Category Archives: Employment Brand

Is Your Recruiting Department Racist?

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At one point in my career, over a decade ago, I was working with a company where we hired a high percentage of foreign born applicants based on the technical skill set they had.  Many of the names of these applicants were extremely hard to enunciate.  Most of the hiring managers I worked with would spell the names out or say “the guy that worked at…” A few would try and say the names and butcher them badly.

Internally, in our recruiting department, we would ‘joke’ about asking these candidates to change their name to something it was easier for the managers to say, ‘Joe’ or ‘Charlie’ for instance.  Deep down we knew we had some managers who would be more willing to interview if the name came across as ‘Joe Vishay’ or ‘Charie Xjang’.  The manager would assume that because the candidate ‘choose’ an American name they must have better English skills.

It’s racism at a strange level.  You want to hire the person, but you feel because you can’t say their name, they must not be worthy.

Check out this video –

This Man Changed His Name From Jose To Joe And… by buzzfeedvideo

I know if I asked 100 HR and Talent Pros if they were ‘racist’, 100 would say they were not.  But, at a certain level we are.  We won’t interview Jose, but we’ll interview Joe. You won’t interview Marcus, but you’ll interview Mark.  My hiring manager wouldn’t interview “Arjun” but he would interview “Al”.

How do you stop this?

Hire Jose and Marcus and Arjun to do the hiring. That’s a start, at least.  Call out those hiring managers who continue to not want to interview qualified candidates because they can’t pronounce the name of the candidate.  You know who they are.

Also, educate your hiring managers, and give them the phonetic spelling of the candidates name.  Let your hiring managers know the pride they feel about their own surnames is shared by cultures all over the world.  I’m proud to be a “Sackett”. I get asked almost monthly by someone if I’m related to the Louis L’amour ‘Sackett’s’, and rarely do I point out those were fictional books!

Take the names off all your resumes you send to managers, as a ‘test’, and replace the name with a code number.  Did it make a difference in who they chose to interview? It’s a great inclusion exercise to have with your leadership team.

No one ever wants to admit they are racist.  The truth sometimes is very sobering.  This isn’t about blame, this is about fixing what’s wrong. Great leadership teams will understand this.

Prospective Employee Camp

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In athletic recruitment there are these things called ‘Prospect’ camps.  Depending on who you talk to these are either just coaching staff supplemental income, or serious recruitment functions needed to get prospective student athletes on campus.

Whatever they are, they’re a little genius!

Here’s how the entire system works.  Usually an assistant coach emails your kid, who has a dream to play college athletics, that they are having a prospect camp and you’re invited to attend, for $150. Two things just happened: 1. Your kid just got an email from a college coach; 2. That coach insinuated that your kid is a ‘prospect’!  Either way, there’s a good chance you’ll bite and pay the $150.

A couple of things happen at these camps.  Coaches actually invite players they really do have interest in, and they invite anyone else who is willing to pay $150!  So, a hundred kids show up, two or three which have actual ability to play college athletics, and they go through drills and modified games.  You instantly know who has ability because the coaches spend time with those kids.  If your kid doesn’t have a coach talking to him or her, they don’t have ability.  It’s a real quick and easy way to set your own expectations.

These camps are a necessary evil of the function of recruitment.  While most parents don’t like them, they all pay the money and have their kids attend.

These prospect camps got me to thinking if we in HR could do this in our organizations.   Could we charge $150 to have potential employees come in and check us out, while we check them out?  We run them through some tests, show them our facilities, make them compete against others in their same job function, spend time with our employees.  At the end of the day, we offer a couple of them jobs.

Could it work?  Maybe not for the average organization, but what about Google or Apple or some other big organization that has thousands wanting jobs with their company?  I think it could work.  The one issue we face is the expectation.  “Well, I paid $150 what do I get for this?!”

We would have to deliver $150 worth of ‘value’ in these Prospective Employee Camps.  I think that is probably the easy part.  Think interview skills, resume skills, leadership skills, some hardcore job function skills based on what they actually do.  It’s part self-development, and part dating game.  People pay millions of dollars per to sites to find their perfect romantic match, with most failing to do so.

Prospective Employee Camps might just be a way for your organization to set itself a part from all the noise, and get candidates to come in that truly interested in (I’m willing to pay to be here, truly) and want to be a part of your organization.  I know, crazy idea, but when you see it work in one area it just begs to be tried in another!

 

What Kind of Mentor Are You?

