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…

 

The Single Best Incentive You Can Offer Millennials!

The world is millennial crazy. If you read this blog you know I think about 99% of the millennial stuff is pure B.S. (we were all young once, it’s mostly great, but sometimes sucks, buy a helmet!), but every once in a while I find something that really hits home.

Student debt is the real deal!

I’ve gotten up close in personal with this. I have two kids in college who are just starting down this debt path. I also have a brother who is a millennial who gets punched in the gut each month he has to make his mortgage-sized student loan payment! Great white collar, professional career, well paid, can’t even think about buying a house. That sucks!

Take a look at his chart:

So, if you truly want to attract great millennial talent you need to do a couple of things:

1. Offer as a sign-on to pay off their student debt.

2. Offer home buying, mortgage assistance.

Why? Turns out employees who own a home, stay around a lot longer, are more productive, and I work for a company that cares enough about me to help me with my student loans and to buy a house, I’m probably a bit more engaged as well!

Here’s the other dirty little secret we know in HR. Let’s say you have a program that pays off student loan debt for employees. With those agreements, you usually have an amount per year payoff (I.E., We pay off $30K, you give us three years of service, or pay us back the money, or something along those lines).

Very few employees leave you after they’ve been employed with an organization for three years. Three years is that tipping point where you decide you’re all in, or all out. So, your job as an HR leader is to get them past three years! Okay, every organization has their own tenure tipping point, but on average most are around three years. Go find yours!

One other item from the chart that sticks out like a sore thumb? No college degree means you’ll more than likely never own a home. That sucks! Guess what, we all have people in our organization without college degrees. These folks need our help with major financial situations, like buying a home, more than any of our employees.

We should be able to figure this out as well. What would stop an employer from offering home buying assistance, for years of service, to their employees? Nothing. But we don’t do it because we see ‘those’ employees as easily replaceable. So, why put in the extra effort?

Employees are our most valuable asset, well, unless, you know, you only make $15 per hour, then you’re just an asset, not really that valuable. Isn’t that what we’re really saying?

Long, story, short: Help your employees buy homes. You’ll never regret it.

 

Be Careful What You Incentivize! You Actually Might Get It!

I’m fascinated in how we compensate and incentivize employees. Not the actual process, but the decision-making process behind the what and how we do it. In my experience, how this usually goes is a two-level process:

First Level: Someone has a hunch, or it’s being done this way somewhere else.

Second Level: Someone in compensation searches for data to justify the hunch or data that agrees with what you want to do.

Real scientific, huh!?

Let me give you a real-world example that most of us are familiar with. We have a prison problem in America. We can all agree on this, correct? Prison populations are exploding and continuing to grow at an alarming rate.

Popular ‘theory’ says the reason behind this are based on a few situations. First, the war on drugs has caused the increase in more inmates in prison. Seems fair, we definitely hate those drugs. Second, for-profit private prisons have turned prisons into a business and this keeps prisoners in longer than they need to be. Third, minimum sentences and three-strike policies have people in prison for life for minor crimes and drug offenses.

What if you were to find out none of this is actually true? That in fact, the real reason we have exploded our prison population over the past two decades is because of one simple incentive program. This is probably going to piss you off!  From The New Yorker:

“So what makes for the madness of American incarceration? If it isn’t crazy drug laws or outrageous sentences or profit-seeking prison keepers, what is it? Pfaff has a simple explanation: it’s prosecutors. They are political creatures, who get political rewards for locking people up and almost unlimited power to do it…between 1990 and 2007, while the crime rate began to fall, the number of line prosecutors went up by fifty percent, and the number of prisoners rose with it. That fact may explain the central paradox of mass incarceration: fewer crimes, more criminals; less wrongdoing to imprison people for, more people imprisoned….

