Category Archives: Employment Brand

How Recruiters Will Break Up the SEC Dominance

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NCAA Football fanatics love recruiting signing day!  That one day, each year, when you get to find out how good your team will be in 2-3 years.  For the past 5 plus years the SEC Conference has been dominating college football’s signing day (as well has the National Championship games!).  2013’s Signing Day was no different.  Of the top 300 college football recruits – 41% signed on to play football at a SEC school! (see chart below)

2013 Signing Day

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

There really isn’t much difference in recruiting a college athlete than there is in recruiting talent to your organization.  The SEC dominance in football recruiting, is similar to the dominance that Google has over Yahoo or Facebook.  The dominance that Gap might have over similar retailers, etc.   If you are being dominated in recruiting by your competition there are some things you can do, and there are some things that will happen naturally to help return balance to the universe.  Here’s how I think Big Ten, Pac12, ACC, etc. conference will break up the SEC’s dominance in college football recruiting, and how you can do the same with your organization:

1. Stars want to shine – Great you go offered to go to Alabama, along with 20 other 5 star recruits – it all becomes relative.  Recruiters, in non-SEC schools, must sell the ‘opportunity’ for these kids to star right away at their schools.  A 5 star kid at Alabama might be a backup for 2-3 years. While at another school they could start as a freshman.  Not every recruit will buy into this – but many will.  Sell opportunity.

2. The NFL Dream – It says something about you when you’re the 9th best player on your team to NFL scouts.  The 9th best NFL player at Alabama might be much better than the best player at Michigan State – the best player at Michigan State is getting more publicity and more NFL scout action than the 9th best player at Bama.  The difference might only be 3-5 rounds in the NFL – but that’s huge!   Sell the NFL dream that 99% of D1 football recruits have.

3. Stop selling “Michigan Man” – 2nd tier conferences and schools sell this concept of being the right ‘kind’ of person for a school – University of Michigan calls it ‘The Michigan Man’ – we only want kids who are Michigan men, blah, blah, blah.  Really!? Well then, I only want to recruit ‘Alabama Men’ because they seem a quite a bit better!  If you a recruiter is selling this concept of culture to top level recruits – it might make you feel really good about yourself – but it doesn’t ring true for great talent.  Nick Saban doesn’t sell ‘Alabama Men’ – he sells championships.  Sell winning, sell being number one in your industry.  People love playing/working for a winner.

4. Set Up Shop – Eventually you are going to see Big Ten recruiters actually living, buying a house, etc. full time in SEC territory if they truly want to compete for talent in those areas on a regular basis.  Having a local presence, establishing local relationships with high school coaches, etc.  says a ton to a player and his family.  Flying in once every few months, when Johnny Alabama is there every week, says something completely different.  Works the same for your organization – want Silicon Valley talent to come to Tulsa – you better get some feet on the ground!

5.  Start Early – You know there are very little recruiting rules in place for kids under the 9th grade!  A ‘donor’ for your school could fly in a 8th grader, buy him a sweatsuit and take him to his suite to watch your game – all legal, if under 9th grade.  Can you image the impression that makes on a young kid?!  Now you might not know if the kid will actually project out to be great – but you get enough interested at a very young age and you begin to get talent you never got before. Long-tail recruiting.  This is why campus recruiting is so important to many organizations for talent – you need both a long and short term recruiting strategy to fill your pipeline.

There’s one other thing that will eventually work against the SEC recruiting which seems to happen at all great organizations – laziness.  Success doesn’t always breed more success – many times in breeds complacency. The might be the biggest risk of all.  The more success they have in recruiting and the more championships they win – the more other recruiters from outside conferences are going to be working harder to get ‘their’ talent.  Their great success might be their biggest risk!

 

How Does HR Think?

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I’m not sure how HR thinks.  I know how I think, and from what people tell me, I don’t think like a ‘normal’ HR person.  One thing I really like, though, is to see how other pros think.  I learn a lot from how maybe an engineer addresses an issue versus say how a Designer would address the same issue.  I like to take aspects of how other professionals think and incorporate those thought processes into how I think about HR.  I think this helps me solve HR issues in ways that the business can grasp onto better.

I found a cool article recently on how Designers think.  Here are some of the ways Designers think:

– “Design is not about solving problems.  It’s about making people happy. And there are always so many personalities and ideas to consider. So you’re trying to simplify it to its fundamental structure.” 

– “You have to understand when the timing is right for dialogue, and when its time to move the limits. Designers arrive at a company to move its limits.”

