Category Archives: Culture

The Best Recruitment Marketing I’ve Seen in Years! #VueDD17

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Okay, the last post from HireVue’s Digital Disruption, but it was something I had to share! TA leader Molly Weaver at Children’s Mercy Hospital in Kansas City is killing the game! If you do an interview with Children’s on the HireVue platform, they have actual kid patients ask you the interview questions via video!

I shared one on Twitter this week under the #VueDD17 stream and I haven’t been able to get those actual videos to share, but here’s one you can get a taste of how Children’s recruitment marketing is just amazing:

You’re in 2017. Molly and the TA team at Children’s is in 3017!

Seriously, talk about driving culture through your hiring process! It’s hard not to get emotional watching these kids ask you screening questions and then you have to go answer it!

This one single idea is the best recruitment marketing I’ve seen in years.

Imagine how you could take and use this idea in your own TA shop. Casual dining, go have actual guests ask the questions for your server screening questions. Get some half-drunk guy at the bar to ask bartender questions! (okay, just kidding!)

Go connect with Molly, she’s a brilliant TA leader and if you’re at CHRO in healthcare with a crappy TA team, back up a dump truck of cash on Molly’s door and talk her into coming over to your team!

Besides transforming their screening and interviewing, Molly’s team also added in HireVue’s “Introduce Yourself” tool that gives every possible candidate to your organization the ability to tell you who they are and why you should hire them.

Molly had some awesome stories of finding and hiring candidates from this tool that they might never have found without it. Some of these folks applied to jobs at Mercy several times and never made it past the first stage. Also, an amazing 28% of these hires were diverse candidates!

Before you say you don’t have the resources to do all this awesome stuff, know that Molly and her team did this on a shoestring budget! Found the kids on their own, filmed them, kept it as real as possible, and it’s brilliant!

Really amazing stuff, I’m starting the Molly Weaver fan club, let me know if you want in!

The Perfect Change Model for HR #VueDD17

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I’m out in Park City, UT this week at Hirevue’s Digital Disruption conference. The conference is designed for TA pros and leaders looking to ‘disrupt’ their current TA shop and the agenda is packed with great content and speakers.

Rusty Rueff kicked off the conference with a great keynote on disruption and change. (Side editor’s note: Rusty joined a growing trend of keynotes bringing their notes on stage with them and referring to them often to ensure nothing was missed. Many ‘professional’ keynoters would consider this taboo, but I find it refreshing and more authentic)

Rusty offered up this change model:

#1 – Compelling Vision: The only way you get change started is to have a great compelling vision of what this change will be.

#2 – What’s In It For Me (WIIFM) – If you need your employees to drive change you quickly have to define what’s in it for them, and it you better make it compelling. “You get to keep your job” – is not a compelling WIIFM for most people in 2017!

#3 – Lead the Way – Servant leadership is they key. Are you doing what you say needs to be done, and are you helping in every way to get everyone on board with you?

#4 – Change the work – If you want to change the way you work, you need to change the work. What!?! So many times we want to make big changes but we are unwilling to change how we do things. That’s a problem. If you can’t attract talent, you need to stop what you’re doing, and do something new!

#5 – Make it stick – Big change is hard and it’s super easy to go back and do what you’ve always done when the initial change seems to be worse or not having the results you wanted. You must be courageous to see your vision through to completion. You might fail, but if you don’t make it stick, you’ll never know for sure.

Rusty focused on big change to big things. In the end, this is what matters.

If you focus on making small changes, or even big changes, to small things, it really has little impact. Focus on making big changes to those things that are most important to your organization that isn’t working. Swing for the fences.

This is super hard for us in HR and TA. We never want to break anything, even when it’s not really working. We’re scared of screwing something up more than it’s already screwed up. I can’t tell you how many executives I speak with that fire HR and Talent leaders simply for this reason alone. The fired leader was unwilling to take the chances needed to fix what was broken.

Are you ready to make big changes to big things?

Is Love intrinsically bigger than Fear?

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The most famous quote from Machiavelli’s book “The Prince” is:

“Better to be feared than loved, if you cannot be both.”

Uh, oh, Tim is quoting Machiavelli, this blog has jumped the shark!

