Category Archives: Hiring

The New Definition of “Passive Candidate”

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Okay, we get it, Mrs. Hiring Manager, you want passive candidates!!! We’ll get right no that…

Passive candidates are the holy grail of candidates, right? Untouched, virgin, pure as the driven snow, fresh meat that has yet to be soiled by the dirty hands of another recruiter. If I could find a way to mainline passive candidates right into my system I’d be the best recruiting junkie on the planet!

Do you even lift bro? I mean, do we even know what the hell a passive candidate even is anymore?

The Passive Candidate Definition from ten years ago:

“A Passive Candidates is someone who is being considered for a position but is not actively searching for a job.”

So, are we buying this today?

If so, it seems like we then need to define “actively searching”. The only candidates I know who are ‘actively searching’ for jobs are candidates out of work, working in a job that isn’t their chosen career (Communications grad from B-level university, selling cell phones in a strip mall), or about to be fired from their current position.

If those are the actively searching candidates, that makes almost everyone else Passive! I don’t think our definition of Passive Candidate matches that of our hiring managers current definition of passive candidate! I think they would say anyone who is searching for a job, passively or actively, is not really passive.

So, why do we see this differently? Well, this is a bit of marketing that TA played on the hiring manager to fill positions. “Hey, Tim is a great ‘passive’ candidate, I found him on LinkedIn, he didn’t even ‘apply’ to our job! You have to interview him!” The ‘he didn’t even apply’ is like crack for hiring managers, who now believe you found Tim locked away in a vault at your competitors that has never seen the light of day.

The reality is a bit less sexy! Tim has been on LinkedIn for three years trying to get out of dead end company he’s been working for, but Tim sucks at networking and finding jobs, so he is just waiting around to be trolled by a recruiter, and he applies to jobs every week, just hasn’t applied to your job!

Let’s be honest with each other. If someone has posted a resume online, err, professional profile, they’re on the market! They might not be actively applying to jobs on a daily basis, but we all know they’re open for business. Someone can’t be passive that has a presence on any of the job boards (Monster, CareerBuilder, Indeed, LinkedIn, Dice, Zip, etc.).  They also can’t be passive if they actively applying to jobs, but just haven’t applied to your job!

So, the new definition of Passive Candidate should probably be:

“A Passive Candidate is someone you find through various methods who is not on the job market in any way.”

That means you might contact someone in your ATS database who applied for a job with you three years ago, but they are currently happily employed and totally off the job market radar. That’s a Passive Candidate. The referral your employee gave you for a former coworker that you can’t find anything online, and they tell you they’re not looking for a job. That’s a Passive Candidate.

A passive candidate isn’t someone you found who just hasn’t happened to think about applying to your job, yet. They actually might be the most active candidate on the planet, who you just happen to run into.

We know a truly passive candidate when we speak to one. They’re a bit nervous. A bit surprised. A bit flattered. You can tell they’re not used to talking to recruiters and feel guilty talking to you. This is the person you’re hiring managers are asking for when they say they want a passive candidate.

This isn’t to say passive candidates are better. That’s an entire another post, but let’s not act like we are providing passive candidates when we aren’t.

The Single Greatest Metric in the History of Talent Acquisition!

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“0.00” or “Zero”

I’ll let you decide how you want to display it, both ways work.

Oh, what is this measuring? Check this out:

The number of candidates, in the past twenty years that I’ve hired, that were willing to accept a job without first having a phone call with someone at the organization I worked for. 

That number is:    0   

I’m guessing your number is fairly close to my number! If fact, this is a universal metric between all types of talent acquisition professionals (Corporate, Agency, RPO). Across all industries and all levels of hiring, hourly, salary, temporary, 1099, seasonal, etc.

Let me ask you a couple of questions:

1. Would you be willing to accept a job without first speaking with someone about this job?

2. Would you be willing to accept a job interview without first speaking to someone about the position, details, etc.?

My guess is almost 100% will say “No” for number one, but some would actually say “Yes” to number 2. Okay, I’ll buy some of you would go to an interview before ever speaking to anyone live about a job. I don’t think it’s many, but I’ll give you some people just want a job and a text or email communication is good enough for them. I’ll also assume the quality of those people will be questionable.

The fact is there is an extremely high correlation between speaking to a candidate ‘live’ on the phone or in person, and their willingness to continue through your process of hiring. Like a .99 correlation!

Another fact, then, would be that the recruiters in your environment (corporate, agency, RPO) who actually make the most phone calls will have the most candidates willing to engage your organization in your hiring process.

