Category Archives: Culture

Ladies, would you prefer not negotiating your salary?

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An article recently written on NPR speaks to a ‘new’ trend in organizational compensation.  What’s that trend? Apparently, companies are now not negotiating new hire or promotional salaries.  Basically, here’s what we pay for this position, take it or leave it.

Do you believe this would work?

Here is more from the article:

When it comes to negotiating salaries, the research is pretty clear: women are less assertive than men. It’s one reason women who start their careers with a narrower pay gap see it widen over time.

Carnegie Mellon economics professor Linda Babcock, who studies the gender pay gap, says men are four times more likely to negotiate their pay. That keeps women at a disadvantage, though they’re not always aware of it.

“The standard now is that people don’t really know what each other earns, that some people negotiate and some people don’t, and so there’s tremendous inequities in salary,” Babcock says.

Here’s what I’ll say, Yes, we have inequities in salaries.  Having non-negotiable salaries can help these inequities, but this isn’t a solution. The reality is organizations need flexibility to negotiate salary, especially when it comes to attracting hard-to-find talent. Organizations that take a hard stance on this, will lose in the talent attraction game.

What organizations need to do is have a policy on making quicker market compensation moves when they begin hiring in individuals, male or female, at higher rates than someone who might have started a few months prior. Most organizations are very weak on this practice, which causes most of the inequity.

You hire someone last year at $50K, and this year you hired someone into the same position, doing the same job, with a very similar resume at $58K. You now need to go back to your employee making $50K and give them an increase to $58K.  This hurts, but it needs to be done. That’s why it is critical for your talent acquisition team to have great negotiation skills.

It’s not a $8K increase to your budget, it’s a $16K increase to your budget. Now, think about in terms of a company that has hundreds, or thousands of employees in the same situation.  That $8K dollar negotiation can turn into hundred’s of thousands of dollars across the organization in market increases.

This is why most companies turn a blind-eye to market increases, and why so many organizations have pay inequalities. If females are less likely to negotiate higher salaries, and your organizaitons is going to ignore the difference, you’re going to have a growing problem that only gets worse the longer you ignore it.

I recently had a situation with a Fortune 500 client you completely gets this, and refuses to let it becomes a problem. We had a female candidate interview and get an offer. She wanted $47K. She was way under market for the position, and for the company. They knew she only wanted $47K, and they came back and paid her $63K! That was the value of her position to the organization and what similar people in her role were going to make, with her experience.

Like I said, this isn’t a salary negotiation issue. This is a do-you-want-to-do-the-right-thing organizational issue.

What do you think?

T3 – Workshape

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This week on T3, I’m reviewing a new company in the Talent space called Workshape.  Workshape is a new technology that is attempting to change the way we describe human work, and that is no small feat.

Think about all the changes we’ve seen in recruiting and HR over the past 50 years.  What one thing is still constant, and probably shouldn’t be?  The resume! That little piece of paper almost all organizations still rely on to understand what someone’s background is, and what they might be able to bring to your organization.Workshape.ioTalentmatchingfortechstartups20150220111417

Workshape’s technology describes work without using text-based documents. Workshape describes work using times and tasks.  In a major way, Workshape has uncovered a great way for your organization to ensure an organizational fit between a candidate and a hiring manager’s expectations for a position.

Workshape works by both the candidate and hiring manager using a super-simple interface to tell each other what they want from the position. A candidate might want to spend 50% of their time in front-end development and only 10% of their time in testing when in reality the hiring manager is looking for the exact opposite. This is what Workshape does, without the candidate knowing, so they don’t try and ‘cheat’ the system.

The candidate will give you a great, realistic overview of how they would prefer to spend their time in a position. Workshape’s technology then gives you a spider diagram that shows you how the candidate and the position match or don’t match.

5 Things I really like about Workshape

  1. Ultimately, this technology could be a great tool to help companies hire better for fit, not to the organization, but to positions. For some companies, this is a huge issue, that Workshape could solve.
  1. I love the fact that this technology doesn’t allow candidates to tell you what you want to hear. It forces the candidate to tell you what they really want, and ultimately, that might give you great data on whether they would be a great fit or not, for your opening.
  1. The user interface that the hiring manager uses to choose what they want from the position, literally, takes seconds to use, and it’s super easy and engaging for hiring managers.
  1. The results of the match give you a range on closest match, so even if someone isn’t perfect, you can easily see where they didn’t match and make a determination how important that is or isn’t.
  1. You get to find out from candidates what they want to do, and not to do. I can foresee this technology being used for internal mobility as well to match for succession.

