Category Archives: Employment Brand

10 Ways Old White Dudes Can Stay Relevant in the Workplace

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I don’t consider myself an old white dude, but I’m sure most of the twentysomethings working for me probably think I’m the old white dude! Old white dudes are at a crossroads of the American workplace. They used to be on top. There was no better role to have in the American workplace than to be an old white dude!

But times they are a-changin (only old white dudes and hipsters will get that reference!).

In today’s workplace old white guys are as desired as foot fungus. Somewhere between WWII and last Tuesday old white dudes became irrelevant, well, I mean unless you’re a Fortune CEO or President, besides that stuff.

But, I’m here to help. I mean, eventually, I’m going to fall into the old white guy category on the diversity and inclusion surveys so I better find a way to pull us out of this funk and make us super cool again! Here what you need to be doing old white dudes:

1. Denounce all other old white dudes. That way you’re not ‘that’ old white dude, you’re the cool new old white dude who got ‘woke’ (look it up on Urban Dictionary old white dudes).

2. Stop wearing cargo shorts. Apparently, the kids decided cargo shorts are lame and only old white guys where them. Remember those shorty-shorts we wore in the 1970s and 80s? Yeah, those are super cool now. Wear shorty-shorts and show a ton of leg!

3. Hide the fact you like money, small government, and hate taxes. If you want to be cool you have to be willing to give up most of your money to a government who has continually shown to have no idea how to spend our tax dollars for people who claim they can’t find a job.

4. Buy comfortable marching shoes – but not those lame white Nikes or New Balance sneakers all the old white dudes have – go for Nike Air Max’s. Cool old white dudes march with our brothers and sisters who have been wronged. If you don’t march, or at least show up at their parties in downtown areas, you can’t join their click. Also, get ready to wear a ton of rainbow stuff. Calm down, no one looks good in rainbow, but the after parties are super fun!

5. Sell your $60, 000 pickup or sports car and buy a Prius or some kind of Subaru. Only old white dudes drive expensive pickups and sports cars. Cool old white dudes drive Prius’s and Subarus. A good second option is a bike and ride it to work.

6. Talk about Tacos like they’re your new religion. Cool folks in the workplace ‘love’ tacos. Not only are they great food but you’re also supporting a diversity group by eating them, I think. You can’t just ‘like’ tacos. You have to want to have sex with tacos. Tacos should be your primary conversation point each day until you die.

7. Get into a workout routine and then push what you do onto anyone within ten feet of you at all times. It’s cool to workout, but it’s more cool to workout and then make everyone else feel stupid who doesn’t do your workout. Old white guys golf and go boating. Stop all of that. If you want to get into the water buy a paddle board and a rack for the top of your Subaru.

8. Complain about your super long eight hour work day and how you could do all of this working at home in two hours. The goal of becoming a cool old white guy is to fit in. Sure work-life balance has never been better in the history of America, but that shouldn’t stop you from railing against the machine.

9. Be super chill about all dumb decisions people make. To be a super cool old white guy, you have to be super chill about how everyone else decides to live their life no matter how stupid it might seem. “Hey, Mikey, love the new face tattoo! I’m sure that will really help your career path! Super cool!”

10. Never say anything about diversity and inclusion. Old white dudes can’t have an opinion about diversity and inclusion because you don’t know the struggle. Even gay old white dudes should probably keep quiet. I mean Tim Cook is an old gay white dude and he runs Apple! Does he really know the struggle!?

There will come a time when old white dudes will become a minority in the world, but you pointing this out just makes you sound like a racist old white dude, so cut that stuff out. Just suck it up, buy some slim fitting jeans and throw away all y0ur Docker Khakis, no one wants your theories on changing demographics.

You might grow a crazy long beard. Many old white dudes have found that really awful long beards help them blend in a bit better. Like ‘hey, I’ve got a way too long beard, so maybe I’m not an old white dude, but a Viking!” People love Game of Thrones in the workplace, so it might help.

Hey, hit me in the comments about how ageist this is or what other great ideas you might have to keep old white dudes relevant in the workplace!