I heard this quote recently on the HR conference circuit. HR speakers seem to come in two types:

1. Love is bigger than fear. This is popular and most fall into this camp. It’s a feel-good play. The first rule of HR speaking, it’s always better to make the audience feel good, than to give them something they actually need.

2. Machiavelli’s assessment, It’s better to be feared. Less popular take, but I do hear it in the form of stuff like, “I’m not here to be your friend, I’m here to get results!”

I also have smart friends who pull Machiavelli’s name out anytime they want me to feel like I’m on the wrong side of something, “How ‘Machiavellian’ of you, Tim!” Okay, I get it, you’re smarter than me, how ‘Machiavellian’ for you!

The normal breakdown of leadership goes like this. You would rather be a beloved leader than a feared leader. Those leaders who are loved will be more successful than those who are feared. You have to be one or the other. Or do you?

I think all leaders deep down in places we don’t talk about at parties (A Few Good Men reference!) want to be loved, or at the very least, well liked. It’s human nature. No one really wants to be hated. It’s stressful, people don’t want to be around you, it makes for uncomfortable hugs, etc.

On the love side, love can make you do some crazy things, but so can fear. I would drive all night to help my wife or kids with something if I thought they really needed me, even if they or I could probably find another alternative. I would also probably work all night if I thought I might lose my job and I need to pay my mortgage. Love and fear are powerful in getting us to act.

I think fear is bigger when it comes to crunch time scenarios. I might ‘love’ my boss a ton, but when the project is on the line and the company might lose a major project and cost us hundreds of jobs, fear is driving the truck, not love. Love won’t bring those jobs back, fear might just win those jobs back.

As leaders, this our dilemma. I want my team to love me, but I also need a touch of fear on the edge. It’s an imperfect balance.

What I know is love isn’t the only answer, no matter how many memes you make or posters you put it on. I don’t know if Love is bigger, it’s definitely more popular, for obvious reasons, but great leaders have used both. I want you to love me, I need you to fear me a bit, in the end, I’ll probably use both to get the job done.

The American Dream Tax

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Hasan Minhaj is an American comedian who just released his new comedy special on Netflix, Homecoming King, and it might be one of the best comedy specials I’ve seen in years! He’s funny, yes. But, he also introduces a new kind of comedy on stage that is very ‘millennial’ in nature in that it’s multi-media. It’s part TEDx, part standup, part one-man show-ish, and it’s all brilliant!

You might remember Hasan from the Daily Show or as the comedian who roasted President Trump at the White House Correspondents dinner:

He introduces a concept in the special he calls the “American Dream Tax” that his father, who was originally from India, basically was his inspiration for.  Hasan’s father believes immigrants to the U.S. need to put up with a certain level of discrimination as a ‘tax’ of living the American Dream.

He makes jokes about this, as any comedian with brown skin would, it’s a great segment if you have a chance to check it out. Hasan’s father’s point is this, we came from a country where we had a super low quality of living. We came to America and have the possibility of a much better life, for that you should be willing to put up with some crap. (I wonder how many immigrants in U.S. feel a little this way?)

We talk constantly about diversity and inclusion in our organizations. Yet, most of us truly have no idea what most immigrants go through and are willing to go through, without ever complaining. We talk about a broken H1B policy and the need for reform, but most of those on an H1B would probably even accept lower wages for the opportunity. Is this right? Of course not, but we tend to forget ourselves how great we all have it in the U.S.

You see, we don’t pay the American Dream Tax because we hold a birth certificate that says we were born here. We got lucky enough to be on American soil when we were born, and for that, we get off ‘tax’ free. Well, many of us. That’s Hasan’s issue, he’s fully American, and yet, his father still believes he should be fine with paying the ‘tax’.

If you get the chance check out Hasan’s Netflix special it’s really incredible and gives you some great insight to your American born – immigrant workers and a little of bias they go through every day, and it’s pretty freaking funny!

T3 – @Globoforce pre-launches Life Events #WorkHuman

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Hey, last week I was at WorkHuman powered by Globoforce and they had a new product launch that kind of left many in the audience in tears! How often can you say that about a tech launch – take a look:

So, Life Events is designed to increase the quality of your work relationships. Some of us are lucky enough to have this naturally in our work environments, and we completely take it for granted when we have it.

