Category Archives: Hiring

Is Talent Acquisition Wasting Your Hiring Manager’s Time?

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I had a conversation the other day with a corporate HR Director and we were talking recruiters, corporate recruiters.  My friend had a dilemma, a classic corporate recruiting scenario. The problem is she has recruiters who are doing a decent job, but they won’t get out from behind their desk and get out into the organization and get face-to-face feedback from the hiring managers. But, here is the real reason:  the recruiters feel like they are “wasting” the hiring manager’s time.

“So,” she asked, “How do I get them out to build these relationships?”

Great question, but she asked the wrong question (was partially my answer).  Her problem isn’t that her recruiters aren’t building the relationships face-to-face with managers. The problem is they feel they are “wasting” someone’s time.

They don’t value or understand the value they are providing to the hiring manager. If they did, it sounds like they wouldn’t have a problem with visiting with the hiring managers.  It’s a classic leadership fail, solving a symptom instead of solving the actual problem.

I don’t think that this is rare, recruiters feeling like they are wasting hiring managers time. It happens constantly at the corporate level.  Once you train your recruiters (and hiring managers) on the value the recruiters are providing, you see much less resistance of the recruiters feeling comfortable getting in front of hiring managers to get feedback on candidates, and actually making a decision.  This moves your process along much quicker.

What value do recruiters provide?  Well, that seems like a really stupid question, but there aren’t stupid questions (just stupid people who ask questions).  Here are few that will help your corporate recruiters understand their real value to hiring managers:

  • Corporate recruiters are the talent pipeline for a hiring manager. (or should be!)
  • Corporate recruiters can be the conduit for hiring managers to increase or better the talent within their department.
  • Corporate recruiters are a partner to the hiring managers in assessing talent.
  • Corporate recruiters are a strategist for the hiring managers group succession planning
  • Corporate recruiters are your hiring managers first line of performance management (setting expectations before someone even comes in the door)
  • Corporate recruiters are tacticians of organizational culture.

So, the next time you hear a recruiter tell you “I don’t want to waste their time.” Don’t go off on them and tell them to “just go out there and build the relationship”. Educate them on why they aren’t wasting their time. Then do an assessment for yourself to determine are they adding value or are they just wasting time. All recruiters are not created equal and some waste time, and it’s your job as a leader to find ones add value.

A critical component to all of this is building an expectation of your hiring managers of what they should expect from your recruiters.  They should expect value. They should expect a recruiter who is a pro, and who is going to help them maneuver the organizational landscape and politics of hiring. They should expect a recruiter is going to deliver to them better talent than they already have. They should expect a partner, someone who is looking out for the best interest of the hiring managers department.

Ultimately, what they should expect is someone who won’t waste their time!

Are You Hiring Weaker IT Talent If You Get Above 12% Female on Your Staff

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So, Stack Overflow came out this week with their annual Developer survey. This survey is the real deal when it comes to IT staffing and data. Over 64,000 IT pros responded to the survey! That’s a giant data set up on hiring trends! You can download the survey results here: Free Guide: Recruiting Developers in 2017. (FYI – they’re not paying me to promote this, it was just fascinating data!)

So, there’s this concept in hiring when you look at pools of talent in a single skill set when it comes to gender. Let’s say you were running a retail chain. Your total employee mix is 70% female, 30% male. When you go to hire leaders you would assume that your leader gender mix would be 70% female and 30% male. But, we know this doesn’t happen.

In fact, in most cases, we see the opposite, 70% male and 30% female leaders selected. What happens when you do this is that you degrade the quality of leaders you are hiring because you are over hiring out of one pool. So, the quality of talent you are pulling from continues to get weaker and weaker. If only 30% of your employees are male, but you’re hiring 70% of your leaders from that small pool, you are statistically more likely to make bad hires.

In IT 88% of employees are male, 12% female (from the study). Thus, the theory would say, if you hire more than 12% female IT workers, you are ‘over’ hiring within one pool and probably getting lower level candidates from that pool.