 

7 Things HR Pros Should Be Doing to Deliver a World-Class Employee Experience

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Webinar Alert! Tomorrow at Noon EST – it’s me and the 7 Things every HR Pro in the World should be doing to Deliver a World-Class Employee Experience.

Want to join me? You’ll get SHRM and HRCI credit!

Plus, you’ll get to have lunch with me. Well, only if you sit at your desk and eat lunch, and you’re in the east coast time zone, or you can have your fifth cup of coffee with me if your in the west coast time zone, or maybe you’re just central and you get up early and like to eat an early lunch. Look, I’m

Look, I’m fairly intelligent, but I’m sorry I don’t know your eating habits, so just log in and you do you, and I’ll do me, and we’ll all learn something about creating great employee experiences!

Here are the details:

“Our employees are our most important asset,” said every CEO … ever! But what if we truly treated our employees like our most important assets? Would you do things differently than you are right now?

HR expert and world-renowned HR blogger Tim Sackett and Ryan Higginson-Scott, an HR leader at Optimizely, will bring their fun and engaging style to the hottest topic on the planet — building an employee experience everyone wants to be a part of. The program will introduce you to the concept of employee experience, why it matters and, more importantly, dig into what you can do right now to begin designing and developing a world-class employee experience in your own organization. You’ll walk away from this session with at least seven great ideas that can move your employee experience from average to great.

Learning objectives:

  • Learn how best practice organizations are designing a strategy to improve the employee experience.
  • Develop a launch strategy and plan for your organization’s employee experience.
  • Understand the metrics and KPIs around world-class employee experience.

Sounds sexy, right!?

REGISTER HERE! 

The Grand Vision of Your Company: Ingredient #1 of your Employment Brand

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Did you see last week that Facebook changed its corporate vision? The old vision was “Making the world more open and connected”. The new vision is:

“Bring the World Closer Together”

It’s pretty good, right? Five words. That’s pretty tight! Studies have been done on thousands of company mission and vision statements and the average word count runs around 14. It’s really hard to break your mission or vision down in five words or so and have it really mean anything.

When I first got into HR developing your mission and vision statements were a big deal, then like most things we focus on too much, they became a corporate joke. Web sites cropped up where you could throw in some words about your company and these random, meaningless, vision statements would come out and actually sound like something better than you already had, but could have been used by any company on the planet!

Organizations spent millions of hours in meeting developing these statements. Billions of dollars in resources spent. These words were supposed to drive our decision making, help motivate the troops, inspire our customers, cure cancer! If we could just find the ‘right’ words for our vision we’ll change the world!

The reality is, your mission, your vision, has become nothing more than a marketing slogan.

Facebook is a social media site that most people use to share stupid cat videos and once in a while lose their minds about something political before deleting the post after they got their 72 friends in an uproar. “Bringing the world closer together?” Oh, you mean, letting skinning high school friends make fun of fat high school friends. That close? Calm down, Zuck. You stole one great idea, you didn’t cure cancer.

One exercise I’ve done with recruitment marketing and employment branding folks is to tell me your company mission or vision in seven words or less. The reality is, from a marketing perspective, this is probably the time you have as a recruiter to get this in front of a candidate, plus it fits well in a text!

Can you boil it all down in seven words?

It’s tough to do, try it with your team today. Tell me our vision in seven words or less. Share your best one below.

Mine would be – “We put asses in seats”! Five words. Beat that. “We put world-class, asses in seats!” 😉

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!

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.

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?

 

Cybersecurity is Teaching Organizations How To Fix Their Talent Shortages

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Cybersecurity jobs are the hottest thing on the planet. Hackers out to do bad are growing as fast as the need to combat them and at this moment the bad guys are winning!

Every single organization I speak with have needs for Cybersecurity talent, or they are in denial of their needs for Cybersecurity talent!

Here’s the main problem, there are basically very few formal programs teaching cybersecurity. You can’t go to your local state college and get a degree in Cybersecurity. Even if you’re lucky enough to have a program like that close, this is such a ‘new collar’ field that the supply can not even come close to keeping up with demand.

So, what are organizations to do?

