Category Archives: HR Department of One

HR Mind Games!

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HR Mind Games is a quick hitting, 20-30 minute hangout hosted by my great friend, Kris Dunn, founder of FOT and the HR Capitalist and sponsored by Caliper, the leading provider of Assessments for Selection, Talent Management, and Leadership Development.

In each episode of HR Mind Games, we’ll cover how general behavioral assessment geekiness/expertise helps HR and Recruiting Pros make better hires as well as maximize performance once that talent is in the door!

Episode #1 is going to be a doozy – How to Hire Sales Pros Who Are “Hunters”, not “Farmers”.  We have a LOT of opinions on this people, and the scars (and behavioral science) to prove it

If you love to geek out on the assessment side – CLICK HERE TO SIGN UP FOR THIS EPISODE OF HR MIND GAMES!!!

In our first episode, we’re going long on how to use assessments to figure out who the true “hunters” are across sales candidates.  Join us and we’ll share what we’ve learned and what to focus on from a behavioral perspective to ensure sales hires are “optimized” to bring home the bacon!!  We’ll even give you a great template to compare sales candidates to as you hit the recruiting trail!

Even if you’re unsure if you can make it or not, sign up to make sure you get the templates for future sales searches!

Future episodes: How to spot and deal with Narcissistic Managers, How to Use Assessments for Good, Not Evil…. good times in this series…

CLICK HERE TO SIGN UP FOR THIS EPISODE OF HR MIND GAMES!!!!

What do Americans Really Think About Labor Unions?

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So, if you’re in HR, like me, you’re probably sitting back waiting with anticipation for the Supreme Court of the United States to deliver a very important ruling around labor unions in the case Janus vs. AFSCME. It’s a case challenging the practice of public sector unions charging “agency fees” to employees who decline to join the union but who still benefit from the deals it bargains. The fees are typically similar to, but a bit lower than, union dues.

I’ve long said, on this blog, I think labor unions, in America, are virtually useless and ineffective for modern workers. I say this because in modern American hiring practices if you’re a bad employer with bad employment practices, you won’t get talent (hourly or salary) and you’ll go into death a spiral as a company.

Workers today, don’t need protection like they once did in America. But, that’s just my stupid opinion, and as soon as I say that someone always sends me an article or tells me of some bad company or industry where workers still do need protections. I get it! It’s not all or nothing, but you can’t tell me that unions today or doing the same work of the unions of our grandparents and great-grandparents!

Because of this Janus case, APM Research did a recent study to find out what Americans really think about this issue of should an employee be forced to pay union dues, or at least their fair share, or like the 28 states already have laws on the books, should employees be Right-for-Work which allows them to decide if they pay dues or not to work in those jobs?

Here’s what APM Research find? 

-Americans are evenly split in their preference for “fair share” (mandating some dues of all union workers) as opposed to “right-to-work” (where each worker covered by union contract may opt out of paying dues) policy regarding unionization.

– Democrats are in support of “fair share” more often, and Republicans are in support of “right to work” more often. No surprise!

– Surprisingly, lower educated workers (those you would think would be in support of unions) actually are more in support of right-to-work. Why? Probably because lower educated workers tend to make less money and if you make $15 per hour, a union taking “$X” out of that small $15 per hour doesn’t feel good at all! Basically, low-income workers, who are under a union contract, don’t see enough value in those dues to see it worth their while in paying.

– “Fair Share” is favored by about 60 percent of those who have direct union experience themselves or through a household member, and those living in North Eastern states. So, those with actual union experience more often see value in paying those dues.

– Stronger unions are preferred by at least two-thirds of women. Which clearly speaks to the historic employment injustices that most women still feel today.

– A majority of Americans (62%) indicate that “stronger” unions would be better for the country; only one-quarter indicate a preference for “weaker” unions.

Like with any study, you have to look at the sample. APM asked 1,000 American adults, so not huge, but it should be enough to representable, but we don’t know the demographic data behind the sample.

