Category Archives: Culture

Sustainable Talent Acquisition

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Here’s what I know.  A sustainable talent acquisition process can’t happen if it’s human run. A manual, human run talent acquisition process eventually falls apart.

Think about your employee referral program.

It was an awesome program when you launched it last month, last year, etc.  Now it’s dead in the water. Why?  Because it’s almost impossible for you, and your team, to keep it going on your own.  Other things become a higher priority, things move fast, eventually, even the best programs get pushed to the side, or forgotten about completely.

I’m not just talking about employee referrals. Every part of your TA process is exactly the same.  Sourcing, assessments, background checks, onboarding, exit interviews, etc.

To make talent acquisition sustainable, you need to integrate technology, it can be human driven.  TA technology allows you to automatically sustain these efforts simultaneously without you actually having to do anything.  Technology can reach out and source and attract. Technology can screen and assess. Technology can drive employee referrals 24/7/365, without you ever touching it. Technology can interview.

Basically, technology allows you to sustain and ongoing recruitment effort without you ever taking your foot off the gas.  The best of us fail at this. We have the best intentions, design the best programs, then life happens and things fall through the cracks. We then come to a point, where we do it all over again.  This is where and why most talent acquisition processes and functions fail, because they are just not sustainable.

Everything is going great, then Mandy leaves for a new job, Sue goes on maternity leave, and Tim who used to be great, has now lost his mojo, and we can’t seem to do anything right. Humans screw up your process! We need them, because humans also make hires, but boy can they make it difficult sometimes!

How can you make your talent acquisition sustainable for years in your organization?  Utilize your technology to it’s fullest. Add technology to the parts that give you the biggest headaches. Then, utilize your humans to build relationships with candidates and hiring managers. Let the tech run the process, let the humans run the people.

Who Should I Connect With? #HRTechConf

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By far the question I get asked most often at the HR Tech Conference is, “Who should I connect with while I’m here?”  Both vendors and attendees ask me this. I probably face this question a half a dozen times a day, or more.

I really don’t have an answer for that. It’s a very personal question.

Who I might want to connect with, could be very different from who you want to connect with. It all depends on what you’re trying to get out of the interaction.  I know a bunch of people and connect with many more at each HR Tech Conference, which is why I enjoy this conference so much, but I don’t have your ‘secret’ connection list.

Here is how I usually respond:

1. Why are you at the conference?

2. What is your current pain point at work?

3. Ultimately, what do you want to leave the conference with?

Once these are answered you can easily come up with a hit list of who you should be connecting with.

The expo and the amount of sessions can be overwhelming, but if you focus on what you are really here to do, it becomes a little easier to handle.

The one thing I’ve found is that almost everyone I’ve ever met at HR Tech loves to make new connections, both attendees and vendors.  That puts it back on your back to be open to these connections as well

One Pro Tip: Leverage one contact to introduce you to a new contact. Repeat.

If you come here knowing no one, find a vendor that you use, and have them introduce you to another one of their customers.  Also, I find session speakers are usually really open to connect, just stop and say “Hi” and thank them for their session afterwards.  That makes for a good conversation starter!

So, whom should you connect with at HR Tech?

That’s a really good question!

 

Who Will Your Pallbearers Be?

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I had lunch last week with a good friend of mine.  We’ve been trying for six months to get this lunch set up, but just haven’t been able to make it happen.

This is a guy I love!  We worked together at Applebee’s, spent basically every day together. He’s the best operations person I know, great leader, and one of the few people I would ever go to work for.

So, why haven’t we been able to find time to get together more often?

Well, he told me, “Tim, you know I think you’re great. You are the best HR person I’ve ever worked with. But, I’ve been trying to focus on who my Pallbearers will be!”

What!?!

He’s been trying to focus on six relationships. The six people who will carry his casket when he dies. His Pallbearers!