– “Try to pare things down. Very few moves do a lot.”

– “Unoriginal, ugly and cheap. Revolutionary, gorgeous and luxurious. These do not have to be contradictions.”

– “The idea of innovation as a structured process has been taken to the extreme, where it is no longer a really useful or robust concept. You’ve got to go about letting people take sensible risks.”

– “…Pain is temporary. Suck is forever.”

In HR, I tend to believe that most HR pros don’t believe they work in a creative function.  In reality what you create in HR speaks volumes about the culture you’re shaping in your work environment.  If HR lacks creativity – your work environment is going to lack creativity.  The rule setters need to show the organization that from time to time, we need to break the rules to get us to the next level.  Sensibly, but rule breaking nonetheless.  Breaking the rules is like ‘kryptonite’ to HR Pros.  It goes against our very being.  Most HR Pros pride themselves on being ‘the one’ part of the organization that actually follows the rules. “If we don’t do it, Tim, who will?”

I don’t know.  What I know is I like how designers think.  It seems like a thought process that opens my mind and gets me thinking about how I can make things better.  It’s a thought process that challenges me to rethink what I’m doing and why.  That seems like a good thing. I don’t want to suck.  I hear suck is forever.

 

 

I’ll Retire When I’m Dead

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In case you missed it last week, America’s CEOs want to change the social security eligibility age from 65 to 70.  Of course this isn’t shocking and this argument has been building for decades as a possible solution to the social security funding problem as so many baby boomers start to collect.  From Bloomberg:

Raising the Medicare age to 70, from today’s 65, would keep the oldest workers, who generally have the greatest health costs, on private insurance for an additional five years. The shift would hit states that cover more low-income seniors through Medicaid, and it would raise premiums for younger people who buy health insurance through state exchanges, as more people with higher health costs enter the risk pool.

This would save Medicare money—a good thing for taxpayers. But it would effectively increase health costs for the country overall, including employers. “For many seniors, their costs will go up. For employers in the aggregate, their costs will go up,” says Juliette Cubanski, associate director for Medicare policy at the nonprofit Kaiser Family Foundation. That’s because Medicare pays doctors less for their services than private insurers do…

Workers might not relish spending those extra years on the job to keep their health insurance. But it’s the cost of living longer, as Gary Loveman, Business Roundtable member and chief executive officer of Caesars Entertainment (CZR), illustrated with a personal anecdote at a press conference:

“My father, who was an employee of AT&T (T) for more than 40 years, retired at age 61 and lived to be 95. He was a 34-year recipient of Social Security benefits—something that near his death, he noted to me with great pride that he had been on both [AT&T’s] payroll and the federal government’s payroll for much longer than anyone could possibly have anticipated. That’s, of course, generally speaking, good news,” Loveman said. “But it’s a problem the country simply can’t afford over a sustained period of time.”

I’ve witnessed this personally.  I have a grandparent who spent 30 years with good old General Motors – retired at the ripe old age of 51 and collected pension and eventually social security benefits for more years than they actually paid into the system.  That is why our ‘traditional’ way of retirement in America is broke.  The system was not created to have people collect social security for 15-20-25+ years.  When it was created, social security was a plan that the founders probably figured individuals would be on for 10 years or less.  While I don’t want to have to work until I’m 70 – for me and most Americans this is a foregone conclusion.

The new reality we face is 70 years old today, is not 70 years old of 20-30 years ago.  My Dad turned 70 this past year and still works in professional job and really doesn’t want to retire.  He’s reached a point in his career where he knows just about everything in his business and he has 30+ years of great relationships to leverage, and he has no fear about getting ‘fired’ – he’s 70!  Work can now be fun.

I have friends who still talk about wanting to retire at 55 and I tend to just shake my head and let them have their dream.  They really have no idea the amount of money it will take to live from 55 to 90 or so.  You’re talking millions of dollars in retirement investments – not 1 million – multiple millions to live another 30+ years.  I’m realistic.  I figure I’ll get to retire the day after I die.  At least I hope I get to.

Job Description Killers

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You know what position I would love to apply for!?  Jr. Human Resource Manager – said no one ever!

I hate spending 3 seconds on Job Descriptions – because JD’s just scream “Personnel Department” but I have to just take a few minutes to help out some of my HR brothers and sisters.  Recently, I came across a classic JD mistake when someone had posted an opening and then broadcasted it out to the world for a “Jr. Industrial Engineer”.  I almost cried.

