Category Archives: Culture

Recruiting’s 2032 Nightmare

Posted on by
1

According to a recent USA Today article the U.S. birthrate is in sharp decline and is at it’s lowest levels in the past 25 years.   Here’s probably a few facts you don’t know:

– Projected 2013 birthrate in the U.S. is estimated to be 1.86

– Birthrate needed to maintain a population over a 20 year period is 2.1

Why should this concern you?

There are a number of reason – one might be that you need as many young people as old for the simple fact of having enough young people to take care of your older population.  If you turn that equation upside down (Taiwan 1.1 or Portugal 1.3) you have a society full of older people and not enough young people to fill the jobs needed to keep running your society.  The U.S. already has 3 Million jobs left unfilled because of lack of skilled employees – today. Imagine if you now have millions of less workers to even choose from – and by the way – skilled workers aren’t coming from other countries because their societies are growing and need them.  That is what our country’s employment picture will look like in 2032.  I know for many people right now this sounds very good – because of our high unemployment – but this will be a HR/Recruiting nightmare for those young HR/Talent Pros starting out their careers in the next 20 years.

Being the Futurist that I am -I’ve already provided a solution to this problem back in 2011 over at Fistful of Talent- Should You Encourage Your Employees To Have Babies – check it out. Basically my advice remains the same – as U.S. employers we need to create a positive, encouraging environment for our employees, with family-friendly policies that make our employees feel like starting a family is a good thing, and that if they do start a family their job and ability to get a promotion won’t be compromised.  This is not the case as many U.S. employers right now – for both men and women in the workforce.

As HR Pros and organizations we tend to think this isn’t our issue.  It will take care of itself – but as we look at countries with low birthrates, the issue doesn’t take care of itself and those countries have a worker crisis going on right now.    We need to change our ways right now – we need to be family friendly employers – we need to, as HR Pros, be concerned and find solutions for our employees around daycare, flexible schedules and other practices that will help our employees with families.   I know it sounds a bit the-sky-is-fallingish, but the numbers don’t lie we are headed for some of the hardest hiring this country has ever seen.

One solution I’ve thought of, that I didn’t bring up in 2011, is baby sign-on bonuses!  We do it for college students – I think we start doing for babies of our best employees.  I mean if parents can arrange their kids marriage, what stops us from arranging their first job?  Nothing! That’s what.  Imagine how happy your employees would be to cash a $20,000 check to help with baby expenses for the simple task of forcing their kid to come to work with your company upon college graduation.  It seems so simple – I’m not quite sure why no one has started this yet!

58% of College Students Are Willing to Lie

Posted on by
1

According to a recent study by NetImpact – What Workers Want in 2012 58% of College Students (1,726 total in the study) would take a 15% pay cut to work for an organization who’s values matched their own.  In another study, I’m willing to coach the Los Angles Lakers for less than half what they are paying their current coach (1 total in this study)!

These studies are silly – it’s hypothetical, college kids still believe in things – like fairness and equal opportunity and you’ll always be able to drink 12 beers and get up the next morning and run 3 miles.  Let’s wait for all 1,726 college students who took the study to get a job and then 5 years from now when they are employed we’ll go to them and force them to make a choice –

1. You keep your current salary and stay with your current job

2. You take a 15% pay cut and move to Employer A which happens to have the same values as you, under the current leadership team

I will bet my entire life savings that less than 58% of those people would choose to leave their current employers (no matter what job they have) and take a 15% pay cut!  In fact I would be fairly confident to say only about 10% would take us up on our offer, and they were already looking or getting pushed out. So, what does the study really say? That college students being asked silly hypothetical questions for a study about how they will act in the future, are willing to lie.

Why do I think these studies are silly?  Because solid, well meaning, HR Pros will go out and start recruiting folks to their organization who have the same values that “they” have.  “They” being the key word.  Who is “they”?  Well, Tim, we went to our leadership and our managers and our employees and we did value assessment and we found that 73% of our folks valued honesty and integrity over 67% that valued hard work and a fun work place.  Oh, you’ve got it figured out…

Here’s what I’m thinking – values are hard to hire – but you think they aren’t.  I can hire for skills, I can hire for past performance, etc. When it comes to values and morals, I’m really throwing myself down the rabbit hole.  Hiring for values and morals puts the selectors values and morals into play way too much.  If Peggy is your main screener – you better damn hope Peggy shares the exact values and morals you’re trying to hire for – or you’re going to be in for a surprise down the road.