Workshape is currently set up as an open market place so anyone can use it and try it.  Currently, their focus on technology in three major metro areas: San Fran, New York and London, from a candidate pool standpoint. But, like I mentioned above, the technology has much more of market, eventually, from a fit standpoint within your own hiring process.

Definitely worth a look, and a try if you’re in that market. If you would prefer to look at how you could implement into your own hiring process for fit to position, reach out to them, I’m sure they would have interest in speaking about that as well.

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 space and I wanted to educate myself and share what I find.  If you want to be on T3 – send me a note.

How Do You Turn Around a Crappy Employment Brand?

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I get two questions more than any others since I started blogging in HR and Talent over six years ago:

1. What ATS do you use?

2. How can we turn around our bad employment brand? (You can also replace “brand” with “culture” – I get that a lot as well!)

For question #1 on the ATS selection is for another post. Check back Wednesday and I’ll tell you.

Question #2 isn’t necessarily difficult, but it does take work!

There’s a reason you have a crappy employment brand. You need to find out what that reason(s) is and solve it. Sometimes the reason is difficult to solve, sometimes it’s very simple.  If you have a bad employment brand because you have a history of treating employees like garbage, that is going to take some time to turn around. If you have a bad employment brand because you recently had one bad issue in the news, you can recover pretty quickly.

The first step to turning around a bad employment brand is knowing what the problem is.

Sometimes you just know, sometimes you need to do the employee surveys. I love doing employee alumni surveys for this as well, and only sending to those you voluntarily left on their own. Those folks usually give you better, more productive, feedback, than those you laid off and fired.

The second step to turning around a bad employment brand is you need to get your entire leadership team to agree on why you have this problem.

It doesn’t matter what you do in HR, if your leadership is not in agreement, you will never fix this problem. And, it can’t be just the CEO who agrees with the problem. Any leader with influence needs to buy in completely and drink the Kool aid. Once you have this buyin from leadership, it becomes fairly easy to fix.

The third step to turning around your employment brand is your current employees have to begin believing that real change is happening.

They need to hear it, constantly, and they need to see it.  It starts from within. If your current employees believe it’s changing they’ll begin to refer people to be apart of the change. One step I suggest, that almost no organization ever does is to find your true believer employees. Those who you are 100% sure are on board for the change, and do a special referral bonus for only them. You want your true believers referring people, you don’t want your cancer employees referring people.

The fourth step to turning around your employment brand is to change the perception externally.

Most organizations flip-flop steps three and four, and it’s the main reason they fail. They try and change external perception with commercials and marketing, news releases, etc. This creates buzz on the outside, but your internal folks kill it as soon as that first person interviews or is hired.  Do steps 1-3 first, and step four really is just fairly easy employment branding marketing strategy and plan.

The first three steps will take 90% of your time to fix. You’ll be shocked at how hard step two will be, and how long it will take to come to agreement on the ‘real’ problem. That’s because most bad employment brands start with bad leadership.  Bad leaders don’t easily take responsibility for this, and want to blame everyone and everything, besides themselves.

There’s no silver bullet for a bad employment brand. Unfortunately, marketing firms are going to sell you step four as a silver bullet, which is much like putting lipstick on a pig. The pig might look a little better, but it’s still a pig.

HR’s Work Uniform

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I got put on to an article recently about a female Art Director who decided to where the exact same outfit to work everyday.  She’s been doing it for the last three years:

“I have no clue how the idea of a work uniform came to me, but soon, the solution to my woes came in the form of 15 silk white shirts and a few black trousers. For a little personal detail, I remembered my mother loved to put bows in my hair as kid, so I chose to add a custom-made black leather rosette around my neck. Done. During the colder months, I also top my look off with a black blazer. I shopped all the pieces in one day. It burned a hole in my wallet to say the least, but in the long run, it has saved me—and will continue to save me—more money than I could imagine.

To state the obvious, a work uniform is not an original idea. There’s a group of people that have embraced this way of dressing for years—they call it a suit. For men, it’s a very common approach, even mandatory in most professions. Nevertheless, I received a lot of mixed reactions for usurping this idea for myself. Immediately, people started asking for a motive behind my new look: “Why do you do this? Is it a bet?” When I get those questions I can’t help but retort, “Have you ever set up a bill for online auto-pay? Did it feel good to have one less thing to deal with every month?”

I love the idea.

I recently went on a diet. I’m not a big dieter type.  But I’m completely comfortable with eating the same thing, every day, every meal. Give me a plan, and I’ll follow it.  For breakfast I have a banana and two eggs, mid-morning snack is a protein bar, salad with grilled chicken and fruit for lunch, Greek yogurt in the afternoon and a piece of fruit, for dinner it’s fish/chicken/steak, brown rice, veggie combo of some kind. I’m down about 15 pounds. I’ve been doing it for about six weeks or so. It’s easy.  I don’t have to think about what I’m going to eat, and I like what I’m eating.