Build your own! Old school is the new black! Remember when if you needed an Electrician, no you wouldn’t because it’s been decades, you wouldn’t go hire one, you would hire an ‘apprentice’ and basically teach someone how to be an Electrician, and for this training they would give you 35-40 years of great service and you would give them a Timex gold watch and a bad back!

Remember when if you needed an Electrician, no you wouldn’t because it’s been decades, you wouldn’t go hire one, you would hire an ‘apprentice’ and basically teach someone how to be an Electrician, and for this training they would give you 35-40 years of great service and you would give them a Timex gold watch and a bad back!

Cybersecurity is bringing back the modern day equivalent of solving a talent shortage by having organizations actually solve their own problem, and not wait for higher education to catch up and fix the problem.

The new modern day fix to labor shortages involve a number of things the personnel departments from the 1960s and 70s didn’t have, but in some ways are still trying to catch up with a modern equivalent of the old apprentice programs.

IBM is on the forefront of building their own Cybersecurity workforce and they’re basically giving you the blueprint to do this on your own.

Steps you should be taking to build your own talent:

Step 1 – Reexamine your workforce strategy. You better know what skills you need three to five years down the road, you’re too late for the skills you need right now. The only way to solve that current problem is through a big checkbook because you will have to pay your way out of that problem!

Step 2 – Get really close with your community. You’re going to need training help, so start investing in programs at the high school and community college level. Your money goes further in these places than at State U., and you’ll have more direct control. You need to build a recruiting base.

Step 3 – Own the local talent pool you need most. If there are local groups, you support them in every way they need. Bring in national level development opportunities for those skill sets and give it away for free. Build a complete talent ecosystem with you at the center. This isn’t to say you won’t let others in on your market, let’s face it, it’s simple supply/demand economics. If you’re all building this talent, the overall price will come down!

Step 4 – Build Apprentice 2.0 for your Company. This is heavy lifting and hard work, but it’s the only way you can fully build the talent you need. This means great training, mentoring, hiring manager and peer ownership, continual development and upskilling, etc. The difference between old school apprenticeships and new school is you can’t just grow them and forget about them, or they’ll just leave you and waste your investment.

Step 5 (but should probably be #1 but you wouldn’t have paid attention to it!) – Forget about 4-year degrees! Your unfounded need to have college graduates in every role is silly and now hurting your company. IBM has shown you don’t need to be this ‘traditional’ peg to fit in the round hole. You can actually redrill the hole in any shape you want if you find the right attitude and willingness to learn.

But, Tim, we don’t have the money for this!

You will either pay for this, or you’ll pay at least 40% more to lead the market in wages and steal talent. I tend to believe this is the cheaper and more effective outcome because if you grow your own talent from puppies, they tend to be really, really good at your business and your problems. Hired guns might have talent, but you still have the issue of getting them up to speed at a much higher cost.

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?

5 New Rules of Work

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I’m usually a big fan of Fast Company articles (in fact my friend Lars Schmidt is now a regular contributor to FC and his stuff is awesome!)but this one seemed like the biggest contrived piece of new-aged garbage, I just had to share!

The article has a great premise: These Are The New Rules of Work.  You know, one of those articles that will show us all how we use to do work and how we now do work. Well, maybe, but also how we hope we could do work like they talk about in magazines like Fast Company, but we really don’t because we live in the real world.

Here’s a taste:

Old Rule: You commute into an office every day.

NEW RULE: WORK CAN HAPPEN WHEREVER YOU ARE, ANYWHERE IN THE WORLD.

Cute, but I actually work at a job where we go to the office each day, like most people in the world. So, while it would great to work in the Cayman Islands, my job is in Flint, and if I don’t come in, I don’t get paid. Which makes trips to the Cayman more difficult.

You get the idea.  It was written by a professional writer, not by someone who actually works a real job. Writing isn’t a real, normal job. When you write freelance, you can actually work from anywhere, because you basically work for yourself!

Here are the others:

Old Rule: Work is “9-to-5”

NEW RULE: YOU’RE ON CALL 24-7.