Final fact, in every recruiting environment I’ve worked (corporate and agency) the recruiters who connected with the most candidates over the phone, filled the most positions. Every. Single. Environment.

It’s not Rocket Science people! It’s actually Psychology.

If you don’t pick up the phone, you don’t find candidates willing to follow through with your hiring process.

Don’t over think this. Put yourself in the shoes of your candidates. Would you be willing to accept a job without first speaking to someone at the company offering you a job?

0.00!

 

The Secret Sauce to Landing Your Dream Job? Apply Less!

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Robert Combs over at Fast Company had a brilliant article recently, and if you’re in Recruiting or HR, it’s a must read! If you’re looking for a job, it’s also a must read!

Here was Robert’s concept. A.I. (robots) are running the world. It’s the biggest innovation to come into recruiting since Big Data (wait, didn’t we always have data…). If robots can run the apply process and find you where ever you are, Robert thought, why not use a robot to apply to jobs for him. Let the robots fight it out!

So, that’s what he did, he built a robot to go out and find jobs he would want, apply to those jobs, and then even follow up! He applied to hundreds of jobs in minutes! It got a bit out of control:

So I started slowly casting about for new challenges, initially by applying (perhaps naively) to openings at well-known tech companies like Google, Slack, Facebook, and Squarespace.

Two things quickly became clear to me:

  1. I’m up against leaders in their field, so my resume doesn’t always jump to the top of the pile.
  2. Robots read every application.

The robots are “applicant tracking systems” (ATS), commonly used tools for sorting job applications. They automatically filter out candidates based on keywords, skills, former employers, years of experience, schools attended, and the like.

As soon as I realized I was going up against robots, I decided to turn the tables–and built my own….I fired it up I accidentally applied to about 1,300 jobs in the Midwest during the time it took me to get a cup of coffee across the street. I live in New York City and had no plans to relocate, so I quickly shut it down until I could release a new version.

After several iterations and a few embarrassing hiccups, I settled on version 5.0, which applied to 538 jobs over about a three-month period.

So, what did Robert find out? Here were his biggest learnings:

1. Even your ATS robots suck at giving responses! Around 70% of his applications never got a response!

2. Only 4% of 538 jobs he applied for, got a personal email response from a recruiter.

3. Only about 6% of your hires come from people applying to your career site.

Robert found out what most of us in the business already know. Applying to jobs, doesn’t actually work. Yet, we spend so much time, energy, and resources building these great tech stacks and apply processes for just his!

So, what works?

Turns out about 85% of jobs are filled by good old fashion networking. You know someone, who knows someone, who has a friend, who’s cousin works in the department you really want to work for.

“Out-of-the-box hires rarely happen through LinkedIn (or any job board, career site) applications. They happen when someone influential meets a really interesting person and says, ‘Let’s create a position for you.’”

I disagree somewhat with the above quote. I’ve worked in large corporate TA shops, we just didn’t run around all willy-nilly creating jobs for really cool, smart people! We did many times find really great people and then stick them into a job we already had open, and usually the reason we found the person was someone who knew the job was open referred the person to us.

My advice to job seekers is always the same. Stop applying to jobs, start networking with every person you have a possible shred of connection with and let them know you’re looking for a position, what position you prefer, what position you would take, and where in the world you would work.

Every minute you spend networking is a thousand times better than every minute you spend online applying for jobs. Robert just proved this!

Honestly, You’re Not Disrupting Recruiting!

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So, there’s a ton of TA Technology on the market that is claiming to ‘disrupt’ recruiting. The recruiting they are claiming to disrupt is the agency recruiting game, for their ‘ever so thankful’ corporate talent acquisition ‘partners’. I’m going to name them, new ones crop up every day it seems, but I won’t give them the extra publicity. Here’s how their sales pitch goes:

“Hey, We’re disruptive! We’ll save you 70% off your cost per hire, just use our technology! Did we mention WE’RE DISRUPTIVE! Yeah!” 

That’s honestly the sales pitch. The reality is a little less flashy and entirely different story that real corporate talent acquisition leaders aren’t buying. Why? These disruptors are building their 70% sales pitch on agency fees as your cost per hire.

It works like this:

1. You can’t fill a position.

2. Agency can for 25% of the first-year salary on a $100k job.

3. Thus, your cost of hire is $25,000.

4. We’ll do it for $7,500!

The reality is, these tech companies are frauds. The true cost of hire for a direct hire for most organizations is less than $7,500. So, no one buys your disruptive pitch of savings. What you’re truly selling is a ‘discount’, not a technology disruption, and your soft-math is all wrong. Your ‘technology’ is basically an automated version of what an agency does (but less effective), offered at a discount.

