401(K) Program – Retirement Plan or Student Loan Repayment Plan? Both!

If you didn’t see this week the IRS ruled on a request by a private employer to use their 401(K) plan to be utilized as a sort of a student loan repayment program. Here are the details:

“Here’s a quick (but not complete) summary of the plan proposal. According to the PLR, the taxpayer (who is anonymous in publicly released PLRs) proposed to amend its 401(k) plan to offer a student loan benefit program. Under the proposal, the employer would make nonelective contributions on behalf of the employee conditioned on the employee making student loan repayments (“SLR nonelective contribution”). The program would be voluntary and after enrolling the employee could opt-out… 

Under the program, if an employee makes a student loan repayment during a pay period equal to at least 2% of the employee’s eligible compensation for the pay period, then Taxpayer will make an SLR nonelective contribution as soon as practicable after the end of the year equal to 5% of the employee’s eligible compensation for that pay period.”

So, a couple of thoughts on this proposal:

  1. While this isn’t a perfect or complete solution, it’s something and as employers, we have to help out our employees who come in with life-altering amounts of student loan debt.
  2. Holy crap – this is really great, innovative HR work by some private employer who is really trying to figure this stuff out! I want to meet the HR Leader/Pro who even thought of this.
  3. It’s the chicken or the egg scenario. Do you start your retirement savings or do you first pay down debt? Obviously, this employer believes you need to solve the debt issue first, then go back and focus on the retirement.

The HR Nerd in me loves this stuff!

You had an employer who saw a major pain point with employees and hiring of potential employees. They started to brainstorm and somehow came up with an idea, what if we gave the employees money into their 401K which then would be used to pay down student loan debt, and because we are doing it through a qualified plan the IRS will work with us to make it non-taxable?

Um, what!?!?

99.9999999% of HR pros would give up on this as soon they heard IRS! But this employer decided to just ask the IRS the question and it sounds like the IRS was like, “Yeah, this makes total sense, for sure we need a few rules around this, but let’s do it!” The freaking IRS did something that makes sense?!?

So, this is a lesson for me and my HR brothers and sisters. I’m not saying anything is possible, but many things are possible if you keep trying to innovate, try stuff, and just every once in a while be naive or smart enough to just ask the question.

Keep HRing out there!

Your Weekly Dose of HR Tech: @CandidateReward – The final piece of your Candidate Experience! #CoffeeIsForClosers

Today on The Weekly Dose I review the candidate experience technology Candidate Rewards. Candidate Rewards is a new solution from the folks at Total Rewards. Candidate Rewards is basically a platform that allows you to build personalized micro-sites for each candidate to present them their offer.

The offer letter virtually hasn’t changed in years. You have a template. You plug in the salary offer. You might attach a ‘one-pager’ of your benefits that you offer, but for 90%+ of organizations that is the process for decades! Oh wait, some of us use really nice quality paper and send some swag as well…

Quick Question – Is closing candidates important to your organization?

The reality is Generation Z by 2019 will actually make up 32% of the eligible workforce, Millennials will make up 31.5%. So over 63%+ of those, you’ll be making offers to will expect a digital experience, not an email with attachments. Candidate Rewards built a platform that easily allows Talent Acquisition or HR to plus in a few details and a full-blown personalized experience is sent to each candidate.

Candidates are no different than you or I, we all want to feel special. What would make you feel more special, an offer letter template, attached to an email, or an invitation to a full website that is tailored right to each candidate’s specific needs?

What I like about Candidate Rewards: 

– The average offer letter probably takes 2-3 minutes for a candidate to consume. The data shows that a candidate on average will spend about 15 minutes on a Candidate Rewards personalized offer site, checking out the total compensation, figuring out what benefits make the most sense and value to them, watching video content, checking out the culture, etc.

– One thing I know is that candidates who have significant others love to know ‘exactly’ what benefits you’ll be having. It’s rare that an offer letter ever really digs into that level of information. Candidates Rewards works with you benefit’s providers to upload each plan and allow candidates to select what they want, while the site will automatically adjust the Total Rewards statement to reflect those choices.

