Category Archives: Employment Brand

My Momma Don’t Like You

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My Momma don’t like you and she likes everyone…

Do you like that new Justin Bieber song?  Yep, I’m a Belieber! Don’t hate. The kid can entertain!

How does this have anything to do with HR?  Come on, you know I’ll bring you back!

“My Momma don’t like you and she likes everyone.” Do you have someone in your organization that is a walking cultural fit filter?

I do. Her name is Lori. I call her LJ. She has been with us for over 15 years! True story we hired her when she was 18 years old, straight out of high school to be a receptionist. Married, mom of three great boys, she is still rocking it at HRU in a much more expanded role!

When we interview a candidate to work in our corporate office, LJ knows if the person will fit or not, without being in the interview! LJ is like Justin Bieber’s mom. She likes almost everyone. Easy to get along with, but most importantly she knows the HRU culture.  If LJ says the person won’t work, the person won’t work.

I think most organizations have someone like this.  No, it’s not you in HR or Recruiting. You think you know, but you fail constantly at choosing. Cultural fit filter people are on the front lines. They hear and see the crap that HR and Recruiting never gets to hear and see. They know your true culture.

I’ve worked with organizations, that truly carried about cultural fit, that have added one step into their candidate screening process. It’s a cultural fit interview, with a cross-functional team on non-hiring managers, non-HR, non-Recruiting folks. It’s also a knockout screen. If you don’t make it past them, you don’t move forward.

Organizational fit has always been important, but organizations are beginning to put some real emphasis behind it recently.

I don’t worry about it much. I just ask LJ, she’ll let me know.

 

 

Cutting the Cord of a High Performer

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There is nothing worse in HR than having to terminate a high performer.  If you’re in the game long enough you will eventually end up facing this situation. A high performer does something incredibly stupid, and even though everyone in the organization wants to keep him or her, you all know they have to go.

Nothing sucks more.

I’ve seen executives in very large companies almost lose their own jobs because they tried to save a high performer from getting fired.  We like to think only idiots and low performers get fired, but something really good performers will get fired because of bad circumstances.  Take the case of Cincinnati Bengals Linebacker Vontaze Burfict and his illegal hit on Pittsburg Steelers Wide Receiver Antonio Brown in last week’s NFL playoff game:

Let’s be clear, I’m not a fan of either team, just an observer. He could have killed Antonio Brown!

Okay, one bad hit. One bad choice. You don’t fire a person over that! Especially, a person of Vontaze’s talent. He might be the single biggest reason Cincinnati actually made the playoffs this year.

Herein lies the problem. For how great of a performer Vontaze is, he has one major issue that the Bengals and the NFL can’t ignore, he seems like he truly wants to injure other players! Vontaze now has a ‘history’ of trying to hurt opposing players with questionable and illegal hits. He was fined this year by the NFL to the tune of $169,000 in the 2015-2016 alone. His hit on Antonio Brown alone will cost upwards of million dollars in fines and lost game wages!

So, what do you do?

It’s something the Cincinnati Bengals are going to have to determine.  They can’t keep him and have him continue to do this. It’s not good for the franchise brand. Although, some will argue it actually might help their brand. In the NFL, you need white hats and black hats! Not everyone can be the good guys.

Here’s the problem you face if you’re the Bengals leadership.  You allow Vontaze to continue to play. Vontaze will do what Vontaze does, which is play dirty. He’s proven that with his actions. His past performance has shown you what his future performance will be!

This won’t come back on Vontaze. It will come back on other players on the Bengals team, more than likely a highly skilled offensive player like a quarterback or wide receiver. Vontaze will go out and hurt his next victim, and the other team will eventually retaliate. The Bengals risk this if they keep Vontaze around.

Great performer. One major career derailer.

It sucks to have to let a great performer go, but many times it’s the best thing to do for the over health and wellbeing of the organization. It never ceases to amaze me, though, at what some in the organization will do to keep that risk around.

