

I think what we learn over time is that not all of our critics are bad and some actually might help truly make us better.  The key is to continue to have confidence in what you do, without it, your work critics will make your work life less than artistic.

No, really, just keep being wrong!

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I was with some HR Pros recently and one of them shared a standard HR axiom about what we do as HR Pros in the vain of maintaining consistency. If we are wrong in the beginning then we just keep being wrong!  It sounds idiotic doesn’t!?! But you see it every single day in HR. At one point someone made a decision, for who knows what reason, and no matter what the reason precedence was set and through hell and high water we will keep making that same decision!

We are HR! We are HR! We are HR! (keep the chant going!)

I’m this person.  Well, I’m trying not to be. You see in my organization we do the same stuff.  If my recruiters exceed their goals we have various rewards that get – one of those is the ability to have a flex day throughout their week, where they can work from home or come in late, leave early, etc.  It’s up to them.  In our environment, that reward is worth its weight in gold!  But (there’s always a “But”) when a holiday week happens where the person is already going to be off for a day, we have said no flex day that week.  Seemed like a reasonable plan.

But was it?

A reward is set up to be a reward it shouldn’t matter if the person has a vacation, or has a holiday, etc.  I had to ask myself why do we do this, take this away just because of a holiday? I trust my people, especially those working their butts off to exceed their goals, so why take it away? I was wrong.  So, I decided to change it and do the right thing.

Do you know what the first reaction was?  Yep, it was “Wait” that’s not how we did it before. A very normal reaction we have as leaders because we want to deliver consistency to our teams, and I agree with that concept for sustained engagement but there’s one thing that should override this. When you’re wrong!

So, do you have the courage to stop being wrong?

Most of your peers don’t. They get caught up in groupthink. They get caught up thinking they are being “consistent” and that is good. But being consistent on doing something wrong is just being consistently wrong!  You have a choice, keep being wrong or start being right!  What will you do?

Are you ‘Manager Shaming’? #WorkHuman

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Do you know what’s wrong with companies and organizations?

I know the answer because I go to a lot of conferences and listen to a lot of speakers. All of them will tell you exactly what’s wrong with your organization and every other organization. Turns out we all have the exact same thing wrong! Which is comforting in a way.

Our Managers Suck!!! 

Yay!! We figured it out!! We all agree!! Good for us!!

Can I tell you something? I hate Manager Shaming!! HATE IT!

Almost every speaker, at every conference, who speaks about the employee experience or employee engagement, or just about anything to deal with people blame managers. It’s lazy analysis for the most part. Let’s find someone or something everyone loves to hate and then we’ll blame them for everything, and then I’ll give them some great plan that you can’t possibly pull off, filled with funny little stories about my kids.

Look, I get that we have managers that are struggling, but the reality is we put them in a position to fail and now we just want to shame them and blame them for every single ill we have in an organization.

We have to be better than this. We were the idiots who put these folks in charge, didn’t teach them to properly lead people, or hold them accountable to properly lead people, or actually select them based on who had the right DNA to lead people, and not who is the best individual contributor but truly has no ability to lead people. It’s so stupid.

I want us all to start calling out Manager Shaming at conferences.

Cool tell me all my problems are my terrible managers, but you better be super quick to help figure out how to solve this or we get to throat punch you right on stage! If I hear about one more ‘study’ on how they found out managers suck and this is the ‘real’ problem with helping our organizations be successful I’m going to vomit.

So, how do we stop “Manager Shaming”:

1. Understand we are all part of this problem. It’s not ‘managers’, it’s all of us. We all suck because we all allowed this to happen. Also, most of us are managers.

2. Stop picking people to be managers based on they were the best at something, that has nothing to do with actually managing or leading people!

3. Build a leadership program that not only teaches and mentors employees on how to be effective leaders, but then hold them accountable to be that person.

4. Stop blaming and start fixing. It’s not a ‘manager’ issue. If it’s broke. If you are not successful. That’s an organizational issue. We all own that.