I know that sounds crappy, right! Everyone hates when data doesn’t tell the story we hoped for! I get it, we all want more females in IT. I want more females in IT. But if you force it, you actually are giving your organization weaker talent, based on the pools available.

Some other super cool things that Stack Overflow was able to pull out of the data: 

– How do IT Pros find their job (called Job Discovery)?

  • 27% Referred by friends, peers, internal employees
  • 18% External Headhunters
  • 14% Contracted
  • 13% Job Board
  • 8.5% College Career Fair
  • 7.7% Visited Career Site directly

What’s missing? Yep! Almost no IT talent is hired by your internal recruiters! This should be super scary for TA Leaders! Go ahead and argue the data – it’s 64,000 IT pros! This is not a lie. Why is this the case? Well, the study also shows that only 13% of IT pros are actively searching for a job at any one time. Most internal recruiters only work with actively searching job candidates, so their pool of talent is very small, to begin with, thus way less hires.

– Job evaluation factors? Those things IT pros find most important when deciding upon which company to go work for. This one will also sting most Corp TA Leaders:

  • #1 – Is this position better for my career and skill set (okay, this is good)
  • #2 – Money fools!
  • The last thing on the list? Diversity. Ouch. IT pros could care less about your diversity initiatives and working in a diverse workforce. We want so badly for this to matter to candidates, but this study says it doesn’t. IT pros care more aobut the reputation of the person they work for, than diversity.

Go download the study for yourself. If you truly understand all of this data it will make it much easier for your organization to hire IT talent. We tend to spend so much time focusing on the wrong things and then struggle to understand why we can’t hire enough or fast enough.

 

 

 

What Would You Ask For If Your Workplace Went Union?

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If you didn’t see it last week a Nissan automotive plant in Mississippi went through a union vote deciding on whether the 6,000 workers at the plant wanted to represented by the UAW. It’s 2017, right? Is it just me or does it seem strange that we are still having union votes?

Here’s what the Nissan workers who support the union vote say they are looking for:

“Union supporters complain that the company has been stingy with benefits and bonuses, that workers on the production line are pressured to sacrifice safety to keep the line moving briskly, and that supervisors arbitrarily change policies about discipline and attendance.”

So, basically:

  • Pay
  • Benefits
  • Retirement
  • Safety

The UAW is trying to make this out about race. Be careful thinking this is the real issue. When you have a predominantly diverse workforce it’s an easy tactic to use to drum up votes. This is about the UAW increasing membership, period. They could care less about race issues, pay issues, or safety issues, just come ask all the out of work former UAW members in Flint! The UAW would try and unionize a girl scout troop if it increased their coffers.

Have you been in a modern day automotive plant? You could eat off the floors. There are so many safety precautions in place you would have to be blind to put yourself in harm’s way. The average UAW employee makes twice the average salary of an American worker. These workers don’t need a union, they need a reality check.

This got me thinking though of what I might ask for if my company decided to go union. Or, what would any of us in a modern society ask for from a union? The reality is in today’s world with the current competitive talent landscape there really isn’t much a union can offer. Pay and benefits are pretty competitive, pensions are no longer viable with current life expectancies, and laws are in place to protect workers from most safety issues.

Here’s what I think most people would want from a modern union:

– Flexibility in working hours. Not work from home, although in many cases that could be argued, but the ability to be treated as an adult when it comes to my schedule and getting my work done. It’s not too much to ask to allow me to drop my kids at school at 8 am then come into work by 8:30 am. Just because you want everyone at the office by 8 am, doesn’t mean it has to be that way. That’s just silly. Not all of your employees are living the same life.

– Different Financial Benefit Options for Time in Life. A college graduate with student debt needs different financial benefits than your employees who are ten years away from retirement. A recently married employee looking to buy a house has different financial needs than the employee having his first kid go off to college. Having one company 401K match no longer makes sense to all of your employees.