– The ability to tailor video content to each candidate is super powerful! It can immediately connect the candidate with your company, with their co-workers, with their new boss, etc. The options are endless.

– I love that this is one of those technologies that you will know precisely the impact it’s having. Currently, you are at “X”% candidate acceptance of offers. Once you implement Candidate Rewards you’ll be at “X”%+/-. Simple and straightforward to determine ROI.

I think some people will look at this and see it as an extravagance they don’t need. We are already at 90% acceptance rate. We’re fine. This technology is for those organization where unaccepted offers are really painful, and closing offers are critical! Think CPA firms, Nursing, Law firms, Technology – both IT and Engineering, MBAs, etc. Where every single offer being accepted is a huge deal to your organization and your TA team!

So often, we lose out on candidates because you make a salary offer of like $85K with some PTO, etc. The candidate’s own company will come back and show how the total compensation for what they’re making is way more. Or if you’re heavy into making campus offers this kind of technology is even more persuasive because now you’re just going against traditional offers and your total comp offers with the site looks way more enticing.

Candidate Rewards is well worth a demo. It super simple to use to implementation and adoption are a non-issue. Go check them out!


The Weekly Dose – is a weekly series here at The Project to educate and inform everyone who stops by on a daily/weekly basis on some great recruiting and sourcing technologies that are on the market.  None of the companies who I highlight are paying me for this promotion.  There are so many really cool things going on in the tech space and I wanted to educate myself and share what I find.  If you want to be on The Weekly Dose – just send me a note – timsackett@comcast.net

Want help with your HR & TA Tech company – send me a message about my HR Tech Advisory Board experience.

Want to make more money? Be an extrovert!

New research out of the University of Copenhagen finally puts to rest the age-old argument around what’s better: being an extrovert or being an introvert? I have friends who are on both sides and super successful in their careers, but it’s still one of those things where if you are one or the other, you usually believe what you are is the best.

Well, in terms of lifelong earnings the data is pretty clear you want to be an extrovert! From the study:

One striking result is how much the trait of conscientiousness matters. Men who measure as one standard deviation higher on conscientiousness earn on average an extra $567,000 over their lifetimes, or 16.7 percent of average lifetime earnings. Measuring as extroverted, again by one standard deviation higher than average, is worth almost as much, $490,100. These returns tend to rise the most for the most highly educated of the men.

For women, the magnitude of these effects is smaller (for one thing, women earned less because of restricted opportunities). Furthermore, extroversion is more strongly correlated with higher earnings than is conscientiousness, unlike for the men.

Yeah, that’s a half of million dollars! That’s life changing money for most people!

Here is something else that came out of the study that I thought was fascinating, people who are ‘agreeable’ by nature, actually make less money!

It may surprise you to learn that more “agreeable” men earn significantly less. Being one standard deviation higher on agreeableness reduces lifetime earnings by about 8 percent, or $267,600. In this context, you can think of agreeableness as meaning a person is less antagonistic and more likely to consider the interests of others. You might have thought agreeableness would be correlated with higher earnings but alas not.

So, here we are as HR pros telling all of our employees who want to be leaders they should be more ‘agreeable’, put the interests of others above your own, etc. What we are really telling them is “hey, here’s how to ensure you’ll make less money in your career!”

I think we see this in our world today. We tend to want to believe we all want ‘servant leaders’ when it comes to someone leading us individually, or leading our companies. But, for the most part, most of our great leaders we can point to, male and female, are still overwhelmingly extroverted and mostly directive in their style of leadership.

One last thing that came out of the study is that being smart and being extroverted is not correlated. Why does this matter? Well, being smart does correlate to higher income as well. So, when we go try and select great employees we tend to just look at intelligence. Which is necessarily bad. If you are going to try to increase your talent, starting with smart people is never a bad idea, but in the long run, it’s more than just IQ:

Another interesting result from the data is that IQ and conscientiousness are not very well correlated. That implies that finding ideal workers isn’t so easy. The quality of openness, however, is moderately positively correlated with IQ, so you might expect that the smarter workers are more willing to experiment and try new things.