 

What is your most valuable hiring source?

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As many of you know I’m a writer over at CareerBuilder’s recruiting blog called The Hiring Site. Great group of industry practitioners writing about everything related to talent and recruiting. Because of my relationship, they share cool data with me, that I can share with you!

Some of the most eye-opening stuff I’ve gotten recently is all around hiring sources, and it’s not stuff you normally hear about or see.  Let’s face it. We (Talent Acquisition Pros) hate sharing our data because it makes us feel like we’re giving up our secret sauce!

It’s not really secret sauce, that’s the secret, we all pretty much do the same thing when it comes to talent attraction. We get referrals, we leverage our internal databases, we use job boards and postings, we pray. We pray a lot!

Here’s the data that CB shared with me from crunching the data of 1600+ CareerBuilder clients in 2015:

– 21% of hires came directly from using CareerBuilder.

– 41% of hires actually could have come from CareerBuilder, if the client was fully utilizing the technology they purchased!

– 45% of companies added more sources of hire over the past five years

– On average a candidate will use 18 sources to search for a job!

What does this really mean?

Every organization’s talent acquisition strategy has to have a multi-pronged approach.  You have jobs that you can post on CareerBuilder and find great talent. You have jobs that you will need a great referral strategy to fill. You have jobs that you’ll need outside specialized help to fill. You have jobs that need hardcore sourcing and bust-your-butt on the phone recruiting to fill. You need all these approaches, just one won’t work.

You need all these approaches, just one won’t work.

The key is are you fully utilizing the easiest, fastest sources you have?  We tend to want to discount our job board vendor (mine is CareerBuilder), but the numbers usually tell a different story.  41% of hires seems like a lot, but the data is deep! 1600 clients equal ten’s of thousands of recruiters banging on CB technology. The data is real.

What does this really mean, to you?

1. Make sure your recruiting staff is fully trained on the technology you give them. Then, retrain them!

2. Make sure you’re accurately measuring your source of hire. This is the single most important thing that recruiting leaders miss, consistently. It drives all of your purchasing decisions. I can’t tell you how many recruiters I speak with that truly believe LinkedIn is their most valuable source, and, so far, 100% of the time, the data says it’s not when we pull the numbers.

3. Are you looking at your existing internal database first? It’s the most valuable source in the industry and this is consistently underutilized.

Happy recruiting my friends!

 

The Best Talent Expects Tougher Interviews

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I was reminded this week about the importance of tough interviews and their importance!

My friend has been interviewing at a number of good companies for high-level jobs. He’s going to be a great hire for someone, he’s a top notch talent. Great resume, experience, education and personality. He’s a five-tool player, A level talent!

He was debriefing me on some of his interviews and one thing struck me as soon as he said it. He was talking about one interview in particular and why he was interested in the company. Basically, he was interested in the company because they gave him the most challenging interview!

It was his determination that if a company was going to be that challenging in an interview, it was a place he would like to work. It was the toughest interview he has been on, and as a top talent, it seemed they were doing more to ensure they were only hiring top talent, and that made him feel like it was the right place for him!

A few things about this interview:

1. It was a long interview.

2. They didn’t force him to interview with 15 people over 8 stages.

3. They asked tough, challenging questions, they only someone who really knew their stuff, and worked at that level, would be able to answer!

The problem with saying tough interviews are better is too many HR Pros believe ‘more’ interviewing, is tough interviewing. More doesn’t equal tough, it equals more. There is a huge difference!

Tough, difficult interviews are ones where the questions asked would challenge the knowledge and skill of the person asked. Many times we end up not asking anything challenging in interviews because are spending all of our time just ‘talking’ the candidate into the job. In this instance we end up hiring the person who had the best interaction with us, maybe not the best candidate.

Top talent likes to be challenged. It’s the reason they’re top talent! If you don’t challenge them, most will not accept your offer, because they won’t view your organization as a great fit.