Really!  No, Really!  “Jr.”  You actually took time, typed out the actual title and then thought to yourself – “Oh yeah! There’s an Industrial Engineer out there just waiting to become a ‘Jr. Industrial Engineer’!”  Don’t tell me you didn’t – because that’s exactly what it says.  “But Tim, you don’t understand – we’ve always called our less experienced Industrial Engineers, Junior, so we can differentiate them from our ‘Industrial Engineers’ and our ‘Sr. Industrial Engineers’.  What do you want us to to do, call them: Industrial Engineer I, Industrial Engineer II and Industrial Engineer III?”

No – I don’t want you to do that either.

Here’s what I want you to do.  I want you to title this position as “Lesser Paid Industrial Engineer” – you’ll get the same quality of responses!

You know how to solve this – but why you won’t – just have one pay band for “Industrial Engineer” – from $38K to $100K.  Pay the individuals within that band appropriately for their years of experience and education.  This is why you won’t do it.  Your ‘Sr.’ Compensation Manager knows you aren’t capable of handling this level of responsibility and within 24 months your entire Industrial Engineering staff would all be making $100K – Jr’s, Middles and Sr’s!

And please don’t make me explain how idiotic it looks when you list out your little number system on your post as well (Accountant I, Accountant II, etc.). Because you know there just might be an Accountant out there going – “Some day I just might be an Accountant II!” If SHRM actually did anything, I wish they would just go around to HR Pros who do this crap and visit their work place and personally cut up their PHR or SPHR certificates in front of them – like a maxed out credit card that gets flagged in the check out line.  That would be awesome!

All this does is make it look like you took a time machine in from a 1970 Personnel Department.

But, seriously, if you know of any Sr. Associate HR Manager III positions please let me know.

You Never Truly Leave Your Favorite Job

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I wasn’t a huge fan of high school.  I didn’t hate it – I just always felt my time was not the four years of high school – or at least I hoped it wasn’t! As you can imagine, being 5’7″, with above average intelligence and a ginger isn’t normally the recipe for high popularity in an American high school environment.  I wasn’t great at any sport, but participated in a few.  I was involved in theater and had fun with that.  I had friends, but none that I call a close friend now.  I know people who won’t ever admit, but you can tell about how they talk about it, that high school was the best years of their life.  It’s sad really – four years – all happening so early.  They haven’t left high school, even though they graduated long ago.

Everyone has their own ‘high school’, that place where for that one moment in time – everything seemed to fit together just right.  Maybe it was college for you, or your first job, or your current job or maybe you are still searching.   If you’re lucky that ‘time’ lasted for a while, for some, it might only last a few weeks or days.   Right now, in your mind, you’re picturing your time (if you’ve had it!).  As I’m writing this, I’m picturing mine.

In June 2001 I started my first ‘real’ HR job with a company in Omaha, NE called Pamida.  Our HR Department had a great group of men and women – people I’m still in contact with today. The one reason that my position at Pamida is ‘my time’ is because of 3 guys I had lunch with almost every day over a two year period.  Luke, Bob and Ray.  The four of us worked within 50 feet of each other and interacted throughout the day, but each day we would go off to some fast food restaurant for lunch and laugh.  Laugh like your sides hurt, like you were going to pass out, laugh.  Every stress we had in life, in our job, etc.  would get made fun of in some way or another.  It was the best therapy session you could ever have.  It made coming to work, fun.

Now, don’t get me wrong.  I’ve had other great positions, with other great companies and have made great relationships (heck, I talk about my time at Applebees like we somehow created burgers and beer during my time there).  But if I had to force rank which job I’ve had that just felt the most comfortable – it would be that.  Comfortable is a good word for it.  I’ve had higher level jobs that have paid me more and challenged me more – but none where I was just completely…comfortable.  The best part of having ‘that time’ is it will always be ‘that time’ in my mind.  I know I could never go back.  Lunch with Luke, Bob and Ray would never be like it was.  It as a moment in time, and it was great.

Some people will find this exercise depressing.  Those are the people still stuck in ‘high school’.  I find it refreshing.  I’ve enjoyed certain parts of every single position I’ve ever had.  I’ve made great personal and professional relationships with people in every position.  I’ve been apart of ‘that time’ for other people in other companies, and I cherish those times as well. I like having my time, because it helps me as a leader want ‘that time’ for those I lead.  It’s like a goal.  I want their time, under my guidance, to be ‘that time’! That would be awesome.

What has been your favorite job?

Ex-employers, Please Send Gifts!