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I got asked to be a mentor for someone recently.  It’s not the first time I’ve been asked, but I found myself wondering what ‘Tim Sackett’ as a mentor should look like.  Maybe it’s where I’m at in my career, but I found myself wondering what is it that I could really give someone coming up in our industry.

I would assume anyone asking for a mentor doesn’t really want me to show them how to recruit.  They’ve probably got that down pretty well, at least the basics.  The advanced stuff is probably best taught by some folks much better than me (Glen Cathey, Jim Stroud, Amybeth Quinn,  Paul DeBettignies, etc.).

Maybe I could offer up some help on the employment branding/marketing side on HR and Talent Acquisition.  I’ve had to do that for the last 20 years, I probably know just enough to better than most, but not as good as folks like Laurie Ruettimann, William Tincup, Maren Hogan, Lance Haun and Matt Charney.

I’m just dangerous enough with HR Tech that I could probably help out in that area for sure.  I’ve bought and implemented systems and tools at every stop in my career.  I know the game, but I certainly don’t know it as well at Steve Boese, William Tincup (again), John Sumser, etc.

It could be my mentee could use me for just straight HR generalist knowledge base.  If I know anything, I know a little about almost anything in HR from my stops in my career.  While I love talent acquisition, I really consider myself more of an HR pro.  Probably not as good as Kris Dunn,  Dawn Burke, Robin Schooling, Jessica Miller-Merrell, etc.

Compensation and Benefits, maybe that’s should be my ticket?  Um, no, probably not.  I probably know the least about this area as a whole and Ann Bares is my go to person for all things compensation.

There’s got to be something I’m the best at, worthy of being a mentor.  What about employee engagement?  From small companies to organizations with tens of thousands I’ve had employee engagement as a major measurable, I could do some damage here.   But, again, not as well as someone like Paul Hebert.

Talent acquisition as a function might be something I’m most comfortable with.  In my career, I’ve been constantly pulled into TA no matter what organization I’ve been in.  It’s been the one constant in my career, start in HR, and end up in Talent Acquisition.   Moving an organization from old school, post and pray, to one that hunts for talent is right up my alley. I don’t really know anyone I would recommend over myself on this.

As a mentor I think the most valuable thing I can give someone is the network I’ve built over the years.  It’s something I discovered a long time ago. I’m probably not going to be the best at any one thing, but I can know people who are.  Having the ability to know you need to surround yourself with people who are better than you, especially in areas you’re weak, is the key to having success in any stop you have in your career.

As a mentor I’m probably going to find out what you’re bad at, then introduce you to people who are really good at those things.  You don’t need to the best at everything when you surround yourself with the people who are the best at everything!

Riding The School Bus

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It’s that time of year when parents and kids make a big decision, to ride or not ride the school bus! From the Project archives.

I read a very funny quote today from a comedian, Jenny Johnson, which she said

“If you rode the school bus as a kid, your parents hated you.”

It made me laugh out loud, for two reasons:

1. I rode the bus or walked or had to arrive at school an hour early because that was when my Dad was leaving and if I wanted a ride that was going to be it.  Nothing like sitting at school talking to the janitor because he was the only other person to arrive an hour before school started.  Luckily for me, he was nice enough to open the doors and not make me stand outside in the cold.  Lucky for my parents he wasn’t a pedophile!

2. My kids now make my wife and I feel like we must be the worst parents in the world in those rare occasions that they have to ride the bus.  I know I’m doing a disservice to my sons by giving them this ride – but I can’t stop it, it’s some American ideal that gets stuck in my head about making my kids life better than my life, and somehow I’ve justified that by giving them a ride to school their life is better than mine!

When I look back it, riding the bus did suck – you usually had to deal with those kids who parents truly did hate them.  Every bully in the world rode the bus – let’s face it their parents weren’t giving them a ride, so you had to deal with that (me being small and red-headed probably had to deal with it more than most).  You also got to learn most of life lessons on the bus – you found out about Santa before everyone else, you found out how babies got made before everyone else, you found out about that innocent kid stuff that makes kids, kids before you probably should have.  But let’s face it, the bus kids were tough – you had to get up earlier, stand out in the cold, get home later and take a beating after the ride home, just so you had something to look forward to the next day!

You know as HR Pros we tend also not to let our employees “ride the bus”.   We always look for an easier way for them to do their work, to balance their work and home, to do as little as possible to get the job done.  In a way, too many of us, are turning our organizations and our employees into the kids who had their Mom’s pick them up from school.  I’m not saying go be hard on your employees – but as a profession we might be better off to be a little less concerned with how comfortable everyone is, and a little more concerned with how well everybody is performing.