His theory is I can’t keep up with everyone. I’ve probably got six relationships that I can really focus on in my life. These six people I call my Pallbearers. They are the ones who will carry me to my final resting place, and given that, I better focus on having a really good relationship with them.

So, two things:

  1. I didn’t make his Pallbearer list. Which I’m actually okay with. I loved hearing the philosophy to behind why he’s dodged me for six straight months, and how he selected his six!
  2. I don’t have six!

It really got me to thinking.  Who the hell would my Pallbearers be?  If you take out family, because I really don’t want them to work to hard the day I go six feet under, who would carry my casket? Sadly, I couldn’t come up with six.

I’m 45 years old, and I couldn’t think of six people who would carry my casket. Not if they were asked. I’ve been asked to be a pallbearer, and you can’t say No, even if you really don’t know the person. I mean six people who wouldn’t allow anyone else to carry my casket because they wanted the honor!

In my mind, I’m thinking six men.  I have some close friends that are ladies, but I’m a little traditional in that you don’t normally see ladies carrying a casket. I’ve either got a bunch of relationship building to do, or I need to lose a bunch of weight! If I’m super skinny, maybe I can get away with just four pallbearers!

Another thought was cremation. If I get cremated I really only need one person to carry the ashes.  That would be way easier to find just one!

I still kept coming back to the pallbearer six.  Why don’t I have six male relationships in my life who would really want to carry my casket?  Need to change that.

In the end, it comes down to priorities.  For the better part of 19 years I’ve put my time into my family and raising kids. And, I don’t regret a moment of that! But, my friendships suffered because of it. Pallbearer type friendships take time and effort. Time and effort I didn’t give.

Do you know who your pallbearers will be?

 

New for 2016 – Organizational Micro-Cultures

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It’s actually not new, it’s been around since Culture, we just kind of ignored it.

It’s similar in concept to Micro and Macro Economics.  Big and Little.  In terms of culture, it’s the main reason changing your overall company culture is so hard. You don’t just have one company culture, you actually have tens, hundreds, thousands of cultures, that make up your big over culture.

The problem we are having advancing our company culture is we keep doing it top-down. Get the guy with gray hair, or the lady with the navy blue pant suit, to tell us his/her vision and we’ll shove that culture down everyone’s’ throat and tell them what our culture is now.

Obviously, this doesn’t work, but we don’t know of another way, so let’s keep trying, it will work eventually, right?

Take all these functions, divisions, departments, regions, subsidiaries, locations, mergers and acquisitions, etc. and let’s tell them what their culture will be now. Until we have new leadership, than we’ll just do this all over again.

The reality is you don’t have ‘a’ culture. You have many cultures. HR has a different culture than IT. Albuquerque has a different culture than New York. Manufacturing has a different culture than Sales.

These microcultures added up, make your company culture.  It’s not top-down, it’s bottom-up.

So, what can we do?

You need to get down to the lowest level of leadership that you can. The frontline leaders of your organization are the ones creating your organization’s microcultures.  These are the people ultimately responsible for your overall organization’s culture. Your CEO is a puppet to this process.

To influence these microcultures you need to start planting seeds at the frontline leader level. Don’t worry about even driving this down from the top. Skip the C-suite, skip the SVPs, skip the VPs, skip the Directors, skip the managers, go right to the supervisors. You know the folks, the ones doing the work. The ones who have 8-15 direct reports they see everyday, talk with everyday, work side by side, everyday.

The builders of culture in your organization are not executives and they are not HR.  Executives and HR are framers. The builders are your frontline leaders. 90% of your time and resources spent on building culture need to be spent at this frontline level.

It’s not easy. When you get down at that level, you’ll see what your organization is really about. Most of your executives will disagree with what they see, and not believe this is your actual culture.  That is very typical of most organizations. Executives and HR are the worse at creating and judging culture, because they’ve drink the koolaid.

Influence culture from the bottom, not the top.

