Category Archives: Hiring

It’s Too Long

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Wait for it…

“That’s what she said!”

I saved you the trouble.

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

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

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

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

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

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

You’re taking too long.

 

There Are Only 6 Ways To Engage Employees

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

1. Anger

2. Disgust

3. Fear

4. Happiness

5. Sadness

6. Surprise.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

10 Mistakes You Don’t Want To Make In HR

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I thought it was time that I randomly start listing mistakes we make in HR and letting those coming into HR what not to do.  So, here you go, enjoy!

10 mistakes you don’t want to make in HR:

1. Hiring someone who reschedules their drug test more than once.  I’m willing to give someone one reschedule, stuff happens.  After one, if you’ve got a druggie trying to find out how to keep his Mom’s pee warm long enough to make it to the testing center.

2. Creating a leadership training program when it’s really one bad leader who just needs to be canned.  Everyone knows who the problem is, and now ‘HR’ is making everyone go through training one person needs.  They hate us for this.  Just shoot the one bad leader and move on.

3. Changing policy or making a new policy, when it’s really one idiot who is taking advantage of the current situation. See above.  We do this because *93% of HR Pros and Leaders are conflict avoidant (*Sackett Stats, it’s probably higher!).  Come join the 7% of us who aren’t, this side of the pool is really enjoyable!

4. Designing health benefits that are better for you, but worse for everyone else.  Don’t tell me this doesn’t happen!  It happens all the time.  The person in charge of plan design sees something that will help them, and believes it will also help everyone else.  Oh, look! We now can go see the Chiropractor for massages, but I can’t get my kid the name brand Asthma medicine he needs.

5. Talking about how much less money you make in HR, as compared to a bad performer in any other area. No one cares that you make $25K less than Mark in sales who is a buffoon.  It just makes you look bad and petty.

6. Throwing a fit about hiring an executives kid, or anyone else they want you to hire.  Just hire the executives kid.  This is not a battle you want to fight, it’s not worth it.  In the grand scheme of things this one hire doesn’t mean a thing.  The kid will either be good, average or bad.  Just like the rest of hires we make.

7. Designing a compensation plan which, by peer group, puts you higher than other functions.  I don’t care what the ‘Mercer’ data says, you shouldn’t put out there that you should be making $15K more than the person in Finance at your same level.  No one believes you, and they don’t trust you can handle this when the data doesn’t seem right.  This is especially sticky for Compensation Pros, who always believe they should be paid higher within the HR function.

8.  Thinking you can be ‘friends’ with people you work with, outside of work.  I’m not saying it can’t happen, it might.  It just becomes really bad when you have to walk into your BFF Jill’s office and ‘can’ her one day.   You can have very friendly relationships at work without inviting those folks over to the office for Girls Night Out.

9. Believing it’s not your job to do something.  In HR we fill the voids left by every other function.  It’s our job to do everything, especially those things no one else wants to do.  Never believe something is not your job!  It is.  Plus, that actually adds value to the organization.  Be the one function that doesn’t bitch and complain when they need to do something that isn’t on their job description!

10. Telling an executive they can’t do something because ‘we’ll get sued’.  Our job in HR is not to tell executives, or anyone else, they can’t do something.  It’s our job to tell them how they can get it done, while making it less risky to the overall organization.

What mistakes do you see HR makes?

 

Can Corporate Recruiters Poach?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Can Corporate Recruiters ‘poach’?

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

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

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

 

The 5 Most Common “I Missed My Interview” Excuses

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There’s one thing that happens to all recruiters when the job market shifts from employer driven to candidate driven: candidates accept interviews, then don’t show or cancel at the last minute.  Many times the candidates come up with the lamest excuses on why they have to cancel. Rarely, will they just come out and say, “Hey, I just don’t like you guys that much!”  It’s the one thing, no matter how good of  a closer you are, as a recruiter, you have to deal with almost daily in our business.

Since I’ve been in the business of recruiting for twenty years I’ve heard all the cancellation excuses. I’ve become numb to the entire process. Great HR Pros have to.  While it is upsetting to have someone cancel, it’s not surprising.  Our reality is we offer a potential candidate an opportunity and the best of us make it sound very enticing. Many times once the candidate comes back to earth, they realize for whatever reason, the opportunity isn’t for them.  Being that most people are super conflict avoidant, they won’t just tell it to you straight, that make up little white lies that seem believable.  Believable only to themselves, that is!