The crazy part about all of this is only 12% of full-time workers in America are covered by unions! So, if you ask 1,000 workers about unions, only 120 of them are even in union jobs. So, we, as Americans, have very strong views about unions, positive and negative, without much experience in actually working in or with unions in our careers.

Keep an eye out for the Janus decision! I’m sure the HR world will light up with opinions on what it means for the future work environment for millions of workers nationwide.

Career Confession of Gen Z: Flexible Work Hours Are Key to Recruiting Gen Z

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You may notice that I mention my Mom in a lot of my posts because I have the best Mom in the world. It’s just a fact. She has an agreement with my Dad that he’s not allowed to talk about her in his posts without permission, but I don’t have that agreement so, sorry Mom!

One thing that my Mom has always been super big on is sleep. Ever since my brothers and I were little, she made sure we got more than the recommended amount and now I can’t survive without 7-8 hours of sleep a night!

One thing that I have noticed during my time abroad here in Spain and during my time in Japan (I was in an exchange program in middle school) is that sleep is not as important here.  My 6-year-old host sister gets about 8 hours of sleep every night where I would get 11-12 when I was her age. My host parents maybe get 4 or 5. There is just a different culture around sleep in other countries.

Another thing that has stuck out to me is the late start times in Spain. The streets are usually dead before 9 a.m. and most shops don’t open until 10 or 11. People go out to bars and clubs at 1 or 2 and stay out until 4 or 5 and then, get up for work the next day!

Something that I enjoy about college is that you get to make your schedule around what times fit best for your own personal preferences. For me, I learn best in the mid-morning to mid-afternoon, but many of my friends learn best at night.

This is another thing where I don’t know which system is better. I don’t know if America’s “early bird gets the worm” is necessarily better than Spain’s later start times, but I do know that every person is different. Something that is really important to me is sleep and I know that in my 20s, I don’t want to have to go to bed at 9 or 10 pm in order to get the amount of sleep I need because my job starts super early in the morning.

This brings up something that I know I will look for in a job when I get out along with many of my fellow Gen-Z’ers: flexible start and end times.

I think it’s important to allow your employees to work at the times that are best for them. I have seen flex time discussed as a benefit for people with families but it also benefits those people that don’t work best in a traditional “9-5” setting. Maybe 11-7 works best for those night owls. I know that there is no part of me that will ever want to work a 7-3 like some people do. (Editor Dad note: Don’t you love how Cam believes ‘working’ 8 hours is 9-5, and now 8-5 with an hour lunch!)

Right before I wrote this post, I called my Mom to talk about how many hours of sleep we got as kids. When I told her what I was writing about, the first thing she said is “well Dad has his meetings first thing in the morning, so he can’t always let people do that”. I get it. I get that it doesn’t work for every company and every situation, but I think that flexibility is important to implement in as many ways as possible.

Let your employees get enough sleep and do their best work by allowing them some flexibility to sleep and work at the times that are best for them. So, if you want your Gen-Z employees to be competent the day after the Super Bowl or the Game of Thrones finale, it’s a good idea to let them sleep in a little bit. 

 

This post was written by Cameron Sackett (not Tim) – you can probably tell because it lacks grammatical errors!

HR and TA Pros – have a question you would like to ask directly to a Gen Z? Ask us in the comments and I’ll respond in an upcoming blog post right here on the project. Have some feedback for me? Again, please share in the comments and/or connect with me on LinkedIn.

Do You Work in a HR Center of Excellence?

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Is your HR department the best in the biz? If you answered “yes” you’re probably stretching it – but we know a few HR experts who can actually help you get there! The FOT team is made up of industry pros from multiple top-notch HR shops (with the awards to prove it), and now they want to tell YOU how to be awesome at HR too during our upcoming webinar.