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Dear Applebees,

I use to work for you in Human Resources.  It was a great 3 1/2 years, I loved working for you.  I was surrounded by the most talented group of Human Resource, Operations and Training professionals I’ve ever been around.  I tell this story often, but you know when you go into a large business meeting with like 20-40 people all sitting in a large square or circle of tables?  And you look around and you instantly see a couple of slugs, people who shouldn’t even be working for the company, let alone be in this meeting.  The first time I traveled to Applebee’s headquarters for a large operations meetings and I walked into the entire group of HR professionals that the Applebee’s leadership team had assembled, I looked around the room and couldn’t find one of those people!  Then it hit me – I’m that person – I’m the slug!  It was the coolest feeling to be challenged like that – to be surrounded by talented, caring people all working to make a company great.

I’ve moved on to bigger roles and a bunch of new experiences, but I still share so many things I learned while I was with you to those HR Pros I’m connected to.  I still talk so highly of the brand and the people that make your brand what it is today.  You’ve got some really great people still working for you, even after that crappy pancake place bought you.  You’ve lost some great ones as well – I could point out a number and where they are currently working and what their numbers are – who knows, they might want to come back.  You knows, maybe I want to come back.

Tell you what.  Why don’t you send me something. Just a little something to remind me of what I’m missing – a gift card, a free appetizer coupon, a carside to go Frisbee – you could even have someone drop off lunch to my office — grilled chicken oriental roll-up .  You see, I might want to come back, but no one has ever asked.  No letters, no phone calls, no tweets or Facebook messages.  I know I left you and that probably didn’t feel very good, but I think we can all be adults about this.  I had some growing up to do, I needed to see if those fries on the other side of the street really were hotter.   You can’t blame a guy for that.

So, who knows, we were so close once – and there’s nothing to say we can’t be close again,

Tim

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Just in case you are very lost at this point – check this out from Yahoo! Also, Marissa Mayer if you want to send me stuff, I’ll even think about coming over to Yahoo! Who knows – I like gifts!

In case you’re still lost: some of the best recruits you’ll ever get, are people who’ve already worked for you and were good, but you’ve never asked them to come back.

 

The A+ Player Employee

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I know a ton of HR/Talent Pros are sick of hearing employees broken down into A, B and C players.  It seems played out and dated.  But I like it.  I’m simple and the ABC player scenario is easy for me to describe, in very quick manner, how someone is performing.  I’ll give you, though, there are problems.  Once you have your “A” players, how do you tell which is the best one?  Can’t a “C” player be close to moving up to “B”, but another “C” be close to getting terminated?  The problem is, ABC doesn’t accurately enough describe individuals, it just describes groups of employees – a range of performance at any given snapshot in time.

I was having a conversation about this the other day with a peer and was describing a person’s performance who worked for me – an “A” player.  As I was describing this person, I said, “but you know what, they are better than an “A” player – they’re an “A+” player”!   Oh, boy, here we go.  What the heck is an A+ player?!

Traits of your A+ Players:

– All the talent and performance of your traditional “A” player, but with:

A.  Work like they’re a “B” player hungry to get to “A” status

B.  Lack the ego some “A” players tend to catch upon gaining “A” status

C.   Don’t believe they’ve reached “A” status, even when they have.

A+ players are special.  As soon as you read the traits you had an individual come immediately to mind.  That person who is a great performer, but also someone you wish all of your employees would emulate.  A person who is a joy to work with, and gets things done.  Maybe not the best at any single task – but the person you want to do every task.  A+ players aren’t culture changers, they are the culture.  Not everyone has an A+ player, and I don’t believe you can create one.  You usually have to hire them – and they ascend to A+ level very quickly.

When people tell me they only hire “A” players I tend to judge them as not having any idea about HR/Recruiting/Life.  You don’t hire “A” players.  You hire talent you believe is capable of becoming an “A” player within your organization.   Because they were an “A” player at another organization, has very little impact on their performance level within your organization – unless you somehow magically cloned their previous environment, leadership and resources and put them back into that same place.  It’s true that past performance is predictive of future performance – but only when you put that talent into a very similar circumstance.

That’s why it’s really hard to find A+ players, because you don’t even know when you hire someone if they will reach that level.  You might have a feeling – like – “oh boy, we’ve got someone special coming in”, but you don’t know, until you know.  All I really know is when you have one, do what you have to keep them around, because you’ll never know if you’ll get another one.

 

Sales Pitch Tuesday – Why Us?