Too many HR Pros (and HR shops for that matter) tend to act as “parents” to the employees, not letting them learn from their mistakes, but trying to preempt every mistake before it’s made – either through extensive processes or overly done performance management systems.  We justify this by saying we are just “protecting” our organizations – but in the end we aren’t really making our employees or organizations “tougher” or preparing them to handle the hard times we all must face professionally.  It’ll be alright – they might not like it 100%, but in the end they’ll be better for it.

It’s Too Long

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Wait for it…

“That’s what she said!”

I saved you the trouble.

Being too long is a major problem in the world today.  People aren’t willing to wait, primarily because they don’t have to.  Baseball can’t attract a young audience because the kids don’t want to sit around for three hours, at a minimum, to find out the outcome of the game.  Soccer is exploding in the U.S. because it’s 90 minutes and they don’t even stop the clock when someone is injured!  No commercial breaks, except for a short halftime period.

People won’t read a 700 page book, they want 300.  No one wants to watch a three hour movie, make it two.  Why do we have to have an hour meeting, make it thirty minutes.

Being too long is not a weakness you want to have in todays world.  Being too long is now a sign that you probably don’t really know what you’re doing.  If you can’t be short and concise, you’re looked at as ‘old fashion’.

That’s what your candidates are thinking of your selection process.  You try and tell yourself, and your leadership, that we ‘take our time’ because we want to ‘make the right decision’. But your competition is making those same decisions in half the time.  You’re old fashion. You’re broken.  You’re taking too long.

Moving fast used to be considered reckless.  Older generations would tell us to ‘slow down’.  Measure twice, cut once.  But, what if I made a process where measuring once was all that was needed, and I could eliminate the second measure?  Wouldn’t that be better?

The legacy of the recession in Talent Acquisition is this, you had less to do, so you filled that time trying to add value.  There is a tipping point to adding value.  You extending the length of your selection process at a point no longer adds value.  You’re taking too long to make hiring decisions.  I know this because I’m constantly hearing stories of candidates you want, accepting offers from other companies before you’re ready to make an offer.

You’re taking too long.

 

There Are Only 6 Ways To Engage Employees

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We think there are millions of ways to engage, or disengage, employees but there aren’t.  Truly, there are only six.  The six basic emotions we feel as humans, which are:

1. Anger

2. Disgust

3. Fear

4. Happiness

5. Sadness

6. Surprise.

Knowing there are only six doesn’t necessarily make it any easy for us to figure out how to raise engagement, but at least it will help you giving you a concrete starting point.

Let me help get you started.  Of the six, only one really help you engage in a positive way: Happiness. The other five can all be very disengaging factors: Anger, Disgust, Fear, Sadness and Surprise.

So, you want to raise engagement?  Well, that seems easy, happy employees will equal engaged employees.  But, you’ll have your haters which will say, “Tim! Just because I’m happy doesn’t make me ‘Engaged’!” Yes, you’re right.  But, have you ever tried to engage an employee who was angry, disgusted, fearful, sad or unexpectedly surprised?  It’s tough.  If I need to increase engagement, I would prefer to start with happy employees.  Makes my job easier.

In the short term you could ‘engage’ employees by the negative emotions as well, but that never plays out well long term.  I can make employees fearful for their jobs, their livelihood and they will perform better, for a little while and seem very engaged. Until they find another job.  All the negative emotions can be played out like this.

So, I’m left with Happiness.  It’s not a bad emotion to be stuck with if you can only have one that helps you.  I like happy people, even on Monday mornings.  It’s better than assholes for sure!

We focus our engagement on so many things that have little impact to the emotion of happiness. We spend millions of dollars a year on leadership development, because better leaders raise engagement, we’re told.  We spend millions of dollars on building better environments because $800 office chairs raise engagement.   We spend millions of dollars on increasing wages and benefits, because more raises engagement.  But none of these really raise happiness.

“But, Tim! You’ve told us before you can’t ‘make’ someone happy.”

Ah, now we’ve come to something important.  If you can’t ‘make’ someone happy, how can we positively raise the engagement of our employees?!?

You can’t.  It’s a dirty little secret the engagement industry doesn’t want you to know (oh boy, can’t wait for Big Papi Paul to kill me in the comments on this one!).