To be fair, if you have no ability to recruit internally and you use a ton of agencies and have a huge agency spend, this might help you save some money. But, it’s a band-aid for a bullet wound, not a disruptive solution.

Discounting is a crappy world to compete in because you can never get out it. Once someone gets a discount, they always want a discount or more of discount. If discounting is your business model, you need to get out of that business.  Take a look at every single retail organization that has ever gone out of business. It started with discounting.

Okay, I’ll give you that you’re disrupting bad recruiting. I’ll give you that. But, guess what, no corporate TA leader I know likes the awful Indian-Call-Center recruiting models anyway. It’s the lowest common denominator in the recruiting world. We don’t need more of that, we need less of that.

Do you really want to disrupt recruiting?

Help TA leaders truly become better in understanding the technology that will actually help them hire noticeably better talent. Don’t just take advantage of them a little less the next company. Help them build a stack and a model where they don’t have to rely on outside organizations to do the hiring for them.

There’s some really good TA Tech on the market doing this. That’s the disruptive stuff – folks like Lever, Clinch, Smashfly, HireVue, Outmatch, Role Point, Greenhouse, Textio, Jobvite, Text Recruit, etc. (plus a ton of others I reviewed on my weekly  T3 tech blog series)

These organizations aren’t trying to take advantage of your ability not to be able to hire the talent you need, they’re trying to partner with you to make you self-sufficient. That’s disruption!

So, yeah, I run an agency. A post like this probably doesn’t help my business, but I can’t stand to see these upstarts try to sell themselves as technology when they’re not. Also, I do contract work, I don’t want your direct openings! I want your contingent openings!

Happy recruiting this week!

Association of Talent Acquisition Professionals (ATAP) first Board Meeting

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This week the Association of Talent Acquisition Professionals (ATAP) Board (of which I’m apart) met for the first time, live, and in person in Atlanta. There hasn’t been an official launch yet of ATAP, but the work continues to make this association the one global talent acquisition association that all recruiting professionals will turn to.

What the heck is ATAP? 

ATAP was founded originally by Ben Gotkin and Gerry Crispin, and then with a ton of help from a whole host of great TA advocates! ATAP was founded on the belief that talent acquisition, as a profession, needs an organization (like a SHRM) to support “US”, the TA Pros and Leaders that work in corporate environments, agencies, RPO, vendors, etc.

What the heck did the ATAP board and Executive Director Ben Gotkin (plus Gerry Crispin) do this past week? 

So, for over a year a ton of folks have put in a ton of work to get ATAP to the position it is now, which is basically build a complete foundation of an organization. That’s not easy! And this group brought ATAP into existence and gave it a soul.

The board and the Executive Director is tasked with building a Talent Acquisition specific association that meets all the needs of the stakeholders in talent acquisition. As you can imagine, just deciding on what the hell that means is a big job!

There are a number of critical things on the agenda that need to be addressed. First, you can’t have an association is you don’t have money! You don’t have money without members and/or sponsors. Why would someone want to be a member of ATAP?

That’s no small question. When you ask an HR Pro why they are a member of SHRM, they can rattle off a number of reasons. All those reasons were built over time, SHRM wasn’t launched with resources, certifications, advocacy, etc. But, you need to start somewhere!

ATAP is looking to do all those things you expect from a modern day association that represents your professional field. We need to build a complete body of knowledge for talent acquisition. We need to build a code of ethics for our profession. We need to build resources for our members.

We need to decide which pieces add the most value to our members, now and in the future, then prioritize that work. We need to do all of this with a current 100% volunteer organization, that can’t stay that way for long if we really want to gain traction and do really cool stuff for members.

How can you help? 

First, you can become a member! Becoming a member puts you in a position to be able to shape the future of ATAP and the future of talent acquisition. We have a ton of work in front of us, and we need TA pros and leaders who are passionate advocates of talent acquisition who want to volunteer and give back.

Second, join the conversation around a number of committees we’ll be launching over the next 90 days and once you become a member join the ATAP Facebook Group to give us feedback on many items we’ll be putting in front of our membership.

Third, spread the word. This is a grassroots organization that will not be successful with you. If you’re a TA leader, have your entire team join. If you’re a vendor consider being a sponsor of ATAP. For everyone, raise the conversation around how we (all of us) make recruiting better and a profession we are proud to be a part of.

