Category Archives: Employment Brand

What Not To Eat: Work Edition

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We are constantly bombarded in the media about what we should be eating and what we shouldn’t be eating. Just last week the FDA came out with it’s new ban on Transfats starting in 2018.  While this is a good thing for the health of our society, it’s just one example of how we are being told what to eat and what not to eat.

While I don’t want to get into an argument here about whether or not you should be eating more protein, or fruits and vegetables, etc. I do want to give you some insight into foods you just should never eat at work.  Here’s my list:

1. Bananas.  No one wants to say it, so I will. There’s no good way to eat a banana at work and not have some fourteen year old comment come out. Male or female, eating a banana just isn’t a good look for anyone at the office.  I know, I know, you just break off small pieces and it’s fine.  It’s not. Stop it. Eat that home before coming in. (Also see: Twinkies, foot long hot dogs, those cream filled long john donuts, a full carrot)

2. Beanitos Chips.  The name pretty much tells you why.  Really, any “Beanito” product isn’t a good office product if you’re within fifty yards of a co-worker.  Yeah, they taste great, I’ll give you that!  But, an hour down the road we hate you, and that Fabreeze isn’t helping.

3. Sushi.  I love sushi.  The one problem with sushi is similar to bananas, you have to open your mouth so wide that you look gross eating it!  Sushi is a bad date food of choice as well, it’s just not a good look.  Any time you have to shove something the size of a golf ball into your mouth in one bite, you’re in trouble.

4. Raman Noodles. Again, love noodles, but I don’t want to see or hear you eating them. The slurping of noodles, while respected in Asian countries, is not respected in my office.  I don’t want to hear you eat, or slurp.

5. Anything cooked in the microwave in the break room that stinks up the entire place. Usually, this means fish. While it tastes great, fish does not smell good warmed up, and lingers.  I actually have a policy in our employee handbook at HRU that if you cook fish in the microwave you get fired.

6. Microwave Popcorn.  I actually love the smell of fresh popped popcorn! I worked in movie theaters growing up and can kill a large bucket by myself. The problem is, most people can’t quite grasp the concept of cooking popcorn in a microwave.  You have to watch it, listen for it. You have about a three second window to get it out before you have incinerated microwave popcorn. You just can’t push the “popcorn” button on the microwave and walk away, that is a recipe for disaster!

7. Any Vegan Food that looks like poop. Vegan’s know what I’m talking about. Let’s face it, most vegan food is gross and tastes like dirt, but God bless those people, they’ll probably live a lot longer than I! Like into those great 90s and 100s years! Yeah, can’t we all wait for those years…

What are the foods you don’t think people should eat at the office? Hit me in the comments!

*Shoutout to Jacks in my office for the idea for this post!

 

The Biggest Lie HR Tells Candidates

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No one ever wants to admit this but it can be really intimidating working with someone who is way smarter and more talented than you.  This is the basis for the biggest lie HR tells candidates.

You are Overqualified!

Truth be told, no one is ever ‘overqualified’ for a position.  You might have more qualifications than the organization needs for the position you are interviewing for, but that really isn’t the issue.  The issue is the person interviewing is scared that you are better than they are.

Back in the day, HR pros and hiring managers were trained to give the excuse to overqualified people that we won’t hire you because you’re overqualified and we are scared that you won’t stay in this position, and you won’t be satisfied.  Yeah, right! It’s not that we don’t want you! You won’t want us, because you’re so talented that you’ll get bored with this position and leave.

It’s such a lie, and yet, for decades we just accepted it as truth.

Being overqualified isn’t a negative, it’s a blessing! Companies should be bending over backwards to get overqualified hires.  We no longer live in a culture where people are going to stay in the job for 40 years. If you can get a good 3 to 4 years out of hire, you’re doing great.

Take the best most qualified person you can get for every position you have in your organization and let them do great things. Being worried the person will won’t be ‘engaged’ long term is silly.  That’s not for you to worry. Hire great talent and get out of their way.