The Most Powerful Employee Motivator of All

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I was once fired from a job.  I won’t go into the story because we all have a story and we all frame it to sound like a victim. In hindsight, many years removed, I would have fired me to!

After being fired I could only think about one thing. It consumed me. I wanted to show whomever I went to work for how great I really was.  I didn’t want the ‘fired’ label to follow me, even for a minute.  I wasn’t ‘that’ person. I was better. I wanted…

Redemption!

Redemption is the most powerful employee motivator of all time. None others are even close.

It’s why always laugh when a hiring manager tells me they will never hire someone who has been fired from a job. Really!?  I actually only want people who have been fired from jobs! I want people who have failed, and have a giant chip on their shoulder to show the world they are better than that.

I don’t want to hire crappy people who were fired because they actually have no skill and no personality.  That’s the problem, right? We believe everyone who has been fired to be crappy. “Well, Tim, people don’t get fired if they’re good!” Really? You believe that?

Good people get fired every day. They get fired for making bad decisions. They get fired for pissing off the wrong person. They get fired because they didn’t fit your culture. They get fired because of bad job fit. Good people get fired, maybe as much as bad people get fired. Unfortunately, we lump all of them into the same pool.

Redemption sets the good fires apart from the bad fires.

You can hear redemption speak when interviewing a good fire.  Bad fires don’t speak of redemption, they speak of justification.  Good fires want a second chance to show the world they are right. Bad fires want a second chance to show the world they were wronged. Those are two very different things!

I like redemption motivation.  It sticks around for a long while. Those scars don’t go away easily.

The Three Loves Job Theory

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Helen Fisher, PhD. is a Biological Anthropologist and Chief Scientific Advisor to the Internet dating site Match.com.  Helen’s life work is centered around the Three Loves Theory, which helps us better understand our relationships.

The Three Loves Theory basically says not all love we feel is experienced equally.  Fisher have studied the cognitive and neurobiological processes underlying attraction and love, and they’ve begun to pinpoint different emotions that occur at different stages of romantic relationships. She believes we have three kinds of love: Lust, Passion and Commitment.

So, what does this have to do with Human Resources?  I theorize that Fisher’s Three Loves Theory can be extended to our employees.

Think about it for a second and chart your employees, who ‘love’ their job, in the following categories:

  1. Lust – It’s that new love of the job and organization. They act a little crazy about it. Can’t stop talking about it. People at this job love level will tattoo the company logo on their body!
  2. Passion – You’re working in something you really care about. You feel it’s what you were born to do, at this time. You love discussing your job with people on a deep level, wanting to learn more about it.
  3. Commitment – It’s gone beyond the job and you feel deeply connected to the organization. In fact, you would change jobs within the organization if it’s what the organization needed from you. Your job love as evolved beyond the job.

While all of these employees love their job, we tend to think of them differently.  We tend to rank this job love and judge these employees who on who ‘really’ loves their job.

We tend to value one love over another. Some organizations value that job lust, they want to hire people who are lusting over their work. Some organizations what their employees to be committed to the organization over the work. Every organizations is different, one is no better than the other.

Think about your own career path. What level of job love are you in right now?  Maybe you’re not in job love at all.

To me that is always the measure. Are you in love with your job?  People tend to think of job love, on only one level, and that level is usually Lust or Passion, rarely Commitment.  It’s also how we usually judge our employees. Those with job love Commitment, get their love discounted, because they are no longer lusting or passionate about their job.

It’s all love. We should be celebrating job love, not judging it.

What phase are you in job love?

 

3 Things You Desperately Need to Understand About Your Employment Branding

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Employment Branding is the new black.

It’s been the new black for a few seasons now, so I keep waiting to see what’s next.  Talent Acquisition technology (mostly CRM based tools) are really hot right now and will get hotter in the future, but EB is still king for the moment.