Here’s what Eric Mosley, Globoforces CEO, had to say about Life Events:

“The lines between an employee’s life and work are constantly blending—more so now than ever before,” said Eric Mosley, CEO of Globoforce. “Our goal through Conversations and Life Events is to encourage more human-focused interactions that help create a community of growth, collaboration, and inclusion. If we work in environments where we can trust our managers to have our best interest top of mind and feel strong connections with our colleagues, we are more likely to actively participate in our success, our colleagues and the companies we work for.”

I truly believe that most people want to live one life. They want to be the same person at work as they are at home. Technology like this helps build that bridge. Job satisfaction, engagement, etc. all tend to rise as we feel we have stronger connections at work.

Does this change the world? No, probably not, but it might just make your work world a little better. I thought it was one of the more unique features I’ve seen in the space for a while and it definitely plays to a workforce that is comfortable with sharing their lives via video. While you might not be, the majority of our upcoming workforce is.

Coming later this year, check it out on the Globoforce platform.  (BTW – all the people in the video are actual Globoforce employees, and the story is completely real!)

T3 – Talent Tech Tuesday – 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 T3 – just send me a note – timsackett@comcast.net

Maybe we got this Culture Fit thing all Wrong! #WorkHuman

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So, I’m sitting on a plane flying back from the WorkHuman conference and I’m going through my notes. Here’s one of the things I wrote down:

“Instead of culture fit, what if we focused on culture contribution…” 

I don’t even remember who said it that sparked me to write it down, but I loved it. I want to say it was Adam Grant, seemed like he was saying a bunch of stuff I liked during his session.

It struck me immediately when it was said. It’s one of those times when you go, “Holy crap, have we missed this all along and no one said anything!”

The problem is, hiring for culture fit is really hard. There are technologies and experts who will tell you they can do it, but it’s mostly smoke and mirrors. When you sit down and interview people, you mostly don’t get culture fit, you get ‘I’m comfortable with this person’ and that turns into you saying, “they’d be a great fit in our culture!”

Hiring for culture contribution actually is a bit easier and probably more effective! I can easily interview someone and ask for concrete examples of the cultural contributions they currently provide at their organization or have provided, and what they’ll provide when they come to my organization. Sure they could lie or exaggerate, but that happens already, so that’s nothing new.

What I like about culture contribution over cultural fit is I can measure cultural contribution! Don’t tell me you fit, show me you fit! There’s millions of ways employees can contribute to culture, so it’s not like we are limiting hires to only those who ‘want’ to be involved.

I don’t know. What do you think?

It was just a note on a scrap of paper, but man it seems really profound. Hit me in the comments if you’re doing anything with cultural contribution in your organization.

How Are You Helping Your Transgender Employees? #WorkHuman

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Hey, kids! I’m out at the WorkHuman Conference this week! This the third event for WorkHuman and it’s really becoming a world class conference. I mean, let’s be honest, if you have Michelle Obama on your agenda, you’re completely legit!

One of the keynotes from yesterday was Chaz Bono. I’ve never gotten a chance to see him speak so I was very interested. I was probably hoping for some great Sonny and Cher stories, but also, just naturally interested in hearing was he had to say about his transition from a woman to a man.

In our society, for the most part, we get very little interaction with the trans community, so I still feel fairly naive about everything surrounding the transgender. I’m sure there are many HR and TA pros out there who feel the same way. I loved that Chaz was super transparent, open and comfortable sharing his story.

A couple of really great takeaways I got from listening to him was that the actual process of transitioning, the mechanics of physically doing it, are far less complicated and painful, than the social and emotional pain transgender folks go through. We all seem super interested in the mechanics, but to a transgender person, that seems much less important in the overall process.

Chaz is in a really great place now, professionally and personally, but that clearly wasn’t always the case. Even he was amazed at how gratitude and being grateful for where you are in life can ease the hard times and pain that he went through over his lifetime of figuring out who he really was.

You don’t forget the super bad times in your life, but as you become more grateful, those times don’t seem as bad, even when many of those times were completely horrific. I struggle with being grateful for where I’m at in life, I can only imagine the difficulty Chaz went through to get to this place he is now.

The one big question I left with was how would I (HR) help out a transgender employee? What could my organization do? What should I personally be doing?

Chaz really broke this down simply to the root. We (HR) need to make it completely safe for our transgender employees to be who they are. It’s the number one issue that all transgender individuals face. Is it safe enough for me to be who I really am?