I’m not saying don’t do it – I’m saying you better weight it appropriately with some other criteria.  I seem to be in the minority who still believes having the fire power to do the job, and some past performance to back it up, is still fairly important when selecting candidates. And if Humility doesn’t seem to be a part of their value chain, I think I might be able to work around that – if they can perform!

Why Only HR Managers Feel Busy: An Economic Theory

Posted on by
4

The Atlantic had an interesting article recently (Why Only Yuppie Feel Busy: An Economic Theory) based on a study by an economic professor at the University of Texas.   The basis of the study was this:

“It turns out that if you hold the hours people spend at their jobs and on household chores constant, individuals who bring home bigger paychecks still feel more stressed for time. Increase a husband’s income, and his wife begins to feel busier.”

This got me to thinking! About HR. About how crazy we HR/Talent Pros act sometimes in Corporate settings  More from the article:

“We all live on two things: time and money. And people who have extra income don’t get much, if any, extra time to spend it. As a result, Hamermesh argues, each of their hours seems more valuable, and they feel the clock ticking away more acutely. Much the way it’s more stressful to order dinner from a menu with 100 items than 10, choosing between a night at the symphony, seats at the hot new play, or tickets to Woody Allen’s latest flick is in some senses more stressful than knowing you’ll have to save money by staying in for the evening. There’s a lot the rich could be doing and too few hours to do it all. 

That isn’t to say the rich are necessarily more stressed overall. While the poor are less likely to complain about a lack of time, they are much more likely to complain about a lack of money. “One of them is always going to be scarce for you. If you’re rich, it’s time that’s scarce. If you’re poor, it’s the money that’s scarce,” Hamermesh says.”

Let’s put this into an HR example.  HR Pros want to feel important Strategic.  They see their operational partners running around with real important stuff that needs to get done – new product launches, assembly change overs, new marketing campaigns, etc.  Because they are so busy, we (HR) equate busy with strategic.  So, we become busy, we run around stressed with too much to do.  I mean the processes aren’t going to re-process themselves!  So, we add – for the sake, many times, of adding – we equate busy with strategic (importance to the organization) – I mean, hell, if we are this busy, how would the organization ever live without us!

Corporations are funny – if you would survey your organization about who is the busiest (doing the most stuff) – it would always look like everyone is always busy.  In reality your senior leaders would say they are the busiest, and then they would go down by levels from highest to lowest on the busiest meter.  If you brought in a third party and had them force rank who was busiest, you would find something different.  The lowest levels of your organization are actually the busiest (leaders are trained to delegate, delegation rolls down hill, it has to stop eventually!) – as you move up, you get less “busy” more strategic – probably more boring meetings, a lot of wasted time at higher levels of leadership.  Ask any senior leader and they will tell you probably 1/2 of their time is wasted in meetings where no decisions are being made and mostly they are just “updating” or “getting updates”.

HR Managers feel busier because they are trying to show their business partners that they also have real important stuff to do – so they add.  A better way?  Stop adding HR stuff – start using that time to help your business partners on their stuff.  You will be amazed at how much time you have when their stuff becomes your number #1 priority.  You’ll still probably feel busy – but it will be the right busy!

 

 

When Work-Life Balance Comes Full Circle

Posted on by
2

Did you see what RIM did last week?  What’s RIM? You ask. Makers of Blackberry, you know that phone we use to use before the iPhone came out.  Yeah, they’re still in business, barely, and trying to survive and save their company and thousands of jobs.  From the Ottawa Citizen:

“Research In Motion Ltd. is limiting summer vacations and ordering six-day work weeks for many of its Ottawa staff as it scrambles to push out its much-promised BlackBerry 10 operating system….

“The successful launch of the BlackBerry 10 platform, and the delivery of high quality, full-featured BlackBerry 10 smartphones, remains the company’s No. 1 priority; and we’re incredibly proud of the commitment shown by all RIM employees as we work toward this goal,” a RIM spokeswoman said in a statement.