Meanwhile, all the rewards for the prosecutor, at any level, are for making more prisoners. Since most prosecutors are elected, they might seem responsive to democratic discipline. In truth, they are so easily reëlected that a common path for a successful prosecutor is toward higher office. And the one thing that can cripple a prosecutor’s political ascent is a reputation, even if based on only a single case, for being too lenient. In short, our system has huge incentives for brutality, and no incentives at all for mercy.”

Go read the full piece in The New Yorker, it’s loaded with statistics to back up these real reasons for prison growth, and it’s an exceptional example of you actually get what you incentivize!

Many times we come up with incentive plans based on a short-term situation we want to change, but then years later those short-term incentive plans are still in place, and driving behaviors we never wanted or intended.

The other stat I loved from the article that we never hear in mainstream media or from our politicians is after the age of 40, most crime just stops. Basically, crime is young person’s game for the most part. If we were to release all prisoners at age 40, we would basically see no increase in the crime rate, but this will never happen. Why?

Because it only takes one. It takes one person getting out and committing another horrific crime and we all go, “See! It doesn’t work!” And, if it was someone I know, or god forbid my family, I’m probably right there with you. So, we lock up 7 Million Americans!

Be careful what behaviors you’re incentivizing, my friends, you actually just might get them!

3 Ways to Get Rid of an Overpaid, Underperforming Employee

One of the biggest issues we face as HR Pros is trying to get rid of our overpriced employees.  Let’s be real, we made our own bed with this issue!  We were the ones going to our ‘comp’ guy, going “No, we have to go over the range, this talent is worth it!”  Now you’re living with an employee making $20K more than the rest of team and all hell is breaking loose!

To be fair, we aren’t the only ones who do this.  Pro sports are classic for overpaying talent.  You sign a player to what looks like a great deal, but by year 4 or 5 all of sudden you wonder how do we get rid of this stiff!

This happened recently with the NFL’s Houston Texan’s in the signing of Brock Osweiler. Osweiler played great for a few games with the Denver Bronco’s behind an injured Peyton Manning, and when Osweiler became a free agent the Texan’s offered him a four-year, $72 million dollar contract.

He then fell to earth and showed his short success in Denver wasn’t a trend as he performed way below average and the Texan’s were forced to trade him to Cleveland in hopes of salvaging anything from this bad signing.

Let’s assume your overpaid employee isn’t horrible but has become just average.  Sound familiar?

How do you get rid of an overpaid, high priced, average employee?  I’ve got a few ideas:

1. Buy Out/Severance/Job Elimination – These aren’t all the same but these can be used to help you with this issue. For those HR Pros who have never used these options, you’re missing out.  Let’s be clear, it costs money but it also gives you legal protection and gets rid of a problem very quickly. Don’t blow this option off, you would be shocked at what amounts of money an employee would accept to go away.  Start low in your negotiations! Make sure you work with legal to get the right paperwork drawn up to protect yourself against future litigation!

(I’ve been able to get middle management levels folks to go away for $25K!  A huge positive impact with the team, productivity, engagement, etc.  Best $25K I’ve ever spent)

2. Put them in a box – Most of our leadership teams suck at accountability. To get rid of an overpaid person you need to turn up the accountability to an uncomfortable level. This usually pushes them out the door. You can’t let off the gas with this tactic. You really have to follow up on the accountability until the person bails.  This can be painful and loud, and usually isn’t the cleanest way to get rid of person. If they’re smart, they’ll know exactly what you’re doing and could cause further problems then your overpay issue! Ironically, most HR Pros use this technique, over all else.

3. The Breakup Conversation – I’ve also had some good success having the breakup conversation.  Face-to-face, nothing in writing, close the door and just get ‘real’.  “Tim, we need to talk. You’re making $20K more than the next highest person on the team, and you’re not delivering that level of compensation.  We’ve got to do something. That could be you leaving in some form, or what do you think?”

I’ve been amazed what my overpaid workers have come up with in terms of possible solutions.  I’ve had people retire after these conversations. They’ve put themselves into a tighter box than I ever would have created. They even offered up taking a pay cut because they love the company and the job and realize ‘we’ made an error and it’s become a problem.  I’ll be honest, in my career pay cuts rarely work out so be cautious using them, but breakup conversations can lead you to a solution!