Will the organization accept me? Will my peers accept me? Will my boss accept me? Will our clients accept me? For those of us in HR this seems simple. Of course, we will!!! Chaz, and other transgender individuals, know the reality, most of the time, they do not feel safe enough to be who they truly are.

So, how do you help your organization’s transgender community? You work, constantly, to ensure they have a safe environment to be the person they want to be. That starts before the individual needs it. It starts with great diversity education and programs, it starts with a leadership team that truly values and supports inclusion.

For me, it starts with having a better understanding myself.

Why Am I Being Ghosted After I Interviewed?

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Dear Timmy,

I recently applied for a position that I’m perfect for! A recruiter from the company contacted me and scheduled me for an interview with the manager. I went, the interview was a little over an hour and it went great! I immediately followed up with an email to the recruiter and the manager thanking them, but since then I’ve heard nothing and it’s been weeks. I’ve sent follow-up emails to both the recruiter and the manager and I’ve gotten no reply.

What should I do? Why do companies do this to candidates? I would rather they just tell me they aren’t interested than have them say nothing at all!

The Ghost Candidate

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Dear Ghost,

There are a number of reasons that recruiters and hiring managers ghost candidates and none of them are good! Here’s a short-list of some of these reasons:

– They hated you and hope you go away when they ghost you because conflict in uncomfortable.

– They like you, but not as much as another candidate they’re trying to talk into the job, but want to leave you on the back burner, but they’re idiots and don’t know how to do this properly.

– They decided to promote someone internally and they don’t care about candidate experience enough to tell you they went another direction.

– They have a completely broken recruitment process and might still be going through it believing you’re just as happy as a pig in shi…

– They think they communicated to you electronically to bug off through their ATS, but they haven’t audited the process to know this isn’t working.

– The recruiter got fired and no one picked up the process.

I would love to tell you that ghosting candidates is a rare thing, but it’s not! It happens all the time! There is never a reason to ghost a candidate, ever! Sometimes I believe candidates get ghosted by recruiters because hiring managers don’t give feedback, but that still isn’t an excuse I would accept, at least tell the candidate that!

Look, I’ve ghosted people. At conference cocktail parties, I’ve been known to ghost my way right back up to my room and go to sleep! When it comes to candidates, I don’t ghost! I would rather tell them the truth so they don’t keep coming back around unless I want them to come back around.

I think most recruiters ghost candidates because they’re over their head in the amount of work they have, and they mean to get back to people, but just don’t have the time. When you’re in the firefighting mode you tend to only communicate with the candidates you want, not the ones you don’t. Is this good practice? Heck, no! But when you’re fighting fires, you do what you have to do to stay alive.

What would I do, if I was you? 

Here are a few ideas to try if you really want to know the truth:

1. Send a hand written letter to the CEO of the company briefly explaining your experience and what outcome you would like.

2. Go on Twitter and in 140 characters send a shot across the bow! “XYZ Co. I interviewed 2 weeks ago and still haven’t heard anything! Can you help me!?” (Will work on Facebook as well!)

3. Write a post about your experience on LinkedIn and tag the recruiter and the recruiter’s boss.

4. Take the hint and go find a company who truly values you and your talent! If the organization and this manager treats candidates like this, imagine how you’ll be treated as an employee?

 

Turns Out, Millennials Actually Don’t Want Your Feedback!

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It’s conference season and I got a chance to see the ever-popular, Marcus Buckingham.  Marcus has the great English accent, high energy and great leadership content to share. He’s strong every time I’ve seen him, going on way too many times at this point in my life!

Here was the money-shot quote Marcus dropped on the audience this time:

“Millennials don’t want feedback!”

We’ve all been told by thought leaders and Millennial experts for a decade that all Millennials want is feedback and work-life balance!  They don’t want money or power or ice in their beer.  Just feedback and time off.  Marcus put a stop to all of this, and had the data to back it up!

In reality, Marcus told us the truth.  Millennials and the rest of us don’t want feedback, we all just want attention. Pay attention to us!  Stop by frequently and see how we are doing, give us some insight into our near future, help us get our jobs done.  But, please, don’t give us feedback on what we are doing wrong!