So, do you have to be extroverted to make more money? No, but it’s easier and more likely if you are. If you’re introverted, by nature, it wouldn’t hurt to work on your outwardly extroverted self. We all have the ability to be extroverted and introverted in certain situations. The key for earning more income is being extroverted in a professional setting.

Okay, my introverted friends! Tell me why this research is complete B.S.!

Your Weekly Dose of HR Tech: Kashable – Low Cost Loans for Employees (@GetKashable)

Today on The Weekly Dose I take a look at the HR Tech, voluntary employee benefit and financing solution for your employees called Kashable. Kashable is basically a simple way for your employees to borrow money, where you as a company are not involved, but can still ensure they get the assistance they need!

Here’s the scenario – Timmy walks into your office. He’s got a problem. His car broke down over the weekend. He needs new brakes. He has no savings and no way to get the money. Without his car, Timmy stops coming to work.

You’ve had this conversation before, haven’t you? In fact, you probably will have it this week!

Here’s the problem. Your company and you in HR don’t want to become a bank. Loaning out money to employees, through your company, always becomes a nightmare. This is why I was so intrigued with a technology like Kashable.

Kashable gives your employees access to low-cost loans based on a percentage of their take-home pay. You as the employer, only facilitate the repayment through payroll deduction, but ultimately you are not responsible for repayment.

Having this option for employees is important! 

Here’s what way too many of our employees do in a cash crisis situation. They choose bad money options! 401K loans, high-interest credit cards, cash advance shops, or they go without something that is critical, like health insurance or a medication, etc. All of which puts them in a worse situation long term than where they started. The problem is, most of our employers have a bad or low credit and don’t have access to cheaper capital alternatives.

What I like about Kashable: 

– Gets the employer out of the loan business and puts it back where it belongs, in the hands of a financial institution that I have validated will do right by employees.

– Kashable reports directly to the credit bureaus, allowing your employees to build positive credit on these smaller amount loans that are paid back through payroll deduction.

– Kashable doesn’t allow employees to take a loan that can’t afford, so they are also teaching them responsible financing. The average amount of a weekly repayment is 5-10% of their takehome, so they don’t put themselves in a worse situation. They also only allow an employee to have one loan at a time.

– Many of your employees have a bad credit and could never get a low-cost loan, but with Kashable because they are employed by you, they will have access to this financing mechanism.

– Gives a credit option to your employees have no credit as well (high school grads, college grads, H1B workers, etc.).

Kashable has data to show that 35-40% of employees who use the service use it to pay down higher interest debt they have. So, already you’re helping to teach them to get away from the nightmare too many of our employee get caught in with high-interest credit.

I’m in love with any kind of technology that helps my employees and helps me and my organization. I’ve been in the bad situation of having to loan my employees money and how that usually ends up bad. I’ve begged my banking partners to give me an option like this, but they never would because they had to follow traditional banking rules. Kashable takes on the loan risk, and they do it because they know your employees are an actual fairly low risk.

Go check them out and do a demo – www.kashable.com


The Weekly Dose – is a weekly series here at The Project to educate and inform everyone who stops by on a daily/weekly basis on some great recruiting and sourcing technologies that are on the market.  None of the companies who I highlight are paying me for this promotion.  There are so many really cool things going on in the tech space and I wanted to educate myself and share what I find.  If you want to be on The Weekly Dose – just send me a note – timsackett@comcast.net

Want help with your HR & TA Tech company – send me a message about my HR Tech Advisory Board experience.

My Wife Approves of this Blog Post! (And we have a rule I can’t write about her!)