You can raise engagement of your organization, though.  Hire happy people.  Happy people aren’t just happy some of the time, they’re predisposed, for the most part, to be happy.  Hiring happy people consistently over time will raise your engagement.  Do you have a pre-employment assessment for happiness?  Probably not. HR people hate happy people.

 

Can Corporate Recruiters Poach?

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Before we get right in and answer this question, let’s all get on the same page.  What is Poaching?  Wiki defines it as:

“Poaching has traditionally been defined as the illegal hunting, killing or capturing of wild animals, usually associated with land use rights.”

It can also be a cooking term, like Poached Eggs or Poached Salmon, but that’s not what we’re talking about.

The fact of the matter is that I don’t like the term ‘Poaching’ when it is used regarding talent acquisition.  Business Insider loves to use this in titles when they are talking about normal recruiting activity (Here, Here, and Here to share just a few).  There’s nothing illegal about ‘recruiting’ someone from another firm. Nothing!

Google has a talented group of Software Developers. Facebook needs Software Developers. Facebook recruits Google developers to come work for them.  That’s Recruiting at its most basic.  Nothing illegal about that.  That’s actually the basis of our capitalist society.  Free market economy.

So, why is it that we use the word “Poach” when describing something that is just basic business?

It’s because when an employee leaves you for your competition it pisses you off!  You feel robbed.  You feel like it should be illegal.  “Wait!  I spent so much time and effort to get you hear and now you’re just leaving me, for her!!!”

But, it’s not illegal.  It’s not ‘poaching’.  It’s business.  You either do it well, or you use words like ‘poach’.

Can Corporate Recruiters ‘poach’?

Let me put it to you this way.  If I was running your corporate talent acquisition department, and we had a recruiter who felt like they shouldn’t ‘poach’ from the competition, I would ask that recruiter to go work for the competition! At that point, that’s basically what they are doing anyway!

I feel so strongly about this, I truly believe a really good corporate recruiting function can cripple your competition. Truly!  If your corporate recruiters take the best talent from your competition and bring them to your team, your competition isn’t long for this world.  “Oh, yeah, but that’s poaching, Tim.” No, that’s Capitalism. That’s free market. It’s what our country is built on.

So, what I’m trying to say is this, if you don’t poach your competition’s talent you’re not American!

 

Dad’s Don’t Get Work-Life Balance Empathy

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Max Shireson, the CEO of mongoDB, turned in his resignation this past week.  That announcement in itself isn’t really that big of a deal, CEOs turn in resignations every day.  The reason he turned in his resignation is huge.  I’ll let him tell it in his own words from a letter he sent to mongoDB’s workforce:

“Earlier this summer, Matt Lauer asked Mary Barra, the CEO of GM, whether she could balance the demands of being a mom and being a CEO. The Atlantic asked similar questions of PepsiCo’s female CEO Indra Nooyi. As a male CEO, I have been asked what kind of car I drive and what type of music I like, but never how I balance the demands of being both a dad and a CEO.

While the press haven’t asked me, it is a question that I often ask myself. Here is my situation:

* I have 3 wonderful kids at home, aged 14, 12 and 9, and I love spending time with them: skiing, cooking, playing backgammon, swimming, watching movies or Warriors or Giants games, talking, whatever.

* I am on pace to fly 300,000 miles this year, all the normal CEO travel plus commuting between Palo Alto and New York every 2-3 weeks. During that travel, I have missed a lot of family fun, perhaps more importantly, I was not with my kids when our puppy was hit by a car or when my son had (minor and successful, and  of course unexpected) emergency surgery.

* I have an amazing wife who also has an important career; she is a doctor and professor at Stanford where, in addition to her clinical duties, she runs their training  program for high risk obstetricians and conducts research on on prematurity, surgical techniques, and other topics. She is a fantastic mom, brilliant, beautiful, and  infinitely patient with me. I love her, I am forever in her debt for finding a way to keep the family working despite my crazy travel. I should not continue abusing    that patience.

Friends and colleagues often ask my wife how she balances her job and motherhood. Somehow, the same people don’t ask me.”

When we talk about ‘inclusion’ we aren’t really talking about everyone.  That’s the problem.  We wonder how possibly a woman could handle the pressures of being a CEO and being a Mom, but we never wonder, or even care, how a man handles the pressure of being a CEO and a Dad.   It’s expected a man can do both, we question if a woman can do both.  