The company is racing to complete quality control and bug testing on the new devices, which were originally expected to be released in the fall. On a conference call to investors Thursday, chief executive Thorsten Heins announced a delay to the release of the devices until early 2013 because making sure the phones work flawlessly is taking far longer than the company had hoped.”

Yep – we are on the precipice of our company either surviving or going under forever, and your going to have to work a little extra each week and miss out on your vacation to the cottage this summer!  That’s “real” work-life balance in a nut shell.

You want to measure your engagement of employees on an individual basis – do this and see who bitches about it and see who steps up and asks for more!  I’ve seen both happen.  Unfortunately, when your organization is at a critical point – either for survival, growth, major project, etc. and you need a little extra – work-life balance needs a little shift temporarily, you’re going to have employees who don’t care.  This is the Universe’s way of showing you who should be let go immediately – don’t wait!

Work-Life Balance doesn’t mean that the balance only works towards the employees favor.  It has to work both ways – to be “Balance”!  There are times when our employees will need extra time for their personal life – you need to understand that – also employees need to understand there are times when the organization will need extra as well (FYI to Employees: “Extra” is not defined as showing up on time and doing the job you’re getting paid to go).

I don’t have a Blackberry (that’s a lie, I do, but it’s in a drawer someplace collecting dust) – but I hope they make it, I hope they are widely successful – for the sake of the thousands of families who are getting their support from RIM and for all those employees who are giving it their all to help make their company successful.

Greatness Defined – finally!

Posted on by
1

For those who are fans of the NBC TV show Parks and Recreation you’ve probably already seen this – for those who haven’t – it’s brilliant!

Here is Ron Swanson’s Pyramid of Greatness:

 

 

So, you want some Great Leadership advice from Ron Swanson, here you go:

  • America: The Only Country that Matters.
  • Fish meat is practically a vegetable.
  • Capitalism: God’s way of determining who is Smart and who is Poor.
  • Skim Milk: Yep, it’s on there twice – Avoid It!

Sometimes, you just don’t know when Brilliance is going to find you!

Laurie Ruettimann – This one is for you!

 

Keep Being Wrong

Posted on by
2

One thing I love about being at SHRM12 is that I get to hang out with great HR Pros from all over the world!  And what happens when you get a bunch of HR people together? You talk shop!  And tell a bunch of war stories – and a few drinks are probably consumed – we’re like elementary school teachers at happy hour on a Friday afternoon!

I was with some HR Pros last night and one of them shared a standard HR axiom about what we do as HR Pros in the vain of maintaining consistency – if we are wrong in the beginning, than just keep being wrong!  It sounds idiotic doesn’t!?! But you see it every single day in HR. At one point someone made a decision, for who knows what reason, and no matter what the reason – a precedence was set and through hell and high water we will keep making that same decision!  We are HR!

I’m this person.  Well, I’m trying not to be – you see in my organization we do the same stuff.  If my recruiters exceed their goals we have various rewards that get – one of those is the ability to have a flex day throughout their week, where they can work from home or come in late, leave early, etc.  It’s up to them.  In our environment that reward is worth it’s weight in gold!  But – there’s always a “But” – when a holiday week happens – where the person is already going to be off for a day – we have said – no flex day that week.  Seemed like a reasonable plan.  But was it?

A reward is set up to be a reward – shouldn’t matter if the person has vacation, has a holiday, etc.  I had to ask myself – why do this, take this away just because of a holiday – I trust my people, especially those working their butts off to exceed their goals – so why take it away – I was wrong.  So, I decided to change – do the right thing – do you know what the first reaction was?  Yep – it was “Wait” that’s now how we did it before. A very normal reaction we have as leaders – because we want to deliver consistency to our teams, and I agree with that concept for sustained engagement – but there’s one thing that should override this – when I’m wrong!

So, do you have the courage to stop being wrong? Most of your peers don’t – they get caught up in group think – they get caught up thinking they are being “consistent” and that is good – but being consistent on doing something wrong is just being consistently wrong!  You have a choice – keep being wrong or start being right!  What will you do?