Around Mother’s Day, the PR folks at Salary.com sent me an infographic. (Editor’s Note: please do not take this as an invitation to send me your infographic! I get at least one per day. I know it’s your job to push these onto people in hopes they’ll publish and you’ll get SEO, but most of them are awful. Yes, you’re is awful!) This salary.com piece caught my eye because it listed what a Stay-at-Home Mom should make for a salary!

So, what do you think that amount is!?

For 2018, salary.com figured a stay-at-home Mom should make a salary of $162,581!!!

That’s a nice salary! I will tell you my wife definitely makes that much! Because she takes home 100% of what I take home! 😉 BTW – Mom’s got a $5000 raise from 2017. Pretty nice!

Check out the infographic – it lists Mom’s salary from 2009 ($122,732) to present. I think Mom’s in 2009 were way overpaid by the way!

My wife and I have an agreement, a marriage contract, that I can’t write about her, which I break about 2-3 times per year. I try to break it in the best way possible that makes her look like the Hall of Fame wife and mom she is, and in return puts me in good graces! She says I should write a book on how to be a good husband because I’m 100% a great husband about 60% of the time.

So, I need to break down this $162,581. That’s a big number, but like most compensation figures, it’s just magically made up from bad data and we just end up paying the figure that we have to pay, if we want the talent. Yes, that was a shot a the compensation profession, err, arts, err, black magic…

My wife is worth $162,581 assuming I actually have that much to pay her. Otherwise, she’s probably worth more or less, based on the budget!

Here’s what I, and my 3 boys,  get for my $162,581:

  • Unlimited consultation with every decision and action we take.
  • Expert advice on everything, except technology and anything out of doors.
  • Someone who will fight to the death for your honor, will also putting you in your place.
  • A magical person who somehow gets out every stain.
  • A house so clean people think we must be selling it.
  • An endless supply of boxes on the front porch for places like Amazon, JCrew, Ann Taylor, Banana Republic, Target, etc.
  • Well prepared meals that are both tasty and nutritious, unless it’s been a hard day, then it’s probably pizza.
  • A full rundown and recap of what my family has been up to on social media all day.
  • A fully functioning teacher that knows something about everything. Plus, full editing capabilities on all papers.
  • Exercise coach and in-home Physical Therapist. Untrained Nurse Practitioner, but fully functioning.
  • Pet Therapist, dog walker, Vet assistant.
  • Neighborhood Uber driver and security guard.
  • Other wifely duties I’m contractually obligated not to discuss on this blog or any public forum.

I know I’m missing things. It would impossible to actually list out all of the duties of a stay-at-home mom, because they get asked to do everything!

If my wife goes away from 24 hours, our world falls apart and I quit the job of stay-at-home Dad before she gets far enough away from the house to hear me scream in terror! Stay-at-home moms are the real superheroes in the world.

I’ve been telling this to anyone who will listen for years now, the best hire you will ever make in your business, is to hire a woman who had to stay at home and raise kids for an extended period of time! They actually love coming to work, and they work! It’s like magic!

When a hiring manager tells me they don’t want to interview a woman because she has been at home for 5 years, I punch them in the face and fire them, because they’re an idiot! They have the potential to hire a unicorn! You don’t ever pass up hiring a unicorn!

 

The Anatomy of the Perfect Keynote Speech

I was recording a podcast last week with my friend and professional speaker, Jennifer McClure, last week for her new Impact Makers Podcast (check it out!). I won’t be for a while, but she has some great people she has already recorded including a brilliant session with William Tincup!

One of the secret ingredients to a well-produced podcast is that all the participants are somewhat ready for the conversation that is about to happen. So, Jen and I did some pre-gaming and post-gaming conversation that wasn’t recorded, and the topic of keynote speeches came up.

I was telling her that I had a new talk that I’m doing that is killing (speaker talk for doing well!) and I made a comment about it’s all just stories with bits of data thrown in to make the stories seem more important! (half joking) Jen commented saying, “That’s a blog post! The anatomy of a keynote!” So, here you go Jen!