So, how do you challenge top talent and recruit top talent at the same time?

It’s your recruiters job to recruit and close. It’s the hiring managers job to challenge the heck out of the talent you put in front of them, then tell you which is the best. Part of the recruiters job is to ‘warn’ the candidates, that they will be challenged in this interview like none they ever have been a part of. This alone will help weed out those who aren’t up for the challenge!

Top talent wants you to want them, but they also want to know they’re going to a great organization that will challenge them and make them better!

The Next Generation Just Named Itself! #NicknamingYourselfIsStupid

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Have you ever had a nickname you didn’t want?  You were in the third grade and crapped your pants and some dumb kid called you ‘Stinky’ and it stuck, for life! The rest of your life you got to go around being called ‘Stinky’ and having to explain this to people.

I think most people in those situations try to create a new nickname!  “Hey, guys, just call me Dice! I was at summer camp and all the guys there called me “Dice”! We played this game with dice and I was really great at it, anyway, it stuck. So, you guys can call me Dice, I’m cool with it.” Okay, Stinky, we got you!

There’s only one rule in nicknames. That rule? You can’t make your own nickname!

To my surprise the great folks at MTV decided it would be a great idea for the kids over at GenZ, that generation under the Millennials, to just come up with their own generational nickname.  The MTV crew actually surveyed thousands of high school kids from across the country to determine what they would prefer to have their ‘generation’ called.

Say hello to The Founders!

Why the founders?  Well, apparently this next generation has attached itself the Silicon Valley culture of founding companies.  Not they have really actually done this, but it’s what they identify with, so why not act like you started this whole dot com, startup thingy.

What do we really know about these Founders? A few things for sure, that I think will help organizations understand this next generation entering the workforce:

1. They were raised during the Great Recession. Not since the Great Depression, have so many kids witnessed parents and adults close to them lose so many jobs and struggle financially. This will impact their work ethic, the importance of keeping a job, etc. Think the opposite of how Millennials view work! The Founders probably have more in common with the Greatest Generation, than the Millennials.

2. They have never not had a Smartphone. This will impact how they do their work, how they socialize and how they communicate. The Millennials had flip phones to start!

3. The media has bombarded them with unrealistic views of what work looks like.  Google is an outlier, not the norm. Yet, they tend to believe it’s the norm because the ‘Googlized’ work environment gets so much publicity. 99% of work environments do not look like Google. This will cause some ‘hey, I didn’t expect this’ moments for a ton of kids in their first jobs.

I hate naming generations. Millennials, Founders, Gen-X… They’re kids.  They won’t know their ass from a hole in the ground, and you’ll have to teach them most everything they’ll need to know about your company and your jobs, because our educational system continues give them real-world skills to compete.

Call them whatever you want.  Entry level always seems to fit best.

What Would It Take To Get Your Employee To Leave You?

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Anthology (formerly Poachable) came out with a fun survey recently that polled where current employees of some of the hottest tech companies would go if given the chance.  The results are interesting and really speak to organizational fit, and the appetite for risk, in the employees you hire.

On the outset, I would assume any talented person working at companies like, Microsoft, IBM, Apple, Facebook or Google would be willing to accept a job at another tech firm, given the opportunity, location and pay are all that they are looking for.  Turns out that the employees at each of these organizations have a particular career taste when it comes to possible change, take a look:

Microsoft: 74% would prefer to go to another Public Company, only 32% to an early stage startup. (this limits the competition you’re up against, right?)

IBM: 72% to a Profitable Private Company, only 23% to an early stage startup.

Apple: 62% would prefer well-funded startup, or the same 62% to a public company, only 28% to early stage startup

Oracle: 69% to a public company, only 29% to early stage startup.

Amazon: 75% to public company, only 35% to early stage startup.

Google: 73% to well-funded startup, 45% to early stage startup and only 59% would want a public company.