Well, you’re not really on call 24-7, you choose to be ‘connected’ 24-7, there’s a difference.  I do believe that ‘leaving’ your job at the office was a concept that was overblown for the most part in our parent’s generation. They claimed to do this, but only because they didn’t have email and smartphones and laptops. Let’s face it, our parents would have been just as connected given the same technology.

Old Rule: You have a full-time job with benefits.

NEW RULE: YOU GO FROM GIG TO GIG, PROJECT TO PROJECT.

There’s no doubt there is a rise in the use of the contingent workforce, but this doesn’t mean it’s necessarily chosen by the worker.  True, thoughts have shifted that many people no longer want to work at one company for forty years, but much of that has been shaped by companies and economics. When you live through an entire decade of layoffs and downsizing, you begin to think of the work environment as more transient. The crazy part about this mindset is organizations still feel like candidates should want to stay at a company for forty years, even though they can’t, and won’t, guarantee that for you.

Old Rule: Work-life balance is about two distinct, separate spheres.

NEW RULE: FOR BETTER OR WORSE THE LINE BETWEEN WORK AND LIFE IS ALMOST ENTIRELY DISAPPEARING.

This is the one rule I actually agree with.  Again, from a day when you could actually separate yourself from your work and personal life. In today’s ultra-connected world, it becomes very difficult to do this. I think most people get tired of living two separate lives, and just want to live one. This is who I am, professionally and personally, take me a whole person, or not.

Old Rule: You work for money, to support yourself and your family.

NEW RULE: YOU WORK BECAUSE YOU’RE “PASSIONATE” ABOUT A “MOVEMENT” OR A “CAUSE”—YOU HAVE TO “LOVE WHAT YOU DO.”

This is actually the single worst piece of advice ever given to mankind! Bar none.  If this was actually the case, how do you think anything would actually get done on this planet? How would store shelves get stocked? Gas stations get to run. Your dinner gets cooked and the dishes washed at your favorite restaurant? Do you really feel there are folks “passionate” about washing dishes for you? That they want to wash dishes for your cause of having a chicken fried steak and gravy for dinner?

Get some freaking perspective.

I think it’s great if you can work at somewhere you’re passionate about, good for you. But it’s definitely not necessary for you to have a great life. Have a cause that is special in your life? Perfect, go for it. You know what really helps most causes? Money! If you have a job that makes great money, just imagine how you can truly help that cause.

So, what do you think about these ‘new’ rules of work?

7 Ways to Increase Your Hourly Hiring!

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In 2017 there will be over a thousand webinars on how to hire more IT talent, 15,285 blog posts on how to hire more IT talent, 100s of new technologies will be released on how to hire more IT talent. You won’t see a fraction of that help when it comes to hiring Hourly Workers!

Why?

The majority of hiring done on a daily basis by most companies around the world is in hiring hourly workers, yet almost no one spends time on how to make this easier or do it better. This webinar is designed to help our brothers and sisters in the trenches who are out there every single day, doing all the dirty work in their organizations. Those recruiters and talent leaders who are responsible for hiring the masses!  

Tim Sackett loves the people! (and apparently talking about himself in the third person!) The real people, who go to work every single day and keep our organizations running like a well-oiled machine, not those pretty boys sitting behind a computer screen who have no idea what we really make and do on a daily basis!

Can you hear that music playing in the background? “America, America, God shed His grace on thee…” (Okay, I’m off my rocker, but you get it, I love this stuff!)  

What you’ll learn from FOT’s first webinar on better hourly hiring:  

–7 things you can start doing to increase and simplify hourly hiring in your organization

–3 ways top organizations are leveraging technology to do massive (over 1,000 hires per year) hourly hiring

–Pitfalls most organizations fall into when hiring hourly workers, and what you can do to make sure you don’t go down this path  

Smashfly, the world’s best recruitment marketing platform, is the sponsor for this FOT webinar.  So, you know we’ll be discussing the benefits of utilizing CRM technology in mass hiring, along with so many other tips, tricks, and techniques.

Joining me on the webinar will be my special guest, friend, and HR Influencer, Robin Schooling, VP of HR from Hollywood Casinos, who every day is in the weeds with her team in hiring the best hourly talent!

Register today! Thursday, April 27th at 2 pm ET!