Category Archives: Hiring

HR’s Christmas Gift

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Ok, before we get started, stop it.  I could have titled this, “HR’s Holiday Gift” or “HR’s Chanukah Gift”, etc. But, I didn’t, the majority of people celebrate Christmas, so I used Christmas. Breath in HR people. (for the record we celebrate both Hanukkah and Santa in my house – my kids are equal gift getters!).

So, what would it be? If you could have one thing in HR for Christmas, what would you ask for?

And don’t be lame. “Oh Tim, I would just ask for world peace and that Snapple brought back Compassion Berry” No you wouldn’t, not if it was real. I mean for really real!

I’m sure a bunch of HR Pros would ask for a new HRIS System. I mean that’s what we do during the holidays, we want the biggest baddest fastest new electronic device that will make our lives easier and make us look 10 pounds thinner!

I’m sure a bunch of HR Pros would ask for the ability to Hire more employees!  What a gift that would be.  Not only for the people getting hired, but for your overwork staff. One thing that hasn’t come back from the recession is HR and Talent Acquisition staffs. Most shops are still running very thin!

I’m sure a bunch of HR Pros would ask for a new Employment Brand!  Oh to be as sexy as Google, Zappos or Sodexo! Wouldn’t that be a wonderful environment to work in HR.  Life just seems easier when you work for a sexy brand.  It isn’t actually, but that’s what great branding does.  It makes some idiot like me think it must be easy to work in a great place like that, so they should hire me!

I’m sure a bunch of HR Pros would ask for better Talent for their organizations (which is technically way more than one gift, but let’s face it, some of us HR Pros don’t follow directions well!).   This is the freaking holy grail, right!  If we only had the top talent (instead of saying we only hire top talent – then hire those who respond to our posts) our lives would be so much easier!

There are so many things we could ask for in HR, but this is why I love HR – for all those gifts I listed above, and for so many more you and I could come up with, we work in a profession where we have the ability to deliver each and everyone of those to our organizations.  With enough time, patience, influence, strategy and luck, not one of those things I couldn’t give my organization.  Maybe that’s the best gift of all.

For the record – Visionary Leader – that’s my one gift – the one I would ask for.  Those are rare, those are hard to find.  Not many of us get the opportunity to work with a true visionary. Great managers, strong leaders, charismatic personalities – yes; But a Visionary Leader, that is something few get the opportunity to experience.

What would be your One gift you want for HR this holiday season?

How to Hire a Hustler

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Hustle: (via Marriam-Webster) “to sell or promote energetically and aggressively”.

Hustle: (via Urban Dictionary) “Anything you need to do to make money”.

Hustle: (via Sackett) “Getting sh*t done with a smile”.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately on what really makes someone successful.  I know folks who are completely brilliant, in a way most of us can’t even comprehend, both intellectually and creatively. I know why they’re successful. I also know of people who don’t seem to be the smartest, or the most creative, but they are also super successful. Those are the ones that make me wonder, what makes them successful?

They know how to hustle.

I say that will a love for what they do. Most people can’t hustle. It’s not in their makeup, their DNA.  It’s not a skill you can learn, you are either born a hustler, or you’re not.  Hustling gets a negative connotation. When in reality, it’s not always negative.  I find those people who I’ve worked for that have a hustler’s mentality can be highly professional and highly successful.

The thing is, there is really no replacement for hustle.

Not every organization needs people with that skill, and I don’t think I would want an entire organization of hustlers!  You need some, though, and you need them in the right positions. Hustlers know how to get things done in an organization.  They know how to make people feel like both sides won.  Some of the best hustlers I know in HR are on the labor relations side of the business.  Contract negotiations are usually one big hustle!

I wish someone would come up with an assessment that measured someones hustle level!  Hey, HR Tech, get on that! I’m buying.

Here’s the traits I think you need to find when assessing someone’s hustle level:

1. Are they willing to what it takes to be successful in whatever role it is you’ll be putting them in?

2. Do they have an entrepreneurial spirit?

3. Are they self-driven and ambitious?

4. Do they like competition?

5. Do they enjoy interacting with others?

6. Do they have a high tolerance to handle rejection?

7. Are they coachable and willing to adapt?

I don’t care what kind of department you are running in an organization, you can benefit from having a hustler on your team.  I think you could take most street hustlers off the street, clean them up in a corporate professional way, teach them corporate language, and they would thrive in corporate America!  No formal education. No skills. Just hustle. Let’s face it, most of what we do in corporate America is hustle!

How Fake Is Your Employment Brand?