Free Frozen Yogurt is Always a Great Union Buster!

If you’ve read any of my posts over the past five years you know I really don’t think too highly of unions. Unions today, especially the UAW, are basically in bed with major corporations, doing almost nothing for the members that pay their dues and keep them in business. Which is why I loved Elon Musk’s response when the UAW came knocking on Tesla’s door.

The Tesla CEO also lambasted the efforts of the United Auto Workers union to unionize Tesla employees at the company’s factory in Fremont, California, calling the organization’s tactics for doing so “disingenuous or outright false.” Musk alleged that the UAW’s “true allegiance is to the giant car companies, where the money they take from employees in dues is vastly more than they could ever make from Tesla.”…

Musk’s email includes a point-by-point rebuttal of a number of Moran’s claims. Regarding long hours, Musk said overtime has actually decreased by 50% in the last year, and that the average employee worked 43 hours a week. Regarding compensation, he noted that Tesla factory workers earn equity, and therefore, over a four-year period, earned “between $70,000 and $100,000 more in total compensation than the employees at other US auto companies.” On issues of safety, Musk said Tesla’s incident rate is less than half the industry average, and noted that the goal is to be “as close to zero injuries as possible.”

There will also be little things that come along like free frozen yogurt stands scattered around the factory and my personal favorite: a Tesla electric pod car roller coaster (with an optional loop the loop route, of course!) that will allow fast and fun travel throughout our Fremont campus, dipping in and out of the factory and connecting all the parking lots,” Musk wrote. “It’s going to get crazy good.”

Don’t underestimate the power of free frozen yogurt and roller coaster rides through the factory!

Unions prey on your employees who are disgruntled. We all have them and there’s really nothing you can do about it. What you can do is continue to provide great communications to your employees about what being union-free means to them as workers, and what it doesn’t mean.

Unions lose their power the more your workers are actually educated. When they know the facts (not the alternate facts!) about what truly happens in today’s world when a union takes over a plant. This isn’t the 1940s. Most organizations today, and for sure Tesla, are competing for the best talent against their competition. This forces them to be competitive with wages, benefits and even frozen yogurt.

Where most of us fail in leadership, and this is traditionally how most organizations worked to remain union-free, was you became Fight Club! The first rule in being union-free, is to not talk about being union-free, especially with employees! This actually puts you a catch up role and you look behind the eight ball when unions come knocking.

All of sudden they have the upper hand, because you allowed them to talk about unions with your employees first, so your employees are naturally going to believe them over you. If this isn’t a big deal, why weren’t you talking to us about it?!

I think most employees today get that voting a union in your shop isn’t all rainbows and butterflies. You have to have a really bad work environment for anything to substantially change. What most workers today see when a union is voted in is the immediate payment of dues, and not much more!

Dear Timmy: How can I best incentivize my corporate recruiters?

Dear Timmy,

I have a team of corporate recruiters who we pay salary and then they also get paid a bonus amount for every individual you hire. When I read your post “The Corporate Recruitment Incentive Program” at Fistful of Talent, I was encouraged we are doing the right thing. But, I have an issue. From time to time we go through periods of time when we have no hiring needs or a hiring freeze. During these times the recruiters feel shorted. How

But, I have an issue. From time to time we go through periods of time when we have no hiring needs or a hiring freeze. During these times the recruiters feel shorted. How do I incentivize them during these times? My recruiters all work remotely, hire very specialized talent, and it’s fairly low volume around 15 hires per recruiter per year. The average salary is around $150K, plus bonus.

Thanks,

Corporate TA Leader who gets it


Dear Mrs. Gets it,

Will you please hire me!? No, I mean it. I will come to work for you for only the $150K and no bonus!