I’m leaving Atlanta so energized and excited. The board of directors for ATAP is a ultra-passionate and diverse group of individuals that truly represent our profession. I’m proud to be a part of this future!

Working from Home is One Big Lie!

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Right now every single one of your employees is saying they would prefer to work from home! You’re doing everything you can to add work-at-home options to as many roles as possible, because this is the single hottest trend in workplaces, and it’s the only way you can attract talent to your organization.

By the way, it’s a big lie!

Actually, you have a very small percentage of employees who are saying they want to work from home, but they’re very loud and vocal, so it sounds like everyone. You also have a very small number of roles within your company that can be effective as a work-at-home role, based on a number of issues specific to your organization and your roles.

When you do the math of a small number of people who actually want to work at home and the small number of roles you have that could do this, you don’t have a real problem. You have a made up problem.

How do I know this?

Because most work-at-home people are actually choosing to ‘rent’ shared outside-the-home workspace. Organizations like WeWork and Factory are exploding in the co-working space. These are shared workspaces for the startup generation types, who are mostly working as individual contributors but want to be around other people who are also working.

In every mid-sized to large-sized city, you can find coworking organizations who are offering space. Why? Because this is what people want. They actually get motivated to be around other people who are working.

Working at home in your underwear sounds great until you get beyond the vacation phase.  At first, working from home seems like this great idea. All the freedom to work when you want, with little distraction, and ultimate flexibility. What most people find is this ultimate ‘freedom’ is something they are not very good at.

Working at home is one GIANT distraction. Oh, I should throw that load of laundry in. Hey, who’s driving down my street? Why does my neighbor wear Crocs outside to get the paper? I should make a good lunch today, then go for a run. Is that laundry done? Okay, Rocky, I’ll let you outside again, but I can’t play right now, I need to work!

Everyone believes they can work from home. 100% of people. About 2% of people are actually effective at working from home. What you find is 98% of people have almost zero self-insight into themselves. Being in a structured work environment actually, helps them be more productive, get things done, and meet the needs of the role you’re paying them to do.

Work-at-home and being flexible are two very different things. Being flexible means allowing an employee to add in some personal stuff that needs to get done during the day, knowing they’ll meet their work obligations without issue. Don’t confuse these two things. Being ‘flexible’ with your employees doesn’t mean you need to go full work-at-home mode.

What you’ll find is the employees will love it, you’re managers will hate it, and less work actually gets done.

Now, wait for the comments, because the work-at-home set lose their minds on posts like this! Why? Because they’re working from home and have time to read blogs about how they shouldn’t be working at home!

T3 – Hire360 (@Hire360io) – Effortless Outbound Recruiting

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This week on T3 I take a look at the recruiting technology Hire360. Hire360 is part CRM, part sourcing technology, it’s basically automated outbound recruiting made pretty easy. Hire360 is designed for your mid-level effort jobs. It’s easy to hire entry level to mid-level jobs. Once you hit your mid-level it starts getting tough, and this is where Hire360 takes over.

Hire360 is designed to be super easy to use. Simply cut and paste a job description or manually put in a list of skills you’re looking for and the system will automatically go out and source for that position from over 150 million resumes that are floating out in the internet in various databases, social profiles, etc. Also, Hire360 will pull in the resumes from your own ATS, and add those into the final search rankings, and any paid databases you belong to.

What Hire360 comes back with is a ranked list of candidates that are the closest fit for what you’re looking for, based on their initial algorithm, and one that will continue to evolve through machine learning as you hire to get even better and more dialed in. From here the system lets you easily click on those candidates you’re interested in and starts a full functioning email campaign to reach out to them, automated or manual. All email communication on both ends is tracked, and you get great metrics on your campaign.

What I like about Hire360:

– The system is designed for low volume mid to high-level positional hiring, but it’s simple enough that a hiring manager can easily manage the system. So, it makes a great option for SMBs who have their hiring managers do their own recruiting, or organizations with many locations where each location must do their own hiring. But, I also see this tech being used at any size organization.

– You pay by position ($250 max per position) to use the system, and you can make as many hires off that one position as you want. Let’s say you posted a job for Production Supervisor and you had three openings in the same plant, you only pay for one position. Also, even after you fill your position, the CRM functionality doesn’t stop working, so there is potential to still receive candidates after the fact as well.

– The simple CRM email tracking metrics are great for an organization to know where you are in the process of filling the position. The dashboard shows you outreaches, how many sent, opened, and replied. For this level of cost, you rarely see this level of detail.