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I think most employment brands are completely fake. The reason I feel this way is because HR and Executives approve the messaging.  We, HR and Executives, are the last people who really know what our employment brand truly is.  So, we end up with stuff like this:

Seems really cool!  Makes us feel good about ourselves and our organization.  But for the most part it’s one big white lie.

That’s marketing.  It’s not marketings job to tell you the truth.  It’s marketings job to get you to buy something.  Sometimes its just some crappy product or service. Sometimes its the church down the street with the cool young pastor and rock band.  Sometimes its working for your organization.

Many HR Pros and Executives get really pissed off when I say something like this.  That’s because they drink their own Kool-aid.  They truly believe the messages brought forth are the truth.  Those messages are what they hope and dream the organization to become, so they’re all bought in on making it happen.  I actually really like these people. I like people who are bought into making their organizations what their commercials are telling us they are, even when they aren’t.

Who wants to go work for an organization that puts up a commercial of some manager unable to communicate what needs to be done, and Bobby down in the accounting bitching he only got a 14 lb. turkey from the company, when last year he got a 15 lb. turkey?  No one.  But that’s truly your organization.  Organizations are like families. You have some folks in your family you don’t want the rest of the world to see, but when you take the family photo it looks like everyone is fairly normal and well adjusted.

So, how fake is your employment brand?  On a scale of 1 to 10, 1 being Goldman Sachs and 10 being Google, where does your organization fall?

Success is Relative #8ManRotation

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It’s that time of year when college football coaches get fired because they weren’t ‘successful’.

This year’s unsuccessful coach of the year has to be Nebraska’s Bo Pelini.  Here are some of his stats:

– Won 9 games every year he has coached at Nebraska. Not averaged 9 wins. He’s won 9 games each year!

– 67-27 overall record – a +.700 winning percentage

That seems pretty freaking good!  How many of you would take 9 wins each year from your favorite college football team (Alabama fans you can’t participate!)?  I’m a huge Michigan State fan and we’ve been fortunate to have double digit win totals four out of the last five years and we’re on cloud nine! If you asked me five years ago if I would take 9 wins per year for the next five, I would have bought it for sure!

Here’s what Bo didn’t do:

– No conference titles

– No BCS bowl appearances

– At least 3 losses each season

99% of fans in the country would take 7 years in a row of 9 wins each year.  Because most of us will never come close that success on our best year.

That’s why success is relative.

Think of this with your own hires and employees.  You judge success of your new sales person on the results of the sales person that just left.  If your new sales person sells $1 million worth of products, and the old guy sold only $750K, the new person is a rock star.  That same new sales person is judge against your all time sales person at $2 million, and suddenly, they’re a piece of crap.

Nebraska holds their coaching hires against legendary Nebraska coach Tom Osborne who won 13 conference championships and 3 national titles.

This is why comparing individuals in terms of performance never really works out well.  A better way is to determine what does ‘good’ performance look like in your environment, no matter the individual. Also, what does great performance look like.  Then measure your employees against those metrics, not an individual who might have been good or bad.

Most organizations struggle with this concept, because defining good and great performance is hard.  It’s easy to compare.

Don’t allow yourself and your organization to take the easy road. It doesn’t lead you to where you want to go.

Do I believe Bo should have been fired?  Yes, but not because of his won/loss record.  Bo wasn’t a fit, culturally, with Nebraska football.  Bo had a short fuse and lost it publicly and on the field way too often for cameras to see.  This isn’t what Nebraska people want from their coach.  They’re extremely loyal fans, and don’t like to be embarrassed. Yes, they want to win, but it’s not a win-at-any-cost fandom that we’ve been accustom to seeing recently in major college athletics. Win, but win with pride and respect for the history of the program.  That’s tough. Nine wins per year, apparently doesn’t do that!

 

The Container Store Doesn’t Want to Hire Harvard Grads

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You probably saw this on the web this past week, but in case you didn’t a former Harvard University graduate and Emmy award winning writer got rejected for a job at The Container Store for the holidays.  She was very surprised by this, in a pompous I’m-really-to-good-for-you kind of way, but I’m desperate, so you would be lucky to have me. Here it is in her words:

“The email from The Container Store asking for holiday help arrived a week before my rescheduled MRI. Of course I applied! You would have, too, if you had one kid paying his own way through college, another applying, no health coverage, a bum boob, a broken marriage and an empty bank account. There is no time for shame in a recession. You do what you have to do. There are worse ways to spend your day than greeting visitors at the front of a store run by a company whose products you actually use. A week later, I got an email from the Manhattan Loss Prevention department at The Container Store. Here’s what it said:

Hello Deborah —

Thank you for your interest in employment opportunities at The Container Store.

