Category Archives: Career Advice

5 Signs Your Employees Are Interviewing For Other Jobs

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A few weeks back Kris Dunn, Laurie Ruettimann and I did a series for SumTotal called HR Hangouts.  The concept was to get on a Google Hangout for twenty minutes and just talk about real HR things. Basically, watercooler conversations for the modern world.  Quick and easy.  Here’s the actual video (it’s about 20 minutes if you have the time):

We called this one the FOT Turnover Predictor, which was basically what things do your employees begin to do to start showing you they are getting ready to turnover?

We all had different ones, but here are some of my favorites:

1. Parking Lot Calls.  It doesn’t haven’t to be the parking lot, it can be a back stairwell, out a back door to the picnic table behind your building, etc.  Basically, when an employee feels the ‘need’ to start taking calls away from their normal work area, for privacy, something is going on!  Usually, that something, is another job.  As an HR Pro I always address it right away, because it’s obvious and everyone sees you in your car for an ‘hour’ talking during your lunch, when you usually sit at your desk and check Facebook.

2. Banana Republic Wardrobe Update. “Hey, look, Tim has Skinny Jeans!” Wait, isn’t Tim like 40!?  No, Tim isn’t going through a midlife crisis.  Tim is interviewing! Work clothes are like a uniform. No one really wants to spend a ton of money on a uniform, so you tend to wear work clothes way too long.  When you see your employees doing some major updates to their ‘uniform’ there’s a reason – newly divorced, having an affair, interviewing.

3. Crisp White Button Down, Dark dress slacks.  No one normally wears black or navy dress slacks and just a white freshly pressed white dress shirt to work.  Want to know why? It’s a jacket and tie away from being an interview suit! The only other time you see this is when someone will be attending a funeral that day.  So, finding out who is interviewing is usually pretty easy.

4. Professional LinkedIn Updated Headshot.  You know we all get emails when our connections do updates to your profile, right!?  Oh, look, Tim just updated his LinkedIn profile photo from the one of him at the tailgate to one of him with a jacket and tie that looks like it was taken in his dining room with a sheet hanging on the wall…

5. New More Professional Personal Email Address.  Hey, everyone, I just wanted to inform you I will now be using timsackett@gmail , instead of RecruitingGod@gmail – thanks!

 It’s funny how employees really think they are being covert about looking for a new job, when usually everyone in the office knows.  Our worlds are so interconnected now it becomes really difficult to try and go through a traditional job search, when you have a job, without anyone knowing you’re doing it.

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…

Dream Jobs Are A Lie

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I hate that we are meant to feel that we should have our dream job.  It’s drilled into our society at nausea from mass media, our celebrities, our teachers and spiritual leaders. It’s all basically complete bullshit, but we eat it up like it came directly from G*d.

It didn’t.  Whichever G*d you believe in, she/he never said ‘Thou shalt have your dream job’, never.

Celebrities stand on award stages and tell our children to never give up their dreams, you can do whatever you want.  No.  No, they can’t.  Let’s face it, Mr. Celebrity, you were given a gift, most people don’t have that same gift, so stop telling my kid they can be you.

I know this upsets some people.  They love to live in a fantasy world that someday they stop working their 9 to 5 and start being a fairy princess.  I hate to tell you this, but you won’t.  Sorry, Billy, you’re an overweight short kid with bad eye sight and irrational fear of clouds.  You won’t be the next NFL Hall of Fame quarterback.  But you might be a really awesome Accountant, and that’s not a bad gig.

I don’t have my dream job.

I have a job I like a lot.

My dream job would be to make a ton of money managing and/or coaching a professional sports team. I would take basketball or baseball.  I really think I would be happy with either.

I know that won’t ever work out for me, so I don’t spend much time really thinking about it.  It would be stupid for me to do so.  But that’s my ‘dream’.

If it’s my dream, shouldn’t I give up everything I have and chase it?  Give up my well-paying, really good job.  Give up my house.  My kids college education.  My retirement account.  I mean this is MY dream!

Mr. Celebrity said I can reach my dreams.  We all can.  We just have to want it more.  We just have to not give up striving for it.

I met a person last week who said he had his ‘dream job’.  It was a good job, but he also told me he missed his kids, because his dream job made him travel a lot.  He also said his dream job had him working harder than he ever had prior.  The longer he talked, the longer it didn’t sounded like a dream job, and the more it sounded just like every other job.

The concept of dream jobs is bullshit.  That’s okay.  The sun will still come up tomorrow, even if you tell yourself I’ll never have my dream job.  You’ll be alright.  You can still have a really good, awesome life.