5. Move people out of management roles who are unable to lead people. You know who they are, just make the move.

6. Celebrate, publicly your great managers, and be very specific about the behaviors you are celebrating.

Select, educate, measure, reward, repeat. We aren’t trying to launch the space shuttle. We are trying to do something way, way harder. We are trying to lead people!

Stop Manager Shaming!

IN 2025, APPLICATIONS WILL BE accepted for the job of a lifetime—literally!

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Swedish artistic duo Simon Goldin and Jakob Senneby recently announced their next project which they are calling “Eternal Employment”. The project is fully funded and they have even started to write a job description for this ‘artistic’ endeavor.

What is “Eternal Employment“?

“A fair starting salary, with annual wage increases that match those for Swedish government workers, vacation time, even a pension, and the job is yours for as long as you do it. So what’s the job? Anything you want.

Each morning, the chosen employee will punch a clock in Korsvägen train station, currently under construction in Gothenburg, Sweden, which will turn on a bank of bright fluorescent lights. Other than that, “the position holds no duties or responsibilities besides the fact that the work should be carried out at Korsvägen. Whatever the employee chooses to do constitutes the work,” reads the job description. The employee can also choose how publicly visible or anonymous they would like to be while on the clock.”

So, how is this art?

“As Gothenburg’s working class finds itself marginalized, Goldin and Senneby see a job that gives total control to the worker as an act of economic imagination.”

It’s an interesting concept, even more so as we move into the world of A.I. knowing so many tactical jobs we do now will go away and many economists are already talking about these concepts of people being given a living wage to basically just live, but not work.

This is truly art potentially mimicking life. We can already foresee a time when we don’t need most of the workers we have today, yet we still have to provide for the population and understand a new kind of productivity when ‘work’ isn’t apart of the equation.

So, what would you do in this job?

It’s a great question to think about. If you didn’t have to worry, every, for the rest of your life, about finances, and you couldn’t be fired. What would you do in this train station each day on your shift?

I want to hope that I would find ways to brighten the day of others. To welcome them to the day, to wish them the best on their way home, and everything in between, but it’s such a far-out concept it’s really hard to even imagine.  It kind of reminds me of the movie with Tom Hanks, The Terminal. While he had to stay in the airport and couldn’t leave, he basically had to figure out how to spend his time in this pass-through public space.

I have a feeling this ‘job of a lifetime’ would probably get super boring for most people. Most of us would start out with the best intentions, but eventually, fall into the trap of not really doing anything productive. Maybe that’s part of the “art” to select someone who actually would take full advantage of this opportunity. I would love to be on the selection committee!

What would you do if you were given this job? Hit me in the comments.

 

It’s International Women’s Day! Is Your CEO Female? #ReferHer #BalanceForBetter #IWD2019

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6% of CEOs in the S&P 100 are female. 50.8% of the population is female.

I’m not super at math, but that seems like a disconnect, right?

Today is International Women’s Day and a young lady (Tatiana Hollander-Ho) reached out to me this week. She’s an entry level marketing pro for The Ladders, 2018 grad from NYU and she said, “Hey, you have a passion around women in the workplace and I want to get this #ReferHer going and make a difference. Can you help?” (FYI – go connect with her – she’s going to be a great one in our industry!)

I can do what I do, which is write about and socialize it and support it! #ReferHer is an awesome idea. We need to refer more women to leadership positions, period.

I’m not one of these dudes who just goes out and flies the female flag because it’s the politically correct thing to do. I’m also not one that buys into the bullshit studies that say “Female CEOs return better financial returns!” – those are bad studies with flawed data – you can’t run a regression on companies run by women and the financial performance and call that good data.

There might be a correlation, but there is absolutely no causation. If you believe in those studies, you also believe in the study that says if your name is Mike and you’re over six foot and you are the CEO of a Fortune 500 company, you will have higher financial returns than anyone else, not named Mike. Those two studies say the exact same thing.

That’s the problem, right!? You see it, right!? You can’t just throw out garbage and expect smart people not to get it and just blindly support females. The opposite actually happens. Smart people see that and go, that’s not what that says, so now I don’t buy any of it. Smart people – both women and men.