Join us on June 7th at 1 PM ET for our webinar, The FOT Guide to Building an HR Center of Excellence sponsored by Paycor where we will reveal our trade secrets to making your HR shop #Goals by sharing:

– How to build a solid HR team from the ground up that will put you on track to become a Center of Excellence

– The 6 pillars necessary to any HR team’s success, and how you can use each one to propel your organization towards greatness

– 3 key insights that will allow you to move past the foundational HR and put you on a clear path to HR excellence

– A FREE tool that will allow you to pinpoint where your team is at on the journey to becoming an HR Center of Excellence

Kris Dunn and I will lead you through how the FOT team would build out your HR COE from scratch, or from where you are right now no matter how bad you think you might be broken!

FOT believes that every HR shop can be a COE. It’s not easy, but it’s also not like we are trying to launch the Space Shuttle! What you need is the knowledge and the plan, which we will give you!

It all goes down on June 7th at 1 PM ET (Noon CT, and 10 AM PT).

Register today for this Free Webinar

Does This Sweater Make Me Look Fat?

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I’ve got a bit of a problem.

I love buying new clothes, jackets, and shoes. You see, I’m kind of built like a fire hydrant. Picture a fire hydrant in your mind right now. Not very sexy is it!

So, I compensate, not by eating a great diet and working out constantly! Hell, no! That’s really hard work. I compensate by buying more clothes that I think will make me look skinnier than I really am!

Do you do this?

We do this in HR and Talent Acquisition all the time!

Just replace ‘clothes’ with ‘technology’. Yeah, we suck at HR, so instead of going out and fixing our foundational issues, let’s go buy a new pretty technology to cover up all of this fat, err incompetence!

Yeah, baby, with this new shiny technology no one will ever suspect we really suck as bad as we do!

The new stuff we buy screws with our heads. Every new shirt and sports coat I buy, I look at myself, and go “oh yeah! you’re going to look so awesome when you wear this!” Then I get on stage and someone tags me in a picture and I want to starve myself for a year!

Buying new stuff to make us look better than we are is the biggest lie we tell ourselves, ever.

So, before you go buy that new technology to fix all of your problems of why you suck at HR or TA, you have to know one truth. That truth is technology doesn’t fix why you suck. If you suck, great technology will make you suck faster. Bad technology will still make you suck, you just won’t be as fast as sucking!

Just like clothes won’t make me skinnier, new technology won’t make your function perform better.

 

The Talent Fix – My new book is now available to purchase! If your organization is having trouble hiring, this is a must buy! 

Talent Fix Review: My mom says it’s her favorite book that I’ve written!!! (I’ve only written one book!)

Purchase The Talent Fix now! 

How Hard is it for Candidates to Find Your Jobs on your Career Site?

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The other day I got contacted by a large enterprise level TA leader. She had a major problem about to hit them. They had to hire thousands of people and she was hoping I could tell her which chatbot to use to help them.

Sweet! I love TA Tech, let’s talk about some of my favorites!

I pulled up their corporate site because I wanted to see what ATS they used and just check out the career site.

This is where I found her first problem! The first problem was I had to search to find out how to find their jobs! Like four clicks deep into the corporate website before I could even begin a job search, let alone apply.

There is only one right place for candidates to find jobs on your corporate website. It’s at the top of the page, the same exact place where you find things like: Home, Company, Products, Search, etc. If you’re making candidates scroll down to the bottom of your site, you don’t care about talent. If you’re making candidates search to find “Careers” on your site, you don’t care about talent.

You know who you are. “Well, Tim, we put “careers” under the “About” tab because we want our products front and center!” Nice! So, those candidates you desperately need now have to go on a snipe hunt to find out how to apply for your jobs!? How’s that working out for you? Or you make the scroll down fourteen feet to the bottom where you put things like “investor relations”, “contact information”, “press inquiries”, “Legal Notices”, etc.

The most innovative companies in talent acquisition have ‘finding’ their jobs down to one click. You pull up their page and it says something like “Jobs!” or “Apply Now” or “Careers” in the top right corner of the website. Sometimes there is even a button along in the corner to make it even easier for candidates to spot.