There is a cultural expectation, wrongly, that as a man I can be CEO and a Dad and perform just fine. As a woman, I’ll have trouble doing both jobs, because the Mom does more than the Dad.  The mom cooks and cleans and nurtures and schedules and kisses booboos and, well, does everything for the family.  The lazy asshole Dad comes home and waits for the Mom to fix him dinner and his drink.  Really!?! Is that where we are in 2014?

I’m a Dad and a President of a company.  I feel for Max.  My wife does a ton, it can’t even be measured.  I don’t expect her to do everything and help out a ton with parenting when and where I can.  I assume if the roles were changed and my wife was a CEO, I would have to pick up more of her home and parenting duties.

This goes beyond just duties, though, this is about emotional connection.  As a Dad, like Max, why should I have less of a connection as a parent than my wife.  Why do we throw that cultural expectation onto our employees, on to our executives?  As a father I frequently feel failure.  Maybe it’s because I missed being able to have lunch with my son at school.  Maybe it’s because my wife has a stronger relationship with my kids than I do.  Maybe it’s because I trying to live up to a cultural expectation that I should be less of a parent.

No one ever wants to talk about how hard a man has it, trying to be a father and work.  It’s not ‘politically’ correct.  Men have it easier. End of story.  That sucks sometimes.

Why Your Employment Brand Really Matters

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There’s really only one reason that you should have any concern over your employment brand and it’s this:

Job at Great Brand = High Self-esteem

Stop for one minute and don’t think like a marketer, but like a normal person. Why does a normal person want to go to work for a great brand? Why would you?

Let me put it another way.  Why do you buy and wear brand name clothing?  It’s not because it’s, necessarily, better made than any other brand.  It’s because it makes you feel good to wear that brand.  People look at you and see that you’re wearing that brand.  It gives you a boost to your self-esteem.

Now, think about the brands you love. For me, I love Nike.  Always have, since I was a kid.  I have a lot of Nike stuff in my life.  When I see someone that works at Nike, I get excited.  I want to know more about how they like it, what its like, etc.  I’ve applied to work at Nike early in my career, and got shot down.  I know working for Nike would have made me feel good about myself and the company I was working for.  I have a belief that others would have been ‘impressed’ I was working for Nike.  Whether if it was true or not, that was my perception.

The only true reason your employment brand is important is because of this.  People want to work an organization that is a boost to their self-esteem.  Even if your brand is neutral in doing that, it’s a negative.  They want to work for a brand ‘they’ feel others will be impressed by for a number of varied reasons: it’s cool (Google/Zappos), it’s important (Universities/Government/FBI), they do good stuff (Hospitals/Teachers), they make a ton of money (Berkshire Hathaway), they are innovative (hot new tech firms), they are professional (law firms/banking/professional services), etc.

Your employment brand, for some segment of your hiring population, needs to raise their self-esteem.  Find out what it is about you that does that, and you’ll have employment branding figured out.

3 Ways I Make HR Better

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If you’re sitting in your HR office right now reading this, about to create some new HR stuff – stop – your wasting our time (and by “our” I mean all of us employees in the organization).  “Wow, look who woke up on the wrong side of the week!”

It’s not that I don’t think being creative is important. It is, it’s Hugely important.  Being creative in HR just isn’t important.   I know you think it is, that’s because you want to be creative, so you make yourself believe that’s important.  But the reality is, anything you can do, I can do better.  No, not because I’m better than you.  I mean I probably am, but that isn’t the point.  I can do it better because all I’m going to do is take what you’ve already done, and make it better.

In fact I’ll do a few more things while working on improving your thing:

1. I’ll make it cheaper

2. I’ll make it more simple to use

3. I’ll make it fun to do

See! Stop being creative, and just start making things better.

From an article in Fast Company:

The line between becoming a pioneer and a “me-too” flop can be unclear when you’re in the weeds of development. Uncertainty is an easier destination to arrive at than confidence, especially when the truth is, there’s no such thing as making anything that’s really new. Everything is an evolution of something else. But you can make something better. When in doubt, ask yourself if you’d use your new product instead of the market leader’s. If the answer is yes, keep going. If it’s no, then stop and rethink.

This obviously talks about products, but services and what we offer in HR are very similar.  Is that program you’re developing in HR better than what your competition is developing in HR?  If yes, carry on. If no, make it better.  It isn’t hard. It will take some hard work, but it’s not mentally challenging.  When I see people unwilling to make their HR Shops better, I know one of two things are at play:

1. They’ve given up on the organization, and they need to go, or;

2. They are fundamentally lazy, and need to go.

It’s a painful truth most leaders just don’t want to realize.

Just make it better.