I’ve worked for great women. Strong women who are great leaders. These women, in my opinion, had many traits that most of the male leaders I’ve worked for didn’t have. In most cases, these traits made them leaders employees wanted to follow, not forced to follow.

We have this awful bias that says white dudes over six feet make better leaders. It’s literally been drilled into us for 100 years. Look at the Presidents all the way up to Obama and after. White dudes over six foot have nothing buy stature. We are betting that the trait of stature is the most important thing for running a high functioning organization. It’s insanity, right?

The reality is we can solve this. We can. Not overnight, but little by little.

It starts with flooding your leadership ranks with women. That means we have to give opportunities to women to move into leadership in ways we haven’t before. We have to develop Women Leadership Councils in our organizations who can tap on the shoulders of female employees and invite them in and mentor them into leadership roles. We have to purposeful about doing this. It won’t happen organically, we’ve been waiting for a hundred years for it to happen organically.

So, how do you start?

It’s super simple!

Step 1 – Tell your c-suite you are starting a Women’s Leadership Council in your organization and you need their support. 100% will give their support because if they don’t the backlash would be tremendous.

Step 2– Be inclusive, not exclusive. If a woman in your organization shows any sign of potential leadership you pull them into your council.

Step 3– Focus on hard leadership skills, not soft skills. Give them the inside information around how the company makes money or doesn’t make money. Show them how to budget and write a budget. Teach them how to performance manage. Show them how to balance themselves for great success. Show them how to support each other in this drive upward.

Step 4 – Make your C-suite come, present, participate, and watch. They need to see your smart females in action.

Step 5 – Draft your high potential leader internal mobility charts and scoreboard it publicly within the c-suite. Tell them the minimum goal is 50/50. Show it to them monthly.

Step 6 – Make female leadership goals/hires part of your c-suite annual bonus. At least 30%.

It can be done. This isn’t hard. But it has to be purposeful.

Check out LinkedIn’s Gender Insights Report as well it’s loaded with great information on helping solve this problem!

The 1 Thing You Need to Do to Get the Job You Always Wanted!

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Last week I got a call from an old work friend. He wanted to have lunch.  He just left a position and was in transition.  Not a bad or negative job loss, just parted ways.  When you get to a certain executive point in your career, it’s rare that bad terminations take place. It’s usually, “hey, we like you, but we really want to go another direction, and we know you don’t want to go that direction, so let’s just shake hands and call it a day, here’s a big fat check.”

Executives get this.  For the most part, there aren’t hard feelings, like when you were young and lost a job. I usually find that the organization the person is leaving from are super complimentary, and usually takes the blame for the change.  Executives in corporate America are like NFL coaches. You get hired with the understanding that one day you’ll be fired.  It’s not that you know less, or aren’t going to be successful in your career, it’s just that the organization needs change, and you’re part of that change.

Welcome to the show, kid.

My friend decided that he was going to find his next position not through posting for positions online, or trolling corporate career pages, he was going to have lunches.  About two per week, with past work friends. Let’s connect, no pressure, we already know each other and I want to catch up.

You see, in 2019 you don’t find great jobs by filling out applications in ATSs and uploading your resume to Indeed. You get great jobs because of the relationships and personal capital you’ve built up over your career.  Having lunch and reconnecting turn on a relationship machine. I believe that people, innately, want to help other people. When a friend comes to you with a situation, and you have something to offer or help, you will do that.

The problem is most people who are looking for great jobs don’t do this. They lock themselves in their home office and apply to a thousand jobs online and get upset when nothing happens. Great jobs aren’t filled by ATSs and corporate recruiters.  Great jobs are filled through relationships. Every single one of them.

Want to find a great job in 2019?

Go out to lunch.

3 Ways to Increase Employee Productivity that Doesn’t Entail Pain or Torture!

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The holy grail of great leadership is simply getting the most positive productivity for an extended period from your team. That. Is. It.

If I take your current team and I get them to do more work that is of the same or higher quality, I am a better leader than you are. “Yeah, well, they don’t like you as much as they like me!”