Before I lay out the perfect keynote, you have to have some ingredients. Here’s the basic keynote ingredient list:

  1. A person who can speak. I would love to say an engaging person who can talk, but I’ve been to far too many conferences where this was a requirement to be a keynote!
  2. A book, working experience with a transcendent brand, or you’re famous. A book is always helpful, conference planners love to have keynotes with books. Books are like a driver’s license for a keynote speaker. But, you can also work Google or Facebook or Nike or just name a giant brand, and working for a brand like that takes the place of a book or your ability to speak.
  3. A price tag north of $20,000. You might be the most awesome speaker in the world, but if you tell them you’ll only charge $5,000, you’re out! Our conference deserves a much better keynote speaker than a $5,000 speaker, I mean we have a budget for $25K!
  4. It helps to be attractive, but the bigger the celebrity/brand the uglier you can be.
  5. Fashion that matches your speaking brand. If you’re a buttoned-up, semi-conservative speaker, you can’t get away with jeans and a hoodie on the keynote stage. If you cuss and drink a red bull and started a tech company and have a YouTube channel with 100K followers, you’ll look foolish wearing a suit and tie.

Okay, we have all the ingredients to a great keynote, what does the actual keynote look like? There are basically three types of keynotes:

Keynote #1I’m famous, you’re not! In America, especially, we are fascinated with ‘celebrity’. If you’re famous, you can keynote because somehow we believe you being famous gives you something important to say, even when it doesn’t.

The anatomy of Keynote #1:

– I’m famous!

– I have “being” famous stories!

– But I’m humble and I’m really just like you, but I’m famous!

– Here’s how you should live your life, because I’m famous!

Keynote #2I’m not famous, but I work(ed) for a famous brand/person. These keynotes can be fascinated because again we are all interested to know what the secret sauce is of other organizations, and our hope is this person will tell us.

The anatomy of Keynote #2 –

– I work for a famous brand, you don’t!

– Working for this famous brand is awesome! You should try it!

– Here’s what we do because we are a famous brand. You should try it!

– Here’s how you should live your life, because I work(ed) for a famous brand!

Keynote #3I’m a Professional Story Teller. A good portion of keynotes falls into this camp. Someone worked their butt off to learn how to be a professional speaker, paid their dues, probably wrote a book or two along the way, probably had a decent actual career to a point, people liked hearing them speak and they turned that into a full-time gig.

The anatomy of Keynote #3:

– Start with a story that will endear the audience to you, even if that story has nothing to do with you.

– Share some data or research, that might not even be yours, but the audience is like “Wow” that can’t be.

– Share another story (that isn’t even about you) that reinforces that data/research and ties to the concept of your new book that was written about other’s people research and stories.

– Another piece of research and data, that ties to the model you present in your book. Plus, acts as motivation for the audience to change something in their life.

– The final story, this is a big one (not yours, again), that you foreshadowed in the first story, and that will wrap up the entire keynote like a bow! This ending story is a crescendo of laughter, tears, and motivation to change your life in ways you didn’t dream of just sixty minutes before.

– Here’s how you should live your life, because I just entertained you for an hour and you have no idea why you want me to sign a book.

Okay, you guys know I love to joke and make fun of life. I get that it’s super hard and takes a ton of practice and talent to pull off a great keynote. I’ve seen keynotes that were brilliant and I know it’s a skill! I’ve also seen keynotes where the keynote speaker stole my time and the conference organizers money!

Great keynotes at any level start and end with great storytelling. The best tie those stories to an actual takeaway that will help you get better at something. That takeaway could be personal or professional, it doesn’t matter. The best keynotes also entertain you a bit. They are masters at almost instantly getting you to trust them and like them.

My least favorite keynotes are famous people. I’m not impressed by celebrity. The worst ones are the new Q&A’s with celebrities. It’s an insult to my intelligence that you’re getting paid $150K for an hour and you couldn’t even come prepared with an hour of material, instead, you just show up and we’ll ask pre-sent questions and listen to your lame answers.