Be wary of someone telling you to chase your dream job.

The Voice – Picking Leaders

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I like watching the TV show The Voice.

It’s singing competition show that has four famous singer judges who compete against each other by picking teams of singers who compete against each other.  The Voice doesn’t allow the professional judges/coaches actually physically see the participants before they’re selected.

It’s a ‘blind’ audition. They can hear them, and have to decide if they want the singer based upon their voice, not how they look. It’s really well produced and the people are talented and hungry.

One thing happens on the voice with the four judges every so often.  A singer will be so good that all four judges will turn around and want the singer to select them to be their coach.  This causes the judges to ‘sell’ themselves on why the singer should pick them over one of the other judges to be their coach.

Within these scenarios is the heart of great leadership and determining what people really want.

Adam Levine, the lead singer from Maroon5, is the best at ‘winning’ these scenarios.  He definitely let’s the person know he wants them on their team, but he also gives them some very critical feedback on what he will do to make them better.  He almost always wins.

He’s figured out that why people definitely love to be told their great, they also want critical feedback as well.  Most of us have this deep need for people to be truthful with us.  “Thanks, I appreciate the kind words, but what do you really think? And, how can I get even better?”

It’s so freaking simple, it’s insane!

Still, most of our leaders, especially new leaders, are unwilling to understand this concept.  Critical feedback won’t push your employees away from you, if you can learn how to deliver in a manner where the employee can see the benefit to them.  Of course, this is based on trust and respect.

It’s also based on a belief from the employee that you as a leader have only one goal. To help make them better.  Period.  It’s not about me showing I’m smarter, or know more, or I’m in control.  It’s only about me helping you get better.

Want your employees to ‘select’ you as their leader?  Make them a better version of who it is they want to be.

 

Is Your Personal Strength Your Biggest Weakness?

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I’ve always been a huge fan of adult learners ignoring their weaknesses and focusing on bettering their strengths.  This goes against almost every single OD department in the corporate world where employee weaknesses have to be improved at all costs!  Adult learning studies have proven time and again that after a certain point in a person’s life, usually once reaching adulthood, focus on improving a weak skill will still only slightly improve even with focused training. But, you can see better increases when focusing on bettering an adults strengths.

Let me give you a personal example, I’m terrible a grammar, always have been.  I see grammar rules as something that are only important to high school English teachers. But, I love to write! Now, I could spend hours on improving my grammar, or I could spend those hours on writing better creative content, then hiring an editor to fix the crap I write.   Seems simple enough.  Hire an editor.  Bam, people will think I’m a better writer.

But what happens when you overuse a personal strength?

I know quite a few people who have been told and given performance feedback that you have “great attention to detail” (by the way I love these folks – I hire them on my team – because they help catch my grammar mistakes!).  You get told this, you take pride in it, and you now “really” focus on it, because that is what you’re known for.

Your company has a big important project and everyone needs to deliver. Major time crunch.  You get the deal.  You become involved because you want every detail perfect and you want to ensure nothing leaves with an error. Seems good, right?  Except for the fact that you can’t deliver on time because nothing is good enough.  You keep sending stuff back to get better, to get perfect and you miss deadlines.  One small example in our normal corporate lives, but it shows how a person’s strength, something they are applauded for, can become a weakness.

Do you know what your personal strength’s are?  I bet you probably do, but do you know if you are relying on these strengths so much, they are becoming your enemy?

I’ve been told a strength of mine is that I “will tell it like it is”.  Not a bad strength to have on a leadership team – until it is.  There are times and places where “telling like it is” is very valuable, and their are times “when telling it like is is” is very dangerous.  Remember, not all of your strengths will always be strengths!

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.

Fall In Love With Ideas

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I use to have this issue.  I would come up with an idea.  I really, really good idea!  I would then work to make this idea a reality.  I would spend a lot of time, energy and resources making this idea come to life.  The work became more important than the idea.

Someone really smart would come along and want to change my work.  It would frustrate me. It would anger me.  I didn’t like them messing with my work.

I fell in love with the work.  With the process.

The work and my processes became more important to me than the original idea.  I was blind to see that those who were coming to me, to try and get me to change my work, were in love with my idea, but not in love with my work.

It took me along time to understand the value wasn’t in the work, it was in the idea.  Anyone can do the work.  The work can be done a number of different ways to get the same result. But the idea was the creation, the start.  Without it, there wouldn’t be any work.