I wasn’t hired to be friends. That’s a different game that I can also win if you want to play!

Productivity is the ultimate measure. It leads to better business outcomes. Highly productive employees stay at their jobs longer and have higher rates of job satisfaction. While that end measure of productivity is a great measuring stick, actually getting increased productivity in a positive way is super hard!

I’ve found three ways to get increased productivity where both the leader and the employee feel good about the outcomes:

  1. Deliver career value to the employee. 

An employee that truly believes you have their best career interest at heart will run through walls for you, but they really have to believe you are helping their career. That means you have to be very transparent about how this increase in productivity will lead to what they want, not what you want and the organization wants.

Also, if you lie about this and don’t deliver, you’ll lose this employee forever. You need to put in the time and work to put yourself in the position to start acting like their career mentor, it just doesn’t happen overnight. Be clear of the path and process you’ll be taking them on.

  1. Acknowledge individual productivity increases in a public way, especially to the senior most leaders of the organization. 

Appreciation is paramount in getting and extending productivity increases in your employees. One way I love to support the leaders in the organization is to manage-up to those leaders by giving them information on specific individuals that I want to have them give appreciation to.

I will send the leader a message that states specifically the person, their email address or phone number, and what they did that was above and beyond. Then, I go one more step! I will tell the leader specifically what I expect them to do with this information!

It sounds like a bit of micro-managing but in reverse. What I’ve found is leaders are busy and they love that I give them all the information and what specifically I expect them to do with that information. They know that the employee will love getting the appreciation, and they love giving the appreciation, and in how I’ve delivered this to them makes it super easy for the leader to execute!

  1. Define, specifically what ‘extra’ is and what the employee will get in return. 

Too often, I find, employees believe they are going above and beyond when the leader only sees them doing the job they were hired to do. Great performance management is about defining what is expected in the role, and specifically what it takes to thrive in the role.

Once you do this as a leader, getting more is just a function of seeing which employees want to reach that next step and rewarding that effort. No yelling. No kicking and screaming. Just acknowledgment of great work done by employees who want to be successful in their chosen job.

To learn more about Increasing Productivity in your Workforce check out the great resources at Trakstar!

You’re Banned From Changing My Mind…at Work!

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Did you see Facebook’s internal announcement to their employees about banning an employee’s ability to change the mind of a co-worker about Politics and Religion? I think I need to use these for my family get togethers!

An internal memo was leaked (God Bless internal memo links) from Facebook’s Chief Technology Officer on some new workplace rules that Facebook is putting into effect immediately on all communication channels, and they are:

  1. Don’t insult, bully, or antagonize others
  2. Don’t try to change someone’s politics or religion
  3. Don’t break our rules about harassing speech and expression

Sorry workplace trolls at Facebook, your Employee Experience just took a major blow! (BTW “Workplace Trolls” is a great podcast name)

As you can imagine I have a few thoughts on this!

My actual first reaction to this had nothing to do with “the rules”, but had everything to do with who was communicating this message! Why is this coming from the CTO and not the CEO or CHRO? Definitely different than most organizations.

This tells me one of two things: 1. The CTO made these up on his own; and/or 2. Facebook’s leadership team wanted to make this seem like it wasn’t that big of a deal, so let’s not have it come from the CEO or CHRO, which normally would handle formal employee communications like this.

This is a bit of an employee experience course correction that I think we’ll start seeing in many organizations over the next couple of years with a softer economy. In an ultra-low unemployment economy the inmates run the asylum.

As we back to a bit of normal unemployment environment, employers will focus less on becoming a playground you get paid to attend, and more of a ‘back to work’ mentality. You shouldn’t have time to berate Billy all day because he worships Pokemon. Get your a$$ back to work!

Over the past couple of years with #MeToo and Trump, our workplaces have become littered with landmines of employee strife. We want and value inclusion, and at the same time this increases the communication issues and the need for rules like Facebook are instituting.

So, what do you think? Does your workplace need to adopt rules like this?