The bigger reality we face in most organizations is we aren’t hiring ‘overqualified’ people because your hiring managers are intimidated to hire someone who is better, or who could become better than they are.  This is the mentality we must change in our organizations.  You can’t get better if you don’t hire better.  Hiring under the level of talent you have now is a slow slide to becoming an organization no one wants to work for.

My Big Fat Recruiting Dilemma!

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Have you had an employee who had to stop working because they became too fat? Just wait, you will, it’s just a matter of time.

I remember when my biggest nightmare as an HR pro was going to tell an employee they need to bath and wear deordorant. I can’t even imagine having to go tell an employee, “Hey Bro, you have to go home, you’re too fat.”

The U.S. Army recently came out and shared some statistics about how the U.S. obesity epidemic is hurting their recruitment efforts:

“Just under three in 10 young people [ages] 17 to 24 can join the Army today – and the other armed services for that matter – and the single biggest disqualifier is obesity,” Major General Allen Batschelet of the U.S. Army Recruiting Command told CNN. “Ten percent of them are obese and unfit to the point that they can’t join the service. It’s really very worrisome.”

“The obesity issue is one of the most troubling because the trend is going in the wrong direction,” says Batschelet. “Ten percent are disqualified today, and we think by 2020, it could be as high as 50 percent, which would mean only two in ten would qualify to join the Army.”

Our national security is at risk because our citizens can’t put down a Big Mac. Our enemies don’t need to attack us with bombs and troops; they just need to keep sending us cheap junk food to consume!  Then one day they just come ashore and roll us over to the POW camps.  I sure hope they serve good food at the camps…

Big fat Americans just aren’t a national security issue; this is a major issue facing all employers.  The reality is, no one wants to hire unhealthy people. If given a choice between people with similar skills and abilities, one in shape and one obese, employers will always hire the person who is in shape.

You want to see hiring discrimination at its finest?  Put a minority in good shape, a woman in good shape and an obese candidate, all with similar skills, in front of a hiring manager and have them rank them on most likely to hire.

The obese person will always rank last. Why?  Your hiring managers fear hiring someone who might die on their watch, more than hiring a minority or woman.  Was that too real for you? Check your analytics, you know where your problems are.

How do we fix this?

Companies have failed at wellness across the board.  I think it’s just a matter of time until you begin seeing organizations tie performance and compensation into their wellness plans.  It seems extreme, but so is this problem.  When a company reaches the point where they’ll tie your job performance to your health ‘performance’, that’s when you have an organization that truly cares about you.

The Path to Becoming a Highly Selective Employer

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We all think it, don’t we?  We all want to believe in this notion that we only hire the best and brightest. We only hire quality.  We are ‘highly’ selective.

We’ll show our executives really cool data that shows how ‘highly’ selective we are.  Stats like number of applicants per hire. 25,000 people applied for this position, and we only took the best one!

Time magazine  took a look at college admissions at highly selective colleges. Schools like Harvard, Yale, MIT, etc.  Schools that are super hard to get into because of how selective they are.  You know kind of like the hiring process of your organization. From the Time’s article:

“What many parents and students don’t realize is that increasing numbers of applications isn’t necessarily a sign that it’s harder to get into a selective school; rather, it’s a sign of changes in behavior among high school seniors. More and more people who aren’t necessarily qualified are applying to top schools, inflating the application numbers while not seriously impacting admissions. In fact, it has arguably become easier to get into a selective school, though it may be harder to get into a particular selective school…

The most recent study available from the National Association for College Admission Counseling shows that between 2010 and 2011 (the most recent years available), the percentage of students applying to at least three colleges rose from 77% to 79% and the percentage of students applying to at least seven colleges rose from 25% to 29%. In 2000,  only 67% of students applied to three or more colleges while 12% applied to seven or more.”