So, I hear you. It’s all relative to the market, location, industry, etc. I kid about wanting a job with you, but only slightly. Very few recruiters in the world make $150K working from home making 15 placements per year in a corporate environment where all of their overhead is paid and they have a great benefits package.

So, step one of finding the right incentive would first be to understand why these recruiters feel ‘underpaid’. You might be lucky and have all rock star recruiters who are the top in the field, but I doubt they are all that level. So, then I would ask myself, is this a team incentive issue, or do I have an outlier who is truly worthy.

All that being said, your problem is a real problem if part of your compensation plan for your recruiters is to be paid by hire and you have no hires to be made!

Here are some suggestions:

– If you look at your normal hiring pattern and it’s consistently at a certain level, work your bonuses into an average hire scenario. Then give your recruiters some education on how to budget! Look you first quarter might be giant, but you better know every second quarter sucks for hires, so your bonus will be low.

– Instead of compensating by hire, maybe compensate by activities that lead to hires. Thus, just because you don’t make hires, doesn’t mean the recruiters need to stop doing all those great things that fill the pipeline. The hard part about this is it will probably drag down your candidate experience as candidates won’t be too happy to be strung along and never get hired!

– Are there other valuable activities your recruiters can do in low hire situations? I love to focus on retention and the activities that increase retention. Maybe there are project related completion bonuses you can use during these times to get some things done that have been put on the back burner, but you really need to get done now that you have the capacity.

– Ask your hiring managers for suggestions. I’m always pleasantly surprised by some of the suggestions I get from hiring managers on what my team can do for them, to help them out, even if they feel it’s not recruiting related. Many of the projects they have can be done by recruiters as well, plus it gets your recruiters more integrated into the business.

Hope this helps! Please hire me.

Tim

 

Moneyball Rules: Offering More Experienced Workers Less Money!

For years I’ve been trying to get people to understand this Moneyball concept as it relates to hiring, but few really listen. I know you saw the movie, Moneyball, where a major league baseball general manager finds success by signing and drafting ‘undervalued’ players. The players are undervalued for a number of reasons, it doesn’t matter, what matters he was able to get talent on at a discount rate!

Don’t you want to hire employees at a discount rate!?

Hired.com recently came out with a survey that once again demonstrates the most undervalued talent in any market are older workers, 50 years old and up. Apparently, once you become 50 years old, you start becoming worthless! Don’t kill the messenger, “you” are the ones saying this:

Basically, our average salary offer increases every single year of age. It makes sense because as you age, you gain more experience, more experience is more valuable. Or is it?

The chart, also, shows that once a worker turns 50 years old or so, employers (but not you…) start offering those workers less money, even though they have more experience!

Why!?

This has nothing to with wages! This is pure age bias shown towards younger workers. We believe, even older hiring managers, that once someone gets to a certain age, and Hired.com shows us that age to be 50 years old, older workers start losing their effectiveness even as they gain experience.

Somehow, in our minds, that 35-year-old, with three screaming kids and soccer practice four nights a week, is more effective than the 50-year-old with no kids at home, who is willing to work wherever and whenever you need them.

So, now you can play Moneyball!

You already know that most employers in the world hate old people. Thus, there are tons of gray hairs limping around out there willing to take all of your crappy low-ball offers, and they’re probably more loyal for those low wages then any younger worker you have on staff.

Yeah, for capitalism! You get great talent at low rates. Who needs H1B’s when we have old people!

“Well, Tim, it’s not about age bias! It’s about fit and culture and inclusi… I mean, we hire the best available candidate for the job!”

I’m sure you do.

Your reality is as hiring gets tighter, you can continue to overpay for younger talent with less experience, or you can pay a cheaper wage for more experience. Sooner or later, someone is going to ask the right questions. Are you going to have the right answer?

 

Should CEOs make 276 Times More Than You?

Check out this chart from Business Insider:

Screen Shot 2016-08-15 at 3.28.08 PMBasically, this chart is showing you how much more your CEO makes than the average worker at your company, assuming you work for one of the 350 largest companies in the United States.