We carefully review all applications and consider each person for current or future opportunities. At this time, we are moving forward with other candidates for this position.

Again, we thank you for your interest in The Container Store. We wish you much success in your job search.

Sincerely,

The Container Store
Manhattan Loss Prevention

Reader, first I laughed when I read this. Then I cried. Oh, Reader, I cried and I cried, long and deep and mournfully. I cried for me and my kids, then I cried for everyone else in my same boat, then I cried for everyone in far worse boats. Because seriously, if an Emmy Award-winning, New York Times bestselling author and Harvard grad cannot land a job as a greeter at The Container Store — or anywhere else for that matter, hard as I tried — we are all doomed.“

Really?  We are all doomed because someone who has a Harvard degree and can write can’t get a service level holiday job?

Let’s take a look at why she probably didn’t get hired. I’ll give you some possible reasons on why The Container Store decided to go another route:

1. It’s a temporary job for the holidays, where they need someone to greet stressed out holiday shoppers.  Many people work these jobs each year to get extra holiday money, they have experience doing this, they can be counted on, not to quit after the first rude person yells at them. Experience counts. Even in ‘crappy’ jobs.

2.  These jobs are boring and monotonous. Service level companies know that most Harvard educated folks would be bored and not engaged in these positions.

3. Looking at the application of someone with a Harvard education and being a writer, they might have decided the person would work only until they got a better job, and they wanted to ensure the person stayed on through the completion of the assignment.

4. Maybe they had someone who has worked ‘temporarily’ for them in the past apply to come back, that had previously performed well.

5. Maybe they got internal referrals of friends and family from their employees, and decided those hires might ‘fit’ better.

No doubt Deborah is smart and a good writer. That doesn’t mean she would be good for the container store, and it is pompous of her to believe she would be.  She didn’t see this ‘job’ as good, she saw it as a step down, and something she was ‘forced’ to do.  Sounds just like someone you really want working for you, right?  “Well, I don’t have anything else Container Store, I guess I’ll take your crappy job.”

The Container Store rejected a Harvard graduate because a Harvard graduate isn’t the best hire, the best talent, for the position they were hiring for.  I might not be a Harvard graduate, but that seems pretty simple to figure out.

How to Kill a Hiring Manager and Get Away With It!

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My wife and I just finished watching the entire series of Breaking Bad!  All five seasons, sometimes we went three episodes deep in a night. It was tough, but we persevered. You’re welcome!

This really isn’t a Breaking Bad series post, I promise. If you haven’t seen the series, I thought it was worth it. Something funny happens to you when you watch so much darkness in such a short time.  I will warn you about that.  You begin to feel like it’s somewhat normal. Like somehow I could actually get away with the stuff Walt is doing on TV!

That leads me to how you can kill a hiring manager and get away with it!

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard recruiters say, “Ugh! I hate my hiring managers! I wish I could shoot them!” Or, something to that effect.

Next to candidates who bomb or don’t show up for interviews, Hiring Managers have to be in every recruiters Top 3 worst things they have to deal with.  “Of course, it isn’t every hiring manager”, we say out loud, so the ones that are listening think they’re still awesome, when they really suck.  “There’s only a few hiring managers that can be difficult to deal with”, we say out loud again, like it really is going to matter.

I’m guessing there must be some law about posting something on a blog about instructions on how to kill a hiring manager and get away with it.  I don’t remember reading anything from WordPress when they allowed me to sign up this blog.  You would think that would be bolded in the instruction: “HEY! Don’t write sh*t about killing hiring managers! Or you could be put in jail!” 

I better be strategic about how I word this.

Well, after watching 62 straight episodes of Breaking Bad, apparently it’s fairly easy to dissolve a body in a big 50 gallon drum with some acid.  In the show, they always wore protective gear, like rubber suits and gloves.  They also had the equipment to pick up and transport said 50 gallon drums of disgusting liquid. As you can imagine this takes care of the not getting caught part.

Here are a few ideas, for entertainment purposes only, on how you might kill a hiring manager, but of course ‘we’ never would:

1. Disgruntled Crazy Candidate.  We actually protect our hiring managers so many times they don’t even know it!  We know the crazies, but we filter them out.  Not this time! This time not only do we pass them along, but we let the Crazy Candidate in on a little feedback, “Yeah, the hiring manager hated you, and thinks you’re crazy, and here is her address…”

2. Strange White Powder on the Resume. You hear about this stuff all the time with crazies sending stuff to politicians.  I’m sure it works the same for hiring managers! But you put yourself in jeopardy as well. But, if you’ve read this far, my guess is you’re on the edge already, once one more step!