No one wants that.  The whole reason performance reviews fail is because they don’t deliver what we truly want, attention, not feedback.  So, our “HR” answer to this is to do what?!? Let’s do more frequent, smaller, feedback sessions! NO!

Unfortunately, this is going to be big old Titanic to turn around.  The wheels have been in motion too long to stop what we’ve already started.  HR technology platforms and your processes are already in place. Your managers have already been trained, and now you want us to stop?!?

Basically, yes.

Those organizations with high engagement are not the ones who are giving more feedback. They are the ones who are paying more attention to their employees.  Yes, there is a difference.

This is fraught with issues for most HR pros and organizations because it feels a little pie in the sky-ish.  There is an assumption that you pay attention to your employees and they’ll just magically do what they’re supposed to do, and we live happily ever after, cats and dogs living together.

We know that isn’t reality.

Some employees need to be managed to get the most out of them.  They need to be held accountable. I do think there is a balance that we can get to when it comes to paying attention to our employees like they want, and being able to ‘manage’ them like the business needs.

Managers need to know that even with those employees they’ve worked with for a long time, it’s critical that they don’t stop paying attention to what they’re doing, professionally and personally. Also, our employees need to understand that, yes, we care about you, but that doesn’t mean you can just not perform the job you were hired to do.

I don’t need engaged employees that don’t do the job they were hired to do. I want engaged, productive employees.  It’s all about balancing your approach, and I love that Marcus put to bed the concept that Millennials just want feedback!

Hyperlocal Hiring

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The BLS reports that 80% of hourly workers live within 5 miles of where they work. Snagajob’s 2017 State of the Hourly Workforce survey found that 70% of our hourly workers refuse to commute more than 30 minutes to work. When you take a look at your own total workforce, my guess is you’ll find the vast majority live very close to your place of employment.

Blue collar, white collar, it doesn’t matter. People would prefer, for the most part, to live fairly close to work so they don’t waste a ton of time commuting. Commuting hours are for the most part one of the biggest drags on balance. Sure you can be productive on your commute, but it’s not really what you would prefer to be doing!

I’m wondering what it would be like if an organization started “Hyperlocal Hiring”? What if you only hired people who were willing to live within 1 mile of your place of employment? Maybe 2 or 3 miles, but not more, the idea is you could walk or bike to work in a reasonable time.

I know of some local government services that already require this in certain positions. I knew a Fire Chief who worked for a city and one requirement of the job was he had to live within the city limits. This was a rather small town, so he was within that 3-mile distance for sure!

Play along with me for a second!

We already know that the millennial and GenZ workforce like to work for companies that have community involvement. If your employees work in the communities they live in, it makes it pretty easy for organizations to truly support their local community. High engagement equals longer tenure, increased productivity, etc.

The Advantages of Hyperlocal Hiring:

– Hyper-short commutes give employees better work-life balance

– Living close to co-workers build more natural, deeper relationships (if you have a best friend at work…)

– Working and living in the same community gives you a stronger tie to both, increasing tenure.

– It would seem the living/working in close proximity would drive a stronger culture as well.

Okay, I know you’re already poking holes in this theory, but just imagine this for a few minutes on the positive side. It could be extremely cool!

I’m sure an organization with 10,000 employees couldn’t pull this off as it would be super difficult and expensive to have housing for 10,000 employees in a mile or two radius of your place of employment. SMB organizations, on the other hand, could use this as a huge advantage in hiring and attracting that younger workforce. Of course, this also works better in urban settings, but I could imagine a billionaire building their own city!

Dan Gilbert, Quicken Loans founder, basically went up and bought much of downtown Detroit and then moved this headquarters there. 5,000+ employees, modern company, downtown Detroit! If you don’t know the area, you either live a mile or two from the headquarters, or you drive out 30 miles to the suburbs.

There’s nothing that stops you from making a proximity of where someone lives a condition of employment. As long as it’s contractually agreed to up front, you would be fine. You can’t go tell someone they’ll be fired unless they move closer to your office, but new hires coming in can have this condition.

I know most of us would say, well, you’ll limit your candidate pool, so you just can’t do this. That’s my point! I want to limit my candidate pool to others who share this vision with me. To work and build a community in a micro-community with all of us involved! Yeah, Hippies! Come join the commune, but in a very modern, free-will, capitalist sense of being!

What do you think? Would you ever want to be Hyperlocal employee?