Candidate Screener #1 – Baby Car Seats

Posted on by
3

There are some things I hesitate to write about – and this is one of them.   Sometimes, in HR, we allow are hiring managers to do somethings that should get us sent straight to hell. First class ticket – and we deserve it.  I have to be careful on how I phrase this one – let’s just say there is this major U.S. company that made Billions of dollars last year, and for a number of years before that.  Their product is something almost all of us have used in our lifetime.  And let’s just say, that maybe, once in a while (or every time) they interview someone – male or female – they “kindly” escort this person out to their safe, security-gated, parking lot, to their interviewees car.   A naive HR Pro would say, “Aren’t our hiring managers nice to do that.”  A savvy HR Pro would say, “Why the hell are you doing that?!”

You clicked the link with the title – so you already know why they escort candidates to their car – they want to see if the candidate has kids.  Ouch.  The feeling is, they don’t want to hire folks with kids, because folks with kids need more time off, and miss work more, and, well, just aren’t as engaged as non-anchor dragging childless employees.  Ouch, again.   There is an HR person, or two, that will be burning in hell for allowing this to continue.

And let’s continue to say, “hypothetically” that I know a person who has witnessed this type of thing happen – hypothetically.  What would you tell the candidate, hypothetically?   First, I’d tell them the truth!   Look you are about to be judged, in a negative way, on your desire and ability to procreate. That being said, we have a couple of options: 1. You can bail on the opportunity. (Great financial opportunity – you can imagine the culture!); 2. You can clean your car out of all incriminating evidence that you have children, like children, were once a child.   Hypothetically – most people are choosing #2.  That surprises me a little – but it’s dependent upon the job market, personal situations, etc.  A ton of factors go into people making that type of decision – I’m not judging – I’m empathetic to the cause!

Crazy right?  It’s 20 and f’ing 12!  We (hypothetically) have hiring managers looking for baby seats in the back of a sedan as a legitimate screening criteria for a job.  God help us.

If hypothetically the above story is true and I somehow get in a terrible accident because somehow my brake lines were cut, accidentally, just know I died with a car seat in the back of minivan – I’m not hiding it for anyone! Fight the Power!

 

 

Calibrating Your Talent for Succession

Posted on by
1

I’ve been a part of one organization that thought it was pretty important to do Talent/Succession Reviews (sure every organization will tell you it’s important, but very few actually do anything about it really!) on a normal basis (that basis being twice per year -whether we wanted to do it or not!).  That organization was Applebee’s – before IHOP bought them and gutted it like a homeowner prior to foreclosure – and we called them Calibration Meetings.  We were a growing organization, so having an updated succession plan was critical for success.   We thought we had a decent process, the meetings took way too long – usually all day, sometimes a day and half, and at the end we had a clear picture of where are top players were in their development, who needed our help, and who we needed to go out and shoot.  Perfect.

Here’s what the Calibration Meetings taught me out Talent/Succession reviews:

1. Once you talk about an individual employee for 10 minutes – even the best employee turns into a pile of crap with a million flaws.  Put a time limit on how long you spend on a person, focus on the positives they bring to the team (believe me that’s really hard to do).

2. You will find every reason a person shouldn’t be working for you – and you will still struggle to kick them off your bus.

3. If a person is ready for the next level, and you don’t make it happen – they will leave.

4. People appreciate being told where they stand in your succession plan, more than they appreciate the feedback from a performance review. (it’s really the best indicator of their true worth)

5. You must tell everyone where they stand in succession, even the bad ones, for it to really work.

Want some help getting your Talent/Succession Reviews started? – check this out:

Halogen is bringing in the team at Fistful of Talent for a quick, street smart webinar on how to bootstrap a talent review and get started with Succession Planning.  Attend “Zombies, Grinders and Superstars:  The FOT Talent/Succession Review”. 

Register Today for the Wednesday June 20th webinar!