3. Nut Allergies. Hiring managers love conference room cookies!  This time all you need to do is make a special batch of your Chocolate Chip “Surprise” cookies, but don’t call them “surprise”, they’ll feel the surprise!

My guess is I’ll get at least 3 ‘unsubscribe’ emails after this goes live.  That’s always a good measurement of success as a blogger.  How many people did you alienate today?

Happy hiring folks!

P.S. – if this is the FBI or any other law enforcement agency reading this, I’m joking, this is a joke, I love my hiring managers. Well, most of them.

Are You Reliable or Flashy?

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I’m going to put this into a car analogy.  Reliable is a Honda Accord or a Toyota Camry.  Flashy is a Chevy Camaro or a Dodge Charger.  You really can’t be both. In the auto world the closest thing to being both is a Tesla, and most people can’t afford one of those!

You either lean one way or the other.  If you want flashy, you are comfortable with the fact you might not get to work every day, because those cars tend to break down more often.  If you want reliability, you probably aren’t turning any heads, but when you turn your key that engine is starting every time.

I find most people select people like they select cars.  You are biased one way or the other, and find most people biased towards ‘flash’.  They like the good looking people and the smooth talkers.  Damn the results.  That person made me turn my head! They must be ‘good’.  Therein lies one of the major problem we have.  Looking good has absolutely nothing to do with being good.

People look at that new Audi A8 and believe because it looks awesome, it must be awesome.  Do a little research and it becomes a bust of a buy, because it constantly breaks down and has problems.  They look at a Subaru Forester and think ‘boring’! Until they realize that thing will still be running well after you retire.

So, what I’m saying is people are basically cars, minus the extended warranty!

I tend to lean reliable.  It’s not that I don’t like pretty people who speak well.  I really do.  But I really love people who come to work every day and bust ass.  You can be both, you can be a Tesla, but let’s face it, most of us can’t afford that talent!   We make offers to Camrys.  No one pins up photos of Camrys in their bedrooms as a kid.

It’s just so easy to get sucked into flashy.  They’re all bright and shiny, and smell good, and you feel better about them representing your brand, that is until they completely screw something up.   Then you’re out there trying to explain why you hired them to begin with, knowing you can’t say the truth. “Well, have you looked at him!?  He’s gorgeous! How could we not hire him.”

So, the question to you HR and Talent Pros – are you a Toyota Camry buyer or a Chrysler 200/Dodge Avenger buyer? Same exact price point, one is a considerably better buy than the other.

 

Employee-Zero

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All this Ebola talk and Patient-Zero stuff has got me all fired up to be an investigator!  I can’t even imagine the nightmare it must be to try and track back all this illness to the first person.  But, it’s also the coolest thing that they can actually do that!

What if we could trace back to ‘Employee-Zero’?

You know, that one hire, that one employee, that turned it all around for your organization.  I’ve worked at some really successful companies, and I’ve worked at some companies that were successful and then on a downward trend.  I like to think that my hire didn’t put us on a downward trend, but let’s face it, no one really did any due diligence to find out for sure!

You see organizational leadership do this all the time for bad hires and bad results.  I have to say, usually, Chief Marketing Officers (CMOs) take the brunt of this.  “Well, we were great before they hired that new CMO, then sales went into the tank and we haven’t been the same since!”  CMOs become Employee-Zero more than any other single employee! They get way too much blame for bad results, and way too much credit for good results!

You almost never hear about Employee-Zero when it comes to good results!  “Yeah, you know when we really took off, it’s when we hired Tim!”  Bad results equal a bad individual hire.  Good results equal a team of good employees and good hires.  Like how that goes!?  We like to place blame on a few, but give credit to many. Welcome to modern day leadership theory.

We measure almost everything in in HR and Talent Acquisition, you would think one of the new shiny data analytics companies would come up with some secret sauce on how to figure out which one of your employees is Employee-Zero.  Why would it be important?  If we could figure out why that one employee, or why certain employees early on made us successful, or put us on the path to success, don’t we really finally solve the hiring equation?

It’s a bit altruistic I know.  The reality is we would be looking at historical data, the times have changed, the conditions have changed, there is no real way of us replicating that exact scenario again to get the same magical results.   Regardless, I think it would be cool to know, I’m a HR geek that way.  Talk about analyzing your hiring!  I’m sure it’s just a matter of time, many organizations obviously have the data, we just need some data scientist to believe it matters.