– Diet Mt. Dew Fountain Machine. Unions are stupid so I might as well ask for stupid stuff! If you want to represent me, you better install a Diet Mt. Dew fountain machine in the break room or will not get my vote and union dues. I’m paying you $17.63 out of every check for what? No, Diet Dew?! That’s not happening!

– College Education or Free Skill Training for my Kids. Oh, wait, now I’m listening. Don’t you think if unions are truly invested in their members that they should be able to invest the dues and make this happen? We’re talking billions of dollars per year paid in union dues across America, for a very little amount of negotiating every few years. If you can guarantee my kids a college education or to learn a trade, now you’re earning your keep!

What would you ask from a union in today’s world?

 

2017 Michigan Recruiter’s Conference is October 25th in Detroit!

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That’s right gang! We’re back and better than ever!

The 2017 Michigan Recruiter’s Conference will take place on Wednesday, October 25th from 9 am to 4 pm in downtown Detroit onsite at our wonderful corporate host Quicken Loans!

Registration is now open – the cost of this event is $69 per person. This is a corporate talent acquisition event, no agency or third party recruiting pros will be allowed to register. It’s not that we don’t love you all, it’s that this is a development event, not a come pimp us with your services event.

Space will be limited, so please register early if you want a seat. You can transfer registration to another person on your team if plans change.

Who’s on the Agenda I hear you asking yourself! Oh, boy did I hit a few home runs this year!!!

SPEAKERS:

Carmen Hudson, Principle Consultant at Recruiting Toolbox, and Co-Founder of Talent42

Shaunda Zilich, Employment Brand Leader at GE

Will Maurer, Global Talent Acquisition, Sourcing Manager, General Motors

Holly Fawcett, Curriculum Development Manager at Social Talent

Margie Elsesser, VP of Talent Brand & Strategy at Quicken Loans 

Mike Bailen, VP of People at Lever and former Head of Talent for Zappos

Killed it, right?!?!

ERE, SHRM, and TEDx wished they had this line up coming to their events!

Thank you to our sponsors for making this happen – Lever and Quicken Loans.  We could not offer this at such a low price without their financial assistance and support! So, support them!

Can’t wait to see you all in Downtown Detroit! Bringing it to the D!

 

 

 

 

The Questions Leaders Ask When Great Talent Leaves

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Employee Turnover is a major problem in the majority of organizations, and it’s going to get worse. The economy might not continue to be as strong in the near future as it has been, but it doesn’t look to be any major downturn as well. Plus, demographics are playing into the job seekers favor with so many people retiring.

I’ve never been too concerned with low performers leaving my organization. I do have an issue with hiring managers telling me a performer is average or above, then when they leave the ‘new’ story comes out about how that person was a piece of garbage and now we are ‘better’ off that they left. Wait? What? You said this person was solid, but now they’re awful?

This happens all the time, especially in organizations that segment and track turnover by performance and hold managers accountable to this metric.

For me, I think the best organizations at controlling turnover are the ones where the leadership asks certain questions when they see their best talent leave. The ones that really dig into the reasons and not allow a middle-level manager make up a reason. The ones that have a documented ‘save’ strategy in place.

Here are some of the questions I ask myself when great talent leaves:

  1. Is there anything I could have done to keep this person with our organization? Why wasn’t that done?
  2. Was there anything the employee asked for to stay but we couldn’t deliver?
  3. What would have had to take place to keep this employee with us?
  4. Can we get this employee to return to us in the future?
  5. What was the ‘real’ reason this employee left?
  6. Did we ask this employee what it would take to keep them with us? What was the answer?

I’m a firm believer that you can talk anyone into staying with your organization. I’m also a firm believer that the ‘studies’ that tell you people who accept a counter offer will leave in 18 months anyway are completely wrong and out of date!

What I’ve found in all my years of doing this is that for about 50% of people who tell you they’re leaving, small things can keep them and ultimately they actually want to stay, but someone else showed them some love, and that feels so good to be wanted by another! The other 50% probably have a larger issue that is harder to solve, but if you work really hard it can get done.