So, what does this mean?  All those startups looking to attract folks from big tech companies might want to rethink your sourcing strategies! While some organizations like Google and Apple have employees with a higher tolerance for risk, most big tech companies are filled with non-career risk takers.

Organizational fit is so critical to making good hires, and most of us tend to overlook the risk appetite of the employees we are hiring versus the risk culture of our own organization.  This can be vetted out in an interview process, or even with an assessment, but we just forget about it most of the time.

You can usually see it on a person’s resume. Conservative company, conservative company, conservative company, oh hey, come interview over here with us at ‘our pants are on fire’, you’re going to love it! No, they won’t, but they might be attracted to the fire initially, and seem very interested.  The problem is, they’ve already shown you who they really are, you just aren’t listening!

Millennials Are Buying Your B.S. Employment Branding

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I’m a huge fan of Malcolm Gladwell and he recently said some things to say at a data analytics conference in Seattle. He had a number of points but one that interested me most was him discussing the trust levels between younger people today, versus older people in the baby boomer range. Here are his comments:

“Data can tell us about the immediate environment of people’s attitudes, but not much about the environment in which they were formed,” he said. “So which is right? Do people not trust others, as the polls say … or are they lying to the surveys?”

The context helps, Gladwell said.

That context is a massive shift in American society over the past few decades: a huge reduction in violent crime. For example, New York City had over 2,000 murders in 1990. Last year it was 300. In the same time frame, the overall violent crime index has gone down from 2,500 per 100,000 people to 500.

“That means that there is an entire generation of people growing up today not just with Internet and mobile phones … but also growing up who have never known on a personal, visceral level what crime is,” Gladwell said.

Baby boomers, who had very personal experiences of crime, were given powerful evidence that they should not trust. The following generations are reverting to what psychologists call “default truth.” In other words, they assume that when someone says something, it’s true … until they see evidence to the contrary.

“I think millennials are very trusting,” Gladwell said. “And when they say they’re not … they’re bullshitting.”

Why should you care about this?

Employment branding is marketing.  In HR we get so concerned about making sure what we say is the honest to G*d truth and nothing but the truth. We can’t tell a candidate we ‘rock’ when we really don’t ‘rock’. Guess what?  You can. Guess what else?  They’ll believe it.

Why?  Because the younger people today are a trusting lot.  They’re already a bit naive based on their age and lack of experiences. Add this to what Malcolm says above and they are ripe to be picked off.  Is that fair? No, probably not.  But, hey, as my good friend Kris Dunn loves to quote from Jerry Maguire, “this is show friends, this is show business”.

Tell the story you want. People will listen.  And skip the comments, I know this strategy is fraught with issues.  The truth is, it doesn’t matter. The difference between great employers and average employers just isn’t that great in candidates eyes.

GE’s “Owen” Employment Branding is Brilliant!

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If you haven’t seen these TV commercials for GE (they also have a ton of radio ads in the same genre) you’re missing out on one of the best employment branding campaigns that have come out in years! “What’s the matter with Owen?” is the series and they’re very funny!

The ads show that GE knows who they are and what the perception is about them in the technology industry.  They also know, like many other giant established primarily manufacturing companies (see Big 3 Autos, Boeing, Lockheed, General Dynamics, etc.), that they need engineering and IT talent, just as bad as those companies in Silicon Valley.

Here are a couple of the ads:

We talk constantly about how important employment branding is to organizations to attract talent. We also say that small companies have an advantage in employment branding because they can be more creative.  I think GE just gave big orgs a roadmap to how they can flip the script when it comes to be creative and having fun with their employment branding!

Want to have a better understanding at how bad the labor market, truly, is for STEM talent?  GE, one of the most established brands in the world for decades and one of the most conservative with their branding, is making fun of itself and it’s perceived culture!  I can’t even explain at what a huge shift this is within the industry!