The net effect of this behavior is to create an illusion of increased selectivity. Especially at the most selective schools, an increase in applications leads to the acceptance of a smaller percentage of the students who apply. However, students who meet the academic and extracurricular thresholds to qualify for competitive schools will still get into a selective college; it’s just less likely that they’ll get into a specific competitive college. These schools work hard to not admit students who won’t attend;  the acceptance rate and the matriculation rate (the percentage of accepted students who attend) are key measures in many college ranking methodologies, so both admitting too many students and admitting students who don’t attend can hurt a college’s ranking.”

An illusion of increased selectivity…

You see, just because you turn down a high number of candidates doesn’t make you more selective. It makes you popular.  Too many organizations, and HR departments, are marketing that they are highly selective based on some simple numbers that give an illusion of being highly selective, when in reality, they’re just good at processing a high number of applicants. That’s different from being ‘more’ selective.  Just because you turn down 24,999 candidates doesn’t make you selective. It just means you have a high number of applicants.

So what does make you selective?

I would say Quality of Hire, but that measure is totally subjective in most organizations. Can you demonstrate with real measurable items that the applicants you’re hiring are better or getting better than those previously hired?  Most organizations can’t.

You need to being some sort of pre-hire selection science model that you and your hiring managers believe in. This science gives you measures that you can compare over long period of times and every applicant has the same measure.  This creates a real evidence that you’re becoming ‘more’ selective and on your way to becoming ‘highly’ selective.

 

The Open Office Terrorists

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So, how’s that new open office plan treating you!?

A recent study out says that it takes a normal person roughly 37 seconds to figure out working in an open office environment is going to suck! I mean, those were probably the slow people in the study, it doesn’t take a mental genius to see that going from an office where you could actually get stuff done to a bunch of people looking at each other, probably isn’t the best concept for productivity!

Okay, so that wasn’t a ‘real’ study. It was me and the voices in my head discussing the open office concept, and we all agree. Call it what you will, I’ll call it a quorum.

An actual study done GetVoip was spammed to me last week titled: The Detrimental Pitfalls of Open-Plan Offices which had the following findings:

– 95% of employees said working privately is important to them

– 89% of employees are more productive when working alone

– 63% of employees name “loud” coworkers as their #1 distraction.

“But, Tim! Open offices look so cool, and they prosper collaboration and communication and ping pong.”

Great…

But how many of you actually need more collaboration and communication?  I mean really?  Let’s be honest.

If Billy comes over to talk about The Voice one more time I’m going to gut him right here in my 8 ft by 8 ft low wall cubicle space I spend most of my time in. I’ll then use Billy’s skin to make a roof over my cubicle and finally have a little piece and quiet to actually get something done.  It’s not that I don’t like Billy. He’s was super the first three thousand times he came into talk me.  Now I want to see him die. Slowly. Painfully.

Open office space sucks because you have coworkers that are terrorists of the open office.  They come in all shapes and sizes, and they disguise themselves as actual coworkers. Here are a few examples:

1. The CrossFit Terrorist: Mandy does CrossFit. You should do CrossFit. And, apparently, the next best thing to doing CrossFit is talking about CrossFit to people who don’t give a shit about CrossFit.

2. The Vegan Terrorist: Mark is Vegan. You should be Vegan. And, apparently, the next best thing to being Vegan, is talking about begin Vegan to people who are trying to enjoy a nice fried donut and a RedBull for breakfast.

3. The Why Guy: The Why Guy can also be a Gal. They want to know why! Why are we doing this? Why are you doing what you’re doing? Why is the boss nice today? Why is the sky blue? Why are you holding a knife to your wrist?

4. The Schemer: Molly is a schemer. Molly wants you to scheme with her.  Molly doesn’t like how Missy wears hair hair and wants to get her fired. Plus Missy’s teeth are too white. Molly spends 77% of her day scheming of ways to get Missy fired, and needs to tell you all about it.

You see?  Open office plans are the devil in disguise.  If you had an actual office with a door, you could shut it. Lock it. Put up a sign that says, “I hate you! Go Away!”, but that would just look silly hanging from your chair at that table in the middle of the room you share with a bunch of terrorists!