One issue organizations with high turnover face is they let each other off the hook with turnover by giving each other excuses. “Yeah, Tim used to be good, but lately, he’s been awful.” “Well, it’ll hurt losing Mary, but we weren’t going to keep her happy for long.” “George is our best sales person, but he was holding other back that can be great as well.”

To control turnover leadership needs to change this narrative and stop the excuses for every single turn. The one caveat I allow is documented bottom performers that are on a plan. That’s good turnover, but it better be documented, or it’s bad turnover. Leadership owns this and it starts with tough questions about their own behavior that led to the turn.

If you get to this place, turnover will stop being a problem, and start being an opportunity.

Did Your Employees Ride the Bus to School?

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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 the 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.

HR 101: Prepare to be surprised!

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HR 101. If there is one thing I could give a new HR Pro it would be this simple advice. No matter how prepared you think you are, you really only need to prepare yourself, for one thing, being surprised.

You don’t really get judged on your daily stuff.  Let’s face it, 99.9% of the time that goes off without a hitch.  You get judged on how you handle surprises.

Surprises make and break great HR Pro careers.

There’s really the only way to prepare for surprises.  You need to expect that a surprise will always happen. That one employee you can’t lose or the entire project will blow up, be prepared to lose them.  Talk about it, plan for it, and basically come to grips that it will happen.  Then it will happen, and you’ll be the only one not surprised by it.

The best HR Pros I’ve worked with had this one common trait, they were unshakeable when surprised. Almost like they expected it.

We’re Like the Venmo of Recruiting

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So, for the Gen-X and older folks reading this I first probably need to explain what Venmo is. Venmo is a digital payment system, like PayPal (Venmo is actually owned by PayPal) but different. It’s a mobile app that allows you to make payments between friends and socialize the exchange. Out to dinner, want to easily split the check, one person pays, the others “Venmo” them their share and you get this cool friend feed to see what everyone is doing.

I’ve got three GenZ sons and they Venmo. They don’t carry cash anymore, so when they need to exchange funds with friends, it’s all done on their smartphones.

So, we constantly see talent acquisition and HR technology call themselves the “Tinder” of recruitment, or the “Uber of HR”, or some other stupid comparison to make themselves sound way cooler than they really are. I figured no one is saying they’re the “Venmo” of Recruitment, so what the hell, I’m stealing it before anyone else can!

Here’s my Venmo for Recruiting product. It’s a mobile, crowd-sourced app that shows your network where everyone is interviewing and allows you to share information, contacts, questions, reactions, etc. of your interview experience. Candidates can crowd source positions with each other, ask for help in making connections with companies they’re interviewing with, and share how a certain hiring manager might be to work for.

I’m going to start there. Only candidates, no employers, to build traction. Completely free, I’ll live off my angel funding for the first three years on our way to 50 million users. Then, we turn on the employer portion, ala Glassdoor but better, that will allow employers to see what networks are saying about them and their jobs, but not allow any responses or interactions.

You get to see this new voyeuristic kind of experience that is hidden camera in nature to know what candidates truly think about your organization, your hiring managers, your interview experience, your jobs, etc. Then, it’s up to you to make some decisions on how to change what you don’t like, highlight what’s going well, and basically find ways to use the data from our “Venmo of Recruiting” (it’s trademarked!).

If I know anything, I know TA leaders will pay for inside information to what candidates truly think about them. They’ll pay a lot! Also, they’ll continue to pay to see how that data changes with the changes they make. How cool would it be to have this kind of lab environment and be able to test out pieces of your candidate experience and see real-time feedback?

Also, how cool would it be to have a network sharing real information about interviewing, jobs, organizations, etc., on a mobile platform within your trusted network if you’re a candidate? Venmo for Recruiting. I’m calling it “FeedMo.us” – Feedback and More.