What do you think?  Do you know who your Employee-Zero is?

Dream Jobs Are A Lie

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I hate that we are meant to feel that we should have our dream job.  It’s drilled into our society at nausea from mass media, our celebrities, our teachers and spiritual leaders. It’s all basically complete bullshit, but we eat it up like it came directly from G*d.

It didn’t.  Whichever G*d you believe in, she/he never said ‘Thou shalt have your dream job’, never.

Celebrities stand on award stages and tell our children to never give up their dreams, you can do whatever you want.  No.  No, they can’t.  Let’s face it, Mr. Celebrity, you were given a gift, most people don’t have that same gift, so stop telling my kid they can be you.

I know this upsets some people.  They love to live in a fantasy world that someday they stop working their 9 to 5 and start being a fairy princess.  I hate to tell you this, but you won’t.  Sorry, Billy, you’re an overweight short kid with bad eye sight and irrational fear of clouds.  You won’t be the next NFL Hall of Fame quarterback.  But you might be a really awesome Accountant, and that’s not a bad gig.

I don’t have my dream job.

I have a job I like a lot.

My dream job would be to make a ton of money managing and/or coaching a professional sports team. I would take basketball or baseball.  I really think I would be happy with either.

I know that won’t ever work out for me, so I don’t spend much time really thinking about it.  It would be stupid for me to do so.  But that’s my ‘dream’.

If it’s my dream, shouldn’t I give up everything I have and chase it?  Give up my well-paying, really good job.  Give up my house.  My kids college education.  My retirement account.  I mean this is MY dream!

Mr. Celebrity said I can reach my dreams.  We all can.  We just have to want it more.  We just have to not give up striving for it.

I met a person last week who said he had his ‘dream job’.  It was a good job, but he also told me he missed his kids, because his dream job made him travel a lot.  He also said his dream job had him working harder than he ever had prior.  The longer he talked, the longer it didn’t sounded like a dream job, and the more it sounded just like every other job.

The concept of dream jobs is bullshit.  That’s okay.  The sun will still come up tomorrow, even if you tell yourself I’ll never have my dream job.  You’ll be alright.  You can still have a really good, awesome life.

Be wary of someone telling you to chase your dream job.

Why Your Best Performers Make Horrible Leaders

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We all make this mistake, and we’ll continue to make this mistake.  It’s the same old story.  One of your employees performs really, really well, and because of their performance you move them out of the position they are in and put them in a leadership position. Then, they fail and become a lousy performer.

The best companies in the world make this mistake, and keep making it.  The worst companies make this mistake as well, and every other company in between. We can’t stop ourselves, it might be the largest single failure of business in the history of the world, and we can’t stop ourselves.

I like sports and it’s easy to make this analogy with sports.  Larry Bird, one of the all time NBA greats, couldn’t handle being a head coach.  But he was one of the top basketball players of all time.  He couldn’t take that those players he was coaching weren’t as good as him, couldn’t do the things he could do. He couldn’t understand this.  For him, it was easy…

Great performers are great because they do or have something no one else does.  It might be superior work ethic, it might be G*d given talents.  Regardless, they have perform better than everyone else.  Therein lies why they struggle to become great, or even marginal, leaders.  They can’t understand why you can’t do the same thing. I did it. What’s your problem!?

We take our best and brightest and we ‘reward’ them with management positions.  We believe this is what they really want.  In reality most don’t actually want this.  They really love what they are doing, shown by the tremendous performance they are giving you.  And, as an organization we want to reward that great performance, but we have structure and the only way we can really reward them, to give them more money, the big money, and the big title, is to promote them.

So, we promote them.

And we hope. We hope they’ll be one of the few who can make the transition and not be a total failure when it comes to leading other people, but rarely does it really happen.  Usually, it’s just a slow death of another great performer into the mediocrity of leadership.

A few organizations are beginning to just stop this.  They leave their great individual performers in position and just pay them like they would pay a leader. They give them a leader title. But what they don’t do, is give them people to manage!  They reward them for truly great performance, and put them in a position to keep performing great.

Your best, most talented person is worth more than your average leader.  But we struggle with this because it doesn’t fit nice and neat to a compensation pay band, or any job description we have in our HRMS system. We feel this undeniable desire to force people into positions we know they won’t do well in, because it makes us feel better when we pay them more.  Justification of value.  We value leadership more than great performance. That’s 1950 talking.  Stop listening.