I could so easily wear the same thing to work every single day. I basically do anyway for the most part, dark dress slacks and button down shirt. It would be even easier to just keep it all the same.

I wonder what a good HR uniform would be?  Here’s my suggestion:

For the Men of HR: 

– Dress khakis (not the cotton type, the poly blend type. Cotton wrinkles to easily, and the cotton ones that don’t are Dockers and no one wants to see those.)

– White button down or predominantly white patterned button down (In HR you want to wear white, it symbolizes you’re on the right side of things. Pressed. Crisp.)

– Sweater vest  (Sweater vest screams secure, conservative decision making and trust. HR in a nutshell.)

– Wingtips (Brown, not black. Brown is soft and comfortable. Black is cold and hard.)

– Socks (Fun colors and patterns. This speaks to the culture you want, but aren’t willing to go all out for.)

For the Ladies of HR: 

– Dress slacks (Black or Navy, no Khaki for the ladies. Get some pants with some structure to them, no pseudo yoga pants, no one wants to see the HR lady’s cookie – shout out to my girl Mer! – and make sure they’re long enough.)

– White open collar shirt, sligh v-neck (You want classy, not sexy. Long sleeve or 3/4 sleeve. Spend some money so it’s not see through, or get white camis to go under.)

– Lightweight cardigan sweater (Color to match the season, plain, no patterns or picture of cats. This adds softness and approachability.)

– High heels to match the pants (Not hooker high, appropriately high.)

I would totally trust these two HR Pros above!

What do you think? What would you like for your daily uniform if you were going to wear the exact same thing to work every single day?

8 Hacks Benefit Managers Can Do to Raise Employee Engagement

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Tomorrow (Tuesday April 21st) at 2pm I’m hosting a free SHRM webinar (Link to register below) on how you can use your normal, boring employee benefits communications to drive better employee engagement. Well, let me take that back, it won’t be your normal, boring communications, it will be newer, better employee communications!

This won’t be your normal SHRM webinar, because it’s me and the company sponsoring the webinar is called Jellyvision (and their benefit communication technology called ALEX)! This will be fun!

The days of the low-strategy, low-impact benefits communication plan are over. Today’s HR professionals can no longer approach benefits communication as a chore that must get done as quickly as possible.

Smart HR pros know that strong benefits communication strategies drive employee engagement levels through the roof. In this lively program, you’ll learn that it’s not company picnics and spiffy logo polo shirts that make people love their jobs but smart, strategic benefits communication.

What do you know? The benefits team just got elevated to strategic employee engagement driver number one!

What can you expect to hear? 

1. What and how can Leaders in your organization do to aid your benefit communications? Simple tips to get them involved without them lifting a finger!

2. Research shows that 3/4 of your employees don’t understand their benefits, BUT 3/4 also don’t want more Benefit Communications! So, what are you supposed to do!?!

3. Research also shows that the higher percentage of employees to actually understand their benefits, the higher the organizations overall employee engagement is.  I’m going to walk you through some easy to do hacks that can help you, and show you some technology that is transforming how great companies are turning employee benefit communication upside-down!

Click Here to Register! 

What is ‘Meaningful Work’, really?

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I had a couple of communications recently that lit a fire under my ass over the concept of ‘meaningful work’.  You see, there is this widely held belief by a great number of HR pros that to have true employee engagement your employees must feel like they have meaningful work.

I don’t necessarily disagree with that thought process.

The problem is, well meaning, HR pros have taken this concept and started to cram social platforms down the throats of their employees misinterpreting ‘meaningful work’ as meaning as an employer we must have support social causes so our employees see we are giving back.

The best example I can think of is everyone’s darling employer Tom’s.  With complete transparency there is probably ten pairs of Tom’s shoes in my house, none of which are mine.  Each pair of Tom’s costs around $45.  The material and labor to make a pair of Tom’s probably runs around $5. Let’s be honest, these shoes are crap. It’s a piece of canvas, rubber and some thread.

“But, Tim!, they give one of these crappy pairs of shoes to a poor kid!” Great, they just cut into their margin by $5, oh how will they survive on only a gross of $35 per pair?!

So, I’m to believe that because they give a shoe for every shoe they sell, people find this as meaningful work?