So, let’s put this into real numbers:

The average worker makes around:  $45,000.

That means the CEO makes: $12,420,000.

I think most people feel that disparity is too much. I put it in the context of professional athletes. Should LeBron James get $33,000,000 per year to play basketball for the Cleveland Cavaliers?

We tend to think LeBron shouldn’t get paid $33 Million per year, but at the same time were alright with it because well he wins games. But somehow we don’t believe Indra Nooyi, the CEO of PepsiCo, should earn $22,000,000 per year like she did last year. Why is that?

Oh wait, would you feel better if I put one of those old white guy CEOs compensation number up? Would that make it easier for you to hate?

I find it interesting that for most of the modern era (prior to 1980) CEOs made roughly 25 times more than the average worker. In our example above that would then look like this:

Average worker: $45,000

CEO: $1,125,000

Yeah, this still sucks, right?

So, what should the figure be? How much more should a CEO make than the average worker? Does 10 times seem right ($450,000)?

I’m a Moneyball guy. I have a hard time believing any CEO is truly worth 276 times more than an average worker, but if that’s what the market bears, more power to them! I’m also a Capitalist!

I do believe, though, that all of these organizations could fire their CEOs at 276 times pay, hire someone else at half that pay and they would have the same or better results across the board. 50% pay cut, same performance. So, why wouldn’t they do this?

Organizational dynamics are built to continue this behavior of over-paying. At some point around 1980, someone let the cat out of the bag and leaders have been pushing the envelope ever since! Think about how this all goes down. A leader goes to the board of directors and says, “Look we need better talent at the C-level to support me.” The board supports, raises get put in, this pushes up against the CEO.

Well, now we have compression, time to move the CEO up. The cycle continues, again, and again…. It becomes a leadership arms race! The board feels like they are in no win situation. If the company is doing well, of course, they vote yes. If the company is doing bad, well, we need better, so you get another yes vote.

No one is willing to just stop it. To say, you know what, ten times or twenty-five times, is plenty. We’ll find great talent at that amount. I’ve met great CEOs and awful CEOs of very large companies. All made outrageous money and their performance had very little to do with their compensation.

What do you think? How much more should a CEO get paid over the average worker?

Wage Growth Means You Usually Screw Your Female Employees!

I’ve been talking a lot lately about how women are getting paid less. Much of it is legitimate, some of it is not. Either way, it’s about to get worse!

Take a look at this chart from Business Insider, wages are growing at a fast rate:

Screen Shot 2016-07-08 at 2.12.49 PM

What does this mean?  You are about to start paying your employees and new hires more. This is bad news for women, since historically two things happen that screw them over in times like this:

  1. They’re less likely to leave their current organization.
  2. They’re less likely to negotiate higher salaries when starting a new job.

How does wage growth hurt women in these two cases?

First, if you stay at an organization, and don’t ask for more money, most organizations aren’t just going to give you money. At the same time, the organization is hiring new people, in the same positions, for more money! Now, you would hope that organizations would do the right thing, and make everyone whole, but we know this doesn’t happen as often as we would like.

Second, studies show women are less likely to negotiate for higher salaries when they are starting a new job. This becomes an issue as some organizations will pay whatever it takes in hard to find talent environments, meaning those who are tough negotiators are going to come in at higher rates. This usually means men will make more in the same or similar positions.

As wages grow fast, and talent is hard to find, many times in large organizations these inequalities will get missed.  This is part of why women get paid less. Things happen fast, a hiring manager has a shot at a great male developer and they pay more than others in their group. They know it’s more, but they’re desperate. They think they’ll take care of it when things slow down, but we know, things never slow down!

HR pros need to be very careful to watch incoming salaries and salary changes during these times of high wage growth. The market compensation is changing so fast, you might have to look at this quarterly, or even monthly, depending the industry, location, or position.

You already have a problem with paying females less, don’t allow fast moving markets to make your problem worse!