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It’s really the only question I have to answer when I call on a potential client to try and get their staffing business.

Why should you work with HRU vs. the thousands of other choices you have?

It’s not a cost issue for 99% of the business development calls I make.  If a company has decided we need to engage a staffing firm – whether it’s for direct search or contract staffing – cost has very little to do with their final decision.  Everyone likes to get the ‘best’ price – but in staffing you’re talking about talent.  I’ve never met an HR executive or operational executive that wouldn’t in a heartbeat pay thousands of dollars more for a more talented candidate versus a candidate that fits the requirements but seems like a “B” level player.  Corporate HR/Talent Pros constantly get frustrated with staffing firms for doing this!  They tell us they want “X” candidate for $80K and we send over “X” candidate for $90K.  They say they aren’t interested. So, we send over a $80K candidate.  They interview $80K candidate.  They they call us and say “Can we interview $90K candidate?”  It happens constantly.  Don’t hate the staffing company, hate the game.

It’s not a talent issue, either.  What!?  It’s not.  The reality of staffing is that all companies have the exact same access to talent.  Some companies are just faster at uncovering that talent versus others.  In my 20 years of staffing – I’ve really seen very little difference in the quality of talent good staffing firms offer up to their clients (and remember, I’ve been on both sides of the fence on this – corporate and agency).  Don’t get me wrong – bad staffing firms do very little vetting of candidates and just flow paper to you.  Good staffing firms should be sending you fully vetted candidates.  I like to tell my recruiters – “We are the sure thing!”  When a company wants to interview or hire one of our candidates, the only thing they should hear is: “When would you like them to start?”

So, what is it?  It’s a relationship issue.  When I worked with a staffing firm, I needed to have trust in the people I was working with.  I didn’t care about their brand or their process.  I cared about how much do I trust this company is going to represent us as a company to the talent base that is out there.  Period.  Don’t get wrong – they better deliver great talent – but I’m assuming that is a given – if I decided to work with them!  Trust.  Part of that trust comes with full disclosure as well.  Most staffing companies hate this!  But I came from their world – I knew the game.  So, if you wanted to play with me – I wanted to know everything.  I was going to let you make money – but I wanted to know where it was being made.  That helps me sharpen up my internal process.  If a staffing firm really wanted to be a partner with me – then this wasn’t an issue.  I wanted to see them succeed, just as they wanted to see our organization succeed.  Most corporate HR/Talent Pros don’t have this mindset. They feel staffing firms are ‘out to get them’ and not a partner.  They need to cut those relationships.

It works both ways.  I stopped doing business with a really good paying client in 2012. Why? Because they were a pain to work with and didn’t get that this relationship should work for both parties.  I want to work with people I truly like.  People I would go on vacation with.  Right now – every single one of our clients at HRU – I would go on vacation with.  I would invite them to my house for dinner.  I would look forward to having a drink with after work.  That is why I love coming to work.  It’s not stressful on either side – the way it should be.  I understand their challenges and they understand my challenges and we can have ‘real’ conversations about each other – and provide feedback.

That is pretty rare in this industry.

Want to be apart of this?  Contact me: sackett.tim@hru-tech.com; call 517-908-3156 or tweet me @TimSackett – I look forward to the conversation! Also check out my staff – I’d definitely go on vacation with any of these good looking people!

 

 

 

 

 

HR Can Succeed By Doing Less

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You know Jim Collins – the ‘Good to Great’ guy?  He has another book to, it’s called How The Mighty Fall: And Why Some Companies Never Give In.  This isn’t a book review, or for that matter an endorsement of this book.  I will say, Jim brings up one very interesting concept in this book on why companies, organizations, departments, etc. – fail.  It’s something that we do constantly within HR, and most of us would never view it as something that would actually be hurting our organization.  We do too much!

This over-riding pursuit ‘to do more’ has some drastic consequences.

I will tell my HR brothers and sisters, if you never worked in a large HR/Talent shop – you might understand where I’m going with this.  That’s because small to medium sized HR shops usually are working their tails off just to keep their heads above water.  Large HR/Talent shops are a little like the game Monopoly. You’re either making yourself larger in some way or another, or you’re going through a ‘right-sizing’ so you can start over at making yourself larger again!  Within that mentality comes this ‘more’ cycle.

Most large HR shops don’t try to reduce their work because that goes against this empire building mindset.  They try and come up with more programs, more projects, more ways to measure, more ways to ensure an employee is engaged, more ways to check the checklist to ensure compliance, more ways to well, show that you’re doing more than the other guy/gal.  If you aren’t creating more, you’re aren’t valuable and showing your worth.  No one ever got promoted in HR for eliminating programs – the saying goes!