What about those companies that put big money and volunteerism towards things like Habitat for Humanity?  Great cause, right?  I worked for a company that did this. It was nice. But I grew up volunteering for Special Olympics and supporting this organization. The company I was working for wouldn’t support my cause, because they already did so much for Habitat.

What about my ‘meaningful work’?

Meaningful work isn’t about supporting causes.  Meaningful work is do your people feel that what they do on a daily basis is important to the success of your organization.  This doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with supporting causes.  It definitely does for some organizations, but not most.

Employees need to know that when they show up in the morning the effort they give helps the organization reach its goals.  Not that the organization they work supports one cause or another.

The failure in believing meaningful work is tied to causes is that everyone has their own personal causes they want to support. If you believe helping the homeless is your organization’s cause, that’s wonderful! But, now you have to go out and look for talent that also believes this is their cause as well, to make work meaningful for everyone in your organization.

In HR we try and make this concept of meaningful work too difficult.  We need to help our leaders be better communicators to their staffs on how what each one does individually has impact to the greater good of our organizations.  How they, individually and collectively, make an impact to their function and to the business.

Meaningful work isn’t saving puppies. Meaningful work is using your talents to help your organization be successful.

Surprise! You’re an HR Manager! Now what?

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It’s graduation season and soon many new HR brothers and sisters will be entering into their first real HR gigs. Many will be titled, “HR Manager”, even without one day of experience.  That’s because in many organizations, HR Manager is the only HR position they have, and they’ll gladly take a young, fresh new HR grad.

The tendency for new managers, especially HR Managers thrust into a generalist role, is to get buried with tasks.  We all know the drill, you get started at the new company, and by day 3 you already have so many projects, improvements, process changes, etc. that need to be made you determine you probably have about 18 months worth of work.

Whether you’re a new manager, or seasoned HR Pro, we tend to forget the above concepts from time-to-time and get bogged down in the everyday details within HR Departments.  So, for the new HR Managers (and maybe some seasoned vets) I wanted to give you 3 tasks that should be accomplished everyday as a HR Manager who wants to be strategic and add value to your organization:

1. Keep Track of the Score,

2. Find Better Talent,

3. Be a Relationship Bridge.

Keeping track of the score, means you must create and track metrics, for your people practices, that have bottom-line impact to your organization. Communicate these constantly and educate your organization on how they can impact these results.

Finding better talent for your organization is really the only reason the HR Department exists.  If you did only this all day, every day, your company would be better for it.  No, having a better dress code policy isn’t going to make you world class. In the end, talent wins.

The single largest factor to inefficiency isn’t bad processes, it’s bad, or non-existent, relationships. It is your job to develop your leaders, and part of that is helping them understand the value of each part of the organization and getting them to dance with each other.  Being a bridge, and bringing leaders together, with understanding will have the greatest impact on efficiency.

Leaders understanding, and actually knowing, each others pain will solve most organizational problems. Why? Because you hire great talent, and great talent with good relationships will move mountains and get you to world class.

Never underestimate the power of relationships (good and bad).

Show me a leader who claims they can “work around” someone (meaning they don’t get along with that person), and I’ll show you a below average leader who needs to leave your organization.  New, and seasoned, HR Managers underestimate the leverage they have at helping organizational efficiency through better relationships.

Good Luck new HR Managers!

Recruitment Non-Poaching Agreements and Bad HR

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Workforce had an interesting article – When the War on Talent Ends with a Peace Treaty – regarding some national non-profit teaching institutions who regularly found themselves competing against each other for teacher talent. Being “non-profit” these organizations felt that it was their “mission” to find a better way to recruit teachers. A better way, meaning more cost effective and using less organizational dollars in recruitment.

For them, non-poaching agreements were part of the answer to help save costs. Non-poaching agreement = staff retention. Less turnover = money saved.  And in the end? This would allow these organizations to spend more money on their “missions” and make the world a better place to live. Amen.

Sounds good, right?

Non-profits squeezing every penny out of every donated dollar to ultimately give “our children” the best education in the world? Let’s not kid ourselves, Teach For America (TFA), KIPP, etc. are organizations that are “non-profit” by definition, but I’m positive their Ivy League educated leadership are not living in one-room apartments, eating government cheese and taking the bus to work – as many of their constituents are. And ultimately, the individuals hurt by non-poaching agreements are those professionals looking to get a job in that chosen field (in this example they’re teachers – but all the examples play out the same way).

Let me explain. Instead of education, let’s take a look at health care. Under the premise above, it would seem safe to believe that all “non-profit” hospitals should be able to come up with similar agreements, right? I mean, we are just trying to make people better, keep them healthy, it’s our mission. We won’t take your doctors, nurses, etc., and you don’t take ours; agree? Good. Now, I can go back to coming up with some policy, like dress code, how to make our lunch menu more exciting, or some other valuable HR deliverable…

Instead I have another novel idea, how about don’t suck!