When a candidate clicks on that top of the page, right corner link they are instantly taken to a page that allows them to search. No more clicking around, no more searching for how the hell they can find which jobs you have open. It’s right there. One click.

It’s pretty common for me to visit a large brand corporate homepage and it will take me 4-7 clicks before I can actually search their jobs. If you ever want to know where TA falls in the order of importance in your organization, just count the clicks. The more you click, the less influence TA has in your organization. It’s fairly unscientific, but I find this little measure almost always works out.

So, my new TA friend was looking for a chatbot but didn’t really need a chatbot. Well, at least not yet. Foundational blocking and tackling of TA can do wonders for helping you hire. If it takes me four or five clicks to find your jobs, you’re in trouble. If you make me search around your site on how the hell I apply, I leave and go someplace else.

I know that 90% of know this,  but almost 50% of organizations can’t figure this out. Why? Because we as TA leaders aren’t going to our executive team and telling them, “Hey, idiots! We are losing 67% of our candidate traffic because some moron in marketing doesn’t like how “Jobs” looks on our corporate website in the righthand upper corner! Can we stop being stupid and do the right thing?”

I know selling our stuff is important, but if we can’t fill jobs, we won’t have stuff to sell. I know putting our employment brand out front is important, but why are we creating a search game for candidates to solve to just apply for our jobs?

Simple Tip to Share with Your Executive Team: Hiding how a candidate can apply for our jobs, doesn’t actually help us fill jobs! 

So, where do candidates find your jobs on your corporate homepage?

Announcing the HQ for HR Game Show – Sign Up to Play Today!

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Most of you know I founded another site called Fistful of Talent – we are getting ready to do something cool based off of the HQ series many of you play and have some fun in the process…

Fistful of Talent has teamed up with Paycor to bring you HQ for HR every Tuesday at 1 PM, starting May 1st. We’ll air five episodes with fifteen different HR leaders! Watching this could be the best 15 minutes of your day!

Here’s how it works – hit the link here or below to register for HQ for HR, and you’ll automatically receive email notifications each week about when HQ for HR is going live each Tuesday.  Click the link and join us and answer 12 HR body of knowledge questions digitally while you watch your peers answer them live on air.  You can do it from your desk or your phone, we just want you there!
After every episode, we’ll post a top 10 leaderboard at Fistful of Talent and here at the Capitalist showing who among the participants is an HR LEGEND.  We’ll use that leaderboard to invite you on the show live the following week – we’ll keep working down the list until we have 3 takers!  The top 5 cumulative scores across the 5 episodes will receive a major award to be announced during Episode 1.
PS – no Google allowed – or even Bing, people. We trust you because you look trustable, and let’s face it, most of you are in HR.
Check it as FOT’s Tim Sackett and your friend KD get down to the nitty-gritty with some of the sharpest minds in the HR/Talent industry!

Career Confessions from Gen-Z: What is Gen-Z looking for in a Mentorship Program?

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Hey everyone, I’m back! I took a week hiatus (finals week man) and more Gen-Z posts are coming your way! (Dad editor’s note: I didn’t give him a week off for finals! Buck up, son! Welcome to the show! It’s called multi-tasking! Sure I’m paying you nothing, but I still expect a post each week!) 

For my freshman year of college, I wanted to get away from Michigan and the Mid West. So, I decided to move to New York and attend a school called Marist College. At Marist, I was on the swim team and was immediately overwhelmed. Swim was hard, being away from my Mom was hard, having no friends was hard. It was a rough time.

Before I had gone to college, I had signed up to be apart of a student-athlete mentorship program, where upperclassmen athletes at Marist got paired with freshman athletes of different sports. I got paired up with a guy from the cross country team and I immediately knew that I didn’t want to be apart of the program. The purpose of the program was to meet up, maybe get lunch or coffee, and talk through any problems you’re having at school and in your sport. After a few forced hangout sessions, we stopped talking altogether and went our separate ways.