Having Fun at Work

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Mark Manson is a brilliant writer, one of my favorites. He recently wrote an article titled, “Screw Finding Your Passion” where he made a comment about fun:

“A child does not walk onto a playground and say to himself, “How do I find fun?” She just goes and has fun.”

I get asked a lot by HR Pros who are working hard to influence their work culture and raise employee engagement about how can they make their workplaces more fun.  I think the above quote will be my new go-to answer!

If you offer a fun environment, meaning you don’t stamp out the fun your employees naturally want to have, all you need to do is allow fun to happen.

Now, you know your problem.

You try and manufacture a certain kind of fund. A kind of fun that you and your executives feel employees will feel is fun. But, it’s not fun. Safe fun is not fun.

Did you want to use the safety scissors as a kid, or the big sharp ones the teacher had?  Did you want to play the game the parents put together at the birthday party, or just run around with the other kids making up something?  Planned fun, is the opposite of fun.

If you want a fun work environment, you have to allow fun to happen in a way your employees believe is fun. Sometimes that will make you nervous. That’s okay, that is what fun is all about.  If it didn’t make you a bit nervous, it wouldn’t be fun!

When I took my first job as an HR pro, I worked in an office where ‘fun’ wasn’t really something that was being had. I brought in one of those little indoor basketball hoops that hook onto the back of a door and put in my office door.  I would then challenge people to a game of “Pig”.  The office battles became epic!

One day the CHRO came down to the HR offices and saw the hoop and asked me to play.  No one, including me, expected this! He was the opposite of fun. He was a buttoned-up executive! But, he was letting us know, that he approved of us having fun! He wouldn’t do it often, but every once in a while, he would come down and challenge one of use to a game. People would gather, they would laugh, they would have fun.

How do you create a fun work environment?  Let people have fun.

 

Your CEO is a Better Recruiter Than You

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Lou Adler, a great thought leader in the recruiting industry (I love to refer to him as “Uncle Lou” – endearingly), has one of the best recruiting articles of the year up on Inc. titled, “An Open Email from a CEO to All Outstanding Candidates“.   The concept of the email was getting your CEO to send out an email directly to candidates you are trying to source.

Just that idea alone is a brilliant strategy, because 99.9% of organizations will never do it!  That means, you’ll standout from the crowd. That’s good recruiting practices.

The article goes on to give you how you should actually write the email and what you should say:

1. No silly, classic job descriptions.  Instead tell them about what they’ll actually be doing.

2. Describe why the job could be a career move to the candidate.  They’ll believe this from coming from the CEO.

3. Don’t tell them to apply. That can actually be the last step. Get them interested first. Applications scream we have no idea what we are doing.

4. Provide an open invitation and a direct way to have a real conversation with someone with direct knowledge of the opening.

5. Let them know what the process would look like and next steps, if they are actually interested in moving forward.

6. Make sure the candidates have access to your hiring managers as well.  I’m assuming if your CEO is this involved, your hiring managers will be onboard as well!

Great stuff, right?!

It probably doesn’t work for high volume hiring when you have a lot of candidates. This isn’t meant for that, it’s meant for hard to find, critical to the business type positions.

I absolutely love this technique!

Here’s what I know. Most companies, and most CEOs, will never do this. Those who do, will have great success in getting candidates to respond. Put yourself into your candidates shoes. You’re sitting there some idle Friday and an email pops up from a name you don’t recognize. You open it and find out it’s coming from the CEO of a pretty good company in town. You better believe you’ll read it.

You will also ‘trust’ what is in that email, over if the exact same thing is sent by a recruiter. Why?  You believe that a CEO would never put themselves in a position to lie.  Right or wrong, you believe this. Plus, you’re flattered that a CEO sent you a personal email, not some marketing email, from their ‘real’ work email address, with their contact information in it.

None of your friends have gotten an email from a CEO telling them they are wanted! This is cool. This feels good. This feels different.

This is a winning strategy.

Thanks Uncle Lou!