So many of the HR Pros I know have this same issue.  We take great pride in our work, so much so, that we don’t allow others to come in and help make our ideas better.  We don’t allow them to get on board and be a part of something special.  Our pride, blinds us to see just maybe there might be even a better way to make our ideas become reality.

Fall in love with the idea. Don’t fall in love with the work.

What Messaging Tool Should You Pick To Tell Off Your Boss?

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The messaging technology today is ridiculous!  There are so many ways to communicate it sometimes becomes really difficult to determine which technology to use for which messages. Think about it terms of breaking up.  I remember the first girl I had to break up with in middle school.  I had basically three ways to tell this girl I no longer ‘wanted to go out’, which entailed see each other at school. It wasn’t so much of going out, as it was meeting at school.

I could go right up to her face and tell her like a man.  But I wasn’t a man, I was a boy, and that seemed like a really awkward way to communicate, face to face. I could write her a note, give it to my buddy, who would give to her best friend, who would then give it to her.  This was the popular way but fraught with peril, as the message in these notes seemed to travel faster than the actual note.  I could call her on the home phone. This always seemed best to me, but you still risked her mom or dad picking up, and that was a fate worse than the death!

I was listening to a couple of people talk the other day in a coffee shop, and the one was telling the other, she was finally going to tell off her boss. She had enough! You go girl! But, there was a problem. No way did she want to do this face to face. She had to determine the exact right way to do it, that came across professional, but also got the message across she was serious.  (Yes, I listen to your conversation when I’m at a coffee shop acting like I’m working on my laptop)

I wanted to break in and help this poor girl with this problem, but that’s super creepy, so instead I’ll just fill you in on my take on each method:

1. Email – Seems like the logical communication method, knowing you don’t want to speak face to face. The problem is, it’s also very easy to copy and forward to HR.  From a professional standpoint it’s hard to really give it to your boss on email, because you know it’s will be used against you.  Still, I believe most people would use email.

2. Twitter – Probably the passive aggressive way to tell off your boss that is now in use!  Twitter has become the playground for the disengaged workforce of our generation.  You can tell off your boss and there is a 97% chance they’ll never see it, but many of your coworkers and friends will, and you’ll feel better. Plus, how much trouble can you actually get in with only 140 characters?

3. Facebook – First off, are you really ‘friends’ with your boss on Facebook!?  If so, Facebook messaging could actually work for telling off your boss. Definitely a bit more personal than other methods, and it’s likely your boss would probably take it that way as well.  It’s really more of a scream for help, than a tell off, though.  If you actually post the tell off of your boss publicly on Facebook, well that’s just career suicide.

4. SnapChat – Smart move, because chances are your boss is older than you and will have no idea what’s going on until it’s too late to really do anything to copy it. But it’s logistically a nightmare, because you first have to get your boss to sign up with a snapchat account, which seems like a lot of work and hand holding to eventually just tell them off! But, I can still see this being better than doing it face to face for many people!

5. Skype with video – Better than just a telephone call, this one they can at least see you, and you them but you can always click off quickly and claim technology problems.  This way you get all the benefit of telling them off to their face, but don’t have to wait around for their awkward measured responses.

6. Yammer – Okay, I’ll wait, go look it up.  It’s like your own personal social network for your organization.  Kind of like Twitter, but only for your own employees.  This would be an epic way to get yourself fired, but probably not a great tool to tell off your boss!

I still like my 13 year old boy way the best.  Tell one of your coworkers, who you know can’t keep a secret (you know the ones), all the issues you have with your boss.  Wait about 3-4 hours and go in casually to ask your boss about a project.  Your boss will ask you to come in and be super, super nice for some odd reason, almost like someone went and told him or her that you had a problem with them…

I’m Hiring! Are you sure you want to work for me?

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Okay, I’m adding a Recruiter to my team.  At hru-tech.com, we do mostly engineering and IT contract recruiting, some direct placement recruiting and some project RPO work for clients around the country.

I would put my team up against anyone.  They’re that good, and most are homegrown!  That’s right, the majority of our staff came in entry level and we smacked off that new car smell like an old bag of Taco Bell that’s been sitting in your back seat for three weeks in the summer.

I started looking around and getting the word out a couple days ago.  You would think it would be easy.  I don’t really ask for a lot, but I sure know it when I ‘hear’ it!   Recruiting is a pretty good gig.  It’s transferable. I’ve worked in 5 different states, 4 different industries and my recruiting skills I can take with me anywhere.  It’s the one thing I can guarantee you if you come work for me. You’ll always be able to find a job and make money.  Every economy needs good recruiters.