Why?  Mostly because the majority of HR and TA leaders suck at marketing, and their internal marketing folks have bigger fish to fry, like driving top-line sales, increasing traffic, gaining market share, etc.  So, HR and TA pros are left to deal with their employment brand on their own.  Which means, they’re mostly paying others to do this work for them.

Here’s what most HR and TA leaders are missing:

1. Employment Branding is not Advertising. It’s marketing. Marketing and Advertising are different. Employment branding is not about increasing the number of applicants you are getting. It’s about telling and sharing what it’s like to work at your organization.  If you do a great job, yes, you’ll see more applicants. But, I could never share my employment brand and increase my applicants through just sheer advertising muscle.

2. Your Employment Brand is most valuable when people consume it organically. No one likes to be forced fed. They love it when someone introduces them to something cool. Kind of like, “hey, I just discovered this, check it out.”

3. Your own employees’ Network Effect is the most powerful way to share your brand. Network effect is the effect that one user of a good or service has on the value of that product to other people. Meaning your own employees are the most powerful vehicles to share your employment brand that you have. The key is finding ways where they’ll want to freely, and readily, share your brand to their network. This also speaks to the importance of Candidate Experience, since your candidates also have a strong network effect.

At the Glassdoor Employer Branding Summit last week we were asked, “where we see employment branding in five years?”  I see employment branding becoming much more integrated into the overall company branding.  Right now, some big companies are already doing this.  You see General Electric doing a strong job of finding ways to integrate their employment brand directly into their normal brand messaging.

Current GE advertising is sharing the message we are digital company who is also an industrial company, while going after Coders.  It’s a corporate brand message, that is also an employment brand message.  This is not owned or produced by GE’s HR function. This is clearly coming out of GE’s corporate marketing department, with influence from Talent Acquisition and Operations.

Employment branding is still for the most part an issue HR and TA are having to deal with. Within five years, this will be an organizational priority for not only HR, but the entire organization, and marketing will pull it over to their side of the fence, which I believe is where it belonged from the start.

The 1 Reason You’re Afraid To Make Recruiting Simple

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Have you ever wondered why Recruiting Departments continue to make complex processes?  In reality, all of us, wants things simple.  But, when you look at our organizations they are filled with complexity.  It seems like the more we try to make things simple, the more complex they get.  You know what?  It’s you. It’s not everyone else.  You are making things complex, and you’re doing this because it makes you feel good.

From Harvard Business Review:

“There are several deep psychological reasons why stopping activities is so hard to do in organizations. First, while people complain about being too busy, they also take a certain amount of satisfaction and pride in being needed at all hours of the day and night. In other words, being busy is a status symbol. In fact a few years ago we asked senior managers in a research organization — all of whom were complaining about being too busy — to voluntarily give up one or two of their committee assignments. Nobody took the bait because being on numerous committees was a source of prestige.

Managers also hesitate to stop things because they don’t want to admit that they are doing low-value or unnecessary work. Particularly at a time of layoffs, high unemployment, and a focus on cost reduction, managers want to believe (and convince others) that what they are doing is absolutely critical and can’t possibly be stopped. So while it’s somewhat easier to identify unnecessary activities that others are doing, it’s risky to volunteer that my own activities aren’t adding value. After all, if I stop doing them, then what would I do?”

That’s the bad news.  You have have deep psychological issues.  Your spouse already knew that about you.

The good news is, you can stop it!  How?  Reward people for eliminating worthless work.  Right now we reward people who are working 70 hours per week and always busy and we tell people “Wow! Look at Tim he’s a rock star, always here, always working!”  Then someone in your group goes, “Yeah, but Tim is an idiot, I could do his job in 20 hours per week, if…”  We don’t reward the 20 hour guy, we reward the guy working 70 hours, even if he doesn’t have to. (Editor’s note: calling yourself an idiot in a post is cathartic in a number of ways!)