– Hire360 is set up to source only 250 miles max from where your opening is located. Why? Because it’s rare you’ll ever pull in anyone beyond that, so why market and source nationally, when 99% of your hires will come regionally?

I’m impressed with the ease of use and the simplicity of this product. You don’t have to be in TA to use it effectively to find talent, and that is tough to design. I love that it seems to be perfectly made for organizations with multiple locations where a leader at each location is responsible to hire, not a centralized recruiting department. Also, the fact it helps you uncover hidden gold in your ATS is a super bonus I don’t think they even realize how valuable it is!

Well worth a test, you can’t beat the price. They are also building out an iCims integration, so if you use iCims, a test might be a necessity!

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 tech space and I wanted to educate myself and share what I find.  If you want to be on T3 – just send me a note – timsackett@comcast.net

Would You Hire Magic Johnson?

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(this is Magic and I at a recent MSU basketball game)

You might not have paid attention to this because you’re not a sports geek, more specifically an NBA sports geek, but the Los Angeles Lakers just hired their most famous player ever, Magic Johnson, to be their President of Basketball Operations.

If you know anything about me you’ll know this:

  1. I’m a Sparty, which means I LOVE Magic. When I was 9 years old my parents let me stay up and watch him lead MSU to the National Championship. I followed him to the pros and watched him win championships with the Lakers. I think he’s pretty neat!
  2. My dream job is to be the head coach of the Los Angeles Lakers. I make this known widely. They’ve never called.

So, you would have expected I would be super happy that the Lakers went and put Magic in charge of the whole show! But, I’m not. I believe it’s a major mistake on their part. Here’s why:

– Running an NBA team is a really difficult job, that takes specific skills you only receive by coming up through an NBA organization.

– The time commitment to running an NBA team is off the charts.

– The travel commitment to running an NBA team is unbelievable.

Magic, for all of this wonderful qualities, doesn’t seem to possess any of these skills sets needed. He’s an ultra-successful business owner and an all-time great NBA player, who is well respected. He’s also on the back side of his business career, ultra-wealthy, and more than likely unwilling to travel all over the world evaluating players in small, smoke-filled gyms across Eastern Europe.

My hope is Magic, will do magic stuff for the Lakers. He’ll surround himself with the best minds in the game. The greatest data nerds who can find hidden gems. He’ll watch the Moneyball movie and understand he can’t do this on gut instinct and his unbelievable charm. Because that won’t work. Most really great basketball players, put in this position, fail.

We do this in corporations all over the world. We hire the best ‘basketball player’ for a role that has very little to do with playing basketball, and then we are shocked when the ‘basketball player’ fails in a position of not playing basketball! We do this constantly in corporations! High performance in one position does not guarantee high performance in another non-related position.

High performance in one position does not guarantee high performance in another non-related position. I think we could all agree on this concept. Yet, we equate great performance in ‘mechanical engineering’ with the potential to be a great ‘manager’ of mechanical engineers. We somehow think those two things are similar. Mechanical engineering and Managing people. They’re in fact, very different things.

I would hire Magic Johnson for a lot of positions, but running my NBA team is very high on that list. Yes, he’s the greatest employee our organization has ever had. Yes, he knows basketball and played at an unbelievable level. No, he’s probably not the best hire to run this team. But the Magic fan in me hopes he kills it!

Should You Be Using Facebook Job Ads?

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If you haven’t heard Facebook has been rolling out some new job posting functionality on their site for your company’s Facebook page. Audra Knight, over at Workology put together a nice little “how-to”, so go check that out if you want to give it a try!

My question isn’t how do I post a job on Facebook, but should I be posting jobs on Facebook?

Facebook designed the feature because they felt like LinkedIn, and all those organizations that only use LinkedIn, were ignoring a giant percent of the working population. Hourly workers and actively seeking employment workers. That’s not LinkedIn’s specialty. They are unapologetically, white collar and a ‘professional network’, not a job board (so they keep saying).

Facebook looked at this and thought, “Hmmm, we’ve got a couple billion people using our ‘social’ network. A majority are hourly worker types who would like to see what great jobs are open, let’s build something for companies to connect with them”. They probably didn’t really sound like that. My guess is someone at FB said, “hey, you know we can make billions of dollars charging companies to post boost jobs to our members, right?”

So, now you can post your jobs on your Facebook page in a matter of minutes. For a few extra buck Facebook will let you pick certain demographics, like location and skills, and then they’ll make sure your job posting shows up in other Facebook members timeline, even those you have no connection to!