The pay is way better than your normal crappy sales jobs selling cell phones or renting cars to people that bring in their phone bill and a report card. The hours are pretty good. No weekends. A few nights here and there.  You get to interact with a great group of people. The latest and greatest recruiting tools.

What’s crazy to me is how hard it is to find people who want to do this job, and that can be good at it!  I like for people to have a four-year degree.  The actual degree isn’t as important, as the process of gaining that degree.  I find those who worked their way through college, tend to be better recruiters.  Bartenders might be the best previous job if I was forced to pick one. Any kind of job that had you on the phone talking to people would be second.

There’s also a need for people who don’t freak out when they are held accountable for results.  That eliminates most people who want to work in government or big companies.  My recruiters don’t sit around and wait to get paid.  So, self-motivation is important, as long as it’s targeted in the right direction.

Work-life balance is really important to me.  Hold on, let me define work-life balance.  Work-life balance is when you do enough work that I pay you so you can have things and do things you want to do.  It’s not you doing whatever you want at any time you feel.  That’s not balance.  Balance means equal both ways, work and life.

We aren’t saving the world.  For some people that’s really important.  We do find people some really, really good jobs.  Some people find that cool and rewarding.

I care about you as a person, and I want to see you be wildly successful.  I’ll treat you like family. The family that you actually like, not the ones you try to forget about.

The position is in Lansing, MI. No, you can’t work remote or virtual or on a boat, unless the boat is in the parking lot of our building, then you can work on a boat.

So, if you’re interested send me a note – sackett.tim@hru-tech.com.  

If you are interested, and I don’t think you’re a fit, I will actually tell you why I don’t think you’re fit.  Some people like that. Some people think they’ll like that.  Some people don’t like that at all!

The Crappy Job Badge of Honor

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As some of you may have realized from recent posts (Wanted: People Who Aren’t Stupid), I’ve been interviewing candidates recently for the position of Technical Recruiter working for my company HRU. I love interviewing because each time I interview I think I’ve discovered a better way to do it, or something new I should be looking for, and this most recent round of interviews is no different.  Like most HR/Talent Pros I’m always interested in quality work/co-op/internship experience – let’s face it, it’s been drilled into us – past performance/actions will predict future performance/actions.  So, we tend to get excited over seeing a candidate that has experience from a great company or competitor – we’re intrigued to know how the other side lives and our inquisitive nature begs us to dig in.

What I’ve found over the past 20 years of interviewing is that while I love talking to people that worked at really great companies – I hire more people that have worked at really bad companies.  You see, while you learn some really good stuff working for great companies – I think people actually learn more working for really crappy companies!  Working at a really great companies gives you an opportunity to work in “Utopia” – you get to see how things are suppose to work, how people are suppose to work together, how it a perfect world it all fits together.  The reality is – we don’t work Utopia (at least the majority of us) we work in organizations that are less than perfect, and some of us actually work in down right horrible companies. Those who work in horrible companies and survive – tend to better hires – they have battle scars and street smarts.

So, why everyone wants to get out of really bad companies (and I don’t blame them) there is actually a few things you learn from those experiences:

1. Leadership isn’t a necessity to run a profitable company. I’ve seen some very profitable companies that had really bad leadership – people always think they’ll leave those companies and they’ll fail – they don’t.  Conversely, I’ve worked for some companies that had great people leaders and failed.

2. Great people sometimes work a really crappy companies.  Don’t equate crappy company with crappy talent.  Sometimes you can find some real gems in the dump.

3. Hard work is relative.  I find people who work at really bad companies, tend to appreciate hard work better than those who work a really great companies with great balance.  If all you’ve every known is long hours and management that doesn’t care you have a family – seeing the other side gives you an appreciation that is immeasurable.

4. Not having the resources to do the job, doesn’t mean you can’t do the job. Working for a crappy company in a crappy job tends to make you more creative – because you probably won’t have what you need to do the job properly, so you find ways.

5. Long lasting peer relationships come through adversity.  You can make life-long work friends at a crappy job – who you’ll keep in contact and be able to leverage as you move on in your careers.  And here’s what each of you will think about the other: “That person can work in the shit!”  “That person is tough and get’s things done” “That person is someone I want on my team, when I get to build a team”

We all know the bad companies in our industries and markets.  Don’t discount candidates who have spent time with those companies – we were all at some point needing a job – a first experience, a shot at a promotion or more money, etc. and took a shot at a company we thought we could change or make a difference.  I love people who worked for bad companies, in bad jobs with bad management – because they wear it like a badge of honor!