Somewhere in our society the ‘working smarter’ analogy got lost or turned into ‘work smarter and longer’.  The reality is most people don’t have the ability to work smarter, so they just work longer and make everything they do look ‘Really’ important!   You just thought of someone in your organization when you read that, didn’t you!?  We all have them, you can now officially call them ‘psychos’ since they do actually have a “deep psychological” reasons for doing what they’re doing. Harvard said so!

I love simple.  I love simple HR.  I love simple Recruiting.  I hate HR and Talent Pros that make things complex, because I know they have ‘deep psychological’ issues!  Please go make things simple today!

Live Streaming Today @Glassdoor’s Employer Branding Summit

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Today from 10am EST to 6:30pm EST – Glassdoor is Live Streaming their entire Employer Branding Summit from San Francisco!

Kris Dunn and I will be hosting the Live Stream with a Special Kick Off show starting at 10am EST, Halftime show at 3pm EST and special segments at breaks throughout the day!  We will be giving out special prizes to those watching the Live Stream and interacting with us throughout the day!

You can watch Live Stream for FREE by clicking on this Link.

The agenda is packed with some of the best Employment Branding minds in the business:

Glassdoor Speakers

 

 

Check it out! It’s like the next best thing besides actually being there with us, which is pretty cool. I mean you have Kris and I doing our best ESPN SportsCenter acting jobs!

 

Can HR out Crazy a Crazy Employee?

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In HR we run into employees all the time that do “Crazy” pretty dang good!  I’m always interested in how we work around crazy.  Almost never do we just fire crazy and get rid of it, we tend to keep it around. In fact, we tend to try and fix crazy.

I’m not talking about legitimate mental illness. I’m talking about employees who are perfectly “fine” but act crazy for a number of reasons: attention, they love drama, they love pushing buttons, they love being in the middle of shit, you know, work crazy.   We see it every day in our organizations.

I’ve found something that works really well for me in dealing with crazy.  Do crazy, better than the employee does crazy. Sounds crazy right?!  Here’s how it works.

Crazy employees have power because they act crazy, and no one wants to jump into their crazy storm.  So, people just stay silent, try to stay away, change subjects, ignore, etc.  These are all great mechanisms to stay out of the crazy storm.  Unfortunately, this just feeds the crazy storm and helps turn it into a crazy hurricane!  You see, crazy employees hear silence  and silence to them is agreement. Now, they’ve got justification for their crazy storm because in their mind no one told them they disagree, so that must mean they agree!

You can’t reason with crazy.

So, how do you stop crazy?  You do crazy better than they do crazy.  But you do crazy under control. You fight a crazy storm with a crazy calm.  But, let’s be clear, you still need to go crazy.  Let me give you an example:

Crazy Employee:  “My boss is out to get me!  Yesterday he told Jill “great job” and he didn’t tell me great job.  I think he’s sleeping with Jill – you need to investigate.  Also, Jill might be stealing – you didn’t hear that from me, but she just bought a new car and we make the same amount, I think – what does she make? – anyway I can’t afford a new car!” 

Me: “You know what?  I want to thank you for giving me this information – I’m pulling in your boss right now and we are going to have this out!  Just sit here while I call him in – we are going to blast him!”

Crazy Employee: “Hey! Wait! Don’t call him in while I’m here – he’ll know it’s me that told you.”

Me: “Yeah – but to fire him I’m going to need you to testify at the trial. Once I fire him for sleeping with Jill, he’ll want to fight it – happens all the time – no big deal – we got him!  You’ll do fine on the witness stand.”

Crazy Employee: “Um, I don’t want to do that – just forget it”

Crazy doesn’t like to go public in front of others. Crazy works best one-on-one behind closed doors where there aren’t witnesses.  You can stop crazy very quickly by going public and asking them to be crazy in front of others.  I’ve found that if I can do crazy behind closed doors better than crazy can do crazy, it tends to snap crazy back into semi-reality.  Plus, it’s fun to act crazy sometimes, as long as it’s behind closed doors!