Now, I think that mentorship programs are a great idea. Having gone through a program myself, and not getting much out of it, I have gathered my own list of how to make a successful mentor program and what I would like to get from a mentor:

  1. Be Relatable: A key characteristic of having a good mentor relationship is being able to relate to them. The mentor needs to be able to relate to their “mentee” and vice versa, or there won’t be any necessary help given or received. This is the main reason that my mentor relationship wasn’t successful. We had absolutely nothing in common and neither of us could relate to the other. 
  2. Be a Role Model: As a mentee, I would like to be able to look up to my mentor. I want my mentor to have some quality that makes me want to be like them. Although it would be nice, it isn’t vital for a mentee to want the same exact position as their mentor but is vital that the mentor possesses some qualities that the mentee aspires to have.
  3. Share Advice: This feels like a no-brainer, but it relates back to the type of mentor/mentee relationship you have. In order to give worthwhile and helpful advice, you need to be able to relate to your mentor/mentee AND the mentor needs to be a role model figure. In my mentor relationship, I received a lot of advice but none of it was necessary to my experience. The things that I needed advice on, like how to choose a major or how to handle being far from home, weren’t areas that my mentor had any advice to give.

****Bonus factor! Experience: This is my extra little bonus factor to making a mentor program top notch. Any experience that a mentee can directly gain with their mentor by their side will not only be the best form of “advice” they can get, but it will help to strengthen the relationship. Something that a mentor/mentee duo can do together to gain experience is a group project in whatever field the mentee is interested in. This may feel a little intern-y but most of your Gen-Z employees will be interns anyways!

You can follow as much or as little advice as you want from this but the bottom line for a successful mentor program is effort. If both sides are willing to try and get something positive out of the experience, then they probably will! Not every mentor you have can be like Yoda (I know very little about Star Wars but hopefully this analogy works), but just be willing to try and make it a worthwhile experience!

This post was written by Cameron Sackett (not Tim) – you can probably tell because it lacks grammatical errors!

HR and TA Pros – have a question you would like to ask directly to a GenZ? Ask us in the comments and I’ll respond in an upcoming blog post right here on the project. Have some feedback for me? Again, please share in the comments and/or connect with me on LinkedIn.

5 Crippling HR Behaviors That Keep Employees From Becoming Leaders!

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In HR (OD, Training, etc. – pick your title) we like to believe we develop our employees constantly and ongoing to become the next generation of leaders.  But many times our actions tell a very different story.  We (HR and our Leadership teams) do and say things daily that keep people from truly reaching their full potential.  Self-awareness of these behaviors is the key to making sure you are the roadblock to creating great leaders in your organization.

Here are 5 things you are doing to stop leadership development in your organization:

1. We try to mitigate 100% of risk.  Leaders need to understand and experience risk.  It’s part of the growth process of becoming a leader.  If we never allow our future leaders to experience risk, they’ll fail when they finally face it or will be unwilling to face it, thus missing out on huge opportunities for your organization.

2. We don’t allow our employees to fail.  There are two parts to this. First, we get personal gratification by saving the day.  Second, we have this false sense that ‘great’ leaders won’t allow their employees to fail, so we step in quickly when we see things going south.   We tell ourselves that we need to let our people fail, and failure is good, etc. But we can’t stop ourselves from stepping in when failure is about to happen or is happening.

3. We mistake what is expected with great.  Words are so powerful.  It’s so easy to say “You’re doing Great!”, when in actuality the correct phrase is probably closer to “You’re doing the exact job you’re paid to do!”  That’s not great. That’s is expected.  You can’t blow hot air up everyone’s butt and think they’re going to get great.  They have to know what great is, and then get rewarded with praise when great is reached.

4. We mistake high performance for the ability to lead.  Just because you’re great at ‘the’ job, doesn’t mean you’ll be great at leading people who do ‘the’ job.  This might be the one behavior that is hardest to change.  All of our lives we tell people the way to ‘move up’ is through having great performance.  But it isn’t.  The way to move up into leadership is to do those things that great leaders do – which does include high performance, but it also includes so much more than just being good at ‘the’ job you’re doing.