Here are the 5 most common “I missed my interview” excuses from candidates:

1. My Grandfather died! Really!  Really. Really…  In twenty years of recruiting I’ve had more candidates have someone die in their family than I believe is statistically possible, and I’m not just talking agency hires, this is corporate as well!  At a point, I want to laugh out loud on the phone when they call in and say it.  Not that I think death is funny, but it would be comical to them if they were sitting in my seat, knowing how many ‘death’ calls I take annually!  Also, grandparents are the most common death, because it seems to make most sense. This is all a good excuse because most people believe they won’t get a call back from the recruiter because they won’t want to deal with the death issue!

2. I got into a car accident! But, I’m okay, just can’t make the interview.  This one is a good short term excuse, but it still sets them up for a follow up call to reschedule.  Still, it’s used a lot!  Besides my staffing agency business, I also want to open up a body shop and funeral home all right next to each…

3. My kid got sick, I can’t go to the interview.  Another very believable and understanding excuse, but, again, it sets them up for the reschedule.  The problem with any of these types of excuses is they seem great when you’re leaving a message, but then you have to put up with a recruiter leaving thirty voice mails asking you to reschedule the email.

4. My employer needs me to travel out of state!  We work in tech so we actually get this one a lot.  This also comes with a built in reschedule excuse, “Can’t reschedule now, not sure how long I’m going to be, gotta go, big emergency, the data center is down!”  Ugh.  This one is tough to combat from a recruiter perspective.

5. I had to have emergency surgery!  Another good excuse that doesn’t have to be as bad as it sounds because they’ll add in the ‘dental’ component. “I had to have an emergency root canal, can’t talk, will call you when I can.”  Can also use it for ankles, knees, etc. Which gives the built in excuse of not being able to walk.  Plus the added benefit of, “I probably shouldn’t change jobs right now, with insurance, with this going on…”

If, and after twenty years in recruiting that’s a huge if, I was a very trusting man, I would have a view of the world that I must be the most unlucky person ever to have all these bad things and unfortunate timings happen to me!  But, since I’ve been in recruiting for twenty years, I get the game.

What’s the most used excuse you get from candidates who no-show or cancel out on interviews?

 

Why Changing How You Recruit Is Really, Really Hard

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Very quickly we are entering candidate driven markets in almost all segments of job categories, in almost all segments of the country.  Obviously, a better economy and increasing retirements from Boomers play a major role in this.  This is causing most companies to recruit differently than they have in a number of years.  I’m hearing the pain from corporate talent acquisition pros daily.  All over the country recruiters are having to actually recruit for the first time in a long time!

Getting recruiters to recruit is really hard.

Let that sink in for a moment.  Getting recruiters to recruit is really hard, when they haven’t really had to recruit for 10 years.

This will take change and here’s a glimpse of what most Talent Acquisition executives are facing right now:

1. We can’t get talent, we need to start doing this differently (Big Change, Uncomfortable).

2. Those who will have to change (Recruiters) immediately voice their displeasure, at a minimum. “Wait! What! You’re going to start measuring our activity!? Oh! You don’t trust us!”

3. Those who will get the benefit of change (Hiring Managers) sit quietly and watch, partially disbelieving anything will really change. Welcome to organizations.

That’s why changing how you recruit is really hard.  Those who have to do the recruiting don’t want change and are letting you know about it.  Those who need you to change don’t believe you can do it, and want you to prove it.    Neither side, seems to be on your side.

Changing how you actually recruit is very easy.  Getting people to change how they actually recruit is really, really hard.

 

Does Job Security Matter Anymore?

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Tower’s Watson released some data recently from a fairly large study of over 32,000 employees and 1,600 HR professionals which ranked critical factors of retaining your employees.   Here are the results:

Not surprising, money pretty much rules as always.  You want me to stay?  Pay Me!

What is surprising is how high up “Job Security” is on the employee side of the study.  For years Millennial experts have been telling us how these young kids don’t care about job security, they care about balance, importance of the work they do, challenging projects, etc.  Apparently, HR got the message, but the kids didn’t!

Studies like this always make me question ‘experts’.  Don’t you get the feeling that millennial experts are really just snake oil salesmen?  Never has a millennial expert said kids care about job security.  “Oh, these kids will work 10-20 jobs in their lifetime!  They are not looking for life time employment.”

So, employers believe job security isn’t important to employees (or probably more truthfully is the fact that employees have very little control over job security), so they push factors like Career Advancement and Challenging Work.  When in reality it’s very Maslow-esque easier than that.  Employees today, much like employees 100 years ago want basically the same thing:

1. Money

2. To know they have a job when they show up in the morning

3.  A chance to move up in the company they work in.

Fairly straightforward.  Fairly easy.  Fairly consistent over time.

The question is, can you deliver this as an employer?