Feedmo.us is now taking meetings with angel investors. Just send me a note if you’re interested in being a part of Venmo for Recruiting!

Midwest Recruiter’s Bootcamp! Minneapolis July 31st-Aug 1 (LAST CALL!)

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My good friend and recruiting guru, Paul DeBettignies, is hosting the Midwest Recruiting Bootcamp in Minneapolis next week, and he asked me to come and speak at it. He also asked some of the top recruiting minds in the business as well! The camp is next week July 31st and August 1st in Minneapolis, and you can still register and be apart of this!

Check out this list:

  • Maren Hogan – Create Winning Employer Brand for Knockout Recruitment
  • Jim Durbin – 8 Mistakes You’re Making: The New Rules Of LinkedIn
  • Shannon Pritchett – In OR out? Creative Sourcing Techniques to Find Your Candidates OUTside the box
  • Caroline Karanja – 10 ways to build diversity, practice inclusion and increase engagement within your organization
  • Paul himself – Create and Grow Your Recruiter Brand
  • Nick Roseth – Selling Minnesota: Strategies And Tools to Improve Recruiting To The Region
  • And me – hugging mostly! Okay, not really, I’m going to be sharing the 10 Truths Of Recruiting And Why You Are Failing At Them! And, how you can not fail at them!

When Paul first talked to me about the concept of the Midwest Recruiting Bootcamp I knew instantly it would be a hit and something I wanted to be apart of! Why? This is real Recruiting development for recruiting teams! It’s what I wanted to bring to Michigan with the Michigan Recruiter’s Conference.

National level development and speakers, in our own backyard! 

Paul let me know today he still has some space open for any recruiter’s or recruiting managers who want to join us. We’ll be onsite at the University of Minnesota. It’s two days that are packed with great material. If you can’t make both days – come one day, then send someone else on your team the other day! Or just come one day – you’ll still get a ton out of it!

REGISTER FOR MIDWEST RECRUITING BOOTCAMP! 

This might be the biggest bang for the buck in recruiter training budget history!

Here’s Paul telling us a little more:

Disrupt HR Detroit! September 27th – Tickets On Sale Now!

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DisruptHR is coming to Detroit!!!  

I’m pretty excited about it and I’m part of the great team that’s putting this event together. The date is September 27th with registration starting 5:30 pm and the event starting at 6 pm at the Garden Theater in midtown Detroit. The tickets are only $25! We should be done around 8 pm. Food and drinks. A ton of networking and laughs! REGISTER HERE! (we do anticipate this will sell out – we have limited seating)

What’s DisruptHR Detroit? 

It’s fun and fast 5-minute presentations/talks by HR and Talent pros. Powerpoint presentations of twenty slides where the slides automatically change every 15 seconds. It’s done in a TEDx-style format and the speakers are there to challenge how we think about HR and Talent, or maybe to just to poke some fun at the profession we all grind at every day.

Want to speak at DisruptHR Detroit?

Our goal is to have 12 speakers for this first event. We already have some folks who have applied and we welcome everyone who has the interest to apply to speak. It’s super simple! Follow this link and submit your idea! The DisruptHR Detroit team will pick 12 great ideas and save the others for our next Disrupt!

Why should I come to DisruptHR Detroit?

First, I’ll be there as the Emcee! I mean who doesn’t want more Sackett in their life!?!

Second, if you are passionate about our profession of HR and Talent Acquisition, this is the one place on the planet you should be to be around like mind professionals and leaders within SE Michigan!

Third, there’s a great chance you’ll take back to your organization some great ideas from the speakers and from the conversations everyone will be having about the topics!

What does a DisruptHR talk look like? 

Here’s me doing one so you can get a flavor:

Failure Is The New Black | Tim Sackett | DisruptHR Talks from DisruptHR on Vimeo.

So, what are you waiting for? Sign Up! 

See you there! This is going to be so great! The first 200 people who sign up get a personal hug from me!!!