 

Fifty Shades of HR

Posted on by
Reply

My friend Laurie Ruettimann wrote a funny post over at The Cynical Girl on Fify Shades of Grey – and how crappy she thinks it is (go check it out). That post gave me inspiration to write this one, plus the fact that for Mother’s Day I bought my wife the first two books of the series (which is before this SNL bit even ran – making fun of all the guys buying this on Amazon for their wives).    I’m not going to get into the content of the book – it’s lady porn – and this is a family site. Ok, it’s not a family site – but I have standards – although they are very low, I still have some!

Here’s what I don’t get about Fifty Shades, I mean besides most of the terms – why is it Ok for the ladies in the office to talk about sex, but when the guys do it HR is called and we go through an entire round of discipline and sensitivity training?  Don’t tell me that the ladies aren’t talking about it – you’ve read the book – they are saying things that make the most harden HR Pro blush!  Yet, we chuckle and walk away – it’s just the girls – they don’t mean any harm…

I tend to think we allow this double standard for the simple fact 80% of HR Pros are female, so other females either join in the conversation or turn the other cheek.  This is reason #3247 that HR is hard – we send mix messages to our employees constantly.  “Don’t ever engage in sexual conversation in the workplace – there is no place for it – unless it’s a popular book that all the ladies are reading, then have at it, but only if your a female or gay male, otherwise it gets creepy!” (That’s actually wording from our official policy!)

Shades of Grey, literally, has no place in HR – yet we deal with “gray” constantly in our profession and in the workplace.  Individual contributor is creeping out the front desk person by hanging out around her work station to often and we discipline the individual contributor.  Executive is creeping out the front desk person by hanging out around her work station to often, and she gets fired.   Your co-worker “borrows” a ream of paper to do some printing at home and he gets written up like he stealing company secrets. Executive uses the companies IT staff to help put together his kids science project and no one says a thing. Gray.

It might just be the male in me, but the Fifty Shades conversations seem fairly black and white.  Unfortunately, in real life, we can’t have our cake and eat it to.  Leave the books and the stories and the workplace debriefs of chapters 4 and 5 at home where they belong.  We have enough creepy in our workplaces – let’s not be a part of the problem!

A Job Post with Your Name On It!

Posted on by
3

I was in a conversation the other day with another Talent Pro and she was asking me for some advice on getting better applicants to apply for her postings.  I asked a number of questions but one that really got the conversation moving was:

Do you know who you want to apply for this position?

She told me “Yes” and then went on to give the specifications of the job description.  I said “No”, do you know the Name of the person you want to apply to this position?  She laughed – she thought I was joking – I wasn’t.   Well, I half-wasn’t.   It was a quirky idea, but in the right environment and small to medium community you could really make a splash by actually naming your post after the person who you really want to take the job.  Can you imagine!

Wanted “Michael Smith – Chemical Engineer” – please apply today!

The obvious issue at play here is – well – if I knew the name of the person I wanted, why wouldn’t I just call them up and ask if they wanted the job!?  GREAT question – why don’t you?  It’s actually fairly easy to find names of competitor employees you might want to hire.  So, why don’t you call them up and ask them if they want the job you have?  You know why?  Because it’s F’ing hard to do!  That’s why the search industry is a multi-Billion (with a “B”) business.

So, instead of calling them – just make a job posting with their name on it – and go float it around town – through your social channels, on your website, maybe a job board posting, etc.  Believe me – it will get back to the person you are looking, and if they are interested – they will come calling.  Seems silly, but I bet it would work far more than it wouldn’t.  People like to feel wanted.  How much more wanted can you get than a company creating a job posting with your “actual” name on it!  THIS job is for me! You would say to yourself.

In a tough talent marketplace, sometimes it’s the easy, simple things that make the difference.  Sometimes people just want to know they’re wanted.  We make this search game so difficult sometimes.   I always tell people I have the easiest job in the world.  I just have to ask people if they are interested in a job, I have open.  Pretty easy!  I’m not trying to launch the space shuttle or fix someones heart – I just need to see if they would have interest in making a job change.  The rest is just market variables, all of which, are probably pretty similar to the next guy.  Many times, it comes down to only one thing – me showing interest in them, and their current company not showing the same level of interest in keeping them.

I say give it shot – what’s the worse that can happen – you get your community talking about your company and how aggressively you’re going after people?  That’s not all bad – either way!