The 1 Reason You Can’t Find Talent Right Now

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There’s one big reason you can’t find talent right now.  Here it is:

Simple economics plays a huge role in your ability to hire well.  We all like to think we are super star rock star talent acquisition pros, but the reality is we are mostly just pawns in economic cycles.  Sure you can have a great employment brand, and have great recruiting tools, and even have the most talented recruiters money can buy.  But rarely can’t you beat simple supply and demand.

Want to know why you’re struggling to hire right now?  There aren’t enough candidates for the jobs you need to fill.  It’s really quite simple.

We have an extended recession where almost all employee development and employee growth programs got cut to the bone.  No apprenticeships. No internships.  Old people held onto their jobs because of  the recession, while younger people went and found other ways to make ends meet.  The stock market that was in the tank during the recession came back bigger than ever.  The old people now want to retire, and they are in bulk!

Now you want to hire because business is back!  You have new positions to add. You have old employees leaving you with all of that knowledge, and you haven’t seriously tried to grow an employee in a decade.

It took you 10 years to get to this point.  It’s going to take you more than increased job board ads and new ATS to get you out of this.  Here are few tips to get you through a Candidate Driven Marketplace:

1. Start growing your own now. No, it’s not a short term solution. But you must realize your problem is both short and long.

2. Get comfortable with stealing talent from your competitors and anyone else. Also, they’ll be stealing from you.  Welcome to the show.

3. Upgrade your recruiting staff, yesterday.  Yeah, I like Bonnie to, but she can’t really recruit.

4. You have to get your organization to understand your reality.  Like Hillary said, “It takes a village”.

5. Learn the concept “Total Talent” and get comfortable with it.  The rest of the world already has.  The U.S. is a decade behind.  Total talent is the concept that an organization has many avenues of talent: direct employees, consultants, contract employees, temporary employees, part time, job share, etc. No longer should you even want just ‘direct’ employees.  Smart talent acquisition strategy incorporates all levels of talent, not just one.  Unless your name is Bonnie.

There Are Only 5 Real Jobs

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For those who didn’t see this last week the former NBA great and round mound of rebound Sir Charles Barkley made this comment:

“We got great lives. Why would we be miserable? Like, I’ll tell you, there’s five real jobs in the world: teacher, fireman, policeman, doctor, and somebody who’s in the armed services. Those are five real jobs.” 

For those who don’t know Charles he makes outlandish statements all the time, that’s why he gets paid more now to be a commentator on TV than he probably ever got paid to play basketball. But his statement got me to thinking, how many ‘real’ jobs are there really!?

First, you have to define ‘real’ job.  Charles believes talking about basketball on TV is probably not a ‘real’ job.  It doesn’t really add value to peoples lives further than to those who enjoy watching basketball and listening to other people talk about it.  So, it would seem that for a job to be real, it must have some value further than entertainment purposes.

Doctor’s add value beyond entertainment, but so do nurses and dentist and physical therapists.  So, are not those other health professionals ‘real’ jobs?  If we had no nurses, could doctors, theoretically, do what nurses do? Yes. Okay, so a we add another element to determine ‘real’ job. It’s a job no one else can do, but that profession could do the other jobs if they had to.

Teacher. You don’t have doctors without educators. Someone has to teach the kids to be doctors.  So, teachers are for sure a real job.  Could a teacher be a doctor?  Now, we are starting to run in circles.  Not all teachers could be doctors, some just wouldn’t be smart enough.  So, beyond, doctors and teachers, it would seem like there needs to be someone who just is simply brilliantly smart.  We don’t really have a job title for just smart guy or smart girl.

I will say fireman, policeman and armed services all seem to have a very similar skill set.  I would lump them into all one job – people savers.  That gives us really 4 jobs: Teacher, Doctor, Really Super Smart Person and People Savers.

Is there any others?

I’ve got one I think most people won’t even consider.  Sales Person.  Think of all those ‘jobs’ we have that are really just sales: Politicians, Clergy, most business professionals, educators, etc.  Our reality is that we need to people to sell us on stuff.  If no one sells, we all just sit around and wait for stuff to happen. Politicians sell us on the importance of change. Our religious leaders sell us the need to be good and get better.  Educators sell us on the importance of learning.  We are constantly being sold something.

So, for my money, there are 5 Real Jobs in the world:

1. Teacher

2. Doctor

3. Really Super Smart Person

4. People Savers

5. Sales People.

What would you consider a ‘real’ job? Hit me in the comments.

3 Ways I Make HR Better

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

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

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

1. I’ll make it cheaper

2. I’ll make it more simple to use

3. I’ll make it fun to do

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

From an article in Fast Company:

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

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

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

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

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

Just make it better.