My favorites are people you entertain me, teach me something, take me on a journey with them for an hour. It seems like the hour was over in twenty minutes. I want more. My all-time favorite is Malcolm Gladwell. He’s a masterful storyteller and I could sit and listen for hours.

Who is your favorite all-time keynote speaker and why? Hit me in the comments!

It’s Equal Pay Day! Is Pay Equality Even Real?

If you didn’t know April 10th is national Equal Pay Day!

How are you spending today celebrating this Ummm, well, holiday-ish thingy?

I have yet to see a company do this, but it would be awesome to see them make all the white dudes come to work and everyone else who is affected by pay inequality actually gets the day off, with pay!

I know, you probably clicked to come read this article because you thought I was going to give you some right-winged propaganda about how Pay Inequality wasn’t real and it was just made up by the left! If that was your thought, you really don’t know me!

Pay inequality is real and I know it’s real because I’ve worked two decades in HR and I’ve seen it with my own eyes.  I’ve run the compensation reports and sat down with executives to show them the real data we were facing as an organization.

Was it 70 cents on the dollar to men? No, not in my experience, but it was enough to be embarrassing. It was enough to show we had real sexist and racist assholes working for us making pay decisions.

Here’s my take on Pay Equality Day…

We own this as HR. I was once asked to step down and leave a company because I went into the executive boardroom as an HR professional and said, either you pay these women the same as the dudes, or I’ll quit. They took that as my resignation because they were not about to pay the women the same. That’s cowardly leadership, but it proves a point.

We – HR – own this. It’s not hiring managers. It’s not CEOs or CFOs or COOs. It’s you and me.

If HR allows a hiring manager to make an offer to any candidate for less than others are being paid in the same role, and we don’t stop that, we own it!

If you don’t stop it, or you believe you can’t stop it, you can quit and go to work for an organization that respects all their employees. If you don’t, you are now complicit in pay inequality. You are now the problem, not the hiring managers, and not the executives.

Now, should you quit and give an ultimatum like I did? Hell no! I was young and stupid.

What I should have done is approached this with a plan and a solution to fix our problem. If at that point, I was told we didn’t have a problem, or we would not be fixing this problem, then I have some decisions to make. My solution was to change employees salaries now or I’m going to throw a fit. That doesn’t work in the real world of budgets, and stock prices, and, well, life.

It took us a lot of time to get into this position, you don’t get out of it overnight. In hindsight, here’s what I should have done to fix our pay inequality issues:

1. Discover the importance of this issue with the leadership team and our legal team. I can do a lot of things, but if this is considered a non-issue by both my executive team and my legal team, I’m not getting anything done.

2. Stop all new pay equity issues. I might not be able to change the past, immediately, but I can definitely ensure no new issues come in the door!

3. Make a plan, with finance, on how you recommend we solve historical pay equity issues, and request an audience to dual-present this plan on this issue with myself and finance. By doing this, I would have known what we can actually do financially and have the buy-in already from those writing the checks.

4. Discover who my true offenders are, and deal with these folks first. In my experience, pay equity issues rarely are equal across an organization. It’s usually small pockets of hiring managers and locations that are doing bad things. “Well, Tim, we’ve always paid the ‘gals’ a little less because they tend to leave and have babies!” Oh boy! Even after coaching, discipline, etc., I don’t allow these folks to make compensation decisions. They lost this responsibility for a long time.

5. Develop and run quarterly or monthly reporting and ensure your leadership and legal team are aware of your progress.

6. Tell your employees what you’re doing.

Pay equity is an HR issue. HR owns it.

We are now responsible for what happens in our organizations when it comes to compensation because we all have been put on notice. If you don’t take this responsibility then you shouldn’t be in HR.

Are you willing to reduce your office cafeteria prices for female employees?

I read an article a few weeks back in Detroit about a local gym that is offering a reduced gym membership for females. Males pay full price, females pay 30% less because females make less than males. How does that sound?