Who will get the best results from posting their jobs on Facebook?

  • High volume, low skill jobs is an easy target and those should produce well for you.
  • But, you should be doing some testing on most of your jobs!
  • Guess what? Not only are low paid, unskilled workers on FB, so are Engineers, IT pros, Accountants, Doctors, Nurses, Truck Drivers, Cops, Teachers, Executives, okay, basically everyone is on Facebook!
  • The other thing is most people will check into Facebook daily, most check in multiple times. Most people on LinkedIn, only check in once or twice per month.

Every organization should be testing this. It’s easy. It’s fairly cheap. It actually might work you. When you test you should be doing a few things:

  1. Use multiple Ads with different titles and wording. You need to see what catches someone’s eye and what doesn’t.
  2. Use different boost amounts on the same postings to see if that makes a difference. It should.
  3. If you want white collar, professional hires, test putting in the salary level in the title, “Process Engineer – $115K”. You can do this with success with hourly positions as well, “Electrical Technician $18.50/hr”. Every time I have A/B tested this, the postings with the salary in the title produced more results. Every time.

So, should you be using Facebook Job Ads? Yes.

Does Uber’s HR Really Suck?

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Clearly by now if you’re in HR you’ve read this post by a former female engineer from Uber. It’s very detailed and sounds almost exactly like most companies in the world. No, not the part of ignoring sexual harassment, but almost every other part! Worker gets wronged. The company seems to do nothing. Worker gets more and more frustrated. The company loses patience with the worker. It always ends bad. 

The former IT Engineer at Uber, Susan Fowler, left the company and on her way out she, figuratively, burned every bridge in sight with a scathing blog post about her experience!

From her post:

When I reported the situation, I was told by both HR and upper management that even though this was clearly sexual harassment and he was propositioning me, it was this man’s first offense, and that they wouldn’t feel comfortable giving him anything other than a warning and a stern talking-to. Upper management told me that he “was a high performer” (i.e. had stellar performance reviews from his superiors) and they wouldn’t feel comfortable punishing him for what was probably just an innocent mistake on his part.

I was then told that I had to make a choice: (i) I could either go and find another team and then never have to interact with this man again, or (ii) I could stay on the team, but I would have to understand that he would most likely give me a poor performance review when review time came around, and there was nothing they could do about that. I remarked that this didn’t seem like much of a choice, and that I wanted to stay on the team because I had significant expertise in the exact project that the team was struggling to complete (it was genuinely in the company’s best interest to have me on that team), but they told me the same thing again and again. One HR rep even explicitly told me that it wouldn’t be retaliation if I received a negative review later because I had been “given an option”. I tried to escalate the situation but got nowhere with either HR or with my own management chain (who continued to insist that they had given him a stern-talking to and didn’t want to ruin his career over his “first offense”). 

Ouch, that’ll leave an organizational mark! Go read the post, there’s much more than this little bit.

I’m in HR so I realize a few things about this scenario:

  1. There are always, at least, two sides to every story. If what happened to Susan, actually happened as she wrote, shame on Uber. But, there are always two sides.
  2. Susan just happens to have launched a new book and is writing another. The timing on this couldn’t have been better to sell books. (that’s just the cynical HR guy in me).
  3. The former head of HR at Uber during Susan’s time there, Renee Atwood, left to go be the CHRO at Twitter after only 2 years. After seven months she then left that role at Twitter. This might speak to the lack of leadership at Uber in HR during Susan’s tenure, it might not, it’s just one piece of data. Prior to Uber and Twitter, Atwood had only held Director level roles at a giant banking company. Taking on the full show is a completely different monster, then a narrow hr director role in a giant organization.

So, the blogosphere is ripping Uber apart for being a bad organization. They might be right, maybe they’re awful. What I hear from reading Susan’s piece is a disgruntled employee that sounds like they were in a bad situation. In her post, one HR pro points out to her that the common denominator in all of this is Susan. Which she takes offense to, and if everything is as Susan says, rightly so.

I can’t get over how familiar all this sounds and feels, though. I’ve been the HR pro sitting across from a ‘Susan’. A ‘Susan’ who claims to have ‘evidence’ but really has nothing. Who claims to have witnesses, yet none come forward. Who claim some very, very bad stuff, yet, I found it not to be true, and some really solid people getting tarnished in the process.

Uber might really suck at HR and be awful people. I can’t tell that from one person’s story. I’m in HR, I need to see all the sides!

What do you think?