Here’s the other way to do HR that 90% of HR/Talent Pros don’t do:

1. Eliminate any HR program/project that doesn’t save employees time (not your HR department – but the time of the actual employee).  Remember that new Open Enrollment process you put in to eliminate all of that data entry by your department – but it now takes employees 25 minutes to sign up for benefits vs. 5 minutes – that 20 minutes times the number of employees just cost your company a ton of time – which means money in the real world.

2. Develop a talent management process that works for your hiring managers, not one that makes your feel good about yourself.  That 5 page annual review sure looks great – but it’s a pain in the ass of your hiring managers, and the reality is the employees aren’t getting in more feedback.  Stop that.

3. Stop designing processes around gaining 100% compliance and start designing processes so simple you’ll have 99% compliance (which is more than you should hope for).

Doing less HR is actually harder than doing more HR!  It seems like that should be the opposite, but it’s not.  Doing less means you have to really think strategically about what your function should be delivering and what it shouldn’t.  It means you move some things out of your department, that never should have been there in the first place, but “we’re in HR and we’re suppose to do whatever we can to help.”  No, you shouldn’t.  You’re in HR – you should deliver great HR that is simple and easy to understand.  For most HR/Talent Pros that I know – this concept of doing less goes against every bone in their body.  Great HR isn’t about doing more – it’s about doing the least amount possible to deliver the services that are needed for your organization to have great people.  That is really hard to do without adding more for people to do!

 

 

 

Which Best Practice is Ruining Your HR Shop?

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There is a brilliant article over at Harvard Business Review called: Which Best Practice is Ruining Your Business by Freek Vermeulen (I’m naming my next child “Freek” by the way!).  ‘Best Practices’ are a sore spot for me when I attend HR/Talent conferences.  No matter what the conference you’ll find some HR/Talent Pro talking about their “best practice” and God bless them you’ll see a standing room only audience of HR/Talent Pros trying to find out all about this “best practice’ to take back to their own shops.  Therein lies the problem.  From Vermeulen’s article:

“Most companies follow “best practices.” Often, these are practices that most firms in their line of business have been following for many years, leading people in the industry to assume that it is simply the best way of doing things. Or, as one senior executive declared to me when I queried one of his company’s practices: “everybody in our business does it this way, and everybody has always been doing it this way. If it wasn’t the best way of doing things, I am sure it would have disappeared by now”.
But, no matter how intuitively appealing this may sound, the assumption is wrong. Of course, well-intended managers think they are implementing best practices but, in fact, unknowingly, sometimes the practice does more harm than good.

One reason why a practice’s inefficiency may be difficult to spot is because when it came into existence, it was beneficial — like broadsheet newspapers once made sense. But when circumstances have changed and it has become inefficient, nobody remembers, and because everybody is now doing it, it is difficult to spot that doing it differently would in fact be better.”

Best practices aren’t new ideas, they are tried and true ideas, proven out over time to work well for the organization that started using them.  Theoretically, if you use another organizations ‘best practice’ the best thing you can hope for is that you’ll meet what they’ve accomplished.  I know a ton of business leaders that would kick you out of their office if you came to them saying “Hey! I’ve got an idea that will allow us to meet our competitors!”   Most leaders want ideas that will allow you to ‘beat’ your competitors, even when you’re trailing in the industry that you’re in.

I’m not saying that many HR/Talent shops can’t improve by using a best practice from another organization.  That actually might be true.  But, again, you’ll only improve, at best, to the level that other organization has achieved.  You’ll never be industry leading – you’ll be industry following.  I always assume when I hear a best practice that it was something that worked really well for that organization, at a specific time, and then ask – “what are you doing now?”  Almost always, I’ll get a response of something new they are actually working on – but it’s not, yet, a ‘best practice’ in their eyes!  That’s what I want to hear – the new stuff – not what they’ve been doing for 5 years!

For me, true innovation does not start at best practice – that is an ending point.  If you truly want to innovate and turn your HR Shop into World Class – you have to be a best practice creator, not a best practice follower.  I’d rather hear presentations at SHRM (or any other conference) about stuff people haven’t even tried yet – but they think it could be out of this world and why they think it would be great!  Then we both go back and try it, fix it, try it again, and compare notes.

So, which Best Practice is going to ruin your HR Shop this year?