From the article:

“Ever wonder why XY>XX? WE DO! The Gym values its male members tremendously but we don’t value them a THIRD more than our female members!” the ad reads

The ad goes on to read that women can join for $20 a month with no initiation fee. The Gym Lake Orion’s ad promoting that women will pay 1/3 less for membership than men. (Photo: Rich Garvin)

The manager and operator of the gym, Rich Garvin, wants to even the playing field for women due to the pay disparity between men and women. “It’s just difficult to observe injustice or unfairness,” said Garvin. “I think it’s important that we don’t sit idly by … if we do, we condone it. And I don’t condone it.”

Garvin also said he’s not raising anyone’s prices. “You can get a $30 a month membership (for $20) … having a discount, encouraging women to come in, in an attempt to make it a little easier for them to do so, I think is a good business practice and just the right thing to do.”

So, first let me call B.S. on this entire thing and say I don’t believe Rich the owner one even little bit!

The type of gym that Garvin runs is more likely frequented by weightlifting dudes. He knows if he can get more women to sign up, even more, weightlifting dudes will show up. This is just good old fashion marketing, wrapped in activism for a hook.

Can you imagine if you actually tried to do something real like this in your workplace!?

Hey, employees!

This year we’ve decided instead of actually fixing pay inequality, we’re just going to reduce the cost of everything females might pay for in our environment! Health insurance is now 30% off! Coffee at the coffee bar is now 30% off and get scones buy 1, get 1! All full priced menu items in the cafeteria will be 30% off for women only.

Male employees don’t get upset, you make more money!

Have a great week!

HR

Yeah, that probably wouldn’t play well! But, is that the ‘right thing to do’?

So, this sounds completely crazy. Of course, you would never charge employees differently for the same access to healthcare and cafeteria food! I mean come on!

But, what do you do when you know you have certain employees making less for doing the same work? Do you automatically do what’s right and adjust their salary to make it equitable?

Giving your female employees a 30% discount on cafeteria food and drinks sounds ridiculous, but so does paying a woman less for doing the same work.

Will Amazon’s New Salary Policy Actually Hurt Women?

So, a ton of our HR peers around the country in states like California, Massachusetts, New York City, etc. are trying to figure out new laws that ban hiring managers from asking candidates about their salary history. Forever, this has been commonplace.

It might still be in your workplace, as this isn’t federal law, yet, most managers use the salary history question as a screener to understand if they can ‘afford’ a person, or if they can negotiate and get the company a better deal. There are major problems with this practice, and it’s why many states have put in place laws to remove the practice.

Amazon is one of a growing list of companies that voluntarily decided to stop asking candidates about salary history.

From Quartz:

Amazon has promised to hire at least 100,000 new employees in the US this year. And it won’t ask any of them about their prior job history.

According to a report in Buzzfeed yesterday (Jan. 17), Amazon is pledging to do voluntarily what many companies are now being forced to do by law: bar its US hiring managers from asking job candidates their prior salary.

The policy is an attempt to help correct a gender pay gap that’s perpetuated when starting salaries are based on previously low salaries. On Jan. 1, California became the largest state in the US to institute a law barring the practice, joining Massachusetts, New York City, and other states and cities with similar laws.

While these types of laws are designed to help people who have previously been hurt by these practices (females, individuals with prison records, basically anyone who took a lower than market pay wage for some reason or another), we need to understand for every action we take, Newton’s Third Law comes into play.
This law is no different and leading economists are trying to get us to understand some of these realities that will now be the norm:

But there’s reason to believe the law could backfire, and end up punishing women. That’s because taking information away from employers doesn’t make them stop caring about the information, said Jennifer Doleac, an economist at the University of Virginia.

When employers can’t ask about salary history, they’ll make assumptions based on what they think they know, Doleac said. “When we make them guess, it hurts the best applicants in the groups we’re caring about, because we have no way to distinguish them, and they get grouped together with the rest…

…If women were well paid in their previous jobs, and are offered a lower salary at their new place of work, they’ll be forced to negotiate for the wage they already had, Doleac said. For women who can’t prove they earned more, or are unwilling to haggle, they’ll get less, she said. And low-paid women will be in the same position as they were before the laws were passed.