Yeah, that’s right, stop sucking as a place to work, and you won’t have to come up with agreements with your “competition” about not recruiting your people away from you. Stop sucking in not paying what the market bears for pay and benefits. Stop sucking in developing your employees and giving them a great environment to work in.  You don’t hear about Google or Zappos or Pepsi meeting with their competition about not poaching each other’s talent. Why? It’s illegal, it’s called collusion.  It’s the main reason we have Unions and Unions suck more. so stop it!

To recap: Non-poaching agreements are bad. Bad for talent, bad for business, and bad for America (but good for HR folks who don’t want to make their places of employment better). Stop Sucking as an employer. And, Unions Suck.

HR Manager Position that Pays $364,000! Want it?

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I ran into an age old issue last week, which for some reason hadn’t come up for a very long time, but there he was staring me right in the face, and I still don’t get it!  Here’s the issue, should you post the salary (or your desired salary range based on experience, yadda, yadda…) for the position you are hiring, or not?

My guess is you clicked on this post because you wanted to find out which kind of HR Manager position pays $374K! Well, none, but you clicked, I win! But, while you’re here let’s take a look at the issue at play because it’s a polarizing issue amongst HR Pros.

I say, post the salary right out in front for God and everyone to see.  It will create most interest, which gives you a larger pool of candidates, which gives you better odds at filling your position with the type of talent that fits your organization.  It allows you to eliminate many candidates who won’t accept your job, because you’re too cheap. Sure you’ll get some people who see $98K, and they are making $45K, but they want to make $98K, so they send their resume, hoping.  But we’re smarter than that, plus, maybe Mr. $45K would be a great fit for me for another position, or in 3 more years when I have the same position open.

Posting the salary on a job post creates 137% more candidate traffic, than those posts which don’t list salary, or at least it feels that way to me when I do it that way!  I’m sure my friends at CareerBuilder can probably come up with some more precise figures on this exactly, but I’ll bet my made up math isn’t too far from correct.  It’s common sense. You walk by a store and see “help wanted”, and no one goes in. You walk by the store and you see “Help Wanted $12/hr”, and they have a line out the door asking for applications.

There are only 3 reasons you wouldn’t list the target salary for the position you are hiring for:

1. You know you’re paying below market, and you don’t want to the competition to know, because they’ll cherry pick your best people

2. You can’t find the talent you want, so you’ve increased the salary target, but you aren’t going to increase the salary of the poor suckers already working for you at the lower amount.

3. You don’t know what you’re doing!

Look, I get it, I’ve been there.  You don’t want to list salary because your current employees don’t understand that while the position title is the same, you are “really” looking for someone with more experience.  Or, we just don’t have the budget to raise up everyone already working for us, but we really need some additional talent. Or, we’ve always did it this way, and we want people who are “interested in us” and not money.

Well, let me break it to you gently, you’re an idiot.  People are interested in you because the value equation of what you are offering fits into their current lifestyle!  Otherwise, you could just move forward as a volunteer organization now couldn’t you?!

Do yourself a favor and don’t make recruiting harder than it has to be.  Just tell people what you have to offer. “We’re a great place to work, we have these benefits, they’ll cost you about this much, and we are willing to pay “$X” for this position”, if this is you, we want to speak to you. If it’s not, that’s great to, but check back because we might have something for you in the future.

Also, let me know if you find an HR Manager job that pays $374K. I know the perfect candidate!

Compensation 701 – A Master’s Course

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In terms of one part of your corporate Compensation Philosophy you can be a Pay Follower, a Pay Leader or Market Rate.

You never hear Pay Leaders complain about Turnover…

You always her Pay Followers complain about how Pay Leaders can actually pay that much…

Those who Pay at the Market always talk about how money isn’t that important…

HR and Compensation Pros will always talk about how it’s not about how much someone makes, it’s about the total compensation package.  Ironically, those Best Companies To Work for tend to have the highest total compensation packages and be Pay Leaders.  It’s a vicious cycle to get the best talent.

If your a pay follower you will never have the best talent.  If you pay at market, you will never have the best talent for long.  If you’re a Pay Leader you’ll have the ability to attract the best talent and the resources to hook them, but you still have to have the culture and leadership to keep the long term.

This is everything I know about compensation after 20 years of working in HR.

What have I learned?

I always try and work for Pay Leaders, otherwise you end up chasing your tail a lot within the HR world.

Consider yourself graduated.