5. We are not honest about our own failures.  Developing leaders will learn more about leadership from you if they know and understand your own failures at leadership.  We all have major failures in our lives, and many of those are hard to share because they are embarrassing, they show weakness, they might still be a weakness, etc. Developing leaders will learn more from your failures about being a great leader, than from any of your successes.

Developing future leaders has always been a critical part of HR in organizations, but we are quickly approaching a time in our history where your ability to develop leaders might be the most valuable skill you can provide to your organization.

It’s Equal Pay Day! Is Pay Equality Even Real?

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If you didn’t know April 10th is national Equal Pay Day!

How are you spending today celebrating this Ummm, well, holiday-ish thingy?

I have yet to see a company do this, but it would be awesome to see them make all the white dudes come to work and everyone else who is affected by pay inequality actually gets the day off, with pay!

I know, you probably clicked to come read this article because you thought I was going to give you some right-winged propaganda about how Pay Inequality wasn’t real and it was just made up by the left! If that was your thought, you really don’t know me!

Pay inequality is real and I know it’s real because I’ve worked two decades in HR and I’ve seen it with my own eyes.  I’ve run the compensation reports and sat down with executives to show them the real data we were facing as an organization.

Was it 70 cents on the dollar to men? No, not in my experience, but it was enough to be embarrassing. It was enough to show we had real sexist and racist assholes working for us making pay decisions.

Here’s my take on Pay Equality Day…

We own this as HR. I was once asked to step down and leave a company because I went into the executive boardroom as an HR professional and said, either you pay these women the same as the dudes, or I’ll quit. They took that as my resignation because they were not about to pay the women the same. That’s cowardly leadership, but it proves a point.

We – HR – own this. It’s not hiring managers. It’s not CEOs or CFOs or COOs. It’s you and me.

If HR allows a hiring manager to make an offer to any candidate for less than others are being paid in the same role, and we don’t stop that, we own it!

If you don’t stop it, or you believe you can’t stop it, you can quit and go to work for an organization that respects all their employees. If you don’t, you are now complicit in pay inequality. You are now the problem, not the hiring managers, and not the executives.

Now, should you quit and give an ultimatum like I did? Hell no! I was young and stupid.

What I should have done is approached this with a plan and a solution to fix our problem. If at that point, I was told we didn’t have a problem, or we would not be fixing this problem, then I have some decisions to make. My solution was to change employees salaries now or I’m going to throw a fit. That doesn’t work in the real world of budgets, and stock prices, and, well, life.

It took us a lot of time to get into this position, you don’t get out of it overnight. In hindsight, here’s what I should have done to fix our pay inequality issues:

1. Discover the importance of this issue with the leadership team and our legal team. I can do a lot of things, but if this is considered a non-issue by both my executive team and my legal team, I’m not getting anything done.

2. Stop all new pay equity issues. I might not be able to change the past, immediately, but I can definitely ensure no new issues come in the door!

3. Make a plan, with finance, on how you recommend we solve historical pay equity issues, and request an audience to dual-present this plan on this issue with myself and finance. By doing this, I would have known what we can actually do financially and have the buy-in already from those writing the checks.

4. Discover who my true offenders are, and deal with these folks first. In my experience, pay equity issues rarely are equal across an organization. It’s usually small pockets of hiring managers and locations that are doing bad things. “Well, Tim, we’ve always paid the ‘gals’ a little less because they tend to leave and have babies!” Oh boy! Even after coaching, discipline, etc., I don’t allow these folks to make compensation decisions. They lost this responsibility for a long time.

5. Develop and run quarterly or monthly reporting and ensure your leadership and legal team are aware of your progress.

6. Tell your employees what you’re doing.

Pay equity is an HR issue. HR owns it.

We are now responsible for what happens in our organizations when it comes to compensation because we all have been put on notice. If you don’t take this responsibility then you shouldn’t be in HR.