“We know women don’t negotiate, even when it would be really easy for them to push back,” she said, referring to prior research.  “Putting that extra hoop there for them to jump through is going to hurt.”

Fix one problem, create another that might actually have a negative impact on the ones the law was created to help.

What we should be doing as HR leaders are ensuring when offers are made that they are equitable across the board in our organizations based on objective data. We own that. Managers will make dumb decisions, we know this.
This is why we have jobs in HR. It’s our job to ensure we support those managers with information to make good decisions. Then when they ignore our information to make good decisions, we smack them over the head!
I believe Amazon is doing the right thing. I think what we’ll see long term are these laws will end up benefiting more than they’ll hurt. What do you think?

Do you pay your employees more for referring Diverse candidates?

I know a ton of HR Pros right now who have been charged by their organizations to go out and “Diversify” their workforce.  By “Diversify”, I’m not talking about diversity of thought, but to recruit a more diverse workforce in terms of ethnic, gender and racial diversity.

Clearly, by bringing in more individuals from underrepresented groups in your workforce, you’ll expand the “thought diversification”, but for those HR Pros in the trenches and sitting in conference rooms with executives behind closed doors, diversification of thought isn’t the issue being discussed.

So, I have some assumptions I want to lay out before I go any further:

1. Referred employees make the best hires. (Workforce studies frequently list employee referrals as the highest quality hires across all industries and positions)

2. ERPs (Employee Referral Programs) are the major tool used to get employee referrals by HR Pros.

3. A diverse workforce will perform better in most circumstances, then I homogeneous workforce will.

4. Diversity departments, if you’re lucky enough, or big enough, to have one in your organization, traditionally tend to do a weak job at “recruiting” diversity candidates (there more concerned about getting the Cinco De Mayo Taco Bar scheduled, etc.)

Now, keeping in mind the above assumptions, what do you think is the best way to recruit diversity candidates to your organization?

I’ve yet to find a company willing to go as far as to “Pay More” for a black engineer referral vs. a white engineer referral. Can you imagine how that would play out in your organization!?  But behind the scenes in HR Department across the world, this exact thing is happening in a number of ways.

First, what is your cost of hire for diverse candidates versus non-diverse candidates? Do you even measure that? Why not?  I’ll tell you why, is very hard to justify why you are paying two, three and even four times more for a diversity candidate, with the same skill sets, versus a non-diverse candidate in most technical and medical recruiting environments.  Second, how many diversity recruitment events do you go to versus non-specific diversity recruitment events?  In organizations who are really pushing diversification of workforce, I find that this figure is usually 2 to 1.

So, you will easily spend more resources of your organization to become more diversified, but you won’t reward your employees for helping you to reach your goals?  I find this somewhat ironic. You will pay Joe, one of your best engineers, $2000 for any referral, but you are unwilling to pay him $4000 for referring his black engineer friends from his former company.

Yet, you’ll go out and spend $50,000 attending diversity recruiting job fairs and events all over the country trying to get the same person.  When you know the best investment of your resources would be to put up a poster in your hallways saying “Wanted Black Engineers $4000 Reward!”.

Here’s why you don’t do this.

Most organizations do a terrible job at communicating the importance of having a diverse workforce, and that to get to an ideal state, sometimes it means the organization might have to hire a female, or an Asian, or an African American, or a Hispanic, over a similarly qualified white male to ensure the organization is reaching their highest potential.

Workgroup performance by diversity is easily measured and reported to employees, to demonstrate diversity successes, but we rarely do it, to help us explain why we do what we are doing in talent selection.  What do we need to do? Stop treating our employees like they won’t get it, start educating them beyond the politically correct version of Diversity and start educating them on the performance increases we get with diversity.  Then it might not seem so unheard of to pay more to an employee for referring a diverse candidate!

So, you take pride in your diversity hiring efforts, but you’re just unwilling to properly reward for it…