 

How to solve one of the America’s Toughest Recruiting Challenges

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Hey, Tech Recruiters your job is really hard isn’t it?  Do you want to know a recruiting job that is about a hundred times harder than yours? Try recruiting Truck Drivers!

The Truck Driving recruiting industry is insane.  It’s reported that right now there are 36,000 Truck Driver open position in the U.S.!  Go to any major corporation that has a shipping component that is handled by semi-trucks and they have openings, many will have openings in the hundreds!  The largest trucking firms in the country have recruiting teams that dwarf the size any of the major Tech companies in Silicon Valley.

So, how do you solve such a major recruiting nightmare?

By doing this:

Okay, I hear you! “Wait, there still has to be a person in the seat!” You don’t solve the ‘driver’ problem at all!

The main problem with the Truck Driving profession is too fold:

1. They can’t attract younger workers into the profession.

2. They have high turnover.

Being able to use and operate the latest technology in any industry will attract a younger workforce.  Can you imagine the people lining up to be able to operate one of those trucks above?!  I can only imagine how this tech will revolutionize the profession of truck driving, and the skill sets needed.

Truck Drivers turnover because they don’t see a future in driving truck.  It’s seen as a low skill occupation, and a lonely one at that. Hours, weeks, months, years on the road.  Throw in the nasty-ass truck stops and you can see why our best and brightest are jumping at the thousands of open jobs.

Self driving technology opens up a whole new capacity level for the people sitting in those vehicles. I can imagine how organizations could begin training and teaching these operators an entire additional skill set to use while in vehicle, and even upon getting to their destination.  It would easily be foreseeable where your self driving vehicle operators could also become your field sales reps, quality control, etc.

If the operator, theoretically, only has to pay attention to vehicle operations 15-20% of the time, this gives them so much time to concentrate on other ways to add value to the company and to themselves.

From a recruiting perspective, I can sell that.  It’s hard to sell dirty bathroom and lot lizards to a kid who believes he has a future.

Sometimes You Just Love Someone At First Sight

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We aren’t supposed to be those people in HR.  We aren’t supposed to fall in love with a candidate the moment we see them. We tell ourselves we’re better than the rest, than our hiring managers.

The problem is, we do. We do fall in love. In fact, it happens all the time.

For the most part when you go to hire and you start interviewing, you either fall in love with a candidate or you don’t. There really isn’t any in between.  If you don’t fall in love, you never really feel comfortable making an offer, and if you do, you feel it’s probably going to eventually fail.

I’m not saying that those you fall in love with succeed all the time, because they don’t.  Without the love feeling, though, you never feel confident in the hire.

Here’s where I really start to think we might just be over-thinking this entire hiring thing.

If I fall in love with a candidate in the first 2 minutes, why do I need to go on with the interview process?  Do you ever fall out of love with a candidate, you fell in love with at first sight? I haven’t.  If I loved them in two minutes, I loved them after 2 hours of interviewing.  Sometimes you just know.

This doesn’t work for every position. Falling in love works best when you’re really hiring for organizational fit.  When you have a position that you could teach to almost anyone willing to learn, good work ethic, etc. If the primary goal to achieving a great hire is organizational fit, falling in love at first site usually works pretty good on the selection scale.

None of us in Talent Acquisition and HR ever want this to get out. It goes against our secret handshake to make hiring really difficult in our organizations. But, when you really go back and analyze your best hires, almost all of them will have the ‘love’ factor!

I believe in two things when it comes to hiring:

1. Do I really love this person as a hire?  If I can’t immediately answer that question, I need to keep looking.

2. Does this person scare the shit out of me?  Meaning, is this person so talented that eventually they’ll take my job! I hope so. I want to be scared, it makes me work harder. I want people who are better than me. Most people do the opposite. If the candidate is better than you, they pass, because they lack the confidence on how to handle that situation.

If I can answer ‘Yes’ to both of the above questions, I’